Under this influence he gave up his fellowship and abandoned his orders, feeling that the change which was taking place in his own belief made it impossible for him honestly to adopt the career designed for him. In taking this step he compromised all his earthly prospects. His father was severely displeased, and refused to do any more for him. He was turned adrift upon the world to struggle as he might, and as the law then stood every profession was closed to him. The period of struggle in his case did not last long; within a few years Mr. Froude had made a position for himself; but while it lasted it was hard, and he had voluntarily embarked upon it. This crisis in his life was due to Mr. Carlyle’s influence. ‘I mention it,’ he says, ‘to show how little likely it is that for any motive of my own I should have willfully misrepresented his character when it came to me to tell what that character was. I had every conceivable motive, spiritual and earthly, to show him in the most favorable of all possible lights, with nothing on the other side save the sense which he had himself impressed upon me, that, under all hazards to oneself and under all circumstances, it was necessary to stick to the truth.

I was introduced to Carlyle soon after I left the University. I saw him from time to time, not often, for I lived far off in the country. He was very good to me. He helped me when he could. I became intimate to some extent with Mrs. Carlyle, with whom I occasionally corresponded. She liked me, I believe, at least, so Carlyle told me, while I thought her the most brilliant and interesting woman that I had ever fallen in with; so much thought, so much lightness and brilliancy, such sparkling scorn and tenderness combined, I had never met with together in any human being. It was evident that she was suffering; she was always in indifferent health, she had no natural cheerfulness, at least, none when I knew her. Rumour said that she and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I could easily believe it from occasional expressions about him which fell from her. But it was clear, too, that she greatly admired him. Various hints were dropped in the circle which gathered at the house in Cheyne Row, about the nature of the relations between them, that their marriage was not a real marriage, and was only companionship, &c. I paid no attention to a matter which was no business of mine. I have never been curious about family secrets, and have always as a rule of my life declined to listen to communications which were no business of mine. It was enough for me to be admitted to the Cheyne Row tea-parties on my occasional visits, and enjoy the brilliancy of the conversation, whether it was with him or with her.

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 expect, and for the reasons which I have mentioned I did not wish, that it should be closer than it was. Carlyle himself I admired intensely, but it was with admiration too complete for pleasant social relationship. His manner was impatient and overbearing. He denounced everybody and everything, and, though what he said was in my opinion intensely true and right, yet I felt that it would be impossible to live with him on equal terms. One loves those who are not too far removed from oneself. He seemed to me a superior order of being, whom one approached with genuine reverence, but could scarcely dare to love.

To my surprise, one evening in 1861, Carlyle called on me, expressed a wish to see more of me, invited me to come more often to his house, to be his companion in his walks and rides, &c. Nothing could be more flattering. I consented, and I was now continually in Cheyne Row. In all this the advances were on Carlyle's side. I had made no effort to press myself into his intimacy, still less into intimacy with Mrs. Carlyle. To refuse such hands when they were held out to me I thought would be ungracious and unnecessary. I felt myself highly honoured besides, and I promised myself pleasure and advantage from increased opportunities of quiet conversation with him. When more than one person was present he spoke in monologue, pouring out cataracts generally of denunciation against all manner of things and persons. When alone with a single companion he was delightful, brilliantly entertaining, sympathetic, and even occasionally tolerant of what at other times he would execrate, and full of the widest information about all things and subjects.

