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 THE TRUTH 
 
 ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
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 The truth about Carlyle; an exposure of t 
 
 3 1924 013 461 268 
 
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THE TRUTH 
 ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
RECENT BOOKS 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Anecdotes of Big Cats and 
 Other Beasts 
 
 Methuen & Co. Ltd. 
 2S. 6d. net. 1910. 
 
 East and West 
 
 Methuen & Co. Ltd. 
 2s. 6d. net. 191 1. 
 
 The Faith of all Sensible 
 People 
 
 Methuen & Co. Ltd. 
 2S. 6d. net. 191 3. 
 
 William Thomson, Lord 
 Kelvin 
 
 John Smith & Son, Ltd., Glasgow. 
 2s. net; paper is. 191 1. 
 
 For press notices see the end of this book. 
 
 This book is copyright in England; but it may be translated into 
 any language without payment. 
 
THE TRUTH 
 ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 AN EXPOSURE OF THE 
 FUNDAMENTAL FICTION STILL CURRENT 
 
 BY 
 
 OAVID ALEC WILSON 
 
 UTtf.-)K OF "MR. PROUDE AND CARLYLE " 
 
 WITH A PREFACE 
 
 DY 
 
 SIR JAMES CR1CHTON-BROWNE, M.D. 
 
 LONDON: ALSTON RIVERS, LTD. 
 BROOKE STREET, HOLBORN BARS, E.C. 
 
 1913 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface by Sir James Crichton-Browne . . 7 
 
 Preface by the Author . . 23 
 
 I. Preliminary . . 27 
 
 II. Mr. Froude's" My Relations with Carlyle" 31 
 
 III. "The Nemesis of Froude" . 36 
 
 IV. Medical Evidence . . 51 
 
 V. Mr. Harris Tells Tales . . . 60 
 I. How Mr. Harris stood up for Jesus 
 II. A Dream of a Drawino-room 
 III. "The Puritan's Limitations" 
 
 VI. An Open Letter to Mr. Frank Harris . 70 
 
 VII. The Sequel . . 88 
 
 VIII. Conclusion . . . 103 
 
PREFACE 
 
 " A eight faithful piece of investigation. This is 
 my verdict after reading twice." 
 
 That is what Carlyle wrote to John Forster about 
 his Life of Strafford in Statesmen of the 
 Commonwealth ; and that is what I would say 
 about David Alec Wilson's exposition of The 
 Truth about Carlyle. 
 
 It is deplorable that any such exposition should 
 be necessary to-day. I had hoped that the lie 
 was killed in 1903, but, it seems, it was only 
 scotched, and is still wriggling about, envenoming 
 whom it may. 
 
 When preparing the Nemesis of Froude in 
 collaboration with Mr. Alexander Carlyle in that 
 year, I fully realised the mischief done by the cruel 
 and damaging imputation which Froude, with craft 
 and subtlety, had insinuated in his " Life " of 
 Carlyle, and which he boldly and grossly pro- 
 claimed in his memoir, My Relations- with 
 Carlyle, written in 1887, but withheld from 
 publication for sixteen years. There is a natural 
 shrinking from physical defect. There is a deep- 
 
 T 
 
8 PREFACE 
 
 rooted and warrantable belief that certain physical 
 defects carry with them a mental or moral twist. 
 There is a popular conviction, not without physio- 
 logical foundation, that the particular physical 
 defect alleged by Froude to be in Carlyle is incom- 
 patible with intellectual stability and strength of 
 character. Therefore Froude's imputation, in- 
 tended to vindicate his flagrant misrepresentations 
 of Carlyle's relations with his wife, which he 
 foresaw would be exposed, went far beyond that. 
 It reflected on Carlyle's work, and vastly reduced 
 its value to mankind. Carlyle was the great ad- 
 monisher of the nineteenth century. But words 
 of warning and wisdom to be helpful must come 
 from an unblemished source. A bankrupt prophet 
 is of no account. True knowledge and under- 
 standing are shown forth not only in preaching 
 but in living ; and if Carlyle never lived up to 
 the full measure of manhood, his preaching is 
 discredited. " He jests at scars that never felt a 
 wound." How could Carlyle deal fairly with the 
 historical personages he passed under review, of 
 some of whose controlling passions he had no inti- 
 mate knowledge ? His great mission as a writer was 
 the unmasking of evil and wrongdoing. How could 
 he, without hypocrisy, pursue that mission, if he 
 had himself done a great and persistent wrong to 
 the woman who had loved and trusted him ? 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 When Carlyle died, he commanded the venera- 
 tion of the civilised world. He was esteemed and 
 honoured wherever the English language was 
 spoken. A few years later his reputation was 
 dimmed, sadly dimmed, by Froude's biography of 
 him. In 1903 it was hideously besmirched by the 
 appearance of Froude's brochure, My Relations 
 with Carlyle. People came to believe that 
 Carlyle was as depicted in Froude's posthumous 
 fragment, a man of transcendent ability, but selfish, 
 overbearing, cruel, and contemptible, and warped 
 by a constitutional incapacity. 
 
 While writing the Nemesis of Fkoude, as I 
 have said, I realised all this, but I then felt that 
 Froude's crowning and crushing calumny against 
 Carlyle, that of constitutional incapacity, could not 
 with a due regard to decency be adequately dis- 
 cussed and refuted in a work intended for general 
 circulation. I felt that in the interests of truth, 
 and for the reinstatement of Carlyle as a philosophic 
 force and ethical guide, it must be answered and 
 disproved ; but I thought that that could be done 
 indirectly. I calculated that the demonstration, 
 given in the Nemesis, of Froude's hopeless inac- 
 curacy, of his romantic exaggerations and garbled 
 statements, and of the falsity of other charges 
 which he brought against Carlyle, would neces- 
 sarily involve the collapse of this charge, differing 
 
10 PREFACE 
 
 from the others only in its odiousness and inherent 
 improbability. But I did not trust for the disposal 
 of this charge merely to the laying bare of Froude's 
 abounding unveracity. I determined to submit it, 
 in camera as it were, to a thoroughly competent 
 tribunal, specially qualified to weigh the evidence 
 for and against it, and able, without impropriety, to 
 sift that evidence in all its bearings, whose verdict 
 should carry conviction to a discerning public 
 even in the absence of the evidence on which it was 
 founded. I therefore contributed to the British 
 Medical Journal of June 27, 1903, an article on 
 Froude and Carlyle, the Imputation Medi- 
 cally Considered, in which I critically examined 
 the proofs of Froude's contention, if his loose 
 hearsay can be called proofs, traced floating 
 rumours to their tainted sources, and adduced 
 cogent reasons for holding that Carlyle laboured 
 under no physical defect, but was in all respects 
 as other men are. My article must have reached 
 the hands at any rate of more than twenty 
 thousand medical men, and I am entitled to say 
 that judgment was given in my favour. I received 
 many letters from professional brethren expressing 
 complete agreement with the conclusion at which 
 I had arrived, and not one dissenting from it. 
 The article, though it appeared in a strictly 
 medical journal and was addressed to medical men, 
 
PREFACE 11 
 
 was quoted by the lay press and made the subject 
 of comment there, and there too it was generally 
 acknowledged that I had made out my case. 
 
 I flattered myself that after this the obnoxious 
 imputation was finally laid to rest, and that we 
 should hear no more of it ; but it appears I was 
 mistaken. Slanders, and especially obscene slanders, 
 are difficult to stamp out, and this one has been 
 revived. Mr. Frank Harris affirms that Carlyle, 
 when eighty-two years of age but with conversa- 
 tional powers admitting of no suspicion of senile 
 drivel, incontinently avowed his own lifelong in- 
 capacity to a youth of twenty-one, a mere casual 
 acquaintance, to whom he imparted a confidential 
 disclosure, which he had never even distantly 
 hinted at to any of his old and intimate friends, 
 or in any of his voluminous and latterly most 
 self-accusatory writings. 
 
 I leave Mr. David Alec Wilson to grapple 
 generally with Mr. Harris's somewhat slippery 
 recollections of Carlyle, which perhaps, at this 
 distance of time, have become mixed with memo- 
 ries of readings and with imaginations or dreams. 
 But I would specifically point out the obvious 
 blunder about Darwin into which he has fallen. 
 There was no real opportunity for Carlyle and 
 Darwin to meet before the Beagle voyage, as Mr. 
 Harris could have discovered if he had studied the 
 
12 PREFACE 
 
 details of their lives ; and when Darwin returned 
 from that voyage in 1836, he was not a notoriety, 
 but an obscure and private individual, the last 
 person in the world to be lionised or called " Sir 
 Oracle." He had done or published nothing to 
 attract scientific, to say nothing of popular, atten- 
 tion. It was not until 1838, when he read Malthus 
 on Population, that the idea occurred to him that, in 
 the struggle for existence, favourable variations 
 would tend to be preserved and unfavourable to be 
 destroyed. It was only in 1844 that he wrote to 
 his intimate friend, Sir Joseph Hooker ; " At last 
 gleams of light have come, and I am convinced that 
 species are not immutable." The Darwinian theory, 
 however, was not publicly mooted till 1858, and the 
 Origin of Species was published in 1859. In short, 
 the ladies buzzing round Darwin like bees round a 
 
 dish of sugar at the great party of Lady were 
 
 so very much too soon that it is impossible that 
 there ever were any such persons. 
 
 I refer to this myth about Darwin because it 
 throws a sidelight upon the more serious and per- 
 nicious myth which Mr. Wilson has so neatly dis- 
 sected. Even to imaginary conversations there 
 are limits, which are clearly trespassed by the 
 resuscitation of a defunct slander on a great and 
 honoured name. 
 
 Apart from Mr. Frank Harris's new version of 
 
PREFACE 13 
 
 it, I find the old Froude calumny cropping up in 
 various directions, tincturing the compositions of 
 most of those who write about Carlyle in these 
 days. The story of the brilliant, loving, deeply 
 injured wife with the gruff, emasculate and 
 brutish husband at Cheyne Row threatens to take 
 the place of Mdme. Villeneuve's famous fairy tale of 
 Beauty and the Beast. Delicately veiled, the old 
 calumny is the key to a fascinating but, as I believe, 
 wholly misleading essay on Carlyle and his Wife 
 in Some Old Love Stories, by T. P. O'Connor, a 
 book recently republished. " Passion," says Mr. 
 O'Connor, " that tremendous factor in the union 
 of a man and woman was absent from the marriage 
 of Carlyle and his wife. . . . Carlyle's infirmities, 
 bodily and mental," he goes on, " made him an 
 unfit companion for any woman. . . . Marriage 
 had not brought to the wife (Mrs. Carlyle) the 
 satisfaction of either soul, or heart, or body. It 
 was without reverence or affection or the intimate 
 physical communion which is to marriage not its 
 assoiling but its sanctification. . . . One must 
 avoid," he says again, " the coarse, almost brutish 
 language in which women sometimes are compelled 
 to demand separation from their husbands. Froude 
 himself indicates as frankly as needs the real and 
 fundamental reason of Mrs. Carlyle's unhappiness. 
 ' There is not a hint in any way that he (Carlyle) 
 
14 PREFACE 
 
 had contemplated as a remote possibility the 
 usual consequences of marriage, a family — and 
 children.' " This passage from Froude is untrue, 
 but Mr. O'Connor, believing it, remarks, it 
 " needs no comments — for its meaning is plain : 
 and I pass on." 
 
 Mr. O'Connor seems to have been fairly obsessed 
 by Froude's calumny. How else shall we account 
 for the fact that this broad-minded and generous 
 man of letters, who admits that, in the study of 
 the human heart and human soul, Carlyle has 
 told us more than almost any man of his time or 
 of any other time, and who declares that nowhere 
 " outside Shakespeare is there a portrait gallery 
 so rich, so picturesque, so faithful, so full of photo- 
 graphic truth, lurid insight, morals and lessons, 
 finely preached, as that which is to be found in his 
 splendid pages," yet speaks of Carlyle in terms 
 which would be almost harsh and indecorous if 
 applied to a convicted felon ? In the wild flare of 
 Froude, Carlyle's features are in Mr. O'Connor's 
 sight transformed into those of a gargoyle, and his 
 proportions grow Satanic. Mr. O'Connor writes 
 of Mrs. Carlyle's " destruction " by her husband, 
 and tells us Carlyle " was selfish — brutally selfish 
 ... a depressed, silent, gloomy, exacting . . . 
 man, . . . absorbed, repellent . . . visionary, . . . 
 surly, unapproachable bear . . . Carlyle was a per- 
 
PREFACE 15 
 
 fectly unlovable man to live with . . . selfish, 
 tyrannical, bad-tempered, to a degree which 
 scarcely any woman could have stood. . . ." He 
 " was able to bend a woman to his will, ... to 
 his habits, with an unrelenting sternness that 
 sometimes makes one almost loathe him. ... It 
 is somewhat hard," exclaims Mr. O'Connor, " to 
 keep one's hands off him, as we reconstitute those 
 scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock," and 
 one scene at Cheyne Row during her illness " makes 
 one blush for one's manhood." 
 
 After reading this indictment, one asks with 
 Malcolm in Macbeth, " If such a one be fit to 
 govern, speak ? " and answers with Macduff, " Fit 
 to govern ? No, not to live." 
 
 Undiluted Froude has been too much for even 
 Mr. O'Connor, and when such a man has been 
 misled it would be absurd to deny that more light 
 is needed or to blame anyone for going astray. 
 Too long has Carlyle been hideously misunderstood, 
 because Froude's theory distorted all that was 
 known. As soon as it is exploded, the letters and 
 facts will tell their own plain story ; and then the 
 righteous indignation of Mr. O'Connor may be 
 turned against the man who misled him. 
 
 I could quote from other writings, hot from the 
 press, evidence that the Froude slander is again 
 insidiously at work among us, and must again be 
 
16 PREFACE 
 
 checked, if its blighting influence is to be avoided. 
 Professor Calderwood of Edinburgh University 
 told Mr. Wilson in 1896 that if Froude's story as 
 to Carlyle's incapacity was false, it was a duty to 
 say so, as the fiction had a bad effect on the best 
 of the students ; and as Mr. Wilson predicts, even 
 in America and Asia, where the writings of Carlyle 
 are read in the Universities, the fiction is bound 
 to have a defiling effect on adolescent minds, ever 
 prone to dwell unduly on sexual topics. I have 
 myself seen the shrugging of shoulders and super- 
 cilious smiles amongst youths to whom I have extolled 
 Carlyle, as the apostle of righteousness and clean 
 living. 
 
 It has therefore become the duty of those who 
 reverence Carlyle and believe in the virtue of his 
 message to mankind to attack the old slander 
 once more ; and fortunately they can do so now 
 in the open. They have no longer to follow it in 
 its subterraneous burrowings, but can confront it 
 in the light of day. It is not innuendo, suggestion 
 or inference, with which they have now to contend, 
 but direct statement. What Froude got from Miss 
 Jewsbury, who got it no one knows where, Mr. 
 Frank Harris got from Carlyle himself. That 
 young man was, Heaven knows why ! made the 
 repository of the tragic secret of Carlyle's life, and 
 now he shamelessly divulges it to all and sundry. 
 
PREFACE 17 
 
 It is not the friends of Carlyle who are respon- 
 sible for the unsavoury proceeding which becomes 
 requisite. They said nothing to provoke the taunts 
 and would fain have avoided any public utterance 
 upon the subject. They only replied to it when- 
 compelled, and did so then with all possible reti- 
 cence and reserve. They hoped the garbage was 
 buried ; but Mr. Frank Harris has brought it to 
 the surface again in the most ostentatious way, 
 and so it must be once for all well raked and aerated 
 and purified by fire. And right well has David 
 Alec Wilson done this. Mr. Harris's scarabean 
 conglomeration is demolished. No unprejudiced 
 person, I think, can read The Tkuth about 
 Carlyle without realising that it is the truth, and 
 stands triumphant over a pack of lies. It is clear, 
 moderate, and masterly in grasp, and while uncom- 
 promising in its conclusions, makes all possible 
 allowance for extenuating circumstances, even 
 indicating the ways in which Mr. Harris may 
 have been led innocently astray in part of what 
 he has said to the detriment of Carlyle. 
 
 It would be supererogation for me to answer Mr. 
 Harris. He has been answered effectually, and I 
 agree with everything that Mr. Wilson has said. 
 But one or two supplementary observations may 
 be permitted to me. 
 
 Mr. Wilson has shown parsimony, perhaps dis- 
 
18 PREFACE 
 
 creet parsimony, in his use of the medical testimony 
 advanced against Froude's allegation. Much more 
 has been said on that subject from a medical point 
 of view than he has reproduced ; but what he has 
 reproduced is sufficient. Like Mercutio's wound, 
 " 'twill serve." 
 
 The scene in Hyde Park at which the wonderful 
 admission was made to Mr. Harris is, as described 
 by him, inconceivable to those who knew Carlyle. 
 A few additional touches would have made it a 
 harmless caricature. Carlyle was never a gibbering 
 imbecile, and always held his grief for his wife, 
 even in its most poignant days, well under control. 
 His visits to the grave at Haddington were always 
 made alone. Besides, when he reverted to Scotch, 
 he spoke good Dumfriesshire Scotch, not Cockney 
 Scotch. 
 
 As regards what Mr. Wilson has written about 
 the " bodily weakness " mentioned in the letter from 
 Gottingen in 1878, 1 am in a position to confirm it. 
 Mr. Harris has now the unparalleled effrontery to 
 claim that by that phrase in that letter he meant 
 Carlyle' s incapacity, which, he says, Carlyle avowed 
 to him during a walk in Hyde Park in the previous 
 year. But the " bodily weakness " of the letter 
 was of a kind, as the letter expressly says, to de- 
 prive us " of the hope of more from your pen," 
 whereas the incapacity alleged, if it had ever 
 
PREFACE 19 
 
 existed, had never interfered with the use of his 
 pen in any way, as Mr. Harris very well knew. 
 Surely Mr. Harris was not such a tactless blunderer 
 as to recall, in a letter asking a favour, a humili- 
 ating confession of a constitutional defect with all 
 its baleful consequences, that had slipped out in a 
 moment of emotional perturbation. No ! No ! The 
 " bodily weakness " alluded to by Mr. Harris was 
 bodily weakness in the ordinary acceptation of the 
 term ; and in 1877 that bodily weakness was suffi- 
 ciently well marked. In the summer of that year 
 he called at my house in Regent's Park with his 
 niece, Miss Mary Aitken, and was so feeble that it 
 was thought better that he should not make the 
 effort of getting out of the landau. So while Miss 
 Mary Aitken was within with my wife, I remained 
 by the carriage and chatted with him. He was 
 clear and kind ; but very frail and weary, and the 
 partial paralysis of the right hand was painfully 
 visible. He was then quite unequal to a walk in 
 Hyde Park. In 1876 Froude said of him, " his life 
 is fast ebbing away," and in 1878 he wrote of 
 himself, " my strength is faded nearly quite away." 
 The advocates of Carlyle's incapacity, for there 
 are advocates of it, show at what a loss they are 
 for a plea when they bolster up their case by calling 
 witnesses to prove that Carlyle and his wife 
 occupied separate bedrooms. What if they did ? 
 
