Part 3
The garden at Cheyne Row was much appreciated by the Carlyles, who turned to the best advantage this “poor sooty patch.” Mrs. Carlyle writes: “Behind we have a garden (so called in the language of flattery) in the worst of order, but boasting of two vines which produced two bunches of grapes in the season, which ‘might be eaten,’ and a walnut tree, from which I gathered almost sixpence-worth of walnuts.” Here stood the quaint china barrels she often referred to as “noblemen’s seats,” but Carlyle generally used one of the kitchen chairs by preference. He found the garden “of admirable comfort in the smoking way,” and sometimes in summer would have his writing-table placed under an awning stretched for that purpose, and with a tray full of books at his side would work there when the heat drove him from his garret study.
[Sidenote: =The Sound-proof study at Cheyne Row=
_see page 31_ ]
The construction of this sound-proof study was proposed as far back as 1843, but not until ten years later was the enterprise put into practical execution. On August 11th, 1853, Carlyle wrote to his sister: “At length, after deep deliberation, I have fairly decided to have a top story put upon the house, one big apartment, twenty feet square, with thin _double_ walls, light from the top, etc., and artfully ventilated, into which no sound _can_ come; and all the cocks in nature may crow round it without my hearing a whisper of them!”
[Sidenote: =The garret study in 1857=
_see page 29_ ]
The scheme looked promising on paper, but the result was “irremediably somewhat of a failure.” Although the noises in the immediate neighbourhood were excluded, sounds in the distance, “evils that he knew not of” in the lower rooms, became painfully audible; nevertheless he occupied the room as his study until 1865, and here, “whirled aloft by angry elements,” he completed what Dr. Garnett named well “His Thirteen Years’ War with Frederick.” His writing-table and arm-chair stood near the centre, and within easy reach was the little mahogany table for the books he happened to be using—or such of them as were not on the floor.
[Sidenote: =Carlyle’s writing-table and chair=
_see page 33_ ]
Carlyle bequeathed his writing-table to Sir James Stephen. “I know,” he wrote in his will, “he will accept it as a distinguished mark of my esteem. He knows that it belonged to my father-in-law and his daughter, and that I have written all my books upon it, except only _Schiller_, and that for fifty years and upwards that are now passed I have considered it among the most precious of my possessions.”
[Sidenote: =The ground floor rooms at 5, Cheyne Row=
_see page 28_ ]
It was into the ground-floor room—at that time spoken of as the “parlour”—that Edward Irving was ushered when he paid his one visit to Cheyne Row, in autumn 1834. “I recollect,” writes Carlyle in the _Reminiscences_, “how he complimented her (as well he might) on the pretty little room she had made for her husband and self; and, running his eye over her dainty bits of arrangement, ornamentations (all so frugal, simple, full of grace, propriety, and ingenuity as they ever were), said, smiling: ‘You are like an Eve, and make a little Paradise wherever you are.’”
[Sidenote: =The kitchen at 5, Cheyne Row=
_see page 32_ ]
No description of Carlyle’s Chelsea home would be complete without mention of the kitchen where Mrs. Carlyle made marmalade “pure as liquid amber, in taste and look almost poetically delicate”; and where, too, she stirred Leigh Hunt’s endlessly admirable morsel of Scotch porridge. Readers of the _Letters and Memorials_ will obtain many glimpses of this apartment and its occupants. The fittings were very old-fashioned, especially the open kitchen-range with its “kettle-crane” and “movable niggards.” The dresser which stood there in 1834 remains against the south wall; the table still stands in the centre, and there is a sink in the corner beside the disconnected pump.
When Carlyle was resting at Dumfries, after the exhaustion of his triumphant Inaugural Address upon his installation as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, he received the announcement of his wife’s sudden death whilst driving in her carriage in Hyde Park on April 21st, 1866. The effect of the calamity upon him was terrible. “There is no spirit in me to write,” he said, “though I try it sometimes.”