Introduced thus into closer relations with the life at Cheyne Row, I could not help becoming acquainted with many things which I would rather not have known. If Carlyle was busy he was in his soundproof room and never allowed himself to be interrupted. Any one who disturbed him at such times was not likely to repeat the experiment. Mrs. Carlyle was very much alone. She was in bad health and he did not seem to see it, or if he did, he forgot it immediately in the multitude of thoughts which pressed upon him. She rarely saw him except at meal-times. She sat by herself in her drawing-room, either reading or entertaining visitors who bored her, and of whom she dared not ask him to relieve her. She suffered frightfully from neuralgia, which she bore with more than stoical endurance, but it was evident that her life was painful and dreary. She was sarcastic when she spoke of her husband--a curious blending of pity, contempt, and other feelings. One had heard of violent quarrels from others who were admitted within the circle, and one began to realise that they might perhaps be true. One had heard that she had often thought of leaving Carlyle, and as if she had a right to leave him if she pleased. To those whom she liked she was charming - bewitching, and the thought of such a person suffering as she evidently suffered, with so little sympathy bestowed upon her, and suffering through the negligence of a man whom nevertheless one admired as one's own honoured master and teacher, was exquisitely painful. He too suffered from dyspepsia and want of sleep. But whereas she was expected to bear her trouble in patience, and received homilies on the duty of submission if she spoke impatiently, he was never more eloquent, than in speaking of his own crosses. He himself had really a vigorous constitution. He never had a day of serious illness. He used to walk or ride in the wildest weather and never carried so much as an umbrella. Yet I never knew him admit that he felt well. He never spoke of himself without complaint as if he was an exceptional victim of the Destinies. She was weary of hearing a tale so often repeated, the importance of which she was so well able to value. Some degree of self-restraint is expected from all of us, even when there is something real to complain of. Without it none of us could live together. In Carlyle's catalogue of his own duties, self-restraint seemed to be forgotten. She was very little alone with him. She presided at the tea-table at the small evening gatherings of his admirers in her own charming fashion. But Carlyle on these occasions did not converse. He would not allow himself to be contradicted, but poured out whole Niagaras of scorn and vituperation sometimes for hours together, and she was wearied, as she confessed, of a tale which she had heard so often and in much of which she imperfectly believed. She would herself occasionally say this. She admired his genius as much as ever. She had accepted the destructive part of his opinions like so many others, but he had failed to satisfy her that he knew where positive truth lay. He had taken from her, as she mournfully said, the creed in which she had been bred, but he had been unable to put anything in the place of it. She believed nothing. On the spiritual side of things her mind was a perfect blank; she looked into her own heart and into the world beyond her, and it was all void and desert; there was no word of consolation, no word of hope. She was so true that it was impossible for her to satisfy herself with fine phrases about the Infinite. That confidence which sustained him in his uncertainties that ‘the Maker of all things would do right,' he had never succeeded in conveying to her. He believed, or thought he believed, in a special Providence. To her it was an unmeaning phrase. I suppose that his own inconsistencies interfered with the effect of his teaching. He 'recked not his own rede,' and those whose practice falls short of their theories do not seem to believe really in their theories themselves. Carlyle was impatient, irritable, strangely forgetful of others, self-occupied and bursting into violence at the smallest and absurdest provocation--evidently a most difficult and trying household companion. All this was very distressing. Mrs. Carlyle's pale, drawn, suffering face haunted me in my dreams. I set most of it down to ill-health. I did not allow my reverence and admiration for Carlyle's intellect and high moral greatness to be interfered with. I considered him an exceptional person, whose infirmities were greater than the virtues of most other persons. I suppose I considered that to be the wife of such a man was a sufficient honour in itself, and I was more distressed than interested by the bitter things which she occasionally said of him, only I felt that I could never live with such a man. Nothing would do but the most absolute submission to him of your whole being, and then you would do only indifferently.

In 1862, her health finally broke down, and there came on that strange illness of hers which doctors failed to understand, or, if they understood it, they did not venture to speak plainly. For a year she lay in agonies, her nervous system torn to tatters--sleepless, racked with pain which was unlike any pain that she had ever felt or heard of. Carlyle's wild irritability (in one of her letters at the time she described her life with him as like keeping a madhouse) had shattered her at last. The wisest of her doctors insisted as a first necessity on her separation from him, the constant agitation of his presence, and the equally constant provocation which his forgetfulness or preoccupation made incessant in spite of efforts, taking away all hope of amendment while the cause remained. She went to Hastings, to Scotland: she was all but dead. She had again and again been given up. To all inquiries there was but one answer: 'No better. No hope.' Suddenly, as if from the grave, she came back. The illness had seemed preternatural, the recovery equally so. She had been dying. She was apparently well. She came back into society. She was weak, extremely so, but in good spirits. Carlyle had been frightened into realizing how ill she had really been. It had not been that he was consciously different, but he was preoccupied. He made little of other people’s sufferings; she had rarely complained at the worst, and was a Stoic in the sense of the word. He thought more of her comfort; he gave her a carriage. He had felt to his heart what her loss would have been to him. Those last eighteen months, he often told me, were the happiest in his married life, since the first year of it. She, too, seemed to feel more for him; not entirely as he perhaps thought, for she was unforgiving, and she had more to forgive than any one knew, but the atmosphere in Cheyne Row had cleared a little. She still mocked to me at times about him, and the resentment was there, though it showed itself less. In the midst of the improvement, and when he was absent as Lord Rector at Edinburgh, she suddenly died in her carriage. The injury had gone too deep. There had been no real amendment. Her nerves had been so shaken by her many years of suffering that some singular disease had developed itself, I believe, in her spine. At any rate, she went out one afternoon to drive around Hyde Park. I was to have been with her in the evening at tea. She had had a shock at some injury to her dog, and died without a word or a struggle.

Such an end was tragically in keeping with her singular character and history. I have spoken elsewhere of Carlyle’s misery. He shut himself up in the house with her diaries and papers, and for the first time was compelled to look himself in the face, and to see what his faults had been. The worst of those faults I have concealed hitherto. I can conceal them no longer. He found a remembrance in her Diary of the blue marks which in a fit of passion he had once inflicted on her arms. He saw that he had made her entirely miserable; that she had sacrificed her life to him; and that he had made a wretched return for her devotion. As soon as he could collect himself he put together a memoir of her, in which with deliberate courage he inserted the incriminating passages (by me omitted) of her Diary, the note of the blue marks among them, and he added an injunction of his own that, however stern and tragic that record might be, it was never to be destroyed.