20 PREFACE 
 
 I can point to couples who have occupied separate 
 bedrooms all their married life, and have large 
 families. Mr. Wilson has shown again, as Mr. 
 Alexander Carlyle and I showed long ago, that it 
 was only during one period of their married life 
 that they slept apart, and that they did so not on 
 account of matrimonial nullity but for reasons of 
 health. In particular it diminished the inveterate 
 insomnia from which both suffered. 
 
 The allusion to Jesus ascribed to Carlyle by Mr. 
 Frank Harris must be painful and shocking to 
 multitudes ; and it is utterly incredible and even 
 farcical. To say that " Jesus had no Falstaff in 
 Him " is as grotesquely absurd as to say that Judas 
 Iscariot had no Hamlet in him, or St. Paul no 
 Launcelot Gobbo. No one save Mr. Harris has ever 
 said that he heard Carlyle speak of Jesus thus. His 
 public references to Him were invariably marked 
 by reverent solemnity, and all the reports of his 
 private talk show his sincerity, as for example this 
 which Emerson recorded long ago. The scene was 
 Craigenputtock. " We went out to walk over 
 long hills, and looked at the Criffel . . . and down 
 into Wordsworth's country. . . . He was honest 
 and true, and cognisant of the subtle links that 
 bind ages together, and saw how every event affects 
 all the future. ' Christ died on the tree : that 
 built Dunscore kirk yonder : that brought you 
 
PREFACE 21 
 
 and me together. Time has only a relative exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Carlyle was no Narses. He was neither an 
 ascetic nor a sybarite, but a plain, honest Scotch- 
 man, upright in all his dealings, faithful in every 
 relation of life, prickly on the surface like his native 
 thistle, but soft and silken at the core ; endowed 
 with a brain sound and whole in every part, with 
 no crippled convolution or amative deficiency — 
 a brain that has discharged waves more subtle 
 than those of Hertz, waves that have travelled 
 round the world and will continue to do so for 
 centuries to come, bearing messages of mighty 
 import to the children of men. 
 
 Mr. David Alec Wilson has done a signal 
 service to morality in writing The Truth about 
 Carlyle. I look forward to his life of the sage 
 with sanguine expectations. 
 
 James Crichton-Browne. 
 
 Dumfries, 1st January, 1913. 
 
AUTHORS PREFACE 
 
 This book is concerned exclusively with the inti- 
 mate relations between Carlyle and his wife. The 
 need for it can be told in a very few words. 
 
 I may or may not be mistaken in believing 
 Thomas Carlyle to be the Confucius of the English- 
 speaking races ; but it is beyond dispute that he 
 was one of the greatest and most interesting men 
 in Europe in the nineteenth century, and nobody 
 can deny that the discussion of sexual topics in a 
 biography is detestable. It is equally plain, 
 however, that if a great teacher of clean living, 
 such as he was, is plausibly alleged to have been 
 impotent, or in older phrase a born eunuch, and 
 therefore a man who was not exposed to temptation 
 like other men, the statement diminishes the value 
 of his teaching if it is true, and therefore if it is 
 false should be disproved. 
 
 The documents here printed show how such a 
 statement was wrongly made about Carlyle, and 
 how it has been refuted ; and then how in 1911 
 Mr. Frank Harris came forward as a voluntary 
 witness of ancient conversations, and was answered. 
 
 This book is meant to clear the way for all future 
 biographers, and terminate debates that verge 
 
 23 
 
24 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 upon obscenity. What leads me to write now is, 
 of course, the fact that I have myself undertaken 
 a biography ; but it can hardly be finished in less 
 than half a dozen years, and in that time much 
 may happen. I may not live to finish it ; and here 
 at hand is this unwholesome hallucination, which 
 can be rendered harmless by the sunlight, but 
 which, if suffered to subside underground into 
 the minds of men without being purified by the 
 daylight, may pollute the deep-set, innermost 
 springs of life. 
 
 It has cost me an effort to forgive Mr. Harris, the 
 writer who has forced me to discuss such things. It 
 is scavenger's work, which I have loathed to touch ; 
 but it had to be done. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy long 
 ago forewarned me to be prepared for the con- 
 tingency which has arisen. So it may have been 
 inevitable. Every man naturally supposes that 
 other men are like himself ; and it is a trick we 
 have inherited from our arboreal ancestors, as 
 I learned by studying the apes, to love to look 
 down and hate to look up. Besides, there are few 
 things rarer than the apparition of a man of genius 
 of any kind, to say nothing of a great spirit like 
 Carlyle. Centuries may pass before we see another 
 like him. It was inevitable that a great deal of 
 evidence should be needed to make men realise 
 that such a man had appeared ; and those who 
 have the happiness to be writing about such must 
 always be prepared to reply to many unusual 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 25 
 
 questions. So now let it be plainly stated that 
 Thomas Carlyle was neither an ascetic nor a 
 eunuch of any kind. Physically, the difference 
 between him and St. Augustine was merely the 
 difference between Scotland and Africa ; but 
 morally he was on a different level, which perhaps 
 should be explained. 
 
 Emerging from bestiality, mankind resembles 
 a drunkard on horseback, leaning over at first on 
 one side, and then in trying to straighten himself 
 falling over on the other. Struggling after self- 
 control, men everywhere begin by asceticism, 
 finding it easier to abstain than to be temperate. 
 The various stages of the moral evolution of 
 humanity can always be seen in our contemporaries; 
 and in the growth of every healthy man there is a 
 season for asceticism. But those whose moral de- 
 velopment is never arrested grow out of that ; and 
 how to do so harmoniously is one of the great 
 lessons to be learned from the life of Thomas 
 Carlyle. In short, he was not an ascetic but a 
 moralist, who believed in and practised the family 
 life. John Milton, who was worried by his wife, 
 once echoed the medieval ascetic's wish that the 
 Maker of the World had found another way of 
 continuing the species ; but Carlyle laughed at 
 such stuff as heartily as Confucius, or Cromwell, or 
 Martin Luther. 
 
 " Who loves not wife, and wine and song, 
 Remains a fool his whole life long." 
 
26 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 How heartily Carlyle was of those who " accept 
 the decrees of God," as the Muslims phrase it, 
 may be read in his books, his letters, and all the 
 authentic records of his deeds and words ; and 
 that he was physically like other men can be known 
 for certain by anyone who reads this book and is 
 able to weigh the evidence. There is no longer 
 room for two opinions. 
 
 To journalists and men of letters I do now 
 specially appeal. Here was one who lived up to 
 the highest ideal of your calling, a hero of your 
 trade. He spurned alike the follies of Philistines 
 and fribbles, and remained, and insisted on being 
 seen to remain to the end of a very long life, one 
 of yourselves, a writer by trade ; and yet for many 
 years before his death he was recognised as a 
 new moral force in Europe, a man of international 
 importance. He made it possible for Englishmen 
 and Germans to understand each other. The 
 Muslims openly rejoice to this day at his vindica- 
 tion of Mohammed, and the Chinese and the 
 Japanese are loud in their appreciation. He is 
 the greatest of our historians, and the greatest 
 of our peacemakers, as well as the greatest man 
 of letters whom men now alive can boast that 
 they have seen. Are you going to let the memory 
 of such a man continue smeared by smutty fiction? 
 I cannot believe it possible. 
 
 David Alec Wilson. 
 
 Ayr, 1913. 
 
THE TKUTH ABOUT 
 CAKLYLE 
 
 PRELIMINARY 
 
 In 1881 Thomas Carlyle died; and by 1886 his 
 literary executor, Mr. Froude, had published four 
 volumes of biography and five of letters and 
 reminiscences, which were carefully edited to 
 support the biography, all tuned to the selfsame 
 key. The biography was artistically done. A 
 single idea dominated it — mysterious, melancholy, 
 monotonous, like the drone of a bagpipe. Carlyle 
 was an oddity, half mad, and he ill-treated his 
 wife — that was all the common reader read, par- 
 ticularly in the country ; but the esoteric meaning, 
 plainly written between the lines of many a page, 
 whispered in society from the first, and alluded to 
 in the leading newspapers, was that Carlyle was a 
 eunuch, and that his wife's sorrow was the lack of 
 sexual intercourse. This gave to the reiterated 
 
28 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 protestations that nothing was hidden a grimly 
 humorous effect, which was unintentional — the only 
 kind of humour ever to be found in the writings of 
 Mr. Froude. 
 
 In 1886 Mr. Alexander Carlyle and his wife, the 
 nephew and niece of Carlyle, procured the publica- 
 tion of the " Early Letters," edited by Prof. Norton 
 of Cambridge, Mass. In these volumes there was a 
 demonstration as explicit as. it could then be 
 decently made that the fundamental proposition 
 of Mr. Froude's writings about Carlyle was untrue. 
 The best critics in England appear to have ac- 
 cepted the refutation, to the extent of intimating 
 that, in the absence of any reply, the case of Mr. 
 Froude would be lost by default. It was under 
 such circumstances that in 1887 Mr. Froude wrote 
 the pamphlet published in 1903, after his death, 
 " My Relations with Carlyle." 
 
 In the interval between 1887 and 1903 much 
 had happened. Many reminiscences and many 
 volumes of letters had been published ; and the 
 romantic inventions in Mr. Froude's biography 
 had been so plentifully riddled that a belief in its 
 main thesis was becoming the peculiar privilege 
 of a small and diminishing number. 
 
 The book " Mr. Froude and Carlyle," which 
 was published in 1898, I had written at the in- 
 stigation of Prof. Norton, as explained in a recent 
 
PRELIMINARY 29 
 
 book (" East and West "). It passed over the 
 sexual question in silence, not because I supposed 
 there was any truth in that part of Mr. Froude's 
 story, but because it seemed best to say nothing 
 about such things. " Froude dealt with it in- 
 directly — let us do likewise," was Prof. Norton's 
 exhortation to me in 1895. Mr. Alexander Carlyle 
 was resolute to the same effect, and till 1903 it 
 seemed likely that this method would succeed, 
 and the filthy libel lapse into oblivion without 
 having ever been explicitly mentioned. 
 
 Then in 1903 Mr. Froude's pamphlet was pub- 
 lished by his children, who may have naturally 
 failed to see that it vindicated their father's good 
 faith at the expense of his judgment. 
 
 If, however, that was all they intended to do, 
 then it may be said that they succeeded ; for the 
 debate about the sincerity of Mr. Froude is frivolous 
 and verbal. It is true that many moralists besides 
 Confucius have refused to call a man sincere un- 
 less he has avoided self-deception ; but common 
 people are less exacting, and a man is usually 
 called sincere when he believes what he says, 
 whether he has humbugged himself or not. In this, 
 the commonest sense of the word, there is no doubt 
 that Mr. Froude was sincere in his account of his 
 relations with Carlyle, for otherwise he would 
 never have left for publication a defence so 
 
30 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 ludicrously inadequate. Perhaps a summary of it, 
 omitting irrelevancies, and of the replies to it 
 from Sir James Crichton-Browne and Alexander 
 Carlyle, would be the best introduction to what 
 follows. 
 
II 
 
 MR. FROUDE's " MY RELATIONS WITH CARLYLE " 
 
 Here is the gist of what he has to say for himself, 
 with his own words in quotation marks and a few 
 needful notes in brackets. 
 
 " I was introduced to Carlyle soon after I left 
 the University. I saw him . . . not often, for I 
 lived far off. . . . He was very good to me. He 
 helped me when he could. I became intimate to 
 some extent with Mrs. Carlyle. . . . She liked me. 
 ... It was evident that she was suffering . . . she 
 had no natural cheerfulness. . . . Rumour said that 
 she and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I could 
 easily believe it " . . . because she spoke sarcastically 
 about him, though she " greatly admired him." 
 
 " In 1860 I removed to London to live. Such 
 acquaintance as I had with the Carlyles I hoped 
 to keep up, but ... I did not wish that it should 
 be closer than it was. . . . 
 
 " To my surprise, one evening in 1861, Carlyle 
 called on me, expressed a wish to see more of me. 
 . . . Nothing could be more nattering. I consented, 
 and I was now continually in Cheyne Row." . . . 
 
 31 
 
32 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 " Mrs. Carlyle was very much alone "... but 
 " to those whom she liked she was charming — 
 bewitching," and the thought of her " suffering 
 through the negligence " of her husband " was 
 exquisitely painful " to me. " Mrs. Carlyle's 
 pale, drawn, suffering face haunted me in my 
 dreams." . . . 
 
 " In 1862 her health finally broke down," 
 and after then he was more attentive. She died 
 suddenly in 1866, when driving in Hyde Park. 
 He discovered how he had sinned towards her, 
 and was overwhelmed by remorse. In 1871 he 
 gave to me " a large parcel of papers. It con- 
 tained a copy of the memoir which he had written 
 of his wife, various other memoirs and fragments of 
 biography, and a collection of his wife's letters." 
 ... I was to prepare them for publication. They 
 were given to me then and there, so as to be my 
 own property. 
 
 I showed them to John Forster, with his per- 
 mission, and Mr. Forster told me in explanation 
 " that Lady Ashburton had fallen deeply in 
 love with Carlyle, that Carlyle had behaved 
 nobly, and that Lord Ashburton had been greatly 
 obliged to him." . . . 
 
 " Two years later (1873) . . . he . . . sent me in 
 a box a collection of letters, diaries, memoirs, 
 miscellanies of endless sorts, the accumulations 
 
"MY RELATIONS WITH CARLYLE " 33 
 
 of a life," bidding me write his biography, and 
 saying that these were the materials. 
 
 I undertook it to please him, and soon saw that 
 Mr. Forster had been wrong. Carlyle had courted 
 Lady Ashburton, not Lady Ashburton Carlyle. 
 " What was the meaning of Forster's story ? 
 He died soon after, and I had no opportunity of 
 asking him." Carlyle's infatuation had been one 
 of the Cheyne Row secrets ; but I could see there 
 was another. 
 
 Geraldine Jewsbury was (a novelist of the day 
 and) " Mrs. Carlyle's most intimate and most 
 confidential friend." ..." When she heard that 
 Carlyle had selected me to write his biography, 
 she came to me to say that she had something 
 to tell me which I ought to know. I must have 
 learnt that the state of things had been most 
 unsatisfactory ; the explanation of the whole of it 
 was that ' Carlyle was one of those persons who 
 ought never to have married.' " Mrs. Carlyle 
 had been tormented by a longing for children, 
 too. 
 
 " The nature of the relationship between the 
 Carlyles I was not unprepared to hear. I had felt 
 all along that there must be some mystery of the 
 kind. . . . There were floating suspicions long 
 before." 
 
 This discovery solved all the mysteries of 
 
34 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 Carlyle's life in a most satisfactory manner. 
 For example, there was his extraordinary language 
 when she had spoken of leaving him. He had 
 actually told her that " she was at liberty to go if 
 she pleased." Miss Jewsbury had more and worse 
 to tell of the same kind. " The London life was 
 a protracted tragedy. When the intimacy with 
 the Ashburton house became established, she 
 had definitely made up her mind to go away, 
 and even to marry another person. She told him 
 afterwards on how narrow a chance it had turned. 
 His answer hurt her worse than any other word 
 she ever heard from him : ' Well, I do not know 
 that I should have missed you ; I was very busy 
 just then with Cromwell.' " 
 
 (It is surely ludicrous to imagine that talk 
 like that is evidence that Carlyle was a eunuch ; 
 but the levity of Mr. Froude and his fatal lack 
 of a sense of humour are not more manifest than 
 his honesty here. He questioned no relatives, 
 and did not ask permission, which would have 
 been readily given, to consult several doctors who 
 were able to enlighten him. On his own showing, 
 he was ready to swallow the story before it was 
 told him, and did not pause to doubt a moment 
 after he had once heard it.) 
 
 "Miss Jewsbury's information was given to me 
 under too solemn circumstances, and was coupled 
 
"MY RELATIONS WITH CARLYLE " 35 
 
 with too many singular details, to allow doubt to 
 be possible?**" 
 
 I afterwards learned that other people knew, 
 and maybe Mrs. Carlyle's doctors found it out ; 
 but it was enough for me that Miss Jewsbury 
 told me that Mrs. Carlyle had told it to her. So 
 I wrote accordingly, and have been unjustly 
 abused for telling the truth. If 
 
 (The rest of the book is mainly about " property, 
 property, property," and throws no more light 
 upon the matter.) 
 
Ill 
 
 " THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 
 
 " My Relations with Cakxyle," by Mr. Froude, 
 came out in 1903, and received an immediate re- 
 joinder in " The Nemesis of Froude," by Sir 
 James Crichton-Browne and Alexander Carlyle, to 
 which no serious reply has ever been attempted. I 
 put some supplementary notes in brackets. 
 
 " That Froude himself frequently begged to be 
 admitted to the Cheyne Row household is certain," 
 but it is superfluous to dwell upon that. What is 
 more serious is a very grave misstatement about the 
 materials for the biography. It is proved to be un- 
 true that Carlyle gave him these in 1873. What 
 was given him in 1873 was what he afterwards 
 published as " The Letters and Memorials of Jane 
 Welsh Carlyle." It was not Carlyle himself at all, 
 but his niece Mary, afterwards Mrs. Alexander 
 Carlyle, who in 1877 lent him all Carlyle's private 
 papers, which Carlyle himself had given to her in 
 1875. 
 
