This was, of course, exceedingly uncomfortable for such strangers as were present, and it certainly gave no pleasure to their friends.  On leaving the house, some one said to Tennyson: 

“Isn’t it a pity that such a couple ever married?”

“No, no,” said Tennyson, with a sort of smile under his rough beard.  “It’s much better that two people should be made unhappy than four.”

The world has pretty nearly come around to the verdict of the poet laureate.  It is not probable that Thomas Carlyle would have made any woman happy as his wife, or that Jane Baillie Welsh would have made any man happy as her husband.

This sort of speculation would never have occurred had not Mr. Froude, in the early eighties, given his story about the Carlyles to the world.  Carlyle went to his grave, an old man, highly honored, and with no trail of gossip behind him.  His wife had died some sixteen years before, leaving a brilliant memory.  The books of Mr. Froude seemed for a moment to have desecrated the grave, and to have shed a sudden and sinister light upon those who could not make the least defense for themselves.

For a moment, Carlyle seemed to have been a monster of harshness, cruelty, and almost brutish feeling.  On the other side, his wife took on the color of an evil-speaking, evil-thinking shrew, who tormented the life of her husband, and allowed herself to be possessed by some demon of unrest and discontent, such as few women of her station are ever known to suffer from.

Nor was it merely that the two were apparently ill-mated and unhappy with each other.  There were hints and innuendos which looked toward some hidden cause for this unhappiness, and which aroused the curiosity of every one.  That they might be clearer, Froude afterward wrote a book, bringing out more plainly—­indeed, too plainly—­his explanation of the Carlyle family skeleton.  A multitude of documents then came from every quarter, and from almost every one who had known either of the Carlyles.  Perhaps the result to-day has been more injurious to Froude than to the two Carlyles.

Many persons unjustly speak of Froude as having violated the confidence of his friends in publishing the letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle.  They take no heed of the fact that in doing this he was obeying Carlyle’s express wishes, left behind in writing, and often urged on Froude while Carlyle was still alive.  Whether or not Froude ought to have accepted such a trust, one may perhaps hesitate to decide.  That he did so is probably because he felt that if he refused, Carlyle might commit the same duty to another, who would discharge it with less delicacy and less discretion.

As it is, the blame, if it rests upon any one, should rest upon Carlyle.  He collected the letters.  He wrote the lines which burn and scorch with self-reproach.  It is he who pressed upon the reluctant Froude the duty of printing and publishing a series of documents which, for the most part, should never have been published at all, and which have done equal harm to Carlyle, to his wife, and to Froude himself.