Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  NOTES

  1. Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. James Anthony Froude, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 2:41.

  2. Quoted by James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 2:115; also Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. James Anthony Froude (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 453.

  3. Quoted Froude, Carlyle’s Life in London, 2:116.

  4. Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, 2:27.

  5. Ibid., 97.

  6. Ibid., 357, 362–64.

  7. Ibid., 51.

  8. Ibid., 45.

  9. Ibid., 37–38.

  10. Ibid., 40.

  11. Ibid., 47.

  12. New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle, with an introduction by James Crichton-Browne, 2 vols. (New York and London: John Lane, 1903), 2:94.

  13. Ibid., 97, 103.

  14. Froude, Letters and Memorials, 2:47.

  15. Carlyle, New Letters and Memorials, 2:103.

  16. Froude, Letters and Memorials, 2:41.

  17. Carlyle, New Letters and Memorials, 2:101. She also followed the trial of Madeleine Smith, accused of poisoning her lover. (See Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses [New York: Schocken Books, 1977] and entries for 1857 and 1861 in my chronology.) These murder trials, as Mary S. Hartman suggests, seem to have provoked public discussion about family life and its difficulties.

  18. Froude, Letters and Memorials, 2:83.

  19. Ibid., 88.

  20. Quoted Froude, Carlyle’s Life in London, 2:347.

  21. Ibid., 349.

  22. Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, 474–75, 504, 493–94.

  23. Ibid., 509.

  24. Ibid., 467.

  25. Froude, Letters and Memorials, 2:388.

  26. Quoted Froude, Carlyle’s Life in London, 2:324.

  27. Ibid., 349–50.

  28. Carlyle, New Letters and Memorials, introduction by James Crichton-Browne, 1:lv.

  29. Clifford Geertz, discussing the symbolic function of Balinese cockfights, says that spectators are aware that some fights are ‘deeper’ – richer and more meaningful – than others. See ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ in Myth, Symbol and Culture, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 1–37.

  Postlude I: Carlyle and the Punch-and-Judy Show

  Charles Eliot Norton, that peripatetic American man of letters, found himself in London in the winter of 1872, at loose ends. His beloved wife, Susan, had died in Dresden the previous February, after childbirth. His house in Cambridge was still rented out. So, despite his grief and desperate sense of rootlessness, he tried to make the most of his time in Europe, visiting with great writers and thinkers, as had always been his habit.

  The two men in England Norton respected most were Carlyle and Ruskin, and on December 13 1872, he had them both to lunch. Carlyle was a distinguished seventy-seven, a renowned conversationalist, the sage of his era. The reputation which he had lost with the publication of the notorious, reactionary Latter-Day Pamphlets in 1850 had come back to him with age. That he had been fully rehabilitated was signalled by his installation as rector (an honorary post) at Edinburgh University in 1866, the year – the very week – that Jane died, at the pinnacle of her husband’s success.

  On the day of Norton’s lunch, Carlyle brought his host and fellow widower a little bread-and-butter gift, a copy of Sartor Resartus. He and Ruskin, fifty-three, were in their sweetest moods and they were perfectly at ease with each other. The talk, full of humour, devoid of arrogance, was the best that Norton, a connoisseur of talk, had ever heard. It touched on Frederick the Great, Barbarossa, Walt Whitman, the penalties of life in London, the horrors of shopping, Rousseau, magazines, old Scottish women, and Don Quixote, which Carlyle said was among the best books ever written.

  After lunch, a Punch-and-Judy was performed in the street in front of Norton’s study windows. Norton had arranged it especially for Ruskin, because he knew Ruskin enjoyed the play and also liked seeing the amusement of the audience of children. So Ruskin watched Punch beat Judy and Judy beat Punch and Punch beat Judy again and he also watched the children laughing. Carlyle withdrew to the fireside and smoked a pipe. When Punch was over, Carlyle talked kindly to the children in the street, kissing a little girl who stood by the door. ‘Poor little woman! dear little woman!’ he said. Then the men talked together some more, and at sunset Ruskin took Carlyle home in his carriage.

