--Faith cold concerning Carlyle's coming to America.--
Transcendentalism and _The Dial._--Social problems.--Character of
his writing.--Charles Sumner.
LVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 26 September, 1840. Not to go to
America for the present.--_Heroes and Hero-Worship._--Journey on
horseback.--Reading on Cromwell.--_Dial_ No. 1.--Puseyism.--Dr.
Sewell on Carlyle.--Landor.--Sterling.
LVIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1840. Booksellers'
accounts.--Projects of social reform.--Studies unproductive.
--Hopes to print a book of essays.
LIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 December, 1840. Booksellers'
carelessness and accounts.--Puseyism.--Dial No. 2.--Goethe.
--Miss Martineau's _Hour and Man._--Working in Cromwellism.
LX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 21 February, 1841. To Mrs. Emerson.--
London transmuted by her alchemy.--Hope of seeing Concord.
--Miss Martineau.--Toussaint l'Ouverture.--Sheets of _Heroes
and Hero-worship_ sent to Emerson.
LXI. Emerson. Concord, 28 February, 1841. Accounts.--Essays
soon to appear.--Lecture on Reform.
LXII. Emerson. Boston, 30 April, 1841. Remittance of L100.--
Accounts.--Piratical reprint of _Heroes and Hero-worship._--
_Dial_ No. 4.
LXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 May, 1841. Visit to Milnes.--To his
Mother.--Emerson's _Essays._--His own condition.
LXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 21 May, 1841. Acknowledgment of
remittance of L100.--Unauthorized American reprint of _Heroes and
Hero-worship._--Improvement in circumstances.--Desire for
solitude.--Article on Emerson in _Fraser's Magazine._
LXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 May, 1841. Accounts.--Book by Jones
Very.--_Heroes and Hero-worship._--Thoreau.
LXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 25 June, 1841. Proposed stay at Annan.
--Motives for it.--London reprint of Emerson's Essays.--Rio.
LXVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1841. London reprint of
_Essays._--Carlyle in his own land.--Writing an oration.
LXVIII. Carlyle. Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841.
Speedy receipt of letter.--Stay in Scotland.--Seclusion and
sadness.--Reprint of Emerson's _Essays._--Shipwreck.
LXIX. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1841. Pleasure in English
reprint of _Essays._--Lectures on the Times.--Opportunities of
the Lecture-room.--Accounts.
LXX. Emerson. Concord, 14 November, 1841. Remittance of L40.--
His banker.--Gambardella.--Preparation for lectures on the Times.
LXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 November, 1841. Gambardella.--
Lawrence's portrait.--Emerson's Essays in England.--Address at
Waterville College.--_The Dial._--Emerson's criticism on Landor.
LXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 December, 1841. Acknowledgment of
remittance of L40.--American funds.--Landor.--Emerson's Lectures.
LXXIII. Emerson. New York, 28 February, 1842. Remittance of
L48.--American investments.--Death of his son.--Alcott going
to England.
LXXIV. Carlyle. Templand, 28 March, 1842. Sympathy, with
Emerson.--Death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother.--At Templand to settle
affairs.--Life there.--A book on Cromwell begun.
LXXV. Emerson. Concord, 31 March, 1842. Bereavement.--Alcott
going to England.--Editorship of _Dial._--Mr. Henry Lee.--
Lectures in New York.
---------------------
CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON
At the beginning of his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson, writing of
his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says
that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of
whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe. Carlyle's name
was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson's mental
attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius,
and felt sympathy with it.
The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in
English thought and imagination. All the great literary
reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron,
Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say.
The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found
expression. But toward the end of this time a series of
articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh
and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another
on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled "Characteristics,"
displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy
with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its
time, and capable of giving them expression. Here was a writer
whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words
stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet
Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his
contemporaries.
He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope,"
at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his
Journal as follows: "I am left here the solitariest, stranded,
most helpless creature that I have been for many years.....
Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is
quite other than an article... In _all_ times there is a word
which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would
thrill their inmost soul. But the way to find that word? The
way to speak it when found?" The next entry in his Journal shows
that Carlyle had found the word. It is the name "Ralph Waldo
Emerson," the record of Emerson's unexpected visit. "I shall
never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards,
"who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds
as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us,
and left me weeping that it was only one day."
