With equal penetration and greater scorn,
she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was
granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit
of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his
bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane."
Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of
endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither
had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic
troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of
clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical
delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished
friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She
performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical
genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them,
ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable
practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John
Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values
peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839,
"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being,
physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of
indifference to his growling.
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