  Postlude II: Carlyle and the Jamaica Rebellion

  In October 1865 in Jamaica, one of the less-far-flung outposts of the Empire, trouble occurred. One hundred and fifty black men armed with sticks marched on the fort at Morant Bay in order to rescue a man imprisoned there. Scuffling led to serious fighting with policemen and before long people on both sides were getting killed. When the news reached the governor, Mr Edward John Eyre, in Spanish Town, he immediately called the riot a rebellion, declared a state of martial law and sent a detachment of troops to Morant Bay. These troops suppressed the ‘rebels’ with a vigour amounting to ferocity.

  For many days, quick trials produced verdicts of death and the sentences – execution by hanging or firing squad – were carried out immediately. Prisoners who were not killed were flogged. If the natives ran away at the soldiers’ approach, they were shot for running away. One Lieutenant Adcock returned from a foray, having burned seven houses, to find that sixty-five prisoners had been collected in his absence. ‘I disposed of as many as possible,’ he commented, ‘but was too tired to continue after dark. On the morning of the 24th I started for Morant Bay, having first flogged four and hung six rebels.’1

  Governor Eyre became convinced that George William Gordon, a black member of the Jamaica House of Assembly, was responsible for all the unrest. After running him down and allowing him the merest form of a trial, the governor had Gordon hanged. In his own eyes, he was acting quickly to suppress a dangerous insurrection. He remembered – as what Briton in the colonies did not? – the massacre of British men, women and even children at Cawnpore in 1857, and the memory encouraged and justified every ferocity. He was suppressing a mutiny not as small as Jamaica but as large as the Empire, as vicious as the dreams of revenge he imagined were harboured by subject barbarians.

  Still, some people thought he had acted too quickly and severely in ordering Gordon’s execution, that the execution, indeed, was no better than murder. Concern spread back to England, where the Jamaica incident aroused extraordinary interest among Victorian intellectuals. Jane Carlyle, at an evening gathering at the home of Lady William Russell, without her husband, engaged in conversation on the subject with one irate gentleman. According to Jane,

  Hayward was raging against the Jamaica business – would have had Eyre cut into small pieces and eaten raw. He told me women might patronise Eyre – that women were naturally cruel, and rather liked to look on while horrors were perpetrated. But no man living could stand up for Eyre now! ‘I hope Mr Carlyle does,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had an opportunity of asking him; but I should be surprised and grieved if I found him sentimentalising over a pack of black brutes!’ After staring at me a moment: ‘Mr Carlyle!’ said Hayward. ‘Oh yes! Mr Carlyle! one cannot indeed swear what he will not say! His great aim and philosophy of life being “The smallest happiness of the fewest number”!’2

  Jane Carlyle did not have to know her husband particularly well to predict what line he would take on this issue. Although he had, in his earlier days, celebrated revolutionary energies, he increasingly respected the men who could channel and contain those energies, revering the leaders, scorning the masses of people who were led, until it was difficult to tell the difference between Carlyle’s position and that of a simple worshipper of the authoritarian exercise of power. On the subject of blacks, he had expressed himself in 1849, in an essay he called ‘The Nigger Question’, to the effect that blacks were intended for work and to be mastered
. His essay had been scathingly rebuked by John Stuart Mill in an answering one: ‘The Negro Question’.

  The great adversaries who had once mistakenly thought they shared intellectual bonds now squared off. Mill, outraged by Governor Eyre’s disregard of law and human rights, organised a committee which sought to have him removed from office and prosecuted for murder, while Carlyle accepted the chair of the Eyre Defence Fund, saying that the nation owed Eyre honour and thanks for his defence of civilisation and ‘wise imitation’ should similar emergencies arise. ‘The English nation have never loved anarchy, nor was wont to spend its sympathy on miserable mad seditions, especially of this inhuman and half-brutish type, but always loved order and the prompt suppression of seditions.’ Both sides claimed to be fighting for law; but whose law? and laws protecting what – order or freedom? the strong or the weak? heroic Englishmen or their ‘half-brutish’ subjects?

