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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On the evening of March 6, 1835, Thomas Carlyle was resting in the parlor, which often served as his study, at 5 Cheyne Row in London. For the previous five months, he had been working ferociously on the manuscript of the "History of the French Revolution," the book that he hoped would finally make his literary reputation. He had a grand vision for his history--he meant it to explain what had brought France to revolution and thence to Napoleon, and also to suggest how England might avoid the revolutionary violence then sweeping Europe. Carlyle wrote with difficulty, by working himself into an ecstatic state, and it had been a huge relief, some weeks before, to finish the first great volume: the corruption of the aristocracy, the death of Louis XV, the building of revolutionary fervor, the storming of the Bastille, and the insurrection of women. He had reason to feel weary and proud these winter nights when his wife, Jane, set his favorite Scotch porridge down in front of him and took up her sewing.
That evening, there was an unexpected knock at the door. It was John Stuart Mill, one of Carlyle's closest friends. Mill, who originally intended to write a history of the French Revolution himself, had been generous with materials and advice. Carlyle had entrusted Mill with his manuscript and was awaiting his response. Now Mill staggered into the parlor looking, Carlyle wrote later in his memoirs, "pale as Hector's ghost," and asked that Jane Carlyle go down to the carriage, where his companion, Harriet Taylor (who was married to a merchant named John Taylor), was waiting. Mrs. Carlyle assumed that their friend was about to run off with someone else's wife. She rushed downstairs, but could get nothing from Harriet Taylor, who said only, over and over, that Carlyle would never forgive Mill. Running back up the stairs, Mrs. Carlyle entered the parlor, where her husband now sat with a ghastly look on his face. Carlyle's manuscript had been mistaken for wastepaper, and it had been, with the exception of four charred pages, entirely burned.
Mill was beside himself with grief and self-recrimination and stayed very late, obliging the Carlyles to comfort him. At last he left, and Jane Carlyle threw her arms around her husband's neck. "My little Dame stood faithfully by me," he wrote to his mother, "and was very good and brave."
The next day, Carlyle and Mill wrote letters that crossed with each other. Mill, with all his innate decency, begged that he might be allowed at least to recompense Carlyle for his labor and time; he eventually got his friend to accept a hundred pounds, a year's living for the frugal Carlyles. Carlyle, in a letter remarkable for its kindness, wrote, "You left me last night with a look which I shall not soon forget. Is there anything that I could do or suffer or say to alleviate you? For I feel that your sorrow must be far sharper than mine. . . . Courage, my Friend!" It was true, he continued, that he could never write that book again:
Singular enough, the whole Earth could not get it back; but only a better or a worse one. There is the strangest dimness over it. A figure thrown into the melting-pot; but the metal (all that was golden or goldlike of that,--and copper can be gathered) is there; the model also is, in my head. O my Friend, how easily might the bursting of some puny ligament or filament have abolished all light there too! . . . That I can write a Book on the French Revolution is (God be thanked for it) as clear to me as ever; also that, if life be given me so long, I will.
There were many people whom Thomas Carlyle did not like--he called them "Quacks" and "Blockheads"--but he liked John Stuart Mill very much, and he behaved in this instance as few people might hope to.
As the years went on, though, the friendship withered; the destruction of the manuscript had more implications than Carlyle realized. Even at the beginning, Carlyle must have had, as we do, certain questions. Mill's house was full of valuable manuscripts; why would a maid just seize the first pages she saw and use them for kindling? Mill seems to have put them in a pile intended for waste; was there anything behind his carelessness? Was he jealous of Carlyle's accomplishment,...
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