[Sidenote: =Mrs. Carlyle’s grave=
_see page 26_ ]
Mrs. Carlyle was buried in Haddington Church. “I laid her in the grave of her father,” writes Carlyle in the _Reminiscences_, “according to covenant of forty years back, and all was ended. In the nave of old Abbey Kirk, long a ruin, now being saved from further decay, with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine on me more.”
[Sidenote: =Carlyle’s grave=
_see page 26_ ]
The inscription on Carlyle’s tombstone is very simple: the family crest (two wyverns), the family motto (_Humilitate_), and then these few words:—
“Here rests Thomas Carlyle, who was born at Ecclefechan, 4th December, 1795, and died at 24, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, on Saturday, 5th February, 1881.
“No monument,” writes Froude, “is needed for one who has made an eternal memorial for himself in the hearts of all to whom truth is the dearest of possessions.”
[Sidenote: =THOMAS CARLYLE=]
NOTE ON SOME PORTRAITS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
[Sidenote: =From a portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A.=
_see page 5_ ]
This portrait is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. “Carlyle,” writes David Hannay in the _Magazine of Art_, “already the author of _Sartor Resartus_, stands leaning against the traditional pillar with the conventional air of colourless good breeding. There is neither line in his face nor light in his eye.”
[Sidenote: =From a sketch by Count D’Orsay (1839)=
_see page 7_ ]
“He (D’Orsay) has contrived,” says the same writer, “to make Carlyle look like the hero of a lady’s novel—an excellent young man with a curl in his upper lip and a well-combed head of hair.”
[Sidenote: =From Sir J. E. Boehm’s gold medallion=
_see page 15_ ]
The medallion has been reproduced from a wood engraving by Pearson. It was presented to Carlyle in 1875, on his eightieth birthday, by friends and admirers in Edinburgh.
[Sidenote: =From a drawing by E. J. Sullivan=
_see page 24_ ]
“Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, of Weissnichtwo, is nothing if he is not Carlyle in disguise, the projection of the Scotchman’s individuality upon a half-humorous, half-philosophical German background.”—Ernest Rhys: Introductory Note to _Sartor Resartus_.
[Sidenote: =From the painting by J. McNeill Whistler=
_see page 13_ ]
“Mr. Whistler, in the Glasgow Corporation Art Galleries, has distinctly succeeded in making the face of Carlyle interesting. He has avoided anything like exaggeration. He has not tried to make capital out of the rugged mass of the hair, or to give a wild-man-of-the-woods look to the face by laying stress on its deep lines and stern contours. The head is noble, quiet, and sad. The artist has tried to paint a serious portrait rather than to give a ‘view,’ and he has succeeded.”—David Hannay in the _Magazine of Art_.
[Sidenote: =From the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A.=, _act._ =73=
_see page 30_ ]
This portrait, executed for John Forster, who was very pleased with it, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Carlyle himself describes it as “a delirious-looking mountebank, full of violence, awkwardness, atrocity, and stupidity, without recognisable likeness to anything I have ever known in any feature of me. _Fait in fatis._ What care I, after all? Forster is much content.”
[Sidenote: =From the portrait painted by Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A.=
_see page 29_ ]
The picture by Millais, also in the National Portrait Gallery, was painted in 1877 for Mr. J. A. Froude. His opinion of it was as follows:—“And yet under Millais’s hands the old Carlyle stood again upon the canvas as I had not seen him for thirty years. The inner secret of the features had been evidently caught. There was a likeness which no sculptor, no photographer, had yet equalled or approached. Afterwards, I knew not how, it seemed to fade away. Millais grew dissatisfied with his work, and, I believe, never completed it.”
[Sidenote: =From a statue by Sir J. E. Boehm, R.A.=
_see page 35_ ]
In the gardens on the Chelsea Embankment stands a statue of Thomas Carlyle in bronze by the late Sir Edgar Boehm, which was placed there by subscription in 1882. Mr. Froude considered it “as satisfactory a likeness in face and figure as could be rendered in sculpture; and the warm regard which had grown up between the artist and Carlyle had enabled Boehm to catch with more than common success the shifting changes of his expression.”
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