It was now that I learnt to regard Carlyle with a more human feeling. My admiration of him had never wavered; but the contempt with which he treated everybody and everything, the anecdotes which I had heard from his wife, and his manifest forgetfulness of every other person’s interest or comfort where his own wishes were concerned, had made it difficult for me to like him in the common sense of the word. He had seemed to me like a person apart from the rest of the world, with the mask of destiny upon him, to whom one could not feel exactly as towards a brother mortal. Another side of his character was now opened to me – the agony of his remorse for a long series of faults which now for the first time he saw in their true light. For the next four years I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind. His conversation, however it opened, always drifted back into a pathetic cry of sorrow over things which were now irreparable. It was at once piteous and noble; for it was manifest that his faults, whatever they had been (and I did not then know completely what they had been), were no faults in his real nature. A repentance so deep and so passionate showed that the real nature was as beautiful as his intellect had been magnificent. He was still liable to his fits of temper. He was still scornful and overbearing and willful; but it had become possible to love him – indeed, impossible not to love him.

It was in 1871, that suddenly, without a word of warning, without permission given or asked for, he one day brought to me a large parcel of papers. It contained 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 to himself, and other persons. He had put them together, he said, they were not completely prepared for publication, but he could do no more with them, nor could he tell what ought to be done with them. He gave them simply to me. Afterwards he seemed to have forgotten this, for he bequeathed them to me in his will. But at the time he said: ‘Take these for my sake; they are yours to publish or not publish, as you please, after I am gone. Do what you will. Read them and let me know whether you will take them on these terms.’ I did read them, and then for the first time I realized what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been – a tragedy as stern and real as the story of Oedipus. The quarrels, I found to my sorrow, had been no surface differences of married life, but fierce and violent. Surely enough the remorse was needed. The collecting of those letters was an expiation, an expiation so frank and so complete that it washed the stain away. I for myself felt that he had done rightly, that his character never could be put fairly and honestly among the records of the great men to whom he belonged unless the faults were confessed and absolution granted on the only fitting terms. I felt at the time that he was laying upon me a cruel test of friendship, though he did not mean to be cruel. He ought to have come to a resolution himself, and not to have left the decision to me. I believed, however, that his hesitation rose from a sense that to order such a publication would seem ostentatious, as if his affairs were of so much consequence to mankind that he was entitled to call on them to occupy themselves with the seamy side of his life. At all events, and with the still uncompleted story in my hands, I told him my own opinion, that he had done right and that the letters ought to be brought out, but that if they were brought out, in justice both to her and to himself, his own memoir of his wife ought to be made known also. When he first wrote it he added a note forbidding its publication, but he had included it in the gift to me, and it had been copied out for that purpose. I might therefore have acted on his general instructions and dealt with it as I pleased, but I required and I received his own special permission, and on these terms the manuscripts remained with me.

I was so anxious, however, and I felt so seriously the load of the responsibility, that I asked him to allow me to consult John Forster, as it was too heavy for me to bear alone.

Forster read both memoir and letters. To me he gave no opinion. He said that he would speak to Carlyle about it, and I believe he did. I do not know what passed between them. He said that he should tell Carlyle to make my position clear in his will, or trouble would come of it. This Carlyle did. He knew my own feeling, and never once to the end of his life, not once at any moment, did he give me a hint that he wished the letters suppressed. He left me always to the end under the impression that he wished them published, but he wished the act of publishing to be mine.

This incident, however, led to fuller communications between Forster and myself about Carlyle’s history than we had ever exchanged before, and he told me a very singular story. I knew generally that the Carlyle’s had been very intimate with Lord Ashburton, then Mr. Baring, and his first wife, Lady Harriet Baring. I knew that the friendship had been more on Carlyle’s side than on his wife’s, who, I had gathered, generally, did not like Lady Harriet. But I had myself no acquaintance with the Ashburtons. I trouble myself as little as possible at all times with other people’s affairs, and whether Mrs. Carlyle liked the people whom her husband liked was no matter to me. Forster, however, alluded to some mysterious secret in connection with the Ashburtons. When I said I knew nothing about it he seemed greatly surprised, and proceeded to tell me 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. That Carlyle should behave nobly under such extraordinary circumstanced seemed extremely likely to me, but I was greatly astonished. Lady Ashburton was a great lady of the world. Carlyle, with all his genius, had the manners to the last of an Annandale peasant. Wonderful things did happen – and women did strange things. I supposed that Forster must know what he was talking of. But if his account was true, I wondered why Mrs. Carlyle should seem so angry when Lady Ashburton’s name was mentioned. She ought to have felt proud and amused. This too, however, was no business of mine, and I thought no more about it till two years later, when just as before [in 1871, ed.] Carlyle had brought me the first parcel, he again [in 1873, ed.] sent me in a box a collection of letters, diaries, memoirs, miscellanies of endless sorts, the accumulations of a life. He told me that I must undertake his biography, and that there were the materials for me.