At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less
solitary than Carlyle; he was still less known; his name had
been unheard by his host in the desert. But his voice was soon
to become also the voice of a leader. With temperaments sharply
contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances
radically different, with views of life and of the universe
widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in
sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same
foundation of principle. In their independence and their
sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in
spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. Their modes of
thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent,
and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference,
they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata,
miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one"
Two days after Emerson's visit Carlyle wrote to his mother:--
"Three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner,
procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here,
entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music
now, which does me no little good. Secondly, Major Irving, of
Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at
Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered
us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even
tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again.
Money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering
us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner
applicant, 'I cannot, sir; it is let.' Our third happiness was
the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson,
from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from
his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had
an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other
than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most
lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed
till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's
content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says
it is the first journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to
Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a
cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful."
On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the
following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland.
"I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became
acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of
hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us
most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely;
that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the
meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle
does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to
be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world.
I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage
in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature
(say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called
'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent
to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. My own
feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess
from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives
and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own
place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent
men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the
popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon,
--are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates,
the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and
Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has
given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has
not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even
his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will
cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks
finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much
at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I
could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife,
and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for
a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed
down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of
city society." *
-------------
* _Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England_
By Alexander Ireland. London, 1882, p. 58.
------------
Twenty-three years later, in his "English Traits," Emerson once
more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of
Carlyle.
"From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came
from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter
which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It
was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles
distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private
carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery
hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart.
Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to
hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world,
unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own
terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary
powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern
accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a
streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. His
talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the
companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs,
and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a
pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not
a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of
Dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics.
"He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his
discourse. Blackwood's was the 'sand magazine'; Fraser's nearer
approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine'; a piece
of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave
of the last sixpence.' When too much praise of any genius
annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by
his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the
poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great
strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and
had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death,
_Qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history. He worships a
man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had
inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle
was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American
principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in
it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart's
book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he
had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own
house dining on roast turkey.
"We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged
Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a
hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to
the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy
was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's
America, an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten
years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who
told him he would find in that language what he wanted.
"He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this
moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the
great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper
is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on
the eve of bankruptcy.
"He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the
selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons
should perform. 'Government should direct poor men what to do.
Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes
it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies
his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres
which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor
Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so
found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.'
"We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then
without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we
sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not
Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the
natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself
against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step
can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the
subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event
affects all the future. 'Christ died on the tree that built
Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time
has only a relative existence.'
"He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's
appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said,
wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge
machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's boy brings
muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all
the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it
turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially
one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom
London had well served."
Such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between
Carlyle and Emerson. What place this friendship held in the
lives of both, the following Correspondence shows.
---------
I. Emerson to Carlyle
Boston, Massachusetts, 14 May, 1884
My Dear Sir,--There are some purposes we delay long to execute
simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such
an one has been for many weeks, I may say months, my design of
writing you an epistle.
Some chance wind of Fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years
ago, as the author of papers which I had already distinguished
(as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of English
periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound
essays of the day,--the works of a man of Faith as well as
Intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the
despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to
hope and to speak sincerely. Like somebody in _Wilhelm Meister_,
I said: This person has come under obligations to me and to all
whom he has enlightened. He knows not how deeply I should grieve
at his fall, if, in that exposed England where genius always
hears the Devil's whisper, "All these kingdoms will I give thee,"
his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age.
When therefore I found myself in Europe, I went to your house
only to say, "Faint not,--the word you utter is heard, though in
the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails."
Drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers I went to see his
person, and as he might say his environment at Craigenputtock.
Yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much
hope of gratifying him,--in the spirit of "If I love you, what is
that to you?" Well, it happened to me that I was delighted with
my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon
the sea in my homeward voyage I remembered with joy the favored
condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his
fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of
happiness;--not that I had the remotest hope that he should so
far depart from his theories as to expect happiness. On my
arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I had
seen and heard, and they with joy received it.
In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I
have now received four numbers of the _Sartor Resartus,_ for
whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar
is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever
were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by
himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be
offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund.
And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms,
our politics, and schools, and religion. I say _our,_ for it
cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written
for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the
brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings.
But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle
chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the
form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not
appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever
wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if
society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it
beforehand with an objection to the form. Can it be that this
humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience,
and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll
sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon
one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore
Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then admit, as you
will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that
all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that
(at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide
your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond
graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one
revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your
epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved
glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of
variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us
the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should
lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths.
Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they
can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is
rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to
consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I
look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy
of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as
resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words
will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find
suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath
the plague in his house"? Yet all men are _potentially_ (as
Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not
in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;*
and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of
diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.
------------