 (It is pleasant to linger on a fact so beautifully 
 characteristic of the great man. He was so little 
 
 36 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 37 
 
 solicitous about what was to be said about him 
 that he gave all his private papers, excepting busi- 
 ness papers, of course, to his niece, who had long 
 kept house for him, to do what she liked with 
 them.) She believed in the loyalty of Mr. Froude, 
 and lent him everything ; and when more papers 
 came in, as one after another relatives or friends 
 departed, she sent these also to him ; but 
 happily both she and her uncle himself when ap- 
 pealed to made it clear, and Mr. Froude admitted, 
 that the papers were her property, and merely lent 
 to Mr. Froude for a temporary purpose. 
 
 She discovered the mistake too late, when Mr. 
 Froude included in the Reminiscences a memoir 
 about Mrs. Carlyle, the publication of which had 
 by Carlyle been forbidden. She then did all she 
 could to retrieve the papers at once, but could not 
 get them back till Mr. Froude had done with them, 
 and finished the biography. 
 
 While much of " The Nemesis " is concerned 
 with other details, the joint authors face the issue 
 which this book is intended to settle. Was Carlyle 
 a natural eunuch ? 
 
 Mr. Froude staked everything upon Miss Jews- 
 bury. Did she deserve to be believed ? That 
 was the question, and it is proved abundantly 
 that she was a flighty, hysterical person, liable 
 to hallucinations about sexual matters. 
 
38 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 (None can do more than guess about the motives 
 of another, conscious or unconscious ; but a guess 
 is sometimes useful ; and so it is suggested that 
 Miss Jewsbury being addicted to making love to 
 married men, being, in short, what the Asiatic 
 women call a would-be husband-thief, the in- 
 disputable fact that Carlyle remained indifferent 
 to her for year after year, and insisted on her 
 remaining merely the friend of his wife, might 
 alone suffice to convince her that he must be a 
 eunuch. She would think so the more readily 
 if she knew that some men said so, and when she 
 had laid that flattering unction to her soul, some 
 of Mrs. Carlyle's sarcasms, innocent of any such 
 meaning, might easily grow without any intention 
 of falsehood into the tragic story which she hastened 
 to distil into the ears of Mr. Froude. Sir James and 
 Mr. A. Carlyle are guiltless of this suggestion, 
 which is based on the evidence they produce. 
 I take the responsibility for it, and will now quote 
 their words.) 
 
 " Mrs. Carlyle, he (Mr. Froude) tells us, spoke 
 and wrote of Geraldine Jewsbury as her Consuelo ; 
 but if she did so, she must have used the appellation 
 in an ironical sense, for their correspondence proves 
 that she never took any bit of advice Miss Jewsbury 
 offered, snubbed her peremptorily whenever she 
 ventured to express an opinion, and looked upon 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 39 
 
 her more as an exasperator than as a comforter." 
 There was " close intimacy," but " not of the 
 sort Mr. Froude would have us believe, and which 
 he indicates by the incorrect statement that Miss 
 Jewsbury ' was about Mrs. Carlyle's own age ' : 
 the truth being that there were eleven years 
 between them — Mrs. Carlyle having been born in 
 1801, and Miss Jewsbury in 1812. . . . There was 
 always an element of patronage and protection 
 in Mrs. Carlyle's attitude towards her. Mrs. Car- 
 lyle was flattered by the worship she offered, 
 and was grateful for the many delicate attentions 
 she bestowed ; but from first to last she treated 
 her as a weak and wayward being, destitute of 
 discretion and good sense, and it is surely a sig- 
 nificant fact that Froude deliberately suppressed 
 every letter of Mrs. Carlyle's in which her candid 
 opinion of her friend is set forth. 
 
 " In the ' Letters and Memorials ' that Froude 
 selected and edited there is nothing reflecting 
 unfavourably on Miss Jewsbury, whereas in the 
 ' New Letters and Memorials ' may be found 
 abundant proofs of the light esteem in which 
 Mrs. Carlyle held her." (Here be it noted that 
 what Mrs. Carlyle wrote is excellent evidence 
 of her feelings, whether or not we think that she 
 was exaggerating, as it is very likely that she was. 
 We have her actual words ; and whether she was 
 
40 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 right or wrong, she was sincere. Learning her 
 feelings in this way from her words, it is easy for 
 any candid person to see that Miss Jewsbury 
 was not likely to be trusted with any secrets' 
 about her husband. The quotation goes on : — ) 
 
 " She described her as a fussy, romantic, 
 hysterical woman, a considerable fool, with her 
 head packed full of nonsense, and nicknamed 
 her ' Miss Gooseberry.' ' It is her besetting 
 sin,' she said, ' and her trade of novelist has 
 aggravated it — the desire of feeling and pro- 
 ducing violent emotions.' Miss Jewsbury's in- 
 trigues and love affairs are often contemptuously 
 alluded to by Mrs. Carlyle. ' Geraldine,' she wrote, 
 ' has one besetting weakness. She is never happy 
 unless she has a grande passion on hand, and 
 as unmarried men take fright at her impulsive 
 and demonstrative ways, her grandes passions 
 for these thirty years have been all expended 
 on married men.' In another place she (Mrs. 
 Carlyle) mentions that she (Miss Jewsbury) was 
 ' openly making the craziest love to a man ' 
 who was engaged to be married, and in another 
 that she was ' in a frenzy over a letter from her 
 declared lover, an Egyptian,' who had one wife 
 already, and in still another that she had herself 
 allowed that she had ' absolutely no sense of 
 decency.' . . . Miss Jewsbury's feelings towards 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 41 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle herself . . . were highly extravagant, 
 and in some degree perverted. The manifestation 
 by Mrs. Carlyle of some preference or supposed 
 preference for another woman led on one occasion 
 to a wild outburst of what Miss Jewsbury herself 
 called ' tiger jealousy,' " and made Mrs. Carlyle 
 write, ' I am not at all sure she is not going 
 mad.' 
 
 (The next quotation in this context may be 
 introduced by the remark that we are reading 
 the opinion of a specialist in mental diseases.) 
 " Of delicate, nervous, highly-strung constitution, 
 Miss Jewsbury became a morbid, unstable, ex- 
 citable woman, constantly complaining of head- 
 aches and other ailments, and suffering from 
 mental depression." 
 
 Upon the narrow issue whether Miss Jewsbury 
 was likely to report Mrs. Carlyle's talk correctly 
 there is happily evidence of a conclusive kind. 
 " In order to show that Carlyle placed some 
 confidence in Miss Jewsbury, we are told by 
 Froude that he ' had requested Miss Geraldine 
 Jewsbury ... to tell him any biographical anecdotes 
 which she could remember to have heard from 
 Mrs. Carlyle's lips,' and that after reading these 
 he wrote, ' Few or none of these narratives are 
 correct in details, but there is a certain mythical 
 truth in all or most of them.' " It appears 
 
42 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 indisputable that it was Lady Lothian and not 
 Carlyle who set Miss Jewsbury on writing, and 
 that on sight of what was written by her he wrote 
 to Miss Jewsbury : — 
 
 " Dear Geraldine, 
 
 " Few or none of these narratives are correct 
 in all the details ; some of them, in almost all the 
 details are incorrect. I have not read carefully 
 beyond a certain point which is marked on the 
 margin. Your recognition of the character is gener- 
 ally true and faithful ; little of portraiture in it 
 that satisfies me. On the whole all tends to the 
 mythical." ... So that in short he begs her to 
 take Lady Lothian's " word of honour " to show 
 it to nobody else, and consign it to him to be sup- 
 pressed. 
 
 (Seeing Miss Jewsbury failed to be accurate 
 in reporting Mrs. Carlyle's common talk, she was 
 likely to go still farther astray in reporting talk 
 on sexual matters, about which she was peculiarly 
 prone to mistake. At the same time, inasmuch as 
 Mr. Froude was notoriously inaccurate in making 
 quotations, Miss Jewsbury is entitled to the 
 benefit of a certain doubt in respect of verbal 
 remarks he attributes to her. She may not have 
 said exactly what he said. He may have mis- 
 reported her. There is even a curious inconsistency 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 43 
 
 in what he has written about the Ashburton 
 business and Miss Jewsbury's talk to him.) 
 
 . . . " Writing in Cuba in 1887 he seems 
 to have forgotten what he wrote in London in 
 1883, for then he unequivocally stated, in his 
 note to the Journal (of Mrs. Carlyle), that he 
 did not understand it and submitted it to Miss 
 Geraldine Jewsbury, who supplied him with the 
 version of the Ashburton affair, which he now 
 adopts and sets forth as his own." 
 
 If the earlier statement were correct, the blunder 
 about Lady Ashburton would be an additional 
 reason, if one were needed, to discredit Miss 
 Jewsbury's judgment, if not her veracity. What 
 she could tell was of course no more than Mrs. 
 Carlyle told her ; and to clear the memory both 
 of the Carlyles and of Lady Ashburton, Sir James 
 Crichton-Browne and Mr. A. Carlyle are com- 
 pletely justified in making a mournful disclosure. 
 Mrs. Carlyle's jealousy was physiological. As a 
 relief from pain she had contracted the habit 
 of dosing herself with morphia to excess. " It 
 may be laid down as axiomatic in medical psy- 
 chology, that when a highly neurotic and childless 
 woman, at a critical period of life, takes to morphia, 
 morbid jealousy will develop itself. Mrs. Carlyle 
 was highly neurotic and childless, and at a critical 
 period of life she became addicted to morphia 
 
44 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 and other drugs, and ultimately developed morbid 
 jealousy of her husband. . . . She suffered from 
 neurasthenia and climacteric melancholia. . . . 
 The piteous outcries of the Journal . . . were 
 really but the empty ejaculations of her dis- 
 ordered feelings. Only the husband who has 
 gone through the ordeal of living for years with 
 a wife emotionally deranged, but intellectually 
 clear, as Mrs. Carlyle was, can realise what 
 Carlyle must have endured. . . . His sym- 
 pathetic gentleness and forbearance are beyond 
 all praise. . . . 
 
 " The Ashburton affair was truly, as Froude 
 remarks, the cause of much heart-burning and 
 misery at Cheyne Row, but it was so only because 
 Mrs. Carlyle's diseased fancies fastened upon it, 
 as they would have fastened upon something 
 else, had Carlyle broken with the Ashburtons 
 altogether. Froude has wholly misunderstood 
 it, has published abroad the midnight mutterings 
 of a sick woman, and has based on them dis- 
 creditable reflections on her long-suffering husband. 
 That Carlyle took the correct view of his wife's 
 condition is clear." . . . 
 
 No blame attaches to the afflicted woman. 
 She was able to recognise the cause of the mischief, 
 and faced the cure, and abandoned the morphia. 
 But the coincidence of it with her jealousy being 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 45 
 
 established, no other explanation of her jealousy is 
 needed. 
 
 The evidence that Lady Ashburton did not 
 in the vulgar sense fall in love with Carlyle is 
 overwhelming. Her husband survived her, and 
 after, if not before, her death, read Carlyle' s 
 letters to her, and remained as long as he lived 
 the intimate friend of Carlyle. He married again, 
 and the second Lady Ashburton, as his widow, re- 
 read the old letters of Carlyle to her husband's 
 first wife, and said they " were friendly, intimate 
 letters, expressive of admiration, but in no way 
 transgressing proper bounds." Among a cloud 
 of direct eye-witnesses, the first Lord Houghton 
 is quoted, testifying after both Lady Ashburton 
 and Carlyle were dead that " the constant friend- 
 ship that existed between Lady Ashburton and 
 Carlyle " was " on her part one of filial respect 
 and duteous admiration. The frequent presence 
 of the great moralist of itself gave to the life of 
 Bath House and The Grange a reality that made 
 the most ordinary worldly component parts of 
 it more human and worthy than elsewhere." 
 
 The lady's letters to Carlyle survive to bear 
 out the other evidence ; (and, in short, we not only 
 see the truth of the matter, but may be persuaded 
 to forgive the fiction by reflecting that but for 
 it we might not have learned to see so well the 
 
46 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 beautiful aspects of fine human beings, so ludi- 
 crously maligned.) 
 
 Why, then, did John Forster make the state- 
 ment Mr. Froude alleged ? It is certain, and Mr. 
 Froude admits, that it was untrue, and it is 
 incredible that he made it. He lived two or three 
 years after Froude on his own showing dis- 
 covered it was wrong. Why did Froude not ask 
 him to explain it ? 
 
 (There is obvious to all who have critically 
 studied Mr. Froude's writings an easy escape 
 from the apparent dilemma that either Mr. Froude 
 lied or John Forster. If Forster said, as he pro- 
 perly might have said, as much as is in Lord 
 Houghton's words just quoted, then Mr. Froude 
 a while afterwards, without intending to mislead, 
 but merely twisting in his usual way what he loosely 
 remembered to make it fit his story, would be 
 quite capable of telling that Forster said that 
 Lady Ashburton fell in love with Carlyle.) 
 
 As for the yarn that Carlyle grimly told his 
 wife that if she had left him altogether he would 
 not have missed her, the truth seems to be " that 
 Froude has applied to Carlyle and his wife a story 
 which Carlyle used to tell, and at which his wife 
 laughed merrily. It was the story of a North of 
 England farmer, whose wife, with whom he had 
 had a tiff, left him and went back to her parents, 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 47 
 
 but soon tired of the separation and returned home. 
 Meeting her husband, she addressed him thus : 
 ' I'se back again, thou sees ! ' to which her husband 
 replied, ' Back again ? I never kenned thou was 
 away ! ' That Mrs. Carlyle, whatever she may have 
 said in her tempestuous moods, ever seriously har- 
 boured the idea of leaving her husband, no one 
 who has conned her letters will believe." 
 
 The evidence from the letters need not be 
 summarised here. It is enough to note that many 
 good critics think it alone sufficient, and that 
 there is not a word in all the documents to support 
 the obscene romance now being demolished. 
 
 Two maiden ladies alive in Dumfries were 
 able to testify " that twice whilst at Craigen- 
 puttock (in 1831) Mrs. Carlyle consulted their 
 mother, the late Mrs. Aitken, about her maternal 
 hopes, which, alas ! came to nought ; and the 
 late Mrs. Alexander Carlyle . . . was much touched 
 to find in a drawer at Cheyne Row a little bundle 
 of baby clothes made by Mrs. Carlyle's own hands." 
 (As evidence that her husband was not a eunuch, 
 this would be hard to beat.) It recalls the reference 
 to her " child's chair " in the Reminiscences. 
 
 " It can be demonstrated beyond dispute that 
 what Froude called remorse was simply poignant 
 grief," the grief of the right sort of man, thinking 
 of his own faults only. 
 
48 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 (Here it may be permissible to intercalate 
 in corroboration that upon several occasions in 
 1896 the late David Masson assured me that after 
 the death of Mrs. Carlyle, Carlyle often spoke to 
 him freely about her, but never at all in a tone 
 of remorse. When walking with Masson in his 
 later years, Carlyle occasionally said, " Ay me," 
 softly to himself. If speech followed it generally 
 appeared that he had been sighing over some 
 departed friend. At times he was lively and 
 capable of a most hearty laugh ; but it seemed 
 true that his prevailing mood had subsided into 
 gloom and depression. When I inquired whether 
 he seemed soured or disappointed by the results 
 of his life's work, Masson answered, " I think 
 not." In the following year (1897) Sir Charles 
 Gavan Duffy said the same to me with emphasis, 
 scouting as delirious the suggestion that Carlyle' s 
 bitter sorrow for his wife had anything in common 
 with vulgar remorse. 
 
 (The despondency which many observers noticed 
 in the sage may be explained by his physical 
 condition. The indigestion which afflicted his 
 early years continued to the end. David Masson 
 told me that once when some people were dis- 
 cussing hell, he heard Carlyle saying to them, 
 " If the devil had my stomach to chew with, 
 I could not wish him worse, poor fellow ! " 
 
"THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE " 49 
 
 (Indigestion has the same result as the lack 
 of food, and blue pills taken by a man ill-nourished 
 could not fail to cause depression. Mr. Alexander 
 Carlyle told me in 1903 that Carlyle took blue 
 pills occasionally till the last year of his life. 
 " His death," said his nephew, who had been 
 residing with him, and was quoting what the 
 doctors said, " was not due to any disease, but 
 to a complete failure of digestion. He was unable 
 to take any food for the last three weeks of his 
 life ; and he lived for three weeks after Dr. Maclagan 
 who was attending him prophesied that he would 
 die in one.") 
 
 Before passing to other medical details which 
 must be inflicted on readers willing to have a 
 doctor's trouble but without the fees, a few lines 
 may be quoted of a different quality. 
 
 " With plaintive air Froude asks what motive 
 he could have had " for misstatement ? " It is 
 possible that some of the motives which actuated 
 Froude . . . were . . . unknown to himself ; but 
 on the surface, motives, not wanting in strength, 
 are discernible. Froude is not entitled to say, 
 ' I had no secret injuries to resent.' " Carlyle had 
 censured his writings (as, for example, his Caesar, 
 saying "it tells me nothing of Caesar"); and 
 reprimanded " a fondness for indecent exposure." 
 In the letters Froude read " far from compli- 
 
50 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 mentary references " to himself, and his own 
 pamphlet about his relations with Carlyle shows 
 " a sense of injury as to the manner in which 
 Carlyle had disposed of his papers." . . . 
 
 " His mind was poisoned against Carlyle by 
 the conception he had formed of his treatment 
 of his wife, and, do what he might, amidst all 
 the nectar and ambrosia, the subtle and deadly 
 venom would, from time to time, trickle out. 
 In Froude's somewhat rank imagination con- 
 ceptions grew apace. Once formed they were 
 expanded from within, and never subjected to 
 the pressure of facts from without. And so his 
 malign conception of Carlyle gathered strength 
 as he went on, and is seen in full force in his 
 posthumous paper. . . . He wished to limn truly 
 the portrait in his mind's eye, yet that portrait 
 was blotched and discoloured . . . and he was 
 not ignorant that startling effects and contro- 
 versial matter are attractive in literature." 
 