It happened that I had laid out my plans for the occupation of my later life in a way that would have been pleasant and profitable to me. I had finished my ‘History of England.’ I had nearly finished my ‘English in Ireland.’ After that my hands would be free. I foresaw, with the knowledge I already possessed, that I could not write a ‘Life of Carlyle’ that would have a chance of being popular. I foresaw that I should be involved in endless difficulties. To undertake it would involve the sacrifice of all the arrangements which I had made. It would be a certain loss in money. It would be fortunate for me if it did not lead me into perplexities which even at a distance looked sufficiently formidable. I had already, however, undertaken a dangerous part of the business. He seemed bent on my undertaking the rest. He had originally intended that no biography of himself should be written. He had said in his journal that there was a secret connected with him unknown to his closest friends, that no one knew and no one would know it, and that without a knowledge of it no true biography of him was possible. He never told me in words what this secret was, but I suppose he felt that I should learn it from his papers. At any rate, he had made up his mind that I was to do it, and I said that I would, provided I was left free to deal with the story exactly as I might think right, and that I was not to be interfered with. I set myself to study the enormous mass of manuscripts. I saw more than ever how complicated a task had been imposed on me, as the singular and tragical story unfolded itself. He had put these papers in my hands just as he had placed the others, with directions to burn freely as I might think right, - without an inventory, without a word to show that I was to render any further account of them.

I supposed them to have been given to me as the memorials of his wife had been, and if he had any other intention he ought to have informed me of it. He did not. When any subject was disagreeable, it was his habit to thrust it away, and desire to hear no more of it. So these papers were thrust upon me, and so for seven years they remained. The picture which they presented was intensely interesting, in many respects intensely beautiful. His wife’s journal, however, had come with the rest, and here was the explanation of part at least of the bitterness which had appeared in her letters. It was not, as Forster had told me, that Lady Ashburton had been ever devoted to Carlyle. That would have been no cause of complaint, and if Carlyle had behaved as Forster said, she would only have loved him the better for it. Quite evidently the feeling ran the other way. Carlyle had sate at the feet of the fine lady adoring and worshipping, had made himself the plaything of her caprices, had made Lady Ashburton the object of the same idolatrous homage which he had once paid to herself. What was the meaning of Forster’s story? He died soon after, and I had no opportunity of asking him. But where had he learnt it? Of the actual truth there can be no doubt at all. It was no creation of Mrs. Carlyle’s jealous fancies. There are in existence, or there were, masses of extravagant letters of Carlyle’s to the great lady as ecstatic as Don Quixote’s to Dulcinea. There was one even in which he had asked Lady Ashburton not to tell Mrs. Carlyle of some visit which he paid to her, as she was so angry when she heard of his having been with her. It was of course the purest Gloriana worship, the homage of the slave to his imperious mistress. But such it was; while on the lady’s side, whose letters after what Forster had said I looked into with interest, there was nothing else but the imperious witness, to whom Carlyle was a passing amusement. It was not jealousy only on Mrs. Carlyle’s part. She was ashamed and indignant at the unworthy position in which her husband was placing himself. Rinaldo in the bower of Armida or Hercules spinning silks for Omphale. What could Forster have been talking of? It seemed equally impossible (I think it was impossible) that Carlyle himself should have entertained any such extravagant notion. I did indeed know an instance of a peasant of high genius in whom another great lady took an admiring interest under somewhat analogous circumstances. A relation of the peasant who disliked the acquaintance persuaded him that the lady wanted to marry him. He was weak enough to believe it, and an intimacy which had lasted for many years was brought to an end. The vanity of the wisest will carry him far when he is flattered by a woman’s attentions.

It is not conceivable to me that such a person as Carlyle could ever have been so extravagantly deluded. At any rate, there was the story; a myth of a portentous kind already current. I tried once to approach the subject with Carlyle himself, but he shrank from it with such signs of distress that I could not speak to him about it again. He had put in my hands the letters and journals which told Mrs. Carlyle’s view of it. He left them to speak for themselves.

This was one of the Cheyne Row secrets which was the cause of so much heart-burning and misery. But it was not all. Carlyle’s mysterious allusion evidently did not refer to anything connected with Lady Ashburton. I am not sure that I know now what he meant; but a mystery was communicated to me, if I can call that a mystery, which had forced itself upon me from the study of the papers – something which I would infinitely rather have remained in ignorance of, because I could not forget it, because it must necessarily influence me in all that I might say, while I considered I must endeavor if possible to conceal it.

Geraldine Jewsbury was Mrs. Carlyle’s most intimate and most confidential friend. Their correspondence, a large part of which Miss Jewsbury gave me, and which is now in my possession, proves sufficiently how close the confidence was. Geraldine herself was a gifted woman. She had been attracted by Carlyle’s writings, had introduced herself to him as one of his most ardent worshippers, which to the end of her own life she continued to be in spite of all which she saw and knew. She was about Mrs. Carlyle’s own age. She was admitted into Cheyne Row on the closest terms. Mrs. Carlyle, in her own troubles, spoke and wrote of Geraldine Jewsbury as her Consuelo. I had myself some external acquaintance with Miss Jewsbury. 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 at first endeavoured to make the best of the position in which she found herself. But his extraordinary temper was a consequence of his organization. As he grew older and more famous, he had become more violent and overbearing. She had longed for children, and children were denied to her. This had been at the bottom of all the quarrels and all the unhappiness.

