"weltering" man! Many of his sketches are mere Gillray caricatures
of people, seen through bile unutterable, exasperated by nervous
irritability. And Mrs. Carlyle had a mordant wit enough. But still
both of them had au fond a deep need of love, and a power of
lavishing love. It comes out in the old man's whimsical notes and
prefaces; and indeed it is true to say that if a person once
actually penetrated into Carlyle's inner circle, he found himself
loved hungrily and devotedly, and never forgotten or cast out. And
as to Mrs. Carlyle, I suppose it was impossible to be near her and
not to love her! This comes out in glimpses in her sad pathological
letters. There is a scene she describes, how she returned home
after some long and serious bout of illness, when her cook and
housemaid rushed into the street, kissed her, and. wept on her
neck; while two of her men friends, Mr. Cooke and Lord Houghton,
who called in the course of the evening, to her surprise and
obvious pleasure, did the very same. The result on myself, after
reading the books, is to feel myself one of the circle, to want to
do something for them, to wring the necks of the cocks who
disturbed Carlyle's sleep; and sometimes, alas, to rap the old
man's fingers for his blind inconsiderateness and selfishness. I
came the other day upon a passage in a former book of my own, where
I said something sneering and derisive about the pair, and I felt
deep shame and contrition for having written it--and, more than
that, I felt a sort of disgust for the fact that I have spent so
much time in writing fiction. Books like the Life of Carlyle and
Mrs. Carlyle's Letters take the wind out of one's imaginative
faculties altogether, because one is confronted with the real stuff
of life in them. Life, that hard, stubborn, inconclusive,
inconsistent, terrible thing! It is, of course, that very hardness
and inconclusiveness that makes one turn to fiction. In fiction,