IV 
 
 MEDICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 In " The Nemesis of Froude " readers are referred 
 to an article by Sir James Crichton-Browne, m.d., 
 etc., in the " British Medical Journal " of 27th June, 
 1903. In it some interesting details are added. 
 Incredible as it may appear, Mr. Froude did not 
 " think fit to test Miss Jewsbury's statement 
 in any way, although he regarded it not as a mere 
 bit of idle talk, but as of vital importance, and 
 made it the keynote of his whole biography. 
 Carlyle was alive ; many medical men who had 
 attended Mrs. Carlyle were accessible " ; (one of 
 them was Dr. John Carlyle, her brother-in-law, 
 and I have been credibly informed that he was 
 most anxious to enlighten Froude, and when 
 he found Froude omitting to consult him, wished 
 to nip his enterprise in the bud ; and nobody 
 can doubt that Froude had only to ask permission 
 from Carlyle himself to get leave to question any 
 doctor who had anything to tell ;) " judicious 
 friends of hers, like Mrs. Russell, of Thornhill, 
 who had been in far more confidential relations 
 
 51 
 
52 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 with her than Miss Jewsbury, might have been 
 appealed to ; but no step did Froude take to 
 apply the touchstone which lay ready at hand. 
 He received Miss Jewsbury's disclosure with 
 avidity. . . . He had had ' anonymous letters ' on 
 the subject, he tells us." . . . 
 
 (Now anonymous letters may furnish useful 
 clues in countries where a bureaucracy is en- 
 throned and burkes complaints, one scoundrel 
 winking at another, as I have read and seen 
 abundantly in Burma; but even under such 
 circumstances the anonymous report is at best 
 a clue, and never evidence. In England an anony- 
 mous communication that a man who had been 
 married about forty years was a eunuch is so likely 
 to be a smutty invention that it is not needful 
 to discuss it, and men of sense would never 
 mention it.) 
 
 The nearest approach to direct evidence by 
 medical men is this : " Miss Jewsbury sowed, 
 Froude watered, and the calumny has seeded 
 apace — at any rate in the metropolis, in that 
 fertile soil for piquant and lewd chatter about 
 prominent persons which a high civilisation never 
 fails to afford. I have heard it stated in London 
 society many times, with and without facetious 
 accompaniments, that Carlyle was impotent, and 
 that that was the clue to his life-history, and 
 
MEDICAL EVIDENCE 53 
 
 I have invariably asked for authority for or proof 
 of the statement, and the answers I have received 
 have all resolved themselves into these four : 
 (1) It is so reported. (2) Froude said so. (3) Sir 
 Richard Quain said so. (4) The house-surgeon 
 at St. George's Hospital who examined Mrs. 
 Carlyle's body declared that she was virgo 
 intacta. 
 
 " As to report I need say no more. Detached 
 from a definite and approachable point of origin, 
 it is as the idle wind, which it would be the 
 height of folly to regard. As to Froude, I need 
 merely remark that the fact that he said any- 
 thing is the best possible reason for disbeliev- 
 ing it." 
 
 (Besides, Froude did not offer himself as a 
 witness. He was an historian professing to relate 
 facts ascertained from others.) 
 
 "As to Sir Richard Quain, I need scarcely 
 remind my professional brethren that the as- 
 cription of the rumour to him is a palpable lie. 
 Sir Richard (then Dr.) Quain was professionally 
 consulted by Mrs. Carlyle, treated her for a number 
 of years, and gave her death certificate ; and was 
 not, as Chairman of the General Medical Council, 
 likely to commit an act infamous in a professional 
 respect, by divulging a secret confided to him by 
 a patient in his professional capacity. No one who 
 
54 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 knew him will believe that he did so, and that he 
 did not do so I have the strongest reason to 
 maintain, for on one occasion on which I dined with 
 him at the table of Woolner the sculptor, when 
 our host propounded the theory as to Carlyle's 
 impotence, Sir Richard laughed it to scorn as a 
 bad joke. I am informed that when Sir Richard 
 was attending Mrs. Carlyle, sometime in the 
 'sixties, he had on one visit, after leaving Mrs. 
 Carlyle's bedroom, an interview in the drawing- 
 room with Mrs. Venturi (the Hon. Mrs. Stansfeld's 
 sister), who was acting as Mrs. Carlyle's friend 
 and taking his directions, and he added to these : 
 ' You may tell Mr. Carlyle that he may resume 
 marital relations with his wife.' To which Mrs. 
 Venturi replied : ' I would rather you would tell 
 him yourself.' " 
 
 (I know not how Sir James was informed of 
 what was said to Mrs. Venturi, but I have myself 
 heard it from a gentleman unwilling to be named, 
 who said to me that Mrs. Venturi told it to his 
 wife, from whom he heard it. He added that Mrs. 
 Venturi said Dr. Quain replied that he did not 
 dare to speak to Carlyle himself about it, and 
 she rejoined: "Then how can you expect me to 
 do it, being a woman ? " She was an English 
 lady of superior intellect and character, and on 
 very intimate terms with the Carlyles. The story 
 
MEDICAL EVIDENCE 55 
 
 is quite a likely one, and may safely be believed 
 on her word alone.) 
 
 To resume quotation from the medical article : 
 " Froude's final anathema on Carlyle has been 
 delayed so long that much of the evidence that 
 might have been called to prove it unjust has 
 gone beyond our reach. Dr. T. J. Maclagan, 
 who attended Carlyle for two years, and during 
 his last illness, and was supporting his head when 
 he died, has . . . just passed away. He must 
 have had special opportunities of obtaining in- 
 formation, and I have heard him denounce this 
 rumour as to Carlyle's impotency as a foul false- 
 hood." . . . 
 
 " Mrs. Carlyle died suddenly in her brougham 
 on April 21st, 1866, at about four o'clock in the 
 afternoon. Her death was discovered at a point in 
 Hyde Park just opposite the Achilles statue, and 
 her body was immediately conveyed to St. George's 
 Hospital, two hundred yards distant. Within two 
 hours the hospital was visited by Miss Jewsbury 
 and Froude, who thus describes what he saw. 
 ' There on a bed in a small room, we found Mrs. 
 Carlyle beautifully dressed, dressed as she always 
 was in quietly perfect taste. Nothing had been 
 touched. Her bonnet had not been taken off. 
 It was as if she had sat on the bed after leaving 
 the brougham, and had fallen back upon it asleep.' 
 
56 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 The recollection of the Secretary of the hospital 
 is that Mrs. Carlyle's body was laid on a bed, 
 not, as Froude states, in a small room, but in one 
 of the wards, where it was screened off ; but let 
 that pass. . . . There was no coroner's inquest, 
 no necropsy, and the body was removed to Cheyne 
 Row the same evening." 
 
 Sir James points to the absurdity of supposing 
 that the corpse could have been examined as 
 alleged, and mentions the medical fact that the 
 question of virginity could not have been decided 
 by an examination, even if there had been one 
 by the best experts. Then he proceeds : " But I 
 am in a position to state in the most positive 
 terms that no examination of the body of Mrs. 
 Carlyle took place. Dr. Ridge-Jones, who was Resi- 
 dent Medical Officer at St. George's Hospital on 
 April 21st, 1866, writes to me as follows : ' I remem- 
 ber distinctly attending the late Mrs. Carlyle when 
 brought to St. George's Hospital in her brougham 
 from Hyde Park in 1866. She was dead when I 
 saw her, and no examination was made or thought of. 
 . . . No one would have dared to make an 
 examination of the body of any kind without 
 my sanction. Therefore you may take it from me 
 as a fact that no examination was made. The late 
 Mr. Froude called at the hospital very soon after 
 Mrs. C. was brought in, and I had a long talk with 
 
MEDICAL EVIDENCE 57 
 
 him. There was no coroner's inquest, and I do 
 not remember to have given the certificate of 
 death.' " 
 
 (It is pleasant and perhaps permissible to add 
 some unexpected corroboration of Dr. Ridge- 
 Jones. On several days, ending September 25th, 
 1896, I had long interviews with Mrs. Broadfoot, 
 at her house, Yorkvilla, Thornhill, Dumfries- 
 shire. She was a person of strong, natural intellect, 
 and a capital observer. Her connection with 
 Carlyle and his wife dated from childhood ; and 
 she was a maid in their house from July, 1865, 
 till August, 1866, when she left to marry Mr. 
 Broadfoot. My notes of her talk cover more than 
 forty pages. From letters she showed me I saw 
 she had been treated in the old-fashioned way 
 as both a friend and a servant. She told me how 
 on the day of Mrs. Carlyle' s death she had dressed 
 her, and pinned her voluminous underclothing 
 before she went out for a drive, and she it was 
 who received the corpse in the evening and pre- 
 pared it for burial. She assured me, and repeated 
 her assurance later : " Mrs. Carlyle's body was 
 brought home that night, and it had not been 
 examined in any way — dress and underclothing 
 were just as when she left the house." 
 
 (It is not in my notes, but I clearly recollect 
 remarking that doctors were clever in replacing 
 
58 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 things, whereupon she vehemently declared that 
 nobody could have replaced the garments as 
 she had put them in a way to escape her notice, 
 and that Mrs. Carlyle, being frail, was wearing 
 a great deal more than usual.) 
 
 " There were those who had seen Carlyle bath- 
 ing," we read. (In Scotland in the first half of 
 the nineteenth century and later men bathed 
 at a modest distance from the village, and stark 
 naked, even as the Greeks wrestled. In watering- 
 places such as Carlyle frequented, I have seen 
 as late as the 'seventies more than half of the 
 men bathing naked, and the rest nearly so. Any 
 physical oddity about Carlyle, who was an as- 
 siduous bather, would not have escaped notice.) 
 
 " During the later years of his life he suffered 
 from an inguinal hernia, and the person who many 
 times adjusted his truss is still alive, and is 
 ready to testify that he was in all respects 
 normally formed." . . . 
 
 In a letter written in the last year of her life 
 Mrs. Carlyle attributed her childlessness to her 
 own weak health. She " was an only child, born 
 prematurely, and during her life her family be- 
 came extinct, so that when Carlyle came to make 
 his will there was no Welsh left to whom he could 
 bequeath Craigenputtock." 
 
 (More evidence of a direct kind is mentioned 
 
MEDICAL EVIDENCE 59 
 
 in the open letter to Mr. Harris, Chapter VI here 
 following. Only an accident prevented it being 
 all in " The Nemesis of Froude " ; and even with- 
 out it, so overwhelming is the case made out by 
 Sir James Crichton-Browne and Mr. Alexander 
 Carlyle, that I confidently hoped till 1911 that 
 it would never be needful .for any ordinary bio- 
 grapher to deal with such a topic at all. But it 
 was fated otherwise. So now let Mr. Harris have a 
 hearing.) 
 
ME. HARRIS TELLS TALES 
 
 (In February, 1911, there appeared in the " English 
 Review " an article, " Talks with Carlyle," by 
 Frank Harris, from which, by the courteous 
 permission of the editor, these extracts are now 
 made. The brackets indicate my notes intercalated. 
 The rest is quotation.) 
 
 The servant-girl at his house told me that Mr. 
 Carlyle had gone for his usual walk on Chelsea 
 Embankment, so I went off to find him. . . . 
 
 (The description of Carlyle which follows, 
 and most of the opening talk about Goethe and 
 Heine might have been paraphrased from de- 
 scriptions and dialogues published in London 
 long ago. This coincidence would be a corroboration 
 of the writer only if he had not read the previously 
 published reports. Whether Mr. Harris, a London 
 journalist and author and editor, had read them, 
 none but himself can tell. When the conversation 
 turned upon Jesus Christ, then indeed he gives 
 us something original. It is unpleasant reading, 
 
 60 
 
MR. HARRIS TELLS TALES 61 
 
 and it is printed only out of deference to some 
 earnestly religious persons who desire me to 
 explain its absurdity.) 
 
 How Mr. Harris stood up for Jesus 
 
 " Do you think Shakespeare greater than Jesus?" 
 I asked. 
 
 " Indeed I do," was the emphatic reply. . . . 
 " I prefer Shakespeare ; he was larger, richer." 
 
 " Perhaps," I replied, " but Jesus went deeper." 
 
 " I don't admit it," he persisted. " All the 
 Jewish morality was tribal, narrow ; ' an eye 
 for an eye,' stupid, pedantic formula ; and the 
 Christian — ' turn the other cheek ' — mere ab- 
 surdity. I see no greatness in any of it." 
 
 " ' He that is without sin among you let him 
 first cast a stone,' " I replied, " is great enough 
 and modern to boot," but he would not let me 
 continue ; he had got the great argument clear 
 at last. 
 
 " Man, He had no humour," he cried, shaking 
 his head ; " Jesus had no Falstaff in Him ; I wad 
 na gie up the ragged company for all the disciples," 
 and again the deep-set eyes danced. 
 
 I tried to put forward some other reasons, 
 
62 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 but he would not listen ; he repeated obstinately, 
 " He had no Falstaff in Him, no Falstaff." . . . 
 And he chuckled. The subject was closed. . . . 
 
 ii 
 A Dream of a Drawing-room 
 
 " Perhaps you didn't know Darwin ? " (So 
 Mr. Harris says that he inquired of Carlyle.) 
 
 " Indeed, and I knew him well," he replied, 
 taking me up shortly, " knew him when he was 
 quite young — long before his ' Beagle ' voyage — 
 knew him and his brother. I always thought 
 the brother the abler of the two — quicker and of 
 wider range, but both were solid, healthy men, 
 not greatly gifted, but honest and careful and 
 hardworking. ... I remember when he came 
 back after the ' Beagle ' cruise. I met him at Lady 
 
 , a great party, and all the ladies buzzed 
 
 about him like bees round a dish of sugar. When 
 he had had enough of it — perhaps more than was 
 good for him — I called him. 
 
 " ' Come here, Charles,' " I cried, ' and explain 
 to me this new theory of yours that all the world's 
 talking about.' 
 
 " He came at once, and sat down with me, 
 and talked most modestly and sensibly about it 
 all. I saw in him then qualities I had hardly 
 
MR. HARRIS TELLS TALES 63 
 
 done justice to before, a patient clear-mindedness, 
 fairness, too, and, above all, an allegiance to facts, 
 just as facts, which was most pathetic to me ; 
 it was so instinctive, determined, even desperate, 
 a sort of belief in its way, an English belief, that 
 the facts must lead you right if you only followed 
 them honestly, a poor, groping, blind faith — 
 all that seems possible to us in these days of 
 flatulent unbelief and priggish unconcern for 
 everything except swill and straw," and the eyes 
 gleamed wrathfully under the bushy grey brows. 
 
 " That must have been wonderful," I resumed, 
 after a pause, " to have heard Darwin explain 
 Darwinism." 
 
 " He did it very well," Carlyle went on, " an 
 ordered lucidity in him which showed me I had 
 under-rated him, misseen him, as we poor pur- 
 blind mortals are apt to missee each other, even 
 with the best will in the world to see fairly," and 
 he sighed again deeply. 
 
 " But the theory must have interested you," 
 I said, striking the match again, or trying to. 
 
 " Ay," he said, as if plunged in thought and 
 then waking up. " The theory, man ! the theory is 
 as old as the everlasting hills." . . . 
 
 " Did you tell Darwin what you thought of 
 his new scientific creed ? " I asked, after a pause. 
 
 " I did," he said, with a quick change of mood, 
 
64 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 smiling suddenly with the gay sunshiny irre- 
 sistible smile that illumined his whole face, quiver- 
 ing on the lips, dancing in the eyes, wrinkling the 
 nose. 
 
 " After Darwin had talked to me for some 
 time, a little crowd had gathered about us, open- 
 mouthed, listening to Sir Oracle, and when he had 
 finished, I said : 
 
 " ' All that's very interesting, Darwin, no doubt : 
 how we men were evolved from apes and all that, 
 and perhaps true,' and I looked about me, ' I see 
 no reason to doubt it, none : but what I want 
 to know is how we're to prevent this present 
 generation from devolving into apes ? That 
 seems to me the important matter — to prevent 
 them devolving into apes.' " 
 
 And the old man laughed — a great belly- 
 shaking laugh that shook him into a cough, 
 and there we stood laughing, laughing in harmony 
 at length with the sun which shone bravely 
 overhead, while the silken wavelets danced with 
 joy and the air was young and quick. 
 
 in 
 " The Puritan's Limitations " 
 (Reality is funnier than fiction. If any play- 
 wright had brought upon the stage a London 
 editor or author, and made him tell seriously 
 
MR. HARRIS TELLS TALES 65 
 
 this wonderful yarn about Thomas Carlyle making 
 a scene in Hyde Park, and then spluttering obscene 
 confessions to a callow companion, a young man 
 and casual acquaintance, there is not a critic 
 in England but would have scoffed at him for 
 overstepping the modesty of Nature. It would 
 have seemed too unlikely even for a farce. Yet 
 here it all is as it appeared in the " English 
 Review " in February, 1911.) 
 
 On all the main issues then of modern politics, 
 the great Puritan was in the right, his insight 
 has been justified by the event : he was at once 
 the best guiding and governing force ever seen 
 in England. We must now try to realise his 
 limitations and shortcomings. Strange to say 
 he was typical of Puritanism also in this ; his 
 blind side was the blind side of the whole move- 
 ment, and supplies the reason why the movement 
 failed to satisfy modern needs and why it is that 
 to-day Puritanism is universally discredited. 
 
 Carlyle had hardly any sense of sex or stirring 
 of passion. He was even more devoid of bodily 
 desire than Swift or Ruskin. This lack brought 
 him to misery and his life to wreck. Mr. Craig 
 points out that he never shared his wife's natural 
 longing for children ; he could not even understand 
 it. He had not enough sensuality to comprehend 
 his wife's ordinary needs and so he treated her 
 
66 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 atrociously without realising his own blindness 
 till it was too late even for atonement. 
 
 A passage in his " Heroes and Hero- Worship " 
 first put me on the track. Speaking of Dante 
 he admitted that the great Florentine was " gey 
 ill to live with " and nevertheless, defended 
 him. Men like Dante, he says, of keen passionate 
 sensibilities, and conscious of the importance 
 of their mission must always be difficult to live 
 with. It was as if Carlyle had been justifying 
 his own conduct. 
 