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. Indeed, as I have already said, there were floating suspicions long before in the circle of Cheyne Row. That Mrs. Carlyle had resented it was new to me. I had supposed that probably in the struggling and forlorn circumstances in which they began their married life they had agreed, being both of them singular persons, that they would do better without a family. Miss Jewsbury entirely dispelled this supposition. She said that Mrs. Carlyle never forgave the injury which she believed herself to have received. She had often resolved to leave Carlyle. He, of course, always admitted that she was at liberty to go if she pleased.

A fresh light was thus thrown on the Lady Ashburton affair. Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another. This had been the occasion of the most violent outbreaks between them.

I had observed in Mrs. Carlyle's Diary that immediately after the entry of the blue marks on her arms, she had spent a day with Geraldine at Hampstead. I asked Miss Jewsbury if she recollected anything about it: she remembered it only too well. The marks were made by personal violence. Geraldine did not acquit her friend in all this. She admitted that she could be extremely provoking. She said to me that Carlyle was the nobler of the two. Her veneration for her teacher never flagged in spite of all. She looked on his failings as aberrations due to his physical constitution. But the facts were as she told me. She did not live long after this. In her last illness, when she knew that she was dying, and when it is entirely inconceivable that she would have uttered any light or ill-considered gossip, she repeated all this to me, with many curious details. I will mention one, as it shows that Carlyle did not know when he married what his constitution was. The morning after his wedding-day he tore to pieces the flower-garden at Comeley Bank in a fit of ungovernable fury. 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.'

She still admired him, even loved him in a sense for the beautiful and noble traits in his character. His letters to her when they were separated were uniformly tender and affectionate; so extreme indeed was the contrast between the letters and present realities that she used to say bitterly that he wrote them for his biographer. Still she knew that essentially he was generous, upright, and true. Having begun the sacrifice of herself, she struggled to carry it through for better or for worse as she had promised; the trial, however, was so protracted that when her health began to fail it seemed more than she could bear. She would not make a scandal by revealing the truth and dissolving her marriage, but once at least she had resolved to put herself out of the way altogether. She was to have gone to Scotland by sea. She meant in the darkness to have dropped over the stern and disappeared in such a way that it might seem as if her death had been an accident. Something prevented the sea voyage, but Geraldine's entire conviction was that, had she gone that way, she would never have been seen again. The life in Cheyne Row was to her, as Mrs. Carlyle said, like keeping a madhouse. Her entire system was shattered by the scenes which were continually recurring'. She broke down at last with the strangest illness that ever woman died of.

I have since learnt that the nature of Carlyle's constitution was known to several persons, that in fact it was an open secret. Perhaps it was discovered by the physicians who attended in Mrs. Carlyle's illness. Perhaps she herself revealed her wrongs to more than Geraldine. Miss Jewsbury's information was given to me under too solemn circumstances, and was coupled with too many singular details, to allow doubt to be possible. It is as certain as anything human can be certain that what she related to me was what Mrs. Carlyle had related to her, and to all who knew Mrs. Carlyle that is evidence enough.

Any way, these things were communicated to me, and I was to be Carlyle's biographer. What was I to make of them? It was so weird, so uncanny a business that the more I thought of it the less could I tell what to do. I could well understand now how grave the occasion for Carlyle's remorse, which I had often thought morbid and exaggerated. I found myself entangled in painful family differences of exactly the kind which I most disliked to hear of, and acquaintance with which I had always avoided. It was all left to my discretion, but how was my discretion to be exercised? Carlyle's faults had been great, and he had endeavoured to make an atonement for them. It was an atonement complete in itself, so complete that he himself directed the publication of the memoir of his wife with her own letters; it swept the faults away and exhibited his real character in its brightest and tenderest light. If I suppressed all that--if I made my biography a mere panegyric on his writings and his generally noble and self-denying life, I should nevertheless give the world nothing but a mockery. Legends like that which I had heard from Forster were already flying. Innumerable letters were scattered about, from which partial and incorrect versions of his history would inevitably be passed into currency. I knew from anonymous letters, written to myself, that the state of things in Cheyne Row was no secret at all. The lives of great men are scrutinised to the bottom. Mankind will not rest, and do not rest till they have learnt all that can be discovered about such men. The lives of Swift, of Byron, and a hundred others were standing examples. Had I a right to keep concealed all authentic narrative compiled by Carlyle himself, in which he frankly acknowledged his own errors ? I was not blind to the risk which I should run so far as I myself was personally concerned, but Carlyle was one of those rare and exceptional men who had exerted an immense influence on his own age. In my opinion, that influence would continue and would enlarge; and in such instances men are entitled to know everything which can be known of the character of those who have addressed them from the elevated position of prophet and teacher.

