Mill,
poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavour to hide from him how very
serious this business is for us.
Thomas Carlyle to his wife on discovering (March
6, 1835) that his friend
John Stuart Mill had been responsible for the accidental destruction of the only
manuscript of Volume I of Carlyle's The
French Revolution: A History
An elderly Thomas Carlyle in his study
March 6, 1835 | In the evening, English philosopher and former child prodigy
John Stuart Mill (1806 -
1873;
pictured below) knocked at the door of his friend, the Scottish essayist and historian
Thomas Carlyle (1795 -
1881). Mill had fostered Carlyle’s interest in the French Revolution, so Carlyle had asked his friend if he would read the manuscript of his first volume of a history that he had written on the subject.
Ashen-faced, Mill had the unpleasant duty of
telling his friend that his, Mill’s, maid had mistaken for the manuscript (the
only copy in those quill-pen days) for garbage, and had lit the fire with it.
All that remained of the historian’s hard labours were several burned pages.
Carlyle received the news stoically and with laudable magnanimity; he told his wife, Jane, afterward, "Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is for us”.
Perhaps not since 642 CE and the destruction of the
Library
of Alexandria, when Omar, Caliph of Baghdad allegedly had the entire collection of books (except for the works of Aristotle) used as fuel to heat water for the city's public baths, had fire caused such literary damage.
The setback prompted Carlyle to compare himself to a man who has "nearly killed himself accomplishing zero”.
Thirty-nine-year-old
Carlyle had laboured for five months without income to produce the volume:
“Had
Carlyle stooped to journalism and adapted himself to the every day routine of
the professional man of letters – The Times, for instance, was thrown
open to him – he might rapidly have won an assured position for himself.
Instead, he buried himself in French history, laboured unremittingly at his French
Revolution, while months passed when not a penny came into the domestic
exchequer.”
Cambridge History of English and
American Literature (1907 - 21), Vol. XIII
Carlyle’s
journal for the following day, March 7, 1835, tells the tragic story more
poignantly than I can:
"Last
night at tea, Mill’s tap was heard at the door. He entered pale, unable to
speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor whom Mill
later married; and came forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very
picture of desperation.
"After
various inarticulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my
First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading
it) was, except four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED!
“I
remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with
such toil. It is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring
that back: nay the old spirit too is fled.
“I find
it took five months of steadfast, occasionally excessive, and always sickly and
painful toil ...
“Mill
very injudiciously stayed with us till late; and I had to make an effort and
speak, as if indifferent, about other common matters: he left us however in a
relapsed state.”
John
Stuart Mill
Mill offered a sum of two hundred pounds in
compensation, which his gentlemanly friend at first declined. Carlyle changed
his mind and later told Mill that he would take the money after all. He used it
to buy paper, and by January, 1837 he had recreated his masterpiece. It was
different, but perhaps better: Wikipedia’s article on Carlyle notes:
“The resulting second version was filled with a passionate intensity, hitherto
unknown in historical writing.”
George Eliot wrote, “No novelist has made his
creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men
of the French Revolution … What depth of appreciation, what reverence for the
great and godlike under every sort of earthy mummery!”
The French
Revolution was published in three volumes (Ralph Waldo Emerson helped him
publish it in America), and received great critical acclaim. Mill, of course,
among the enthusiastic reviewers. Fortunately for Carlyle, eldest of nine
children of a poor stone mason, sales were good and he was able to continue
working at home on his writing projects.
Kindness
to Mill
As more evidence of the fine character of the Scottish
historian, the following letter which Carlyle wrote the very next day to cheer
Mill up, says it all:
7th March 1835,
Chelsea
My Dear Mill,
How are you? 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; yours
bound to be a passive one. How true is this of Richgter: "All Evil
is like a Nightmare; the instant you begin to stir under it, it is gone."
I have ordered a Biographie Universelle this
morning; - and a better sort of paper. Thus, far from giving up the game, you
see, I am risking another £10 on it. Courage, my friend!
Carlyle
He also wrote
the day after the calamity to Sir James
Frazer: “I can be angry with no one;
for they that were concerned in it have a far deeper sorrow than mine: it is
purely the hand of Providence; and, by the blessing of Providence, I must
struggle to take it as such.” He did not mention Mill’s name to Frazer.
Writer Cullen Murphy
has rightly called it “One of the grimmest
episodes in the annals of combustion”, but in time, Carlyle's History
of the French Revolution became of the classics of
the Western canon.