 One day we were walking together in Hyde 
 Park : as we neared Hyde Park corner it began 
 to rain : naturally, I quickened my pace a little. 
 Suddenly, to my utter astonishment, Carlyle 
 stopped, and taking off his soft hat stood there 
 in the rain with his grey head bowed. For a 
 moment I was lost in wonder : then I remembered 
 his picture of old Dr. Johnson standing bareheaded 
 before his father's shop in Lichfield half in piety, 
 half in remorse. I guessed that Carlyle was thinking 
 of his wife, and then it flashed across me that it 
 was here in Hyde Park she had died in her carriage 
 while he was in Edinburgh. When he put on 
 his hat and walked on, the tears were running 
 down his face. 
 
 I can't remember how the talk began and 
 my notes do not help me much. At the time 
 
MR. HARRIS TELLS TALES 67 
 
 I put down simply : " Johnson's penance and 
 piety ; remorse and repentance not good, harmful ; 
 Carlyle's excessive. Bit by bit he told the incredible 
 story." 
 
 In brief the story was that he admired his wife 
 beyond all other women, loved her and her alone 
 all his life ; but had never consummated the 
 marriage or lived with her as a wife. 
 
 " The body part seemed so little to me," he 
 pleaded : " I had no idea it could mean much to 
 her. I should have thought it degrading her to 
 imagine that. Ay di me, ay di me. . . . Quarter 
 of a century passed before I found out how wrong 
 I was, how mistaken, how criminally blind. . . . 
 It was the doctor told me and then it was too 
 late for anything but repentance. My poor love ! 
 She had never told me anything ; never even 
 hinted anything ; was too proud, and I, blind, 
 blind. . . . When I blamed myself to her I saw 
 the doctor was right ; she had suffered and I — 
 ah God, how blind we mortals can be; how 
 blind ! . . . 
 
 " It was as if I had been operated for cataract a 
 and sight had been given me suddenly. I saw 
 the meaning of a hundred things which had passed 
 me unexplained ; I loved her so that I realised 
 even wishes unconfessed to herself, realised that 
 she would have been happier married to Irving 
 
68 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 and that she had felt this. Speaking once of his 
 pretended gift of tongues, she said ' he would 
 have had no such gift had I married him.' I 
 understood at length, that she had wanted him. 
 Physically he was splendid, and she had felt his 
 attraction. ... I loved her so, I could have given 
 her to him and I did nothing but injure her 
 and maim her life, the darling ! who did every- 
 thing for me and was everything to me for forty 
 years. . . . 
 
 " And the worst of it all is, there is no other life 
 in which to atone to her — my puir girlie ! It's 
 done, and God Himself cannot undo it. My girl, 
 my puir girl ! . . . Man, man, it's awful, awful to 
 hurt your dearest blindly, awful ! " And the tears 
 rained down the haggard old face and the eyes 
 stared out in utter misery. 
 
 I comforted him as best I could, told him that 
 in his remorse he exaggerated the wrong and 
 the injury, that after all, he had been by far the 
 best husband Mrs. Carlyle could have had, that 
 faithlessness went with passion, that she might 
 have suffered more with any other man and that 
 she could never have known with any other 
 such perfect companionship of spirit, such in- 
 timacy of soul, but he shook his head ; he had 
 always loved the truth and now against himself 
 he would not blink it. " Ma puir girlie ! " was his 
 
MR. HARRIS TELLS TALES 69 
 
 cry, and " blind, blind ! " his ceaseless self-reproach. 
 He had put all his pride in his insight, and it was 
 his insight that had failed him. 
 
 Years later I told the fact at a dinner at the 
 Garrick Club, and a man I did not then know, 
 confirmed it across the table : told me he was 
 the doctor in question and afterwards in private 
 gave me the other side of the story from what 
 Mrs. Carlyle had told him. It was Sir Richard 
 Quain, I believe. Some time or other I shall 
 probably tell what he told me that night. 
 
 Carlyle's confession to me broke down all 
 barriers between us. Whenever we met after- 
 wards he treated me with infinite consideration 
 and kindness. But all that is another story, and 
 not to be told here. 
 
 What concerns us now is the fact that this 
 bodily disability of Carlyle explains most of his 
 shortcomings as literary critic and writer. . . . 
 
VI 
 
 AN OPEN LETTER TO MS. HARRIS 
 
 I was in Burma when Mr. Harris's article appeared, 
 and had to send for it. By the time it came my 
 books were packed, as I was preparing to return 
 to England. My Carlyle papers had been in the 
 safe keeping of the Librarian of Glasgow University 
 since 1907, and were not immediately accessible. 
 So I could not sift Mr. Harris's writing at once ; 
 and though on sight of it I saw he had allowed 
 his pen to run away with him, I remembered 
 what I had noticed when attending the Law 
 Courts long ago in London, and an able Irish 
 barrister of my acquaintance had confirmed 
 to me, that an Irishman has an oriental preference 
 for the direct way of quoting and for an amplifi- 
 cation of surrounding circumstances. That makes 
 him occasionally require from his memory more 
 than any memory can carry. So he is a little 
 readier than an Englishman who has learned 
 to write to add fictitious details to a true story. 
 It seemed plain that the article was not entirely 
 invented ; and therefore I decided to try to sift 
 something credible out of it, and even hoped the 
 
 70 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 71 
 
 writer had been " Carlylean " enough to keep 
 notes which he might let me see. It also seemed 
 plainly needful to remonstrate, and maybe induce 
 him to correct the most obvious and dangerous 
 of his blunders. 
 
 The only date he gave in February was on the 
 eleventh page of his article, where a paragraph 
 begins : " When I knew Carlyle in 1878-9 I tried 
 again and again to get him on this subject . . . 
 why he had never stood for Parliament." . . . 
 This seemed to imply that other talks had other 
 dates. As soon as he admitted, on the production 
 of an old letter of his by Mr. Alexander Carlyle, 
 that he first became acquainted with Carlyle 
 in 1877, then indeed it became easy for any student 
 of Carlyle' s life to see that in this instance the 
 erroneous details were likely to bear the same 
 proportion to the original fact as Falstaff's in- 
 tolerable deal of sack to his one halfpennyworth of 
 bread. But in the meantime the following letter 
 had been sent to him as soon as I read his article : — 
 
 Toungoo, Burma, 
 Frank Harris, Esq. 29-7-11. 
 
 Dear Sir, 
 
 Your article in the "English Review" 
 of February last, and the fact that I have been 
 collecting materials for a " Life " of Carlyle 
 
72 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 for nearly twenty years, and am on the point 
 of retiring from professional life to proceed with 
 it, may seem to you to justify this letter. It is 
 to explain to you, and beg you to correct, a dreadful 
 mistake which you unconsciously made in listening 
 to Carlyle's talk. 
 
 It is surely needless to say I have confidence 
 in your perfect good faith, and in the substantial 
 accuracy of your report, which I may yet quote 
 in a way that will please you. Otherwise this 
 letter would not be written. 
 
 The truth is simple, and I will begin by telling 
 it. Carlyle and his wife loved, married, and lived 
 together, exactly as other married people do, for 
 many years, till she came to the time of life when 
 physical changes begin in women which terminate 
 the possibility of motherhood. Mrs. Carlyle, who 
 had been always delicate and ' highly strung,' 
 was then, like many another woman at that time of 
 life, in danger of death, or of what she dreaded 
 more, insanity. She made her husband promise 
 she would never be sent away from him even if 
 insane ; but though she long continued hovering 
 on the verge, she was never at any time in need 
 of a keeper, thanks to his infinite patience with her, 
 though often enough she had to have a nurse. 
 
 This dreadful affliction commenced some time 
 before Mrs. Welsh, her mother, died ; and Mrs. 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 73 
 
 Welsh, who was a doctor's widow, suggested to 
 Mrs. Carlyle that she would best get over the dangerous 
 years in front of her by persuading her husband to 
 abstain from intimacy and let her sleep apart. He 
 consented, and the women had their way. 
 
 Both Dr. Quain and Carlyle himself in speaking 
 to you were thinking of the long period that 
 followed between then and her death. There is 
 abundant evidence to prove this ; but consider 
 your own report : " Quarter of a century passed ..." 
 You say Carlyle was impotent, and that their 
 marriage was " never consummated," and you 
 understood him to be speaking of their whole 
 life together when he said "quarter of a century." 
 But they were married in 1826, and Mrs. Carlyle 
 died in 1866. The context makes it certain that 
 whatever vague word Carlyle used would properly 
 be above and not under the exact figure. From 
 the epoch I have indicated till her death was over 
 twenty years, and so would fit his words as you 
 report them. 
 
 You may reply you may have been mistaken 
 on this point. But my trade has been little but 
 sifting evidence for very many years ; and so I 
 hope you will pardon the remark that you were 
 much more likely to be mistaken about other 
 words than about a phrase like this. There is 
 no part of your valuable report which is not 
 
74 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 more likely to be a mistake than this " quarter 
 of a century," which is fatal to your theory of 
 impotence. 
 
 It may be as well to explain what Dr. Quain 
 advised, and why. It is a commonplace among 
 specialists on mental diseases that nothing is 
 worse for a patient in danger than the feeling, 
 ' I am peculiar.' Many of the best contrivances 
 to steady the brain are based on this fact, arid do 
 good by making the patient feel himself or herself 
 to be like other people. There is no doubt that 
 that was the sole and sufficient reason why Dr. 
 Quain thought that Mrs. Carlyle ought to resume 
 living with her husband, like other married ladies. 
 She shrank from the mention of the subject ; 
 and so the honest doctor, who confessed he " did 
 not dare to speak to Carlyle himself " about it, 
 tried to approach him through common friends, 
 whose subsequent statements are a part of the 
 evidence which I have found conclusive. 
 
 It seems to have been Quain's opinion that 
 Mrs. Carlyle's sufferings were increased by Carlyle's 
 yielding to the whim of her mother and herself ; 
 but all the evidence points to the conclusion that 
 Carlyle was never told of this till it was too late. 
 He was full of remorse for needing to be told 
 it, and thought he had neglected her a little when 
 he was busy ; but his remorse has been exaggerated, 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 75 
 
 and quite misunderstood. (P.S. — 1912. I have 
 never seen any evidence that he ever was told it, 
 except the statements of Mr. Harris. — D. A. W.) 
 
 In the book " Mr. Froude and Carlyle " (1898) 
 my argument was that Mr. Froude's narrative 
 was unsupported by evidence and incredible. 
 I knew that he had meant the fashionable gossip 
 of the town to supply the gaps and suppose 
 Carlyle to be impotent. But in 1898 I wrote so 
 that nobody who had not already heard it would 
 learn it from me. I shared to the full the deter- 
 mination of Carlyle' s relatives and friends to clear 
 his memory, and also their reluctance to mention 
 matters which ought not to emerge in verbiage. 
 (I enclose a note whereby you can get a copy 
 of that book, if you want to see it.) 
 
 Mr. Alexander Carlyle continued to persevere 
 piously in publishing volume after volume of 
 authentic documents, Mr. C. E. Norton, Sir James 
 Crichton-Browne and others helping him. Gradually 
 but effectually the work was being done and the 
 fiction fading away. Then the representatives of 
 Mr. Froude were foolish enough to publish the 
 obscene libel which he had left in writing, and 
 you now repeat it. Of course, it had long been 
 current in London, and it had apparently imposed 
 upon you so completely that, in listening to 
 
76 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 Carlyle's own talk on this very subject, you imagined 
 he was endorsing it. I will not repeat to you the 
 evidence already published in refutation of it ; 
 because I presume you have seen all that and 
 remain unconvinced. So here is something new. 
 
 In 1897, some years before the existence of Mr. 
 Froude's memorandum was known, Sir Charles 
 Gavan Duffy told me he was sure there was some- 
 thing of the sort in existence, " being held back 
 till witnesses like myself are dead," and he explained 
 what he would have put into his " Conversations 
 with Carlyle," if Froude had been explicit before 
 that work was published. Many years before 
 Carlyle died (I cannot here and now give the date 
 exactly), Gavan Duffy heard the story told about 
 Carlyle as a kind of finish to talk about another 
 man. This was in the purlieus of Parliament. 
 A few days afterwards he was taking a walk with 
 Carlyle in the London parks, and told it all to him, 
 with the freedom of a favourite disciple and an old 
 friend, and heard in reply the simple and common- 
 place story which I have told you now. I received 
 permission to retell it, and very soon afterwards 
 I placed it at the disposal of one of our leading 
 editors, but silence seemed the best. It seemed to me 
 a curious coincidence that Mr. Froude's new reve- 
 lations were published shortly after the death of Sir 
 Charles Gavan Duffy. 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 77 
 
 I had discovered the truth before he told me. 
 In 1884 a friend unlikely to be mistaken had 
 hinted to me how Froude was explaining to polite 
 society his printed innuendoes. A memorandum 
 completely vindicating him was then expected 
 to be published soon after the completion of his 
 biography. Till 1890 I had no misgivings. It 
 seemed incredible that Froude would have built 
 so huge a romance upon so small and simple 
 a fact without making sure of it. 
 
 In 1890 I was " put upon inquiry " in a curious 
 way. Having some weeks to spare, I went for 
 a holiday to Ecclefechan, and there listened to 
 the talk of a man who cherished piously an old 
 family feud against the " Carlyle Clan," and 
 gloated over all that Froude had done to de- 
 preciate " Old Tom." Froude had only one 
 fault as a biographer — he had hidden too much. 
 Why should not everybody know that this old 
 atheist was a poor clodhopper till the end, a wife- 
 beater and a sot ? It was with an air of infinite 
 sorrow, and perhaps because others were listening 
 who might have corrected him, that he had to 
 admit he had never seen Carlyle drunk. But if he 
 did not drink, why did he write such strong 
 language ? The fact was that he had married 
 a lady, and did not know how to treat her. If 
 this detractor had ever heard the faintest whisper 
 
78 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 of the London story, he would have vouched 
 for it with gusto. His head was full of all the 
 smut of Annandale for half a century, but he 
 had missed the pleasure of a titbit like that. 
 I wonder if he went to his grave without knowing 
 it ? One almost hopes so. He did not hear it 
 from me ; and unintentionally he let me see 
 that, whether the story was false or true, it prob- 
 ably started in London. 
 
 When I decided to undertake a new " Life " 
 of Carlyle, it appeared indispensable to know 
 what the whole truth of the matter was. A Pro- 
 fessor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh* told 
 me plainly that if Froude's story was false, it 
 was a duty to say so, as the fiction had a bad effect 
 on the best of the students. Medical evidence 
 of a direct kind had never been alleged, which 
 surprised me. The best evidence for Froude 
 was that some of Carlyle' s brothers and sisters 
 had " upheld " him. Had they been aware of 
 what London was saying and Froude had im- 
 plied ? By 1895, when I had leisure for full in- 
 quiries, all of them in Scotland were dead. I 
 saw most of their children, and did not discover 
 one who knew any more about the alleged im- 
 potence than the gossipmonger of Ecclefechan. 
 
 One sister only then survived, the youngest, 
 * Prof. Calderwood, 1896. 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 79 
 
 Mrs. Harming ; and she was living in Ontario, 
 Canada, with Mr. and Mrs. Leslie, her son-in-law 
 and daughter. My curiosity about Carlyle was 
 like that of the Chinese about Confucius. So when 
 the Leslies warmly invited my wife and me, off 
 we went, and spent with them the pleasantest days 
 I ever spent on a visit. Mrs. Harming showed me 
 every letter she had. I read them all, making 
 notes, and read many aloud to her. From time 
 to time she made remarks or added details, 
 which showed that the past was present to her 
 mind. 
 
 Whenever Mrs. Hanning learned what I specially 
 wished to be told, she set me to read aloud all sorts 
 of passages in Froude's books. She explained that 
 the thing had never occurred to her before, and that 
 her expression of confidence in Froude meant 
 that her brother's selection of Froude was final 
 for her, and she was determined that the man he 
 selected must be completely trusted. Meanwhile 
 she listened with close attention to what she made 
 me read from his writings. She had clearly de- 
 termined to see for herself first of all what the man 
 meant. I did not argue at all. I read whatever 
 was wanted, and answered the questions asked. 
 It was plain she was thinking violently; but her 
 daughter reassured me, saying, "She is the better 
 of it, it is doing her good." But except to ask a 
 
80 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 question or say what to read, never a word she spoke 
 till at last one evening, when her daughter and I 
 were both sitting silent beside her, waiting for her 
 to speak. Then she suddenly sat more upright 
 than usual on her chair, and looked at me earnestly 
 and said, slowly and deliberately, " It is not true." 
 After a pause, seeing Mrs. Leslie looking at me 
 as if to ask whether I wanted more, I said, " That 
 is all I needed to know." Then we spoke of other 
 and more pleasant things. 
 
 There is an allusion to this visit in the second- 
 last chapter of " East and West," which Messrs. 
 Methuen and Co. are publishing for me this summer. 
 They will send you a copy if you give them your 
 address. Having to cross the Atlantic to see Mrs. 
 Hanning, I took the opportunity to go to Boston 
 to talk with Prof. C. E. Norton of Cambridge (near 
 Boston, Mass.). He assured me that there was 
 nothing in the unpublished correspondence to 
 support Froude's theory, and much to contradict it. 
 
 Not once, but repeatedly, the late David Masson 
 of Edinburgh has told me he also learned the truth 
 from Carlyle's own lips. Unlike Duffy, he had not 
 directly broached the subject, but once when it 
 accidentally emerged, he had listened intently, 
 and though he said he could not with confidence 
 repeat Carlyle's exact words, he " received the 
 same impression " as Duffy. " There was no 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 81 
 
 room whatever for thinking anything else," he 
 once said. " You must not think that Froude 
 invented it," he said one day. " It was a very old 
 story in London." 
 