My acquaintance with the graver aspects of the story had, on the whole, not impaired my admiration of Carlyle. Taken for all in all, I admired him no less. I loved him better for the feeling which he had shown. He was human; he had his faults like other men. The consequences had been miserable. But he was miserable himself when he thought of them. I felt as if I had never realized how great a man he was till I saw what he suffered. I supposed that what I felt myself would be felt by others, when they had taken time to consider, but I did know that the first impression would be a painful one. I could not tell what it would be wise to do or what it would be right to do. I continued to work at his papers, to copy for myself the most important of his manuscripts, since I could trust no other to do it for me, and I put off my final decision till Carlyle himself should be gone and I could think more calmly over my responsibilities and of the manner in which I was to act. I anticipated as not unlikely the resentment of relations, but Carlyle had selected me apparently because I was not a relation and would be free from influences of a private kind. The position became more complicated when, about a year before his death, he suddenly said one day to me when we were driving in a carriage, ‘When you have done with those papers of mine give them to Mary,’ ‘Mary’ being his niece, Miss Aitken, who had lately married her cousin and was living with Carlyle in Cheyne Row. Hitherto I had looked on those papers as my own. He had empowered me to burn freely. They had then been in my hands for six years, and he had never hinted to me that they were intended to pass out of my possession.

Of course I acquiesced, but for many reasons I felt uneasy. I had been trusted with the most delicate and difficult of responsibilities. My action, whatever it might be, would be open to objection of one sort or another, as no one knew better than Carlyle, since he could not decide for himself. If he had intended that these papers should be made use of by others, and in opposition to the judgment at which I should arrive should that judgment not coincide with theirs, then he was not dealing fairly with me. No one would undertake so dangerous a task on such conditions. He ought to have given me the opportunity of deciding whether under this arrangement I would go on with it; and could I have guessed that I should be treated as I have been treated, of course I should at once and with infinite relief have restored my trust into his hands. I was content, most incautiously, with a promise that Mary Carlyle would do nothing without consulting me and without my consent. Of course I should have gratefully acknowledged errors into which I might have fallen and misreading of his handwriting, which at the end of his life became almost illegible. I should have welcomed and encouraged any more satisfactory biography should my own seem insufficient or inaccurate. I was not prepared for, and I ought not to have encountered, a passionate and angry challenge of my right to make the revelations which were left to me to make or not to make. I was not prepared for attacks on my character as a gentleman and a man of honour. I acquit Carlyle of having meant this. He was incapable of treachery, least of all to me. But faith has not been kept with me. I see now--I saw it before, but I was unwilling to worry him--that I ought to have insisted on receiving from him in writing his own distinct directions. If they were not satisfactory to me I could then have declined to go on.

There were other reasons why Carlyle should not have been contented with a mere instruction that I was to give the papers to his niece, and why he should have given specific orders about them. I had believed them to be my property, and that he had given them to me. I believed, as being mine, I could give them to her, and that if this was not so questions would inevitably arise as to the legal ownership, and the consequent right to the profits of publication. He had made me one of his executors, though I did not know it. In his will he had left his papers to his brother John. This, too, I did not know, and I ought to have been informed of it; but his brother died before him, and the bequest lapsed, and then Mary Carlyle informed myself and my co-executor that the papers had been given to her by word of mouth, as I supposed them to have been given to me. She had no writing to give in evidence. If it was so, I had again been treated unfairly, for I ought to have been informed of it; but all was left uncertain, all was in confusion. The executors did not know, and do not know now, to whom the papers in law belonged. We agreed to act on Carlyle's verbal instruction to me, and to give them to Mary Carlyle, as he had said; but whether they were mine to give, or ours to give, is still an open question.

It was a question of no importance in itself, but it was important as affecting the right of property on publication. Not a word having been said upon the subject, and the whole undertaking having been thrust upon me, I assumed as a matter of course that the copyright and the profits of it would be mine whatever they might be, and that I might dispose of them as I thought fit. By this time I had drifted towards a cowardly conclusion that I would suppress Mrs. Carlyle's letters after all, that I would write a biography such as would most surely be to my own advantage, dwelling on all that was best and brightest in Carlyle, and passing lightly over the rest. I wrote the first volume of the 'Life' as it now stands in this sense. I had found among the papers the 'Reminiscences' of old Mr. James Carlyle, of Irving, of Jeffrey, of Wordsworth, and Southey. They were written, all but the account of his father, after Mrs. Carlyle's death. I thought them extremely beautiful. I thought they gave the most favourable picture of Carlyle himself which could possibly be conveyed. I thought that they ought to be published as they stood in a separate volume. I proposed it to him and he readily assented.

