Part 78 (2/2)

Among the many friends Carlyle made was the young poet Alfred Tennyson. Returning from a walk one day he found a splendidly handsome young man sitting in the garden talking to his wife. It was the poet.

Here is how Carlyle describes his new friend: ”A fine, large- featured, dime-eyed, bronze-coloured, s.h.a.ggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy; who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great, now and then when he does emerge; a most restful, brotherly, whole-hearted man.” Or again: ”Smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe. We shall see what he will grow to.”*

*Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Life of Tennyson.

Although Carlyle was older than Tennyson by fourteen years, this was the beginning of a friends.h.i.+p which strengthened with years and lasted when they were both gray-haired men. They talked and smoked and walked about together often at night through the lamp- lit streets, sometimes in the wind, and rain, Carlyle crying out as they walked along against the dirt and squalor and noise of London, ”that healthless, profitless, mad and heavy-laden place,”

”that Devil's Oven.”

The years pa.s.sed and Carlyle added book to book. Perhaps of them all that which we should be most grateful for is his Life and Letters of Cromwell. For in this book he set Cromwell in a new light, a better light than he had ever been set before. Carlyle is a hero wors.h.i.+per, and in Cromwell as a hero he can find no fault. He had of course his faults like other men, and he had no need of such blind champions.h.i.+p. For in his letters and speeches, gathered together and given to the world by Carlyle, he speaks for himself. In them we find one to whom we may look up as a true hero, a man of strength to trust. We find, too, a man of such broad kindliness, a man of such a tender human heart that we may love him.

Another great book was Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great.

It is a marvelous piece of historical work, and as volume after volume appeared Carlyle's fame steadily rose.

”No critic,” says his first biographer, Froude, ”no critic after the completion of Frederick, challenged Carlyle's right to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past and present.”

He was a great historian, but in the history he gives us not dead facts, but living, breathing men and women. His pages are as full of color and of life as the pages of Shakespeare.

The old days of struggle and want were long over, but the Carlyles still lived the simple life in the little Chelsea house.

As another writer* has quaintly put it, ”Tom Carlyle lives in perfect dignity in a little 40 pound house in Chelsea, with a snuffy Scotch maid to open the door; and the best company in England ringing at it.”

*Thackeray.

Then in 1865 Carlyle was chosen Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and although this could add little to his fame, he was glad that his own country had recognized his greatness.

Fifty years before, he had left the University a poor and unknown lad. Now at seventy-one, a famous man, he returned to make his speech upon entering his office as Rector.

This speech was a splendid success, his reception magnificent, ”a perfect triumph,” as a friend telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle waiting anxiously for news in London. For a few days Carlyle lingered in Scotland. Then he was suddenly recalled home by the terrible news that his wife had died suddenly while out driving. It was a crus.h.i.+ng blow. Only when it was too late did Carlyle realize all that his wife had been to him. She was, as he wrote on her tombstone, ”Suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.”

The light indeed had gone out. The rest of his life was a sad twilight, filled with cruel remorse. He still wrote a little, and friends were kind, but his real work in life was done, and he felt bitterly alone.

Honors were offered him, a t.i.tle if he would, a pension. But he declined them all. For fifteen years life dragged along. Then at the age of eighty-five he died.

He might have lain in Westminster among the ill.u.s.trious dead.

But such had not been his wish, so he was buried beside his father and mother in the old churchyard at Ecclefechan.

BOOKS TO READ

Stories from Carlyle, by D. M. Ford. Readings from Carlyle, by W. Keith Leask.

Chapter Lx.x.xIII THACKERAY--THE CYNIC?

A LITTLE time after Carlyle's French Revolution was published he wrote to his brother, ”I understand there have been many reviews of a very mixed character. I got one in the Times last week.

The writer is one, Thackeray, a half-monstrous Cornish giant, kind of painter, Cambridge man, and Paris newspaper correspondent, who is now writing for his life in London. . . .

His article is rather like him, and I suppose calculated to do the book good.”

<script>