 The true explanation of the obscene romance 
 has always seemed to me to be very simple. 
 Fashionable society is like every other crowd 
 of common people; and experience, almost as 
 old as the hills, has shown that idleness and plenty 
 do often make men worse instead of better. 
 How could such creatures comprehend a man 
 like him ? He was a leader among free-thinkers, 
 a great historian, and a man of genius. Some 
 of the best of the worldly men of his day recog- 
 nised that in knowledge and wisdom he was as 
 far above the ablest of them as they were above 
 illiterate louts or boys. And yet he was a Puritan, 
 an old-fashioned Puritan, as intolerant of vicious 
 living as Confucius or Oliver Cromwell ! In 
 the Ecclefechan tap-rooms and in the London 
 drawing-rooms alike, men could not understand 
 this. The association of righteousness and Christian 
 creeds was inveterate in Scotland, beginning, as it 
 did, at the Reformation. In England there still 
 survived, outside the Quaker and Puritan circles, 
 the medieval tradition of wholesale lechery or worse, 
 which winked at even the sins of the saints, if 
 only they performed their parts with superficial 
 
82 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 decency. It was taken for granted that other 
 men were free to live in the mud. Neither Scotland 
 nor England could comprehend a sage who preached 
 and practised righteousness and clean living, 
 except for pay in the pulpit. The simple reason 
 why Scotland invented no smut about the Carlyles 
 was that their living apart did not begin till 
 they had ceased to live in Scotland. They had 
 been some years in London theij, loose and easy 
 London ; and there, as soon as it was known 
 that Carlyle and his wife were habitually sleeping 
 apart, the obscene romance was not so much a 
 conscious invention of anybody as a necessity of 
 fashionable thought. [See P.S. page 102]. 
 
 Now that it is known that Gavan Duffy had 
 told Carlyle what " Society " was saying, the 
 numerous allusions in Frederick the Great to 
 fashionable smut acquire a piquant double mean- 
 ing, which needed no explaining in London, 
 when the book appeared. Perhaps you know the 
 name of the distinguished author who went 
 about then whining over the dreadful " coarse- 
 ness" of Carlyle, visibly feeling almost as if he 
 had been personally kicked. Look at Book XVI, 
 Chapter X, for one unmistakable hit at him and 
 his like. It is the conclusion of a summary of 
 smutty fiction about Frederick, emanating from 
 a " Demon Newswriter " : — 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 83 
 
 " ' Lamentable, yes,' comments Diogenes, ' and 
 especially so, that the idle public has a hankering 
 for such things ! But are there no obscene 
 details at all, then ? grumbles the disappointed 
 idle public to itself, something of reproach in 
 its tone. A public idle-minded ; much depraved 
 in every way. Thus, too, you will observe of dogs : 
 two dogs, at meeting, run, first of all, to the shame- 
 ful parts of the constitution ; institute a strict 
 examination, more or less satisfactory, in that 
 department. That once settled, their interest 
 in ulterior matters seems pretty much to die 
 away, and they are ready to part again, as from 
 a problem done.' Enough, oh, enough ! " 
 
 Writing of that kind hushed the smut more 
 or less effectually, as long as Carlyle lived. Then 
 it was felt that a dead lion cquld be safely mangled 
 by dirty dogs, arid the story was revived. The 
 only thing now left in doubt is the exact degree 
 of Froude's delinquency. 
 
 At the risk of disappointing some who have 
 helped me well, I will tell the truth — I think 
 it more likely than not that Froude was per- 
 fectly sincere. The practice of self-deception 
 to which we all are prone must have been strength- 
 ened in him when he was under Newman's in- 
 fluence, and writing " lives " of the saints which 
 
84 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 told " all that is known, and more." Then there 
 were differences in country and culture which 
 were all the more misleading because they seemed 
 quite small. Their net result was to leave much 
 in the lives of Carlyle and his wife a needless 
 enigma to his biographer. Worst of all, perhaps, 
 in this connection, was Froude's undeniable 
 love for smut. It is credibly reported to me that 
 he had to endure rebukes about this, in respect 
 of writings he submitted for Carlyle's criticism 
 before publication. It seems to me that it would 
 then be the most natural thing in the world for 
 him to console himself with the comforting thought 
 that " the old fellow had always been a eunuch." 
 It must have been extremely disagreeable to 
 suspect himself of being unusually prurient. 
 
 Last, but not by any means least of all, there 
 is the fact that he was a man of letters by trade. 
 The day is probably near at hand when serious 
 work in literature shall not be expected to yield 
 any pay in the shape of profits on the books ; 
 but nobody thought so thirty years ago ; and 
 Froude had to measure the time he gave to the 
 work as a lawyer does with a brief or a doctor 
 with a case ; that is to say, he did not need to 
 count the hours, but he had to remember to 
 distribute his time so as to secure his pay. So 
 Froude wrote about Carlyle in the usual pro- 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 85 
 
 fessional way. He looked into the masses of papers 
 lent to him as far as he could spare the time ; but 
 time was limited, for every month's delay was 
 damaging his market, and the papers were volu- 
 minous. It is therefore not surprising to discover, 
 upon applying a mental microscope to his per- 
 formances, that what he really did was merely 
 to seek out readable passages to illustrate what he 
 fancied he already knew sufficiently. 
 
 In short, I do not now ask anyone to blame Mr. 
 Froude, but only not to believe him, particularly 
 on this topic, where he visibly went astray. Surely 
 that is not too much to ask ? I can understand 
 what a wrench it must be to you and others to 
 abandon a belief in the " impotence " which made 
 Carlyle so easily intelligible ; and I confess to 
 you frankly, in advance of the " life " I may not 
 be spared to complete, that I have no fine new 
 theory at all. Anecdotes and dialogues which 
 can be believed shall be the substance of that 
 work, if ever it is finished ; and I have had almost 
 as many helpers as the editor of an ency- 
 clopaedia, though the finished work must be 
 shorter than many a romance. But as for " keys " 
 and " secrets," I do not believe in them. Men 
 are mysteries to each other, mysteries to them- 
 selves. The common man on the street is often 
 an insoluble puzzle ; and still more the spiritual 
 
86 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 heroes. Carlyle seems to me like Buddha, Con- 
 fucius, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and one or two 
 others on record, a man whom we can with profit 
 observe and study, but never " explain." 
 
 I am so hopeful that you for one will be con- 
 vinced of the mistake that I will venture a few 
 queries, which you may be kind enough to answer 
 privately. Who was the lady you mention on 
 page 425 ? How many talks had you with Car- 
 lyle ? What were the dates ? Who introduced 
 you ? Did you write and ask an interview ? 
 More than a dozen years ago there was an article 
 in the " Saturday Review," describing a call 
 upon Carlyle, and his conversation. Both Masson 
 and I liked it much. Masson told me he thought 
 it safe to believe every word of it. The editor 
 of the paper was asked, but did not name his 
 contributor. Did you write that ? Your style 
 recalls it. Whether you answer these queries or 
 not, whether you are convinced or not, I con- 
 gratulate you upon Boswellean notes, superlative 
 in their way. You made fine use of your oppor- 
 tunity to listen to a man whose smallest words 
 and actions are likely to interest his fellows for 
 millenniums to come. 
 
 It is for the sake of the public and yourself 
 that I would rejoice to see you join in the cor- 
 rection now being made. Biographers of Carlyle 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HARRIS 87 
 
 shall succeed biographers for many generations; 
 and as any man of sense can see the truth already 
 from the evidence now published, it will not be 
 long before even the simple Simons of literature 
 will cease to doubt the facts of Carlyle's common- 
 place domestic life, and fix their eyes on what 
 is more unusual, his clean, heroic, and disinterested 
 life of successful labour. I conclude with an ancient 
 apologue, not specially meant for you, of course, 
 but a warning to those numerous unfortunates 
 who find matter of offence in the teaching of 
 Carlyle, and for that reason are rejoicing in the 
 delusion that he can be permanently discredited 
 by obscene inventions. When a great spirit is 
 concerned, the truth is sure to prevail. Men may 
 fling what they like at the sky, it always returns 
 to the ground. 
 
 Snowy white the swan sailed by ; 
 
 Crows indignant at the view 
 Came in crowds across the sky ; 
 
 Mud upon the swan they threw. 
 Laughed the crows : " From tail to crown, 
 
 " Caw, caw, caw, with mud you're smeared !" 
 Till the silent swan sank down. 
 
 Snowy white he reappeared ; 
 Saying, " You can see the slime, 
 
 " Which on me you've lately thrown, 
 "Now is serving to begrime 
 
 " No one's feathers but your own." 
 
 David Alec Wilson. 
 
VII 
 
 THE SEQUEL 
 
 The open letter just read was sent in duplicate 
 to Mr. Harrison, the editor of the " English 
 Review," who on 28-8-1911 wrote : " One copy 
 I am gladly forwarding to Mr. Frank Harris, 
 and I have no doubt that you will hear from him 
 in due course." . . . 
 
 Meanwhile the attention of Mr. Alexander 
 Carlyle had been drawn to the matter, and he 
 had discovered a letter dated Gottingen, 12-12- 
 1878, from Frank Harris to Thomas Carlyle. 
 It mentioned that " some two years ago " the 
 writer had called and in a letter solicited an 
 interview, which Carlyle had granted. It quoted 
 the advice given, told how he had acted upon 
 it, and begged Carlyle to assist him in revising 
 a novel he was writing by letting him know what 
 made it so bad, and how to make it better. With 
 all the emphasis of youth, he spoke of " the 
 liquor," meaning his brain apparently, as " still 
 fermenting, throwing off many bubbles." 
 
 After expatiating upon his own need of more 
 
 88 
 
THE SEQUEL 89 
 
 advice, the writer uses words which I am bound 
 to quote : — 
 
 " I await your answer, I turn to you, because 
 I know no other man to whom I can bow, whose 
 judgment I value. Knowing by your silence of 
 late years, and by what you yourself told me 
 about your bodily weakness, that we can look 
 for no more from your pen, I would not trouble 
 you — Sir, if I knew of any other help ; but so it 
 must be." 
 
 Mr, Alexander Carlyle furnished the editor 
 of the " English Review " with a complete copy 
 of this letter ; and in the November number of 
 the Review a portion of it was printed, along 
 with a certain amount of commentary by Mr. 
 Carlyle and Mr. Harris, from which the im- 
 portant facts which emerge are that Mr. Harris 
 admits the letter was his, and that his first inter- 
 view with Carlyle was in Carlyle's house early 
 in 1877. He also claims that the reference to 
 " bodily weakness " is an explicit reference to 
 Carlyle's confession of impotence. 
 
 The absurdity of such a claim can most easily 
 be demonstrated, for such as need a demonstration 
 of what seems plain, by a quotation from an article 
 which appeared in the " Saturday Review " 
 of 30-11-1895, Vol. 80, pp. 722-4. The editor 
 
THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 was this same Mr. Frank Harris, and the article 
 purported to have been written at his instigation. 
 It is signed J. C. C, John Churton Collins, then 
 on the staff of the " Saturday Review." A letter 
 of his recently discovered by Mr. Alexander 
 Carlyle and the article together fix the date 
 as about the end of 1873 or beginning of 1874. 
 When the article appeared, David Masson praised 
 it to me as completely credible ; and I wrote 
 to the editor of the " Saturday Review " to 
 ask the name of the writer and leave to quote the 
 article. I am indebted to the courtesy of the 
 present editor for leave to quote it at full length 
 in the biography. Meanwhile a few words near 
 the end may suffice. The writer mentions he rose 
 to go, and then . . . "he shook hands with me, 
 and holding my hand looked into my face very 
 kindly, and said, ' Well, what can I say to you 
 at parting ? ' What I should like to have said was, 
 ' Say to me that I may come and see you again.' 
 But somehow I had not the courage to say it, 
 though in hesitation I paused. ' Well,' he struck 
 in, ' perge, perge ' (polite Latin for good-bye), 
 and accompanied me to the door ; and with the 
 courtesy which was one of his most striking charac- 
 teristics, was evidently intending to see me down- 
 stairs to the street door, though it was plainly an 
 effort to him, as his stiff and rather tottering gait 
 
THE SEQUEL 91 
 
 showed. So I begged him not to do so. ' Can you 
 find your way to the door ? ' he said. ' Well, 
 perge,' and as I went downstairs I heard him 
 again mutter, in a weary, half-indifferent, half- 
 kindly way, ' perge, perge.' And so ended my 
 interview with Thomas Carlyle." 
 
 After this time (1873-4) Carlyle became weaker 
 and weaker. So it is needless to expose further 
 the inherent absurdity of Mr. Harris's claim that 
 the reference to Carlyle's " bodily weakness " 
 in the reverential letter written to him by Mr. 
 Harris in 1878 is corroboration of the yarn which 
 Mr. Harris spins in 1911. Think of it. Carlyle 
 made a scene in Hyde Park, passing where his 
 wife had died, taking off his hat in the rain, 
 and standing with head bowed, and then walking 
 away with " tears " " running down his face," 
 confided to the modest young man at his side 
 that he had never consummated the marriage 
 with his wife ! 
 
 This wonderful story the young man tells 
 us in 1911, and triumphantly points for cor- 
 roboration to the letter he wrote in 1878, mention- 
 ing that in 1877 the old man (then over eighty) 
 had spoken of " bodily weakness." 
 
 O Frank Harris, Frank Harris ! How little 
 you know yourself ! If any such secret had 
 ever been told to you in reality, you would have 
 
92 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 proclaimed it long ago. It is difficult to believe 
 you are serious when you talk of the reference 
 to " bodily weakness " as invalidating the argu- 
 ment against you ! Such bosh is worthy of 
 your latest hero, Falstaff ! Indeed, the " inimitable, 
 incomparable Jack " you praise so much was 
 never equal to a more glorious absurdity than that, 
 or another you perpetrate in your reply to Mr. 
 Alexander Carlyle : " When the dust has cleared 
 away one must recognise, I think, that the essential 
 truth of the matter is with Froude and myself." 
 
 " Froude and myself," says he ! Mr. Froude 
 was a biographer and historian, injudicious and 
 mistaken ; but he did not allege that the man of 
 whom he was writing made any confession to 
 him of impotence. He honestly explained that 
 he knew nothing but what vague rumour and 
 anonymous letters and Miss Jewsbury told him. 
 It is with Geraldine Jewsbury and no other that 
 Frank Harris must now go linked ; and in fairness 
 to the lady who is dead let us pause to add that 
 her fault was less than his. 
 
 On 10-11-1911 I wrote to the editor of the 
 " English Review " for leave to quote the Feb- 
 ruary article, which was immediately given ; 
 and I enclosed a letter to Mr. Harris, which was 
 kindly addressed to him. The November con- 
 troversy had taken a nauseous turn ; and Mr. 
 
THE SEQUEL 93 
 
 Harris had accused Mr. Alexander Carlyle of 
 " much worse than " foul hitting. " He is not 
 content with outraging truth, he is also careful 
 to suggest the lie, and he adorns falsehood with 
 the arts of the hypocrite," because Mr. Carlyle, 
 who had not felt at liberty to quote the whole 
 of the letter, had not quoted the paragraph which 
 we have seen, containing the words " bodily 
 weakness." 
 
 To minimise adjectives and adverbs, I begged 
 permission from Mr. Harris to print at full length 
 a copy of his letter, which Mr. Carlyle had sent 
 me. My letter being returned through the Post 
 Office, I sent another registered to his London 
 address, repeating my request, but also adding 
 a remonstrance, which readers shall presently 
 see. I was anxious to avoid any public utterance, 
 if by any other means a delusion could be 
 stopped which was tainting as with leprosy the 
 teaching of Carlyle in adolescent minds. 
 
 My letter being again returned by the Post 
 Office, I once more fell back upon the courtesy 
 of the " English Review " editor, and this time 
 my request reached Mr. Harris, from whom on 
 12-12-1911 I received a politely worded letter, 
 which explained my difficulty in reaching him by 
 his change of residence, and vetoed altogether 
 the publication of his letter of 1878. He referred 
 
94 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 to the letter in Chapter VI, but did not answer it. 
 He sent me a copy of his book " The Man Shake- 
 speare." His letter is not quoted at length because 
 I have not his permission. 
 
 I read his book at once, and saw in the author 
 a man who plainly meant to be straightforward, 
 but who was full of an unholy simplicity, like 
 that of certain lady novelists, a dangerous man 
 for boys to listen to, but harmless enough to 
 fashionable London. As men go, he is probably 
 a superior person, above the intention to deceive. 
 He may not believe it immediately ; but when 
 the dust has settled, and it will settle soon, I 
 hope he will be willing to believe that I am really 
 sorry to hurt his feelings, and wish no evil to him 
 or to anyone in Vanity Fair. 
 
 Here is the next letter I sent him : — 
 
 Dear Sir, 13-12-1911. 
 
 I received yesterday your courteous letter 
 of 9th December, and your book, " The Man 
 Shakespeare," for which I thank you. The two 
 letters returned contained a request to allow 
 your letter of 1878 to be reprinted in full, and 
 a remonstrance in these terms : " Permit me to 
 beg you to glance over the medical evidence 
 published by Sir James Crichton-Browne in the 
 ' British Medical Journal ' of 27-6-1903, and in 
 
THE SEQUEL 95 
 
 the book ' The Nemesis of Fkoude.' Until 
 your article appeared I hoped that what Sir 
 James had written, combined with the documents 
 published by Prof. Norton and Mr. Alexander 
 Carlyle, had left no room for any reasonable 
 difference of opinion. It is for your own sake, 
 as well as to diminish discussion of sexual topics, 
 that I beg you, if now satisfied that you were 
 mistaken, to say so like a man. Nobody need 
 think the worse of you. I have frankly let you see 
 that I shared the same mistake for years." 
 
 This was dated 2nd December, and is now 
 quoted for your information ; but no reply is 
 now expected. Your letter of 9th December 
 shows that you persist in maintaining that you 
 have succeeded in making Carlyle's virility again 
 a matter of controversy. 
 
 Nothing would please me better than to let 
 the matter rest and the dust settle, as you desire, 
 and to accept your kind invitation to make your 
 acquaintance later. But there is a duty to the 
 dead as well as to the living. There is also a duty 
 to millions of contemporaries and successors. 
 Already in Asia and America the writings of 
 Carlyle are read in universities ; and adolescent 
 minds are ever prone to dwell unduly upon sexual 
 topics. Dirt has wings ; and even as the dust of 
 Krakatoa was soon reddening the sunsets of 
 
96 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 Europe, so what you have written about "The 
 Puritan's Limitations " may presently be defiling 
 the young in America and Japan as well as England. 
 Surely, if such a delusion can be extirpated, 
 all decent people would like to see it done, and 
 the sooner the better. So it seems to me needful 
 to put together and publish some documents ; 
 but the effect will not be, as you say, to reopen 
 the controversy. The effect will be to end it. 
 
