BIOGRAPHY IN MORTMAIN.
MRS. OLIPHANT and Mr. Venables both take up the cudgels against Mr. Froude, in current numbers of the May Magazines,—Mr. Venables in the Fortnightly, and Mrs. Oliphant in the Contemporary,—both intimating that Mr Fronde has done his duty very ill, and is responsible for repre- senting the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle as much less satisfactory than it really was. For our own parts, we have done our beat to show that the public impression on this head was very hasty, and that for a very large part of her life at least, Mrs. Carlyle was obviously as devoted as a wife as she was brilliant as a woman. But apart from the question as to the proper inferences to be drawn from the facts, we must say that Mrs. Oliphant, whose very vigorous attack on Mr. Prouder is much the more formidable of the two, has not at all sufficiently weighed what was Mr. Carlyle's share of this responsibility, and what Mr. Fronde's. She writes as if the publication of the- fragment of Diary rested on Mr. Fronde's sole responsibility, whereas, as we understand Mr. Fronde, Mr. Carlyle had himself selected for publication a part, and a most painful part, of the Diary, though affording no clue to the bitterness of Mrs. Carlyle's tone. "A part only of the following extracts," says Mr. Fronde, in giving extracts from the Diary, "was selected by Mr. Carlyle, a part sufficient merely to leave a painful impression, without explaining the origin of his wife's discomfort." Mrs. Oliphant represents it as if no part of the bitter Diary of 1855-56 had been selected by Mr. Carlyle at all, but only fragments of letters which seemed to demand explanation, and that Mr. Fronde had out of his head hunted up the Diary to expose the black spot in the relations between the wife and the husband. If we have understood the matter rightly, this is not so. Mr. Froude is, indeed, we suppose, responsible for obtaining and publishing the indiscreet and evidently highly-coloured letter from Miss- Jewsbury with which the extracts from the Diary conclude, and is also responsible, we suppose, for some extension of the extracts taken from the Diary, but not,—so we understand what seems to us his explicit statement,—for authorising the publication of passages which reveal the blackness of desolation in which Mrs. Carlyle was sunk at the time this Diary was written. It is quite another question, of course, whether Mr. Carlyle was not exceeding greatly the right of a husband, in authorising, without her consent, the publication of passages which could not but draw public attention to the bitterness of soul in which his wife at one time seemed to be lost,—passages which, we are well inclined to believe, with Mrs. Oliphant, that Mrs. Carlyle herself would never have written had she thought it possible that they would one day see the light. But if we are to blame any one, let us at least blame fairly, and not make Mr. Fronde the whipping-boy on whom to vent all our indignation.
It seems to us that Mr. Fronde has responsibilities enough to answer for. He has to answer for the literary reduplications which have extended what would have made two charming volumes of unique letters into three volumes of letters abounding in repetitions and monotonies. He is responsible for inviting Miss Jewsbary to add an evidently over-coloured and ex parts criticism to the most painful part of the correspondence. He is
responsible, as we understand him, for revealing the explanation of Mrs. Carlyle's darkest moods,—the indignation which she felt at the intellectual charm exercised over her husband by Lady Harriet Baring. But he is not responsible for revealing the fact that these moods were at one time very dark. Mr. Carlyle him- self, apparently as a sort of penance, had given his sanction deliberately to this revelation, and had heard with satis- faction that lir. Fronde acquiesced in that decision. So we understand the case. And, therefore, Mr. Froude's responsibility appears to us to consist of three distinct elements,—(1), respon- sibility for not dissuading Mr. Carlyle from an act of question- able penance, but rather confirming him in it; (2), responsibility for bringing out the secret of Mrs. Carlyle's desolation of heart. instead of leaving it a riddle to the public ; (3), responsibility
for darkening the picture, by adding Miss Jewsbury's comments. We confess that we think the first of these decisions the most serious of the three, and the second much the soundest of the three exercises of discretion—not a mistake at all, granting that the first course had been irrevocably decided on ; while the third seems to us an unquestionable mistake of secondary importance. We do not think that if any evidence of the darker moods which beset Mrs. Carlyle during some years of her life were to have been given at all, it would have been wise or fair to Mr. Carlyle to leave them unexplained. The public imagination is none too charit- able in such matters, and while we think it certain that before very long the spirit in which this temporary alienation of feel- ing between Mrs. Carlyle and her husband is judged, will not be very harsh, we do not know what might not have been the inferences drawn, if Mr. Fronde had left extracts from the Diary showing us Mrs. Carlyle in her misery, and had not afforded us any explanation. As for Miss Jews- bury's comments, they seem unquestionably to make matters worse than they really were, and, therefore, they should have been rejected. But they are so obviously inconsistent with some of the facts, that they will not exercise any lasting influence on the estimate of either Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle. It is clear, however that Mrs. Oliphant minimises excessively when she represents these moods of Mrs. Carlyle as so transient that on turning a few pages you may always come again on the old affectionate language. We believe that for some years at least the tone of Mrs. Carlyle's letters remains more or less proud and frigid, and that you must turn very many pages at some parts of the book, before you can find any trace of the old playful affectionateness and fondness.
