Murder by Candlelight (19 page)

Carlyle was guilty of an exaggeration, for if it is true that some of those who went to see Greenacre hanged were in danger of being trampled to death, none of them actually perished. But his larger point is not without merit. Carlyle likens the attention we lavish on villains such as Greenacre to the tribute we pay to genuine
heroes. Fascination with villains, Carlyle says, is hero-worship gone rancid, corrupted into demon-worship—a phenomenon with which we are sufficiently familiar in our own time. Such fictional villains as Hannibal Lecter and Dexter, with their psychopathic élan, command the heights of popular culture; actual murderers are celebrated for the devil's-party esprit of their characters. Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
is more properly the gospel of Perry Smith, a book in which the murderer attains practically to sanctification; Manson, Bundy, and Dahmer are very near to being culture heroes. They are the highwaymen of our age; but where the highwaymen of old were honored for their courage and gallantry, their counterparts today are celebrated for their cruelties, depravities, and perversities.

Carlyle thought hero-worship in its purer forms a good thing. “Veneration of great men is perennial in the nature of man,” he said in his essay on Scott. “Let hero-worship flourish, we say.” Yet when we learn who Carlyle's heroes actually were, we are puzzled. There is in them more than a whiff of Greenacreish contempt for human life. Of Carlyle's two great hero-books, one, the biography of Frederick the Great, is his homage to an architect of the Prussian militarism that culminated in Hitler; it is, indeed, the volume by which Hitler himself was comforted in his last days in the bunker.
^*
The other hero-book,
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches
, is a panegyric upon a generalissimo whose dictatorship foreshadowed those of Robespierre and Dr. Francia. Anyone who has studied these books without having become intoxicated by them will find it hard to see how Carlyle's supposedly purer forms of heroism differ from the malignant variety embodied by Greenacre, other than that they were on a vastly greater scale.

Yet the reader who lives and breathes for a certain amount of time in the Carlylean atmosphere discovers that Frederick and
Oliver are but the excuses for the books, not the books' heroes. The hero is always Carlyle himself. What distinguishes him from the countless other fanciful egotists who have become authors is not merely his superior genius, which gives interest to a subject matter which in lesser hands would be tedious, but the way in which he admitted, when the game was up, that it was all a great sham. Like Greenacre and the other Cagliostro-quacks he delighted to expose, Carlyle, too, had risen by dubious means. Through his writing he had become an Eminent Victorian, one of the literary “lions” who hovered distinguished in glittering lion-
soirées
of the age. But near the end of his life he made an astonishing recantation; his own distinction, he confessed, was hardly less fraudulent than Greenacre's.

Jane Welsh Carlyle once spoke jestingly of the resemblance between Greenacre and her husband. “I was charmed at your discovering that gallows-expression in Carlyle's picture,” she wrote to her cousin, Jeannie Welsh, who had recently seen the artist Samuel Laurence's portrait of the sage of Chelsea. “I have all along been calling it
Greenacre-Carlyle
.” The humor was dark. Carlyle was more like Greenacre than he would for a long time have cared to admit. He, too, had a Hannah Brown in his life-tragedy—Jane herself.

Carlyle did not, of course, kill Jane, certainly not in any juridical sense; and although he seems to have abused her bodily on one occasion, the real torment to which he subjected her was not physical. Still, it was severe enough that he came to believe that he had been complicit in a case of soul-murder.

Carlyle learned from the Rev. Dr. Cotton, the Newgate chaplain, that Greenacre, before he died, told him that “he never had a first love.” It is not easy, in our mocking age, to understand the charm
the idea of the “first love” had in more sentimental epochs. Eugène Scribe wrote a play called
The First Love
, Turgenev a novella. But the concept is much older than the nineteenth century, is at least as old as Plato, who in the dialogue
Lysis
spoke of the “first beloved”—the
proton philon
—who is the source and origin “of all friendship between human beings.” It is “because of our general love for this ultimate object of desire,” Plato says, that we are able to “love any individual thing.” Indeed, Kierkegaard wrote in
Either/Or
, our “first love” is the key with which we unlock the secret of our “true love.” When Greenacre told the Rev. Dr. Cotton that he never had a “first love,” he was, in the idiom of the age, admitting that he had never loved at all.