  A kind of litmus paper for political assumptions, the Eyre controversy clarified orientations towards power. The great writers and thinkers of mid-Victorian England aligned themselves with or against Governor Eyre like two hockey teams ranged for the face-off. Behind Mill, opposing Eyre, were the liberals and scientific progressives, including Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and George Henry Lewes. Behind Carlyle, defending Eyre, were the romantic authoritarians, including Dickens, Ruskin, Tennyson, Tyndall and Kingsley.

  Huxley put it this way: ‘If English law will not declare that heroes have no more right to kill people in this fashion than other folk, I shall take an early opportunity of migrating to Texas or some other quiet place where there is less respect for hero-worship and more respect for justice…. The hero-worshippers who believe that the world is to be governed by its great men, who are to lead the little ones, justly if they can, but if not unjustly drive or kick them the right way, will sympathise with Mr Eyre. The other sect (to which I belong) who look upon hero-worship as no better than any other idolatry, and upon the attitude of mind of the hero-worshipper as essentially immoral … will believe that Mr Eyre has committed one of the greatest crimes.’3

  The Eyre affair resurrected some of the issues of the Emancipation controversy thirty years before as well as Mill and Carlyle’s ‘Negro Question’ fight of 1849. Carlyle had argued that the domination of one group by another, of black by white, of slave by master, was ‘natural’, whereas Mill had pointed out that the people had a way of calling ‘natural’ whatever arrangement happened to work to their advantages. And even if such domination were ‘natural’, did not human law exist to counteract the brutality of nature? Similar arguments were made about women’s rights, too, one side holding it was ‘natural’ for women to be subject to men, the other denying it. This was unsurprising, since the great democratic movements of the nineteenth century – emancipation, nationalism, universal suffrage, women’s rights, even trade unionism – were connected, among other ways, in that they all attempted to redistribute power in the face of claims that the status quo was divinely ordained. However sympathetic they were to the plight of the disadvantaged, the supporters of Eyre tended to support, as a solution to the problem, a paternalistic exercise of power rather than a redistribution of advantage.

  Eyre stood trial eventually, but the result was inconclusive. He was neither punished strongly enough to suit Mill nor vindicated strongly enough to suit Carlyle. What the Eyre affair suggests to me is a connection between the way you look at things like the exercise of authority in matters of government and the way you look at things like the exercise of authority within a family; it suggests a connection between politics and sex. Although the alignment is not absolute – Leslie Stephen, who opposed Eyre, was something of a domestic tyrant – the men who backed Eyre mostly tended to uphold strong male authority within the family and to expect submissiveness from wives. If, as with Ruskin, a strong-willed wife showed signs of what we might call self-assertion, those signs were read as rebelliousness, defiance and hostility, and they led to a state of war between them as inevitably as between a ruler and any subject who resists his rule. Dickens married a cipher, made her even more of a cipher during many years of married life, and by middle age resented her for being the nonentity he had made her, thus reproducing in his private life the imperialist Englishman’s mixture of benevolent condescension and contempt for his colonies. Mill, on the other hand, tried so hard to avoid the traditional male-dominated balance of power within marriage, that he enacted a parody of the patriarchal situation and in the name of sexual equality was, if anything, dottily deferential. Both outlooks shared the image of the family as a state, with the man as ruler, the wife as executive class, the children (if any) as the dependent masses to be cared for. They disagreed only about the degree to which the ‘governed’ should participate in power. Was this little state an absolute monarchy or a democracy?

  The underlying metaphor for marriage has changed, and much contemporary discussion is based on the image of marriage as a business partnership. In The Subjection of Women, Mill offered the example of commercial partnership to show that there need be no absolute master in voluntary associations, still less that the law need determine which of two people it should be. In Man and Superman, in one of his many puckish jibes at the bourgeois practice of marriage, George Bernard Shaw noted that while a proposal to abolish marriage would be tolerated in neither England nor America, ‘nothing is more certain than that in both countries the progressive modification of the marriage contract will be continued until it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial deed of partnership’. Marriage counselling nowadays emphasises ‘the marriage contract’, an unwritten agreement at various levels of consciousness between a man and woman about their obligations and expectations.4 The contractual model, which assumes two people of more or less equivalent status in law, seems a decided advance for women. But whether one thinks of a married couple’s relation as that of ruler and ruled or that of business partners, the issue of equality – of the ideal balance of power between two parties – is a crucial one, and not significantly easier to define in terms of the one metaphor than the other.