So the matter rested till three months before Carlyle's death. Had nothing more happened I should have brought out the 'Reminiscences' in the form which I first proposed, have buried or burnt Mrs. Carlyle's letters and Carlyle's memoir of her, and finished my biography as I had begun, and the real story would, through me at least, never have been known. One day, however, on one of our drives (I was with him constantly, as I had been for many years, walking or driving), he began upon the 'Letters and Memorials,' and asked me what I had finally decided to do. He knew what my own feeling had originally been--that the intended collection of those 'Letters' was the most heroic act of his life; that they ought to be published, and the 'Memoir' published along with them. He had then been evidently pleased. He left it all to me. At my own desire he had allowed me to consult Forster; but Forster had given me no advice at all, and was now dead. I had not told Carlyle that my own mind had begun to waver about it, and I had never entered on the subject again, because I was afraid he would be disappointed, or would say something which would make it more difficult for me to do what I had brought myself to intend. He himself, however, began to speak about it exactly in the tone which I had feared: in the old melancholy, heart-broken way which I knew so well. I had not the courage to tell him that I had changed my mind. Indeed, I had not changed my mind so far as the right and wrong were concerned. I had been merely cowardly. I told him that the ‘Letters' should be published and the 'Memoir' also. He seemed at once relieved and easy. He said I must do as I pleased. He never gave me any order. Then and always he avoided giving any order. He threw the responsibility on me; but neither then, nor at any time before, or after, from the first time in 1871, when he placed the manuscripts in my hands, did he ever indicate in the slightest degree that he himself had any reluctance or doubt about the propriety of the publication. If he ever spoke in a different tone to others, again I have been unfairly dealt with. To me the expression of such a doubt would have been more than welcome. To me, if to any one, that doubt ought to have been communicated.

This being so settled, I made up my mind to the worst. The whole story must now come out. I thought that still I might keep back the secrets which Geraldine Jewsbury had told me, but the main facts which appeared in the letters would now have to be brought out, except what I could not bring myself to print, the fatal passage in the Diary about the marks on the arm. Instead of it I would insert another extract from the same Diary which explained the cause of the quarrel, suppress such passages as would hurt other people, and thus once for all discharge myself of the whole burden. The 'Memoir of Mrs. Carlyle' I proposed to attach to the 'Reminiscences,' recomposed in part from the other notes and fragments which he had given to me. In view of what was to come and in order to show how true his affection had really been all along, in order to show what she had been--because when her letters appeared the blame of much might be thrown upon her--for both their sakes I was satisfied that the 'Memoir' had better appear at once, and those tender and suffering passages which I was universally reproached for having published, I thought and I still think, were precisely those which would win and command the pity and sympathy of mankind. The story, I often said to myself, was as sternly tragic, as profoundly pathetic as the great Theban drama. The genuine and heartfelt expression of remorse and sorrow must touch the very deepest chords of every serious heart.

Carlyle died, and the book came out. It was received with a violence of censure for which I was wholly unprepared. It was received also with an indignation of a different kind from Mary Carlyle and her friends. They were surprised and angry at the appearance of the 'Memoir,' being ignorant of what had passed about it between Carlyle and myself. They expected, I suppose, that the publication of the 'Memoir' would involve the publication of the 'Letters,' which I, as well as they, would have willingly avoided if I could.

Another and more paltry cause of disagreement had arisen simultaneously in a form at which I confess I was astonished. I had thought I was standing clear in the money part of the business; I had to find myself mistaken.

Here Mr. Froude refers at some length to certain complications which arose from the publication of the ‘Reminiscences’ in the United States, and from a claim preferred by Mrs. A. Carlyle to the literary profits of the book. These matters are only important from the consequences to which they led, and have therefore been omitted from the text in order that they might not interfere with the continuity of the narrative, but the original passages are given in their integrity at the end of Sir James Stephen’s letter, in which the legal aspect of Mrs. A. Carlyle’s claim is fully discussed. (Appendix, pp. 64-70.)

