GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



situation, and he would stop short in the midst of a torrent of 

 denunciation, and burst out laughing at the absurdity of his own 

 invective. The philosopher who can laugh, particularly at his 

 own expense, is a very human one, and Carlyle himself had once 

 said that " when he called out ' murder,' he was not always killed." 



Mrs. Carlyle herself, if less violently demonstrative, yet both 

 wrote and spoke, as one may say, in italics. Froude, who liked 

 her well, said she was " intense in all things ; " therefore, we may 

 take as the passing jest of a wife proud of her husband, though it 

 was quoted by Froude as tragically significant, her remark to a 

 friend : " My dear, never marry a genius ! " She loved her 

 " genius " truly, and in spite of friction, was his real helpmeet, 

 shielding him to the end of her days from a thousand hindrances 

 to his work and quiet, such as ordinary mortals humbly doing 

 their own bit of unimportant creative work in circumstances 

 equally unfavourable, have to put up with. 



Writing in 1837, she tells him that she " cried over his letter 

 three or four hours. ... I wanted to kiss you into something 

 like cheerfulness," she said, " and the length of the kingdom is 

 between us ; and if it had not been, the probabilities are that, 

 with the best intentions, I should have quarrelled with you rather." 

 But, as Crichton-Browne points out, " it is those who love intensely 

 who are intolerant, and brisk affections are scarcely less apt to 

 clash than quick tempers." 



Carlyle's work was to him as a religion, and as he could not 

 write when anyone was in the room, sometimes he and his wife 

 only met at meals ; and so he temporarily forgot even the woman 

 whom he had set up, as it were, on a pedestal to be worshipped, 

 but worshipped undemonstratively, when she would have much 

 preferred a caress. At other times he was tender, thoughtful, and 

 anxious. He had numerous " sport " names for her " Jeannie," 

 " Jeanikins," his "necessary evil," and others, but "Goody" 

 was the favourite one ; once he speaks of himself as " Good " 

 (" Good," he prettily explains in a footnote, being masculine for 

 '* Goody "). When " Jeannie >: was absent, he seems to have 

 written to her almost daily, long, brilliant letters, very wonderful 

 coming from one whose business was literature, and who must often 

 have been physically weary of the pen; and he was restless and 

 anxious, unless she wrote constantly, and fully, in return. 



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