  Equality is to sexual politics what the classless society is to Marxist theory: the hypothesis that solves the problem. Anyone who thinks about human relationships as negotiations of power will quickly and inevitably come to consider the ideal of equality. But despite the number of people who pay lip service to this ideal, few have been able to pin down exactly what it means or to describe how this desirable state may be achieved. One of the most persistent in the attempt was D. H. Lawrence. His ideal of sexual equality involved the yoking of two strong selves and required the maintenance of self, not its surrender. But every time Lawrence tried to describe his ideal (largely through Rupert Birkin, in Women in Love), he got tongue-tied. ‘It is a difficult, complex maintenance of individual integrity throughout the incalculable processes of interhuman polarity.’ Or, ‘It is a maintenance of self in mystic balance and integrity – like a star balanced with another star.’ Lawrence’s image of the ‘star-balanced equilibrium’ for the ideal relationship between a man and a woman has struck a responsive chord in the twentieth century, but Birkin’s fiancée, Ursula Brangwen, was probably not the last woman to suspect that behind the lure of the star-balanced equilibrium lay just another sun wanting another planet to circle it. Before going into cosmic orbit, how does one find these things out?

  Another persuasive attempt to define equality – one which abjures measurement and metaphor both – is Erik Erikson’s.5 Calling the ideal ‘mutuality’, Erikson elucidates the psychological truth of the prayer of Saint Francis, ‘Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love, for it is in giving that we receive.’ Erikson warns that to approach any human encounter in a demanding spirit is to solicit disappointment. We can never be given enough. But if we ask only to give, to nurture and strengthen someone else, we will find ourselves strengthened in the process. In a marriage that works
well, one person’s needs strengthen – do not deplete – the vitality of the partner who responds to them, in the same way that a child’s demands strengthen the parent who ministers to them by reinforcing his or her sense of competence, vitality, identity. In Erikson’s view, all intimate human relationships repeat the relationship between parent and child in that help given helps the helper as much as the ostensible object of help. Both partners in a marriage are equal in that each depends on the other for the development of the strengths appropriate to his or her time of life. This is attractive, yet I can’t help but wonder if Erikson’s ideal of mutuality isn’t the old ideal of self-sacrifice presented now in the inspirational language of psychological health.

  Personally, I prefer images to definitions. The scene in Women in Love which shows Ursula replying sceptically to Birkin’s notion of the ‘star-balanced equilibrium’ (‘I don’t trust you when you drag in the stars. If you were quite true, it wouldn’t be necessary to be so far-fetched’) is, taken as a whole, a more convincing version of equality between a man and a woman than Birkin’s murky definition, taken by itself. I like the images of sexual equality offered by some American films of the thirties and forties, notably those which continue the tradition of the sparring lovers of Shakespearean and Restoration comedy.6 Some time in the future, the dynamics of equality may be understood, perfected and described. In the meantime, sparring remains one of the most convincing images we have of it. Adam’s Rib, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as attorneys for the prosecution and defence in the same court case, presents one appealing version of a marriage of equals. Pat and Mike offers another. In this one Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a superb athlete who fails consistently when her fiancé, a handsome, socially impeccable college administrator, is in the audience. The looks he throws her as she plays tennis or golf are supposed to be reassuring, but they assume her failure, seek to console her for it and so end up by guaranteeing it. This is the film’s cautionary version of sexual partnership. His strength depends on her weakness. And Pat can be obligingly weak. Tracy as Mike Conovan, Pat’s Runyonesque manager, proves to be the better husband for her, partly because he has a vested interest in her success (talk about marriage as business partnership!) and partly because he is her social inferior. The film suggests that a woman has to transgress some barrier – class in the case of Pat and Mike, but age might be another – to secure an equal partner and to redress the power advantage which belongs to the man on grounds of gender.