To our minds, the primary blunder which Mr. Froude made was in not dissuading Mr. Carlyle from the ill-judged act of penance which, unless we mistake Mrs. Carlyle's nature alto-
gether, she would herself BO strenuously have disapproved and condemned, and so certainly have prevented had she had any-
thing to do with the decision. There is a great deal of in- dignation expended in modern times on the tyranny of "the dead-hand," and it is not we who would contend for the right of "the dead-head" to control unconditionally the disposition of property among the living, seeing that the living brain is much more competent to judge of the expedi- ency of continuing those dispositions of property which a once living brain conceived, than any brain which bad no foresight of the present exigencies of society, possibly could have been. But if, on the one hand, the dead-hand controls the destinies of the living too much, we are ready to maintain that it does not control the disclosures that most concerned the owner of that dead-hand, half enough. It may be maintained, indeed, that no one has any right of monopoly in his own most secret history, if in any way whatever, accidental or otherwise, he puts it out of his own power to keep the secret. Nor would we go so far as to assert that a man,say of the tenth century, whose private history should now be recovered, would have much claim on us of the nineteenth to respect his privacy, if it could be shown that the publication of his story would confer a great benefit on the modern world. The reason, as we understand it, why the privacy of a person lately dead,—or even dead within a period so short that the revelation of his private circumstances would seriously affect a good many living persons,—should be respected, is this,—that he (or she) had means, inaccessible to any one else, of judging how far it was right or wrong to divulge these private circumstances, and when, if ever, the wrong of divulging them would cease to be a wrong. To refuse to respect the privacy of the dead,—at all events, while the dead are still a felt influence among the living, —is to refuse to respect the one judgment which alone was competent to decide on the rightness of privacy or publicity. Thus, supposing we could be sure,—as we quite agree with Mrs.
Oliphant that we can be all but sure,—that Mrs. Carlyle would have protested vehemently against the publication of those of her journals or letters which express either personal dissatisfaction with her husband, or a passionate gloom from which the public could at once have inferred the existence of that dissatisfaction, if not of more than the dissatisfaction which actually existed, we may surely say that it distorts the truth of her character and misrepresents her feeling for her husband, when we, the outside public, receive the confession,—even though we know the confession to be involuntary,— of feelings which she could never have written down without great qualification, if she could have written them down at all, had she imagined that they would. be overheard. Why is it simply dastardly to go and repeat to an assembledparty a soliloquy accidentally overheard, which we well know that the utterer would have cut out his tongue rather than publish P First, because it grossly misrepresents the person who inadvertently says aloud what he believed himself to be saying only to himself. Next, because the reticence he intended to display was in all probability not only for his own sake, but for the sake of others also, and because he was a better judge of the right and wisdom of both kinds of reticence than he who acci-
dentally overhears him can be. Lastly, because we all trust each other not to break the implied confidence we re- pose in each other in this way. Precisely the same reason applies, in our opinion, to this unauthorised revelation of Mrs. Carlyle's journal. So far as Mr. Carlyle was the only one to suffer by it, he might, perhaps, be excused for thinking that he had the right to give permission. But then, in the first place, he was not the only person to suffer by it. In the opinion of many of TIB, Mrs. Carlyle's character has suffered as much, and in part unjustly, because her whole sod would have revolted from this seeming disloyalty to her husband, from which, nevertheless, our knowledge of its involuntary character cannot wholly absolve her. In the next place, even so far as the revelation affects our judgment of Mr. Carlyle himself, surely her judgment was entitled to much weight. No one knew him so well. No one would have been more eager to assert that these crude journals, never in- tended for the public eye, would misrepresent the truth as to Carlyle himself, even though we know that we are, as it were, eavesdroppers, listening to her private soliloquies, and not taken by her into willing confidence. Now, should not these things weigh with us Is it fair to her to overhear her in her moods of anguish talking to herself? Is it fair to her husband P Is it fair, indeed, to the present generation, to give it notice that if we can but overhear its secrets,—or, worse still, if we can overhear what it might like us to fancy its secrets, supposing it could be sure that we should try to worm them out and publish them,—we shall have no scruple in betraying those secrets ? To our minds, the very same reasons which make it so un- desirable that "the dead-hand" should govern the disposition of modern wealth and energies of which the brain which governed that hand had no anticipative grasp, make it in the highest degree desirable that it should govern the responsibility of giving or withholding confidences to the world which survives it, of the wisdom and delicacy of which no one living could have the same power or right to judge as belonged to the dead. No doubt, that right diminishes with every distinct remove from the generation which those confidences would be most likely to fascinate and interest, because the reasons for reticence or disclosure gradually expire with those removes. But, as it seems to us, "the dead-hand" has not half enough power to suppress one-sided and inadequate materials for biography, the communication of which in their present form would have given the most exquisite pain, and caused the most exquisite self- reproach, to the mind and conscience which directed that hand. But in this case, at all events, we blame Mr. Carlyle even more than we blame Mr. Fronde.
Previous page
