A REPAIRED HOUSE. 329 every four or five years, is usually undergone in the absence of the owners. Mrs. Carlyle, feeble and out of health as she was, had remained, to spare her husband expense, through the paint and noise, directing everything herself, and restoring everything to order and cleanliness at a minimum of cost. The walls had been painted or papered, the floors washed, the beds taken to pieces and remade, the injured furniture mended. With her own hands she had newly covered chairs and sofas, and stitched carpets and curtains; while for Carlyle himself she had arranged a library exactly in the form which he had declared before that it was essential to his peace that his own working-room should have. For three days he was satisfied, and acknowledged a certain admiration.' Unfortunately when at heart he was really most gratified, his acknowledgments were limited; he was shy of showing feeling, and even those who knew him. best and understood his ways were often hurt by his apparent indifference. He had admitted that the house had been altered for the better, but on the fourth morning the young lady next door began upon her fatal piano, and then the tempest burst out which Mrs. Carlyle describes with such pathetic humour.1 First he insisted that he would have a room made for himself on the roof where no sound could enter. When shown how much this would cost, he chose to have his rooms altered below-partitions made or taken down-new fireplaces introduced. Again the house was filled with dust and workmen; saws grating and hammers clattering, and poor Carlyle in the midst of it, 'wringing his hands and tearing his hair at 1 Letters and Memorials, vol. i. p. 264. the sight of the uproar which he had raised.' And after all it was not the piano, or very little the piano. It is in ourselves that we are this or that, and the young lady might have played her fingers off, and he would never have heard her, had his work once been set going, and he absorbed in it. But go it would not, except fitfully and unsatisfactorily; his materials were all accumulated; he had seen all that he needed to see, yet his task still seemed impossible. The tumult in the house was appeased: another writingroom was arranged; the unfortunate young lady was brought to silence. Past and Present' was done. and out of the way. The dinner-hour was changed to the middle of the day to improve the biliary condition. No result came. He walked about the streets to distract himself. His mind wandered to other subjects as one thing or another suggested itself. Journal. Chelsea: October 10, 1843.-Began yesterday to dine at 2.30. Perhaps it will do me good on the dyspeptic side. Walked from three to six yesterday afternoon, saw some of Wilkie's prints in a shop-window-Card-players,' 'Reading a Will,' &c. The pictures I had never seen-discovered for the first time what a genius was in this Wilkie: a great broad energy of humour and sympathy; a real painter in his way, alone among us since Hogarth's time-reflected with sorrow that the man was dead, that I had seen him with indifference, without recognition, while he lived. Poor Wilkie! A very stunted, timidly proud, uninviting, unproductive-looking man. I spoke with him a little in his own house while he was painting Sir David Baird and Seringapatam. The picture seemed to me a hollow cloud, as our other pictures are. The man himself was cold, shy, taciturn. I saw Wilkie and did not know him. One should have his eyes opener. BEGINNINGS OF 'CROMWELL. 331 The Life of Wilkie by poor Allan Cunningham, the most chaotic compilation in the world, revealed to me the small but genuine spirit of a man struggling confusedly amid the boundless element of twaddle, dilettantism, shopkeeperism, and other impurity and inanity, of which our earth, and most of all the painter's earth, is at present full. He rebukes me by several of his qualities-by his patience, his submissive, unwearied endeavour in such element as he finds a truly well-doing man. His 'Card-players' struck me more than any of his engravings I chanced to see last night; genuine lifefigures, a great gluttonous substantiality, some glimpse of universal life looking out through the coarse boor shapes; the awfully massive hips and seats, the teeth and laugh of that President at the board head, &c. Alas! poor Wilkie is not here any more. Oh, miserable slip the labour,' what is become of thy endeavour? Not a word of it yet got to paper; the very scheme and shadow of it hovering distracted in the cloud rack, sport of every wind. I am truly to be pitied, to be condemned. So Carlyle had been when he began the French Revolution.' So it was, is, and must be with every serious man when he is first starting upon any great literary work. 'Sport of every wind' he seems to himself, for every trifle, piano or what not, distracts him. Sterling was in London, then on the edge of his last fatal illness. In the Journal of October 23 Carlyle enters : Methinks I see a hieroglyphic hat Skim o'er the zenith in a slipshod hat, And to shed infants' blood with horrid strides A damned potato on a whirlwind rides. Fabulously attributed to Nat Lee in Bedlam; composed, I imagine, by John Sterling, who gave it me yesterday. 'Have After this he seemed to make progress. been making an endeavour one other time to begin writing on Cromwell. Dare not say I have yet begun; all beginning is difficult.' Many pages were covered, with writing of a sort. Mrs. Carlyle, on November 28, describes him as over head and ears in Cromwell,' and lost to humanity for the time being.' That he could believe himself started gave some peace to her; but he was trying to make a consecutive history of the Commonwealth, and, as he told me afterwards, he could not get the subject rightly taken hold of.' There was no seed fitly planted and organically growing; and the further he went, the less satisfied he was with himself. He used to say that he had no genius for literature. Yet no one understood better what true literary work really was, or was less contented to do it indifferently. To John Sterling. Chelsea: December 4, 1843. I am very miserable at present; or call it heavy-laden with fruitless toil, which will have much the same meaning. My abode is, and has been, figuratively speaking, in the centre of chaos. Onwards there is no moving in any yet discovered line, and where I am is no abiding-miserable enough. me. The fact is, without any figure, I am doomed to write some book about that unblessed Commonwealth, and as yet there will no book show itself possible. The whole stagnancy of the English genius two hundred years thick lies heavy on Dead heroes buried under two centuries of Atheism seem to whimper pitifully Deliver us! Canst thou not deliver us?' And alas! what am I, or what is my father's house? Confound it! I have lost four years of good labour in the business; and still the more I expend on it, it is like throwing good labour after bad. On the whole, you ought to pity me. Is thy servant a dead dog that these things have BEGINNINGS OF CROMWELL.' 333 fallen on him? My only consolation is that I am struggling to be the most conservative man in England, or one of the most conservative. If the past times, only two centuries back, lie wholly a torpedo darkness and dulness, freezing as with Medusa glance all souls of men that look on it, where are our foundations gone? If the past time cannot become melodious, it must be forgotten, as good as annihilated; and we rove like aimless exiles that have no ancestors, whose world began only yesterday. That must be my consolation, such as it is. I see almost nobody. I avoid sight rather, and study to consume my own smoke. I wish among your buildings 1 you would build me some small Prophet's chamber, fifteen feet square, with a separate garret, and a flue for smoking, within a furlong of your big house, sacred from all noises of dogs, cocks, pianofortes, insipid men, engaging some dumb old woman to light a fire for me daily and boil some kind of kettle. To Margaret Carlyle, Scotsbrig. Chelsea: December 31, 1843. The saddest story is that of my book, which occasions great difficulty. I not long ago fairly cast a great mass of it into the fire, not in any sudden rage at it, but after quiet deliberation, and deciding on this as the best that I could do. I am now trying the business on another side with hopes of better prosperity there. Prosper or not, I must hold on at it, on one side or the other. I must get in upon it, and drive it before me. But the truth is, it will be a long heavy piece of labour, and I must not grumble that my progress seems so small. I do make progress, as much progress as I can ; and on the whole why should I plague myself or others about the quantity of my progress? I am a poor discontented creature, and ought at least to hold my peace and be thankful I am not in purgatory.' One of his difficulties lay in his extreme conscientiousness. No sentence would be ever deliberately 1 Sterling was improving a house which he had lately bought at Ventnor. |