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. 
258 