Leigh Hunt, when Carlyle told him the story, said that Greenacre “was more to be pitied than condemned” for his stunted affections. Carlyle gruffly shook his head: it was, he thought, but another reason to hang him. Their difference of opinion anticipates the modern debate between Whig liberals, who believe that in judging criminals we should take into account their sufferings and hardships—their loveless childhoods, their poverty, their addictions, their psychological infirmities—and Tory conservatives, who regard such excuse-making as the overthrow of all reasonable notions of personal responsibility. But what is most interesting about the exchange is the light it sheds on Carlyle's willingness to condemn Greenacre for a defect of sensibility under which he himself suffered. For Carlyle, too, never had a “first” or “true” love, unless it was his mother.
^†
He was, Jane Carlyle's friend Geraldine Jewsbury told Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude, “one of those persons who ought never
to have married.” What she meant, in the narrowest sense, is that he was sexually impotent. Whether Miss Jewsbury was right in her supposition is a matter of controversy; but at all events the physical defect, assuming Carlyle suffered from it, was not in itself, insofar as the power of loving was concerned, an insurmountable obstacle. An entirely sexless person, or an avowed celibate, may be, indeed often is, capable of the tenderest devotion. And sexually unexceptional people may, like Greenacre himself, be heartless and cruel. The difficulty in Carlyle's case was that impotence, or some other secret shame or debility, seems to have exacerbated a temper naturally morose.
^‡
Except in his relation to his mother, mere loving kindness was dormant in him, and where his wife was concerned, he did not try very hard to awaken it. Rather than acknowledge his weakness and appeal to Jane's compassion, he allowed the wound to fester. It poisoned his life and hers; it poisoned their marriage; by a sad irony, it poisoned the books, disfigured as they are by hate, to which he sacrificed her.
^§

The intellectual gulf between Carlyle, the world-historic genius, and Greenacre, the small-witted felon, is immeasurably great: the moral one much less so. In the end, however, Carlyle is the nobler of the two. Nobler, not on account of his immensely higher powers of intellect—intellect in itself being neither good nor bad—but in his revulsion at his own hypocrisy. During his lifetime, only a very few people knew anything of his secret faults and failures; as a Victorian public man, he was ranged among the Good and Great
and was honored as a prophet and a sage. If it had not been for his willingness to let the truth be known, the world might never have known it.

After Jane Carlyle's death in 1866, he shut himself up in their house in Cheyne Row with her diaries and papers. For the first time, Froude said, Carlyle “was compelled to look himself in the face, and to see what his faults had been.” He saw that he had made Jane “entirely miserable; that she had sacrificed her life to him; and that he had made a wretched return for her devotion.” Her small fortune had, before his attainment of fame, afforded him the shelter of Craigenputtock, where he composed
Sartor Resartus
; and later, in Cheyne Row, she had ministered to all his whims. But if on occasion he expressed gratitude for this devotion, he more often took it for granted, and even conducted, much to Jane's astonishment and mortification, a platonic flirtation with a woman of fashion, Lady Harriet Baring, afterward Lady Ashburton.

With Jane safely in the grave, Carlyle set out to make amends, assembling a memoir in which he inserted testimonies to his cruelties. Not least of these was an instance of physical abuse which Jane described in her diary: “The chief interest of today,” she wrote in the entry for June 26, 1856, “expressed in bluemarks on my wrists!”
^¶
Whether Jane was much hurt physically was not, for Victorians, and perhaps not even for us, the point; the point was that the man had dared to lay hands on her at all, however great the provocation.

In going through the papers Carlyle left him, Froude said that for the first time he “realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been—a tragedy as stern and real as the story of Œdipus.”
What redeems him is the way he repented of his faults. Through the agency of Froude, he admitted that he had watched—as though it were no concern of his—as Jane, day after day, offered up her life to his, laid it upon the altar of his genius and his egotism.

To be sure, Carlyle's confession would have been more effectual had he made it while his victim was still alive. Even so, it was a brave thing.
^#
Certainly Greenacre, who was as insensible of remorse as he was proof against pity, never attained to such humility. (How many of us do?) He insisted, to the end, that the tragedy in which he had played the leading part was not his fault; that he was a good man; and that it was all a terrible mistake.

Nearly an hour passed before Greenacre's body was cut down from the gallows and taken back into Newgate. It was buried, under cover of darkness, in Birdcage Walk. Sarah Gale was in her cell in the prison with her little boy George when her lover was dispatched; she had not been permitted to see him before his execution. In June, about the time Princess Victoria acceded to the throne of England, Sarah and her boy were removed from Newgate to await their transportation to New South Wales. There she lived for more than half a century, dying in 1888; the fate of little George has not transpired.

*
Goebbels “told Schwerin von Krosigk how he had recently been reading aloud to the Fuehrer, to solace him in his universal discomfiture. He was reading from his favourite book, Carlyle's
History of Frederick the Great
.” See Hugh Trevor-Roper,
The Last Days of Hitler
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), 97.

†
After his father's death, he expressed his love for him in a eulogy that was afterwards published in the
Reminiscences
; and he regretted that he had given the old man so little while he was alive, there having been something “earthly, harsh, sinful” in their relation. “Thou who wouldst give,” he wrote, “give quickly. In the grave thy loved one can receive no kindness.” But Carlyle could not profit from his own advice; his love-gifts were as a rule posthumous and literary.