 All that will remain in controversy will be 
 your good faith ; and upon that issue I will take 
 your side. A perusal of the book you kindly 
 sent has enabled me to do so with some confidence. 
 I will deal with you as tenderly as possible ; 
 and in the minds of judicious persons perhaps 
 succeed in rendering you the same service which 
 Froude's son and daughter rendered him — to 
 vindicate your good faith at the expense of your 
 judgment. 
 
 I do sincerely acquit you of having any im- 
 proper motive whatsoever ; and I hope you will 
 soon forget what you can only remember with 
 regret that you blundered so sadly about a man 
 whom we agree to honour so much as Thomas 
 
 Carlyle. 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 David Alec Wilson. 
 Frank Harris, Esq. 
 
THE SEQUEL 97 
 
 This letter received a courteous reply, with- 
 drawing the veto upon the publication of his 
 early letter, but reaffirming in effect the dreadful 
 blunder which was the principal item of his 
 Talks with Caelyle, and saying I could not 
 " end the controversy." Maybe not. It is for 
 the public to decide whether to believe Mr. Harris. 
 My duty is to tell why he should not be believed. 
 From this there is no escape, and fate decrees 
 that I must join issue with him to clear up this 
 misunderstanding. But happily we can do it 
 without hating each other, and join issue as 
 frankly and honourably as ever was done in any 
 tournament in the Middle Ages. 
 
 Now let the reader willing to take the trouble 
 of a juror, consider the following letter, and ask 
 himself whether the young man who wrote it in 
 1878 was likely to have had with the man he was 
 addressing such talks as we have been reading 
 in Chapter V, and whether the mention of bodily 
 weakness has any necessary reference to sexual 
 matters. 
 
 Me. Frank Habeis to Thomas Caelyle. 
 
 NlCOLAUS BERGEE WEG lC. GoTTINGEN, 
 
 12tk December, 1878. 
 
 HONOEED SlE, 
 
 Some two years ago, I was bold enough 
 to call upon you and in a letter solicit an inter- 
 
98 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 view, which request you were kind enough to 
 grant me. Your advice to me then was, not to 
 proclaim opinions, offensive to the majority 
 of men, rashly and defiantly ; but rather in silence 
 and study to wait till my nonage was past. You 
 hinted also that the best sign of maturity was 
 moderation. Acting upon your good counsel 
 I came to Germany, where I have now been about 
 a year. For a long time the choice of a life's 
 calling embarrassed me. After many doubtings 
 and much incertitude I have determined to do 
 my work with my pen ; as a volunteer in the ranks 
 to fight for what seems to me the best cause. 
 Having enough to live on in a very modest way, 
 which contents me, I need not be a mercenary 
 soldier. I think that this my resolution does not 
 spring from idle vanity, but has gradually grown, 
 as I have of late become more and more con- 
 vinced, that in this way and none other I can best 
 do my work. 
 
 When in January 1877 I called upon you 
 I asked you many questions concerning the 
 writer's-art. Yet the faults of bombast and weak- 
 ness which I then dimly felt, I, now deploring, 
 yet find not easy to correct. Sometimes, almost 
 despairing I have thought that perchance they 
 were radical shortcomings inherent in my blood. 
 The Celtic vanity with its characteristic love of 
 
THE SEQUEL 9 
 
 loud words (you may remember that I am an 
 Irishman), the besetting sin of self-enunciation, 
 I have struggled by calm reflection and thoughts 
 of higher duties, to overcome, as yet with all 
 but too imperfect success. Still, I work on at 
 Philology and History, and in my spare hours, 
 sketch plans and embody thoughts, which when 
 finished strike me with an overwhelming sense 
 of my own impotence ; then and there I confide 
 them to the fire. For the last three years one 
 work — a Novel — has been continually in my 
 thoughts. Sensible however of my deficiencies, 
 I have hesitated to tell the story which presses 
 for utterance, and at last, tormented yet enthusi- 
 astic, I turn for advice to the Man, who, for some 
 years filling my mental horizon, has done me 
 more good than any other preacher living or dead. 
 These — Sir — are no words of eulogy and I can 
 write them to you, without any faintest sense 
 of incongruity, knowing that you will read them 
 as they are meant. To you, I turn, and in order 
 to make your work as light as possible, I have 
 stripped the flesh from the bones — turned the 
 creatures of my brain into abstractions, and ask 
 you for your opinion. In the Enclosed " Skeleton 
 of a Novel " I could not avoid mentioning you, 
 and I have done this freely as if not destined 
 for your eye. Knowing you to be throned above 
 
100 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 all unrealities, I send you this sketch, seeing 
 some of its faults in a glaring clearness, not be- 
 cause I think it the best I can do, but because 
 its faults are so naked in their deformity, that 
 perchance you will be able to tell me what inner 
 fatuity they spring from, and how best to correct 
 them. Yet I would not send it you for the faults' 
 sake alone, but because I believe your tolerant 
 sympathy will feel with me, at least, in my aim ; 
 and if as I think there be something worthy 
 in the object, your experience and insight weighing 
 and recognising it, will aid me to do the work, 
 while showing me at once the pitfalls and the 
 highway. You will at once see, nor would I even 
 if able to, disguise, that no Man wrote this sketch. 
 The liquour [sic] is still fermenting, throwing off 
 many bubbles and is in a state of much greater 
 commotion, than a good liquid could be, yet you 
 will be able to tell me, how to help the fermentation 
 so as to bring it to a more speedy termination 
 and you will be able to predict — what, if cleared 
 and settled, the worth of the draught will be. 
 Is there, do you think, the possibility that a 
 strong generous wine which maketh glad the 
 heart, can come out of the muddy liquid ? If 
 your answer is favourable you will comfort me, 
 which help I need ; if unfavourable I must still 
 work for this is appointed to me. 
 
THE SEQUEL 101 
 
 I await your answer, I turn to you, because 
 I know no other man to whom I can bow, whose 
 judgment I value. Knowing by your silence 
 of late years, and by what you yourself told me 
 about • your bodily weakness, that we can look 
 for no more from your pen, I would not trouble 
 you — Sir, if I knew of any other help ; but so it 
 must be. 
 
 I think you will do this for me, for when 
 we parted you clasped the hand of the stranger 
 in sympathy and brotherhood and bade him 
 Good Speed — The tears that then sprang into 
 my eyes assure me that you also felt — no longer 
 were you to me a voice, an abstraction, but a 
 living Man in this brotherhood of woe and duty — 
 So — I write to you — for what you have already 
 done for me — words are too light for my grati- 
 tude — I cannot thank you — yet there is reward 
 enough for such an one as you — in that you know 
 that you have done me more good than any 
 other man — that if anything I can ever say or 
 do helps and cheers my fellow-man — in no small 
 measure — this is due to you. 
 
 With Love therefore and Reverence too deep 
 
 for words, 
 
 I subscribe myself 
 
 Frank Hakims. 
 13th — P.S. — I have thought that perhaps you 
 
102 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 may not be able to read the whole, in fact 
 I feel angry with myself at daring to ask you 
 anything at all — But if you will glance over from 
 page 18 to 24 you will find the gist of the whole. 
 Hoping your Health is good. 
 I remain, 
 
 Yours gratefully, 
 
 F. Harris. 
 
 I have read a good deal of Mr. Harris's writing, 
 but nothing that made me think so well of him 
 as this letter. There is a beautiful thought in 
 one of Schiller's plays which perhaps he may 
 forgive me for quoting : " Tell him when he is 
 a man to remember the dreams of his youth." 
 
 P.S. — Writing to Mr. Frank Harris, one could 
 take more for granted than usual. Readers puzzled 
 by pages 81 and 82, may refer to the " Fortnightly 
 Review" for January, 1913, page 84. The real 
 asceticism of the ancients quickly subsided into 
 bourgeoise selfishness. St. Augustine himself 
 tells how he paid off a mistress, and took on 
 another, like any French or English young gentle- 
 man; and he was one of the best of the saints, 
 and the most honest of them all. 
 
VIII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Some addition to the open letter (Chapter VI) 
 is now possible, writing in Scotland with note- 
 books at hand. 
 
 On 20th March, 1897, the late David Masson 
 told me that the rumour about Carlyle's im- 
 potence had been circulated by a man he thought 
 he could name. " The individual was dead, 
 however, and it was better not to tell." Masson 
 had known Carlyle since 1844, and " in familiar 
 moments had heard talk from Carlyle which 
 utterly negatived the truth of the obscene hy- 
 pothesis, and fully convinced him that physically 
 Carlyle was like other men." 
 
 On 29th April, 1897, at Nice, I heard from Sir 
 Charles Gavan Duffy what is in the open letter. 
 He told me how he had been disgusted by a witty, 
 obscene epigram circulating in the House of 
 Commons about a lawsuit in which a lady was 
 then divorcing her husband for impotence. The 
 actual epigram is in my notes, but either to quote 
 it or to give the dates would stir up mud about 
 
 103 
 
104 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 other persons. When Duffy, who seemed to me 
 to have been what I once heard him call another, 
 a " Catholic Puritan," was expectorating his 
 nausea in the smoking-room, the impotence 
 of his own hero, Carlyle, was flung in his face. 
 He probably gave the lie on the spot to the man 
 who spoke of it ; but all I can say he told me is 
 that walking with Carlyle, within a week there- 
 after, he repeated to him the " talk of the town," 
 and discovered what to think of it ; and that 
 is the key to some of the Ciceronian invectives 
 against human dogs in " Frederick." 
 
 On 4th November, 1902, David Masson again 
 referred to the matter, saying he could confirm 
 Duffy, but more vaguely, and saying that he had 
 never asked any questions. 
 
 On another point he and Gavan Duffy and 
 Prof. Norton and Mr. Alexander Carlyle seemed 
 to agree — there was not the smallest indication 
 anywhere discoverable that Carlyle had ever 
 been told what Dr. Quain had said about resuming 
 cohabitation, nor was there any reason to suspect 
 that Mrs. Carlyle had ever wished to change 
 the mode of life which was begun for her sake. 
 The only direct witness of remorse on that account 
 is Mr. Frank Harris, whose tale might fit a tipsy 
 old man of gushing habits, but is ludicrous when 
 told of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
CONCLUSION 105 
 
 It was no sudden impulse which made me 
 write to Mr. Harris upon a perusal of his article. 
 That has been a common method of mine in 
 sifting reports about Carlyle ; for in considering 
 what to believe, the first thing one thinks of 
 is the character of the reporter, and whether 
 he means what he has written to be fact or fiction. 
 Imaginary conversations are as familiar in law 
 and literature as in society journalism. 
 
 For example, two or three years ago I read 
 in a book by Mr. E. V. Lucas what purported 
 to be a talk with Carlyle ; and instead of wasting 
 time re-reading it, and groping to dubious con- 
 clusions, I wrote to Mr. Lucas, who almost by 
 return of post let me know that he had faked 
 the dialogue, as, of course, he was perfectly 
 entitled to do in a romance ; and I cordially 
 sympathised with the exultation he naturally 
 expressed over having faked it well enough to 
 take me in, to the extent of putting me on 
 inquiry. 
 
 When the speedy reply which Mr. Harrison 
 expected failed to come from Mr. Harris, I re- 
 considered what he had written ; and soon saw 
 reason to anticipate from him some such merry 
 answer as came from Mr. Lucas. It may quicken 
 the return of peace between him and Mr. Alexander 
 Carlyle to disclose the way I had found, before 
 
106 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 the old letter had been heard of, to test his central 
 anecdote about Carlyle's confession. 
 
 He is probably not aware of it, but there are 
 people who say that when Carlyle took off his 
 hat in Hyde Park in passing the spot where his 
 wife died, he did it in a quiet, unostentatious 
 way, which passers-by would hardly heed, and 
 only a person near at hand could notice at all. 
 Mr. Froude's dramatic story needs corroboration, 
 because it is out of keeping with the usual character 
 of Carlyle, who was more English than the English 
 in the habitual self-control of his bearing. When 
 speaking and roused by anything of interest, 
 it is true that he did not mumble in the common, 
 monotonous manner ; for then he let his voice 
 rise and fall, and he never minced his words, 
 but either spoke the truth without any com- 
 promise, or else was silent. That was the habit 
 which made superficial observers sometimes think 
 him loud. But in going about he would be the 
 unlikeliest man in England to make a scene. 
 
 Here is an extract from Carlyle's private journal 
 of 1868, the second year after his wife's death. 
 It appears in Froude's " Thomas Carlyle's Life 
 in London," Vol. II, page 367 : " The place " 
 (in Hyde Park where Mrs. Carlyle died) " which no 
 stranger knows of, is already quite changed, drink- 
 ing fountain, etc. I was there yesterday, but Froude 
 
CONCLUSION 107 
 
 was in company. I could only linger one little 
 instant." . . . (Quoted from the original journal.) 
 
 It is impossible to read this and not suspect 
 that Mr. Froude exaggerated, and that the reality 
 may have been as quiet and commonplace as 
 other people say. What, then, are we to think 
 of Mr. Harris ? Is he exaggerating what he 
 recollects out of Froude, or is he a reliable and 
 independent witness, corroborating Froude ? When 
 the other facts about the health and habits of 
 Carlyle are considered, the conclusion has to 
 be that Mr. Harris might be a truthful witness 
 only if he was speaking of some time soon after 
 the death in 1866, that is 1867 or 1868 or then- 
 about. I did not think of Who's Who till 
 after the open letter had been sent away ; but 
 when I had ascertained from it that Mr. Harris 
 was born in 1856, so that the earliest possible 
 date for the scene in Hyde Park he tells was 
 1875 or so, all doubt was ended. The only possible 
 theory that could help his story into plausibility 
 was that of senile dementia of some kind, as 
 Carlyle was eighty in 1876 ; but there is abundant 
 evidence that his only weakness was physical. 
 
 Everything else points to the same conclusion, 
 that the scene Mr. Harris described is his distorted 
 recollection of what Mr. Froude had written. 
 Both the language and the behaviour which he 
 
108 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 attributes to Carlyle are utterly unlike those of 
 Carlyle as reported by many credible witnesses, 
 to say nothing of the whole story which he says 
 Carlyle told him being inconsistent with the truth 
 as told by Carlyle to others, and plentifully proved 
 independently. 
 
 So it is not Thomas Carlyle, but Frank Harris 
 personating him, whom we see making a melo- 
 dramatic scene in Hyde Park, taking off his 
 hat in the rain, and standing with bowed head 
 till people had noticed him, and then walking 
 on after replacing his hat, with the tears running 
 down his face, and making obscene confessions to 
 a stranger sixty years his junior. 
 
 The imputation of unprofessional conduct on 
 the part of Sir Richard Quain is worth mention 
 only as a sign of an unbridled pen. What Sir 
 James Crichton-Browne has told already about 
 Sir Richard Quain sufficiently clears his memory. 
 The only question remaining is, why Mr. Harris 
 should write such stuff ? 
 
 I acquit him of faking it. That is possible, 
 of course, but very unlikely. The imitation of 
 Carlyle is too badly done to be faked by a man of 
 Mr. Harris's literary ability. His book, " The 
 Man Shakespeare," enables me to lay emphasis 
 with some confidence on the possibility of his good 
 faith. He has a medieval habit of taking facts 
 
CONCLUSION 109 
 
 direct from faney, with a naivete" unique in recent 
 experience. He has lately put forward a new 
 and original account of the life of Shakespeare, 
 and shall himself explain his revival of an antique 
 way of making discoveries. 
 
 " Many held that my view of Shakespeare 
 was purely arbitrary ; others said I had used 
 a concordance. . . . The truth is much simpler : 
 I read Shakespeare's plays in boyhood, chiefly 
 for the stories ; every few years later I was fain 
 to re-read them ; for as I grew I always found 
 new beauties in them which I had formerly missed, 
 and again and again I was lured back by tantalising 
 hints and suggestions of a certain unity under- 
 lying the diversity of characters. These suggestions 
 gradually became more definite till at length, 
 out of the myriad voices in the plays, I began to hear 
 more and more insistent the accents of one voice, 
 and out of the crowd of faces began to distinguish 
 more and more clearly the features of the writer ; 
 for all the world like some lovelorn girl, who, gazing 
 with her soul in her eyes, finds in the witch's cauldron 
 the face of the beloved. 
 
 " I have tried in this book to trace the way 
 I followed, step by step ; for I found it effective 
 to rough in the chief features of the man first, 
 and afterwards, taking the plays in succession, 
 to show how Shakespeare painted himself at full 
 
110 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 length not once, but twenty times, at as many 
 different periods of his life. . . . 
 
 " As soon as this astonishing drama discovered 
 itself to me in its tragic completeness I jumped 
 to the conclusion that it must have been set forth 
 long ago in detail by Shakespeare's commentators, 
 and so, for the first time, I turned to their works.". . . 
 
 This is not a joke of any kind, but an unconscious 
 self-revelation. The writer seems to see no differ- 
 ence between a guess and a fact ; and in the 
 415 pages of the book, it would be easy to find 
 almost 415 statements of fact which are really 
 the wildest of guesses. 
 
 Opening the book at random, we read, page 368 : 
 " Shakespeare takes trouble to tell us in ' The 
 Comedy of Errors ' that his wife was spitefully 
 jealous, and a bitter scold. She must have injured 
 him, poisoned his life with her jealous nagging, 
 or Shakespeare would have forgiven her." What 
 is the evidence to prove there is any reference 
 at all to Shakespeare's wife in that play ? None. 
 The play is an adaptation from the Latin, and 
 part of it was not written by Shakespeare. In 
 short, Mr. Harris does not distinguish subjective 
 thoughts from objective events when he is thinking 
 about Shakespeare ; and if to even a slight extent 
 he has allowed himself the same freedom of 
 jmagination about Carlyle, then it would be easy 
 
CONCLUSION 111 
 
 for him to humbug himself into believing all 
 that he has written in these " Talks," although 
 there were not a word of truth in any of them. 
 
