The Wit & Wisdom

of

THOMAS CARLYLE

In 1828 the Carlyles moved to Craigenputtock, a farmhouse which even today would be described as extremely isolated. And it was now that the "bread" problem had to be encountered. In a letter to a Miss Jewsbury dated January 11, 1857 Jane Carlyle wrote:-

So many talents are wasted, so many enthusiasms turned to smoke, so many lives spilt for want of a little patience and endurance, for want of understanding and laying to heart what you have so well expressed in your verses - the meaning of the Present - for want of recognising that it is not the greatness or littleness of "the duty nearest hand", but the spirit in which one does it, that makes one's doing noble or mean. I can't think how peopl who have any natural ambition and any sense of power in them escape going mad in a world like this without the recognition of that. I know I was very near mad when I found it out for myself (as one has to find out for oneself everything that is to be of any real practical use to one).

Shal I tell you how it came into my head? Perhaps it may be of comfort to you in similar moments of fatigue and disgust. I had gone with my husband to live on a little estate of peat bog that had descended to me all the way down from John Welsh the Convenanter who married a daughter of John Knox. That didn't, I am ashamed to say, make me feel Craigenputtock a whit less of a peat bog, and a most dreary place to live at. In fact, it was sixteen miles distant on every side from all the conveniences of life, shops, and even a post office. Further, we were very poor, and further and worst, being an only child, and brought up to "great prospects", I was sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar, and very fair mathematician!! It behoved me in these astonishing circumstances to learn to sew! Husbands, I was shocked to find, wore their stockings into holes, and were always losing buttons, and I was expected to "look to all that"; also it behoved me to learn to cook! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my difficulties dreadfully. The bread above all, brought from Dumfries "soured on his stomach" (oh Heaven!), and it was plainly my duty as a Christian wife to bake at home. So I sent for Cobbett's Cottage Economy, and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But, knowing nothing about the process of fermentation or the heat of ovens, it came to pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that I myself ought to have been put into bed; and I remained the only person not asleep in a house in the middle of a house. One o'clock struck. and then two, and then three; and still I was sitting there in an immense solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a sense of forlorness and degredation. That I, who had never been required to do anything but cultivate my mind, should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching a loaf of bread - which mightn't turn out bread after all! Such thoughts maddened me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud. It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all night watching his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and suddenly I asked myself: "After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers, what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf of bread, so that each be the thing one's hand has found to do?" The man's detirmined will, his energy, his patience, his resource, were the really admirable things, of which his statue of Pereus was the mere chance expression. If he had been a woman living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same qualities would have come out more fitly in a good loaf of bread.

I cannot express what consolation this germ of an idea spread over my uncongenial life during the years we lived at that savage place, where my two immediate predecessors had gone mad, and the third had taken to drink.