Neurotic Victorians

NECESSARY EVIL: THE LIFE OF JANE WELSH CARLYLE (618 pp.)--Lawrence & Ellsabefh Hanson--Macmillan ($7.50).

Thomas Carlyle was often a boor, but never a bore. When he came courting Jane Welsh, he "made puddings in his teacup" and "scratched the fender dreadfully," causing her to say that he should be confined in "carpet-shoes and handcuffs" with only his "tongue . . . left at liberty."

"Dare you wed a wild man of the woods." he crooned, "and come and live with him in his cavern . . .?" Jane had often answered "Never, never!" to such proposals. But at last she weakened and agreed, suggesting they live with her mother. To this, he growled: "The man should bear rule in the house and not the woman. This is an eternal axiom . . . It is the nature of a woman . . . to cling to the man for support and direction."

So Jane left mother, married Writer Carlyle (on Oct. 17, 1826), and thereby set in motion a relationship that has since fascinated the literary world. Hardly a decade has passed without fresh information (mostly in the form of letters), with the result that the Carlyles have begun to look like a pair of corpses which are constantly being re-exhumed to see which one had the arsenic. The virtue of this new disinterment by Lawrence & Elisabeth Hanson (who did a similar post-mortem on The Four Brontes) is that it is thorough; no one will have much excuse for doing it again.

Ecstatic Dyspepsia. Why should the modern reader, who seldom reads the works of Thomas Carlyle, hear so much talk about his marriage? The answer lies in the character of Jane Carlyle. Unlike the wives of many geniuses, Jane was neither a gay deceiver nor a suet pudding; she was a formidable intellectual, born to shine in literary and philosophical discussion. Every great man in London, from Charles Dickens to Alfred Tennyson, sat around the teacups with her; a favored few listened sympathetically to her tales of woe and discontent.

Husband Carlyle was made of quite different stuff. His description of his native capital, Edinburgh, more or less expressed his views on life and people generally: "Putrid, scandalous, decadent, hypocritical." While his wife lay stunned by headaches, he groaned and paced the floor in an ecstasy of dyspepsia. "None can say how bilious I am and am like to be," he chanted triumphantly. When somebody suggested that "the first essential was the happiness of the people," Carlyle went half mad with rage and was found bellowing: "Happiness! Happiness! the fools ought to be chained up!"

What held these two utterly different, passionately neurotic human beings together? The Authors Hanson, themselves a husband & wife team, approach the racked double bed of the Carlyle marriage with the serenity of Harley Street specialists, noting every hypochondriacal toss, turn and outburst with cool professional attention. They point out the more admirable aspects of the case--Jane's struggle to put up with her husband's cantankerous restlessness, her bottomless faith in his genius; Thomas' "absolutely unseducible" loyalty to his wife, his habit of rising to grave occasions with awe-inspiring kindliness.

Sex to the Appendix. The Hansons' final diagnosis is that though Thomas and Jane often drove each other half crazy, they were a lot more than half devoted to one another.

This verdict alone amounts to something like a counterrevolution in the biographical study of eminent Victorians. But the Hansons keep their most devastating shell for the end of their book: they relegate the question of the Carlyles' sex relations (a key point of dispute in most of the biographies) to a couple of pages in the appendix. Thomas, they remark, may have been impotent; Jane, on the other hand, may have been "incapable of giving him sexual satisfaction." But whatever the truth may be, "this state of affairs," say the Hansons equably, "is by no means uncommon, and by no means leads necessarily to disaster. Where, as with the Carlyles, there is much mutual affection and a good deal in common, the marriage must be reckoned satisfactory, and the importance of the sexual disparity should not be overrated."

If this is the start of a new trend in biography, good King Oedipus is going to have to find himself another complex.

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