 There certainly is not a word of truth in his 
 bit of blasphemy, describing how he stood up 
 for Jesus against Carlyle preferring Falstaff. 
 It was quoted here in deference to the wishes 
 of religious persons, anxious to see its absurdity 
 exposed, and the exposure need not take long. 
 The deliberate, ordinary talk of Carlyle was 
 invariably plain English, and not Scots ; and he 
 never entertained such sentiments about Jesus 
 or about Falstaff. He admired Shakespeare's 
 humour in presenting such a character ; but he 
 never admired Falstaff ; and to mention such 
 a man in the same breath with Christ would have 
 been dangerous in his hearing. Turn again to the 
 article by " J. C. C." in the " Saturday Review," 
 already quoted. In this description of an inter- 
 view in 1873-4, we learn that at first Carlyle 
 seemed listless : " After the German theatre 
 I see from my notes that we got on to Strauss. 
 And now he became animated. ' That man,' 
 he thundered out, ' has called Jesus Christ a 
 world-historical humbug, mark you,' and he rolled 
 it out in his strong Scotch accent, ' a wor-r-r-ld 
 historical hum-' — this in a high, shrill key — ' bug,' 
 coming down on the word with a crash." 
 
112 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 " That is Carlyle all over," said Masson to me, 
 and there is plenty of evidence to prove it. It is 
 palpably preposterous for Mr. Harris to ask us 
 to believe that this frail old man, thus flashing 
 into unpremeditated fury against Strauss for 
 insulting Christ, was three years later talking 
 to Mr. Harris, aged twenty-one, like a leery 
 old boy about town, and saying he preferred Fal- 
 staff. It would fill a volume to tell all the facts 
 that make the tale incredible. One already men- 
 tioned here is that Carlyle in old age was in a 
 chronic state of physical depression, suffering 
 from indigestion and blue pills. 
 
 Was it a joke ? There is a glorious absurdity 
 in the description Mr. Harris has given of himself, 
 a devotee of Shakespeare then, as he has else- 
 where explained, " standing up for Jesus " on 
 the Chelsea embankment, against the chuckling 
 old sinner who praised Falstaff rather. Neither 
 Bernard Shaw nor Sheridan ever did anything 
 funnier than that ; but the best of this joke is 
 that it was not intended. In stolid earnestness, 
 apparently, Mr. Frank Harris personates Carlyle. 
 The words are an indifferent mimicry of the words 
 of Carlyle ; the sentiments are undiluted Harris ; 
 as may be seen at once from some passages in 
 his book on Shakespeare about the same hero 
 (Falstaff). 
 
CONCLUSION 113 
 
 " It is Shakespeare's humour which differentiates 
 him not only from Coleridge and Keats, but also 
 from the world poets, Goethe, Dante, and Homer. 
 It is this unique endowment which brings him 
 into vital touch with reality. . . . Even in his 
 masterpiece of humour, the incomparable Falstaff, 
 he betrays himself more than once. . . . All hail 
 to thee, inimitable, incomparable Jack ! Never 
 before or since has poet been blessed with such 
 a teacher, as rich and laughterful, as mendacious 
 and corrupting as life itself. . . . Listening with 
 my heart in my ears, I catch a living voice, a round, 
 fat voice with tags of ' pr'ythee,' ' wag,' and 
 * marry,' and behind the inimitable dramatic 
 counterfeit I see a big man with a white head 
 and round belly who loved wine and women and 
 jovial nights. ... It is his humour which makes 
 Shakespeare the greatest of dramatists, the most 
 complete of men " (pp. 144, 158). 
 
 The long narrative by Carlyle, according to 
 Frank Harris, of his early friendship with Darwin, 
 and their pleasant reunion in a drawing-room 
 where Darwin was being glorified, is interesting 
 only as a wonderful sample of the methods of 
 Mr. Harris. It is a dream from beginning to end ; 
 for Carlyle and Charles Darwin became acquainted 
 only in 1875. 
 
 It is pleasant to make a fairly obvious remark. 
 
114 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 If Mr. Harris had not begun by deceiving him- 
 self, if he had deliberately set out to deceive 
 other people, he would probably have looked 
 up the " Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," 
 and so avoided some ludicrous blunders, and the 
 " Autobiography " alone (Vol. I, pp. 77, 78) 
 should have let him see that no such meeting 
 as he made Carlyle describe could have taken place. 
 
 It is always possible, though very unlikely, 
 that he may now in desperation be inspired to 
 say, " I admit the story must be a lie, but I told 
 the tale as it was told to me by Carlyle, and so it 
 is he who must be the liar." If Mr. Harris takes 
 that line, I leave him to his fate. It is not likely 
 that many will be found who prefer to believe 
 Mr. Harris rather than Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 In the " Fortnightly Review " for January, 
 1890, there is a pleasant passage in an article 
 by John Tyndall, which has been reprinted in 
 volume form unaltered. It is corroborated by 
 a passage in the " New Letters of Thomas Carlyle," 
 Vol. II, page 314, which also gives the date, 1875. 
 It is so worded by Tyndall that other evidence 
 on this occasion seems superfluous : — 
 
 " Here a personal recollection comes into view 
 which, as it throws a pleasant light on the relations 
 of Carlyle and Darwin, may be worth recording. 
 Like many other noble ladies, Lady Derby was 
 
CONCLUSION 115 
 
 a warm friend of Carlyle ; and once, during an 
 entire summer, Keston Lodge was placed by Lord 
 Derby at Carlyle's disposal. From the seat of 
 our common friend, Sir John Lubbock, where 
 we had been staying, the much-mourned William 
 Spottiswoode and myself once walked over to 
 the Lodge to see Carlyle. He was absent ; but 
 as we returned we met him and his niece, the 
 present Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, driving home 
 in a pony carriage. I had often expressed to him 
 the wish that he and Darwin might meet ; for 
 it could not be doubted that the nobly candid 
 character of the great naturalist would make its 
 due impression. The wish was fulfilled. He met 
 us with the exclamation : ' Well, I have been to 
 see Darwin.' He paused, and I expressed my 
 delight. ' Yes,' he added, ' I have been to see 
 him and a more charming man I never met in 
 my life.' " 
 
 To pursue the subject farther would be wasteful 
 and ridiculous excess. As an admirer of Falstaff, 
 whose two men in buckram grew in the telling 
 to eleven, Mr. Harris is unlikely to waste his 
 time excusing himself. He would probably like 
 to give a pleasant finish to an unpleasant business. 
 Therein I do agree, and therefore conclude with 
 a song, which he, or any other, has leave to sing 
 anywhere, to any tune, without payment : 
 
116 THE TRUTH ABOUT CARLYLE 
 
 THE SONG OF THE FICTIONEERS 
 
 i 
 That all men misstate, old King David could see ; 
 So fictioneers flourish, of every degree. 
 Some lie and feel shame, as good liars should do ; 
 And others feel shame when they say what is true. 
 
 ii 
 The most of us falter and fumble along ; 
 Intending to tell right, we often go wrong. 
 We miss the fit words, which confusion soon brings ; 
 Or, having the words, we mistake about things. 
 
 m 
 And some have miraculous stories to tell ; 
 They dream what they say, and they dream very well. 
 And sometimes it more than miraculous seems, — 
 Whatever's convenient appears in their dreams. 
 
 Nothing would please me better than to hear 
 that Mr. Harris was enjoying this song, and 
 treating the whole matter as a joke, for that 
 would minimise his natural annoyance at finding 
 himself so much mistaken, and serve as a kind 
 of anaesthetic, a thing as needful in controversy 
 as in surgery. If I have given him any needless 
 pain in this book, I am sorry for it. Nothing 
 was farther from my design. But, nevertheless, 
 reverence for Thomas Carlyle and for laws of 
 decency as old as humanity which were offended 
 by what had been written of him, constrain me 
 to say in conclusion that nothing could be less 
 my intention than any joke. 
 
CONCLUSION 117 
 
 I impute no mendacity to Mr. Harris. I would 
 not do so even if I believed him mendacious, 
 because I might be wrong, as no man knows the 
 heart of another. But in this instance Mr. Harris's 
 books and his letters to myself allow me the 
 pleasure of saying that I do not think him 
 mendacious. It seems more likely than not that 
 he may have written in perfect good faith and been 
 honestly mistaken. All the same, it is as certain 
 as anything can be that Thomas Carlyle was 
 physically like other men. His weakness was 
 that he suffered for half a century from dys- 
 pepsia, and died of it. In all other respects he 
 was healthy and tough beyond the average. 
 In character and intelligence he was more. His 
 books are visibly the performance of one of the 
 greatest intellects ever known, and Goethe's 
 declaration on seeing his early essays has been 
 abundantly justified, he was a " new moral 
 force " in Europe. How completely he practised 
 what he preached has been told by many bio- 
 graphers, and shall yet be told by many more ; 
 but never again, it may be hoped, need anyone 
 either speak or hint of nastiness when discussing 
 Thomas Carlyle. 
 
PRINTED BV 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON 
 PLYMOUTH 
 
SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF 
 
 RECENT BOOR'S BY DAVID 
 
 ALEC WILSON 
 
 ANECDOTES OF BIG CATS 
 AND OTHER BEASTS 
 
 Observer. — ,( It is a book of excellent reading, with 
 many touches of humour and philosophy." 
 
 Times. — " Mr. Theodore Roosevelt can recount 
 many stories of such scenes, while Mr. D. Wilson goes 
 a step further ... by telling his readers something of 
 the mental attitude of the quarry." 
 
 Outlook. — " Some good old stories, and some still 
 better new ones. " 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette.— tl Captivating and engrossing 
 travellers' tales quite out of the common." 
 
 Daily News.—" The book is one that should be en- 
 joyed by both old and young readers." 
 
 Guardian. — " Mr. Wilson is the right person to tell 
 stories of sport. . . . He shows himself a careful ob- 
 server of the habits and customs of the beasts of whom 
 he talks, and is therefore able to write sympathetically 
 of them without investing them with the feelings and 
 sentiments of human beings." 
 
 Manchester Guardian. — " The charm of it lies in 
 the point of view. ' Try for a moment to think of it 
 in the skin of a tiger,' advises the author, and himself 
 makes the experiment so successfully as to put all our 
 sympathies on the side of the great cats." 
 
 Morning Post.—" Delightfully sympathetic account 
 of experiences and reminiscences. . . . Nothing is ex- 
 cluded, from the tiger and leopard to the domestic 
 pussy-cat, from the bear to the buffalo, from the mon- 
 key to the elephant. The sketches are for the most 
 part of a cheerful character, and written in a humor- 
 ous, bantering vein, but some are decidedly gruesome. 
 The pictures of monkey-life are delightful." 
 
 119 
 
SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF 
 
 RECENT BOOKS BY DAVID 
 
 ALEC WILSON 
 
 EAST AND WEST 
 
 Daily Graphic. — "Anecdote and picture and 
 reminiscence, they follow one another with the easy 
 flow imparted to them by the born raconteur. . . . They 
 convey in a wonderful way the habits of thought of the 
 people. . . . There are not many who will read 'The 
 Miraculous Milk ' without a chuckle." 
 
 Manchester Courier. — " One could quote with effect 
 from almost every page of the book. When not con- 
 vincing the reader by argument, the author lays aside 
 seriousness, but grave or gay he says much that is 
 arresting. ..." 
 
 Morning Post. — "Those who like to feel contact 
 with a man through his work . . . will be inclined to 
 forgive the lack of illusion in Mr. Wilson's writing for 
 the sake of its scrupulous veracity. ... As things 
 happened, so they are set down. ... It is characteristic 
 of a ruthless but very good-tempered Diogenes." 
 
 Queen. — "It is a well-written book ... a pleasant 
 book to read." 
 
 Manchester Guardian. — "We get from the book an 
 impression of a well-read gentleman who has seen much 
 in places off the beaten track, and who has achieved 
 (partly perhaps from Chinese sources) a point of view 
 tolerant and humane." 
 
 The Field. — " Mr. Wilson bubbles over with in- 
 formation." 
 
 The Christian World. — "This book is ... a pot- 
 pourri of bright, varied, readable miscellanies ranging 
 from serious opinions on racialism down to an analysis 
 of one's sensations in an earthquake." 
 
 Birmingham Daily Post. — " The difference between 
 Mr. Collier's book and that of Mr. Wilson is the differ- 
 ence due to the degree in which the angle of vision of 
 an intelligent traveller from the West differs from that 
 of the European who is saturated with the spirit of the 
 East by reason of long and close communion there- 
 with. ... By essay and anecdote, Mr. Wilson contrives 
 to convey a very accurate idea of Eastern sentiment 
 and of the Asiatic conceit, which is so very much like 
 our own." 
 
SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF 
 
 RECENT BOOKS BY DAVID 
 
 ALEC WILSON 
 
 WILLIAM THOMSON, 
 LORD KELVIN 
 
 HIS WAY OF TEACHING NATURAL 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Knowledge^ May, igii. — "Re- 
 viewing books would be * very 
 pleasant pastime if they were all 
 so fascinating as this one. It is 
 thoroughly enjoyable, delightfully 
 original. Much sound philosophy 
 and a true glimpse of a great man 
 of true scientific spirit is included 
 in fifty-six pages of real litera- 
 ture abounding with amusement. 
 Read how Lord Kelvin was the 
 * righteous soul in harmony with 
 things in general.' There is a 
 chapter which ends 'failing to 
 realise the deep and irresistible 
 power of capillary (and other) 
 attractions.' There is no doubt 
 as to the deep attractiveness of 
 the book." 
 
RECENT BOOKS BY 
 DAVID ALEC WILSON 
 
 MR. FROUDE 
 AND GARLYLE 
 
 This work is now nearly out of 
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 had from Messrs. John Smith and 
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 and so far as they go, will give 
 copies gratis to Public or Uni- 
 versity Libraries. Librarians are 
 invited to apply to him. 
 
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 THE 
 HAPPY WARRIOR 
 
 By A. S. M. HUTCHINSON, author of "Once 
 
 Aboard the Lugger ." Third large 
 
 impression. 6s. 
 
 The Morning Post.—" A book 
 in a million." 
 
 The Daily Telegraph.—" This 
 is a story of » very rare and 
 beautiful order, a piece of litera- 
 ture which is also a piece of life." 
 
 The Times.— "His fight with 
 Foxy Finsent will always remain 
 one of the notable fights of fiction. 
 It is magnificent." 
 
 The Standard.— -"No reader 
 can put it down without acquir- 
 ing through its pages a more 
 honest conviction that the world's 
 a fine vibrating place.'* 
 
 The Daily Chronicle. — " A 
 happy book. If it does not win 
 fortune then there is something 
 wrong with the British public." 
 
 The Manchester Courier. — 
 "Above and beyond the great 
 bulk of this season's fiction." 
 
 123 
 
ALSTON RIVERS'S SUCCESSFUL 
 NEW NOVELS 
 
 THE DEBT 
 
 By WILLIAM WESTRUP, author of "The 
 
 Land of To-morrow," etc. Fourth large 
 
 impression. 6s. 
 
 Truth. — " Is admirable in all 
 ways ... is incomparably the best 
 South African novel that has ap- 
 peared for years." 
 
 Daily Telegraph.-— ' The finest 
 novel of South African life and 
 character that has been written 
 since ' The Story of an African 
 Farm. ' " 
 
 Morning Post. — "A novel of 
 great interest and unusual 
 ability." 
 
 ST. QUIN 
 
 By DION CLAYTON CALTHROP, author of 
 
 "Everybody's Secret," "Tinsel and Gold," 
 
 " Perpetua," etc. etc. 6s. 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — "A sweet 
 and delightful story ; one that will 
 awaken the romantic in many 
 readers' minds." 
 
 Morning Post.— ' 'This buoyant 
 and dainty book. . . . This is a 
 book to remember for Christmas- 
 time." 
 
 Standard.—-" It is bright, jolly 
 reading; an excellent book for 
 dull days or chilly evenings." 
 
 124 
 
ALSTON RIVERS'S SUCCESSFUL 
 NEW NOVELS 
 
 THE 
 NOTCH IN THE STICK 
 
 By LESLIE MOORE, author of 'The Cloak 
 of Convention." 6s. 
 
 The Aiheneeum.— ft Quite a 
 pleasant little story ; the author 
 writes with ease and grace." 
 
 The Morning Post. — " We can 
 congratulate Mr. Moore on his 
 second excursion into the field of 
 fiction." 
 
 The Fie Zd.—" Miss Moore 
 writes well, and 'The Notch in 
 the Stick' is an eminently read- 
 able book." 
 
 The Western Mercury*—" The 
 author has followed up 'The 
 Cloak of Convention,' which 
 created a very good impression, 
 with another brightly written 
 and entertaining story. It gives 
 a picture of Society life with a 
 dash of Bohemianism which adds 
 to its raciness." 
 
 The Sheffield Independent.— 
 " A book which one can pass on 
 to a friend with confidence that 
 appreciation will be endorsed." 
 
 125 
 
ALSTON RIVERS S SUCCESSFUL 
 NEW NOVELS 
 
 THE SHOE PINCHES 
 
 By EVA LATHBURY, author of "The People 
 
 Downstairs," "Mr. Meyer's Pupil," etc. 
 
 Ss. 6d. net. 
 
 The Observer.— -"The whole 
 book is full of clever things, and 
 exceedingly easy and fascinating 
 reading." 
 
 Country Life. — "Light and 
 sparkling, subtly suggestive and 
 very much up to date is this 
 tale of private life and public 
 tendency." 
 
 The Manchester Guardian. — 
 "Is a most amusing piece of 
 work, extremely cleverly con- 
 structed. " 
 
 The A berdten Journal. — "Miss 
 Eva Lathbury's kindly humour 
 is really delightful. Considerable 
 originality, added to undoubted 
 literary ability, guarantees the 
 reader's enjoyment, and makes 
 the book well worthy of perusal." 
 
 The Scotsman. — " It is an able 
 piece of fiction, the superficial 
 lightness of which ornaments a 
 serious study of feminine senti- 
 ment. " 
 
 126 
 
ALSTON RIVERS'S NEW NOVELS 
 FOR 1913 
 
 THE HOUSE OF RENNEL 
 
 By Mrs. H. rf. PENROSE, author of "Denis 
 
 Trench," "A Sheltered Woman," "As 
 
 Dust in the Balance," etc. 6s. 
 
 NEVERTHELESS 
 
 By Mrs. ISABEL SMITH, author of 
 "Mated," etc. etc. 6s. 
 
 THE PRICE OF 
 STEPHEN BONYNGE 
 
 By MARGARET LEGGE, author of "A 
 Semi-Detached Marriage." 6s. 
 
 AUNT 
 OLIVE IN BOHEMIA 
 
 By LESLIE MOORE, author of "The Notch 
 
 in the Stick " and "The Cloak of 
 
 Convention." 6s. 
 
 127