Though I had accepted Mary Carlyle's version of my engagement to give her the literary profits of the ‘Reminiscences,' the copyright was still mine. I had restored the originals to her as Carlyle had directed; but I retained the literary control. More than once inquiries had been made of me through her lawyers when there would be any further money coming to her from other editions. The book went out of print, and I was at some loss what to do, for, being unable to do anything in England, Mary Carlyle had applied to Mr. Charles Norton to bring out an edition in America. I saw it announced, with an intimation that it was to appear at the desire of Carlyle's family, and that the edition which I had published was full of printer's blunders. I thought, and I still think, that Mr. Norton ought to have communicated with me. I should have raised no difficulty. I knew that there might be many errors of the press in the book. Mary Carlyle has reminded me that I said her uncle's handwriting was beautiful. It was beautiful when he was in his vigour; after his hand began to shake it became harder to decipher than the worst manuscript which I have ever examined. I copied out the greater part of the 'Reminiscences' myself. A large part of them I copied twice; I had to work at them with a magnifying glass, and in many hundred instances I was at a loss to know exactly what particular words might be. My own hand is not a good one, and there was a further source of error in the printer's reading of this. At least I was not careless, except perhaps that I had found the manuscript so difficult that in reading the proofs I trusted too much to my own transcript. The 'Memoir' of Mrs. Carlyle was printed directly from the copy which Carlyle gave me. If there were mistakes in this the fault did not rest with me. I was not surprised, however, when I heard that the book required much correction. I do not let judgment go by default. When I was so often in doubt myself, others may have been wrong and I may have been right, but I did not and I do not stand upon this. I waited for the promised American edition to make the necessary corrections. For some reason it did not appear. A new edition was called for. I thought that the right of editing ought to lie with the possessor of the originals. I therefore frankly surrendered my own right unconditionally, and the result is the edition now published. I should have raised no objection if Mr. Norton had himself applied to me. It would have been more courteous had he done so. For the rest, I went on with my task and I finished in the best way that I could, amidst threatened lawsuits, lawyers' letters pressing for the papers, feeling throughout that I was handling burning coals and under a hailstorm of unfavourable criticism, which under the circumstances was perfectly natural. I was keeping back the essential part of the story which had governed my own action, and the world, not knowing the full truth, considered that I made too much of trifles which need not have been spoken of at all. If I have now told all, it is because I see that nothing short of it will secure me the fair judgment to which I am entitled. I am certain that I have done the best for Carlyle's own memory. The whole facts are now made known. The worst has been said that can be said, and anything further which can now be told about him can only be to his honour; already the tendency is to acquit Carlyle and lay the blame (such blame as there is) upon her. The usual custom is to begin with the brightest side and to leave the faults to be discovered afterwards. It is dishonest and it does not answer. Of all literary sins Carlyle himself detested most a false biography. Faults frankly acknowledged are frankly forgiven. Faults concealed work always like poison. Burns's offences were made no secret of. They are now forgotten, and Burns stands without a shadow on him the idol of his countrymen. Byron's 'Diary' was destroyed, and he remains and will remain with a stain of suspicion about him which revives and will revive, and will never be wholly obliterated. 'The truth shall make you free' in biography as in everything. Falsehood and concealment are a great man's worst enemies.

Such at least is the doctrine about the matter which I learnt from Carlyle himself: such is my own opinion, and on this I have acted. I cannot discover in myself any other motive for the course which I have taken. All motives of worldly prudence lay the other way. Personally I never met with anything but the warmest kindness from Carlyle. I had no secret injuries to resent. I had always admired him, and in his later days I learnt to love him. No one does what he knows to be wrong without some object. If any one will suggest what unworthy motive I can have had, he may perhaps assist me in discovering it. I cannot discover it, myself.

It is likely enough that I have made mistakes in matters of fact as well as in the reading of the manuscripts. Let all such be made known. No one will be better pleased than I shall be. I complain only of reflections on my good faith and personal honesty, which I fling off me with legitimate indignation.

I am told that Mary Carlyle possesses documents which show parts of Carlyle's story in another light. If so, they ought to have been communicated to me. She says now that they were considered too sacred. I cannot help that. I could judge only by what Carlyle put into my hands. She offered to show them to my solicitor. If too sacred for me to see, they were too sacred to be exposed to a lawyer. If she wished me to know what they contained she ought to have sent me copies, or have told me generally their contents.

It is of no importance now. The manuscripts and all that is in them are in her hands. She has released herself from the engagements which were made with me. I am quit of it and for ever. I have made many blunders--the worst and greatest that when I knew what the circumstances were I did not at once decline to have anything to do with them. I was misled by a too confiding admiration of Carlyle's own heroism. It was unwise of me, and I regret my imprudence too late.

When Carlyle decided that his niece was to have the manuscripts after I had done with them, I ought not to have been contented with a promise. I ought to have insisted on his defining precisely and with his own hand the respective positions in which we were to stand. He was impatient of being spoken to on a subject which he wished to thrust from him. I concluded that he would himself have left in writing something that was to guide me. He left nothing.

If I have erred in other ways I may plead the worry and perplexity in which I was involved and the nature of my task, which perhaps the wisest man could not have dealt with without stumbling in places. My book, if it is still to be condemned at present, will be of use hereafter. A hundred years hence, the world will better appreciate Carlyle's magnitude. The sense of his importance, in my opinion, will increase with each generation. The unwillingness to look closely into his character will be exchanged for an earnest desire to know all which can be ascertained about him, and what I have written will then have value. It may not be completely correct, but it will have made concealment impossible, and have ensured that the truth shall be known. The biographies of the great men of the past, the great spiritual teachers especially, with whom Carlyle must be ranked, are generally useless. They are idle and incredible panegyrics, with features drawn without shadows, false, conventional, and worthless. The only 'Life' of a man which is not worse than useless is a 'Life' which tells all the truth so far as the biographer knows it. He may be mistaken, but he has at least been faithful, and his mistakes may be corrected. So perhaps may some of mine, especially if particular papers have been purposely withheld from me.

I have discharged the duty which was laid on me as faithfully as I could. I have nothing more to reveal, and, as far as I know, I have related exactly everything which bears on my relations with Carlyle and his history. This is all that I can do, and I have written this that those who care for me may have something to rely upon if my honour and good faith are assailed after I am gone.

Written in Cuba, Vedado,