to see, good to read,--indeed quite irresistible;--for though I
thought I knew it all, I began at the beginning and read to the
end of the _Apprenticeship,_ and no doubt shall despatch the
_Travels,_ on the earliest holiday. My conclusions and
inferences therefrom I will spare you now, since I appended them
to a piece I had been copying fairly for Margaret Fuller's
_Dial,_--"Thoughts on Modern Literature," and which is the
substance of a lecture in my last winter's course. But I learn
that my paper is crowded out of the first Number, and is not to
appear until October. I will not reckon the accidents that
threaten the ghost of an article through three months of pre-
existence! Meantime, I rest your glad debtor for the good book.
With it came Sterling's _Poems,_ which, in the interim, I have
acknowledged in a letter to him. Sumner has since brought me a
gay letter from yourself, concerning, in part, Landor and Heraud;
in which as I know justice is not done to the one I suppose it is
not done to the other. But Heraud I give up freely to your
tender mercies: I have no wish to save him. Landor can be shorn
of all that is false and foolish, and yet leave a great deal for
me to admire. Many years ago I have read a hundred fine
memorable things in the _Imaginary Conversations,_ though I know
well the faults of that book, and the _Pericles_ and _Aspasia_
within two years has given me delight. I was introduced to the
man Landor when I was in Florence, and he was very kind to me in
answering a multitude of questions. His speech, I remember, was
below his writing. I love the rich variety of his mind, his
proud taste, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of
his sentiment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though
with the flight, I own, rather of a rocket than an orb, and
terminated sometimes by a sudden tumble. I suspect you of very
short and dashing reading in his books; and yet I should think
you would like him,--both of you such glorious haters of cant.
Forgive me, I have put you two together twenty times in my
thought as the only writers who have the old briskness and
vivacity. But you must leave me to my bad taste and my perverse
and whimsical combinations.
I have written to Mr. Milnes who sent me by Sumner a copy of his
article with a note. I addressed my letter to him at "London,"--
no more. Will it ever reach him? I told him that if I should
print more he would find me worse than ever with my rash,
unwhipped generalization. For my journals, which I dot here at
home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities,
unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of
rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries I find in my
basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures.
I ask constantly of all men whether life may not be poetic as
well as stupid?
I shall try and persuade Mr. Calvert, who has sent to me for a
letter to you, to find room in his trunk for a poor lithograph
portrait of our Concord "Battle-field," so called, and village,
that you may see the faint effigy of the fields and houses in
which we walk and love you. The view includes my Grandfather's
house (under the trees near the Monument), in which I lived for a
time until I married and bought my present house, which is not in
the scope of this drawing. I will roll up two of them, and, as
Sterling seems to be more nomadic than you, I beg you will send
him also this particle of foreign parts.
With this, or presently after it, I shall send a copy of the
_Dial._ It is not yet much; indeed, though no copy has come to
me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have
suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the
complement of pages; but it is better than anything we had; and
I have some poetry communicated to me for the next number which I
wish Sterling and Milnes to see. In this number what say you to
the _Elegy_ written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives
near me,--Henry Thoreau? A criticism on Persius is his also.
From the papers of my brother Charles, I gave them the fragments
on Homer, Shakespeare, Burke: and my brother Edward wrote the
little _Farewell,_ when last he left his home. The Address of
the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and
whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know. I
am daily expecting an account for you from Little and Brown.
They promised it at this time. It will speedily follow this
sheet, if it do not accompany it. But I am determined, if I
can, to send one letter which is not on business. Send me
some word of the Lectures. I have yet seen only the initial
notices. Surely you will send me some time the D'Orsay portrait.
Sumner thinks Mrs. Carlyle was very well when he saw her last,
which makes me glad.--I wish you both to love me, as I am
affectionately Yours,
--R.W. Emerson
LV. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 2 July, 1840
My Dear Emerson,--Surely I am a sinful man to neglect so long
making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent
Arithmetic you sent me! It is many weeks, perhaps it is months,
since the worthy citizen--your Host as I understood you in some
of your Northern States--stept in here, one mild evening, with
his mild honest face and manners; presented me your Bookseller
Accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into
France. Much has come and gone since then; Letters of yours,
beautiful Disciples of yours:--I pray you forgive me! I have
been lecturing; I have been sick; I have been beaten about in
all ways. Nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that I got
the _Bibliopoliana_ back from Fraser; to whom, as you
recommended, I, totally inadequate like yourself to understand
such things, had straightway handed them for examination. I
always put off writing till Fraser should have spoken. I did not
urge him, or he would have spoken any day: there is my sin.
Fraser declares the Accounts to be made out in the most beautiful
manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as
he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of
money. A precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade;
mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet. So he
thinks. The only point on which I heard him make any criticism
was on what he called, if I remember, "the number of Copies
_delivered,_"--that is to say, delivered by the Printer and
Binder as actually available for sale. The edition being of a
Thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are "waste."
Our Printers, it appears, are in the habit of _adding_ one for
every fifty beforehand, whereby the _waste_ is usually made good,
and more; so that in One Thousand there will usually be some
dozen called "Author's copies" over and above. Fraser supposes
your Printers have a different custom. That is all. The rest is
apparently every-way _right;_ is to be received with faith;
with faith, charity, and even hope,--and packed into the bottom
of one's drawer, never to be looked at more except on the
outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men!
In that capacity it shall lie there.
My Lectures were in May, about _Great Men._ The misery of it was
hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful.
I had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience;
as if I had something to tell them, and would tell it them. At
times I felt as if I could, in the end, learn to speak. The
beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager
attention. I meant to tell them, among other things, that man
was still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true
men continued true to this hour,--Odin himself true, and the
Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on
Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet") astonished my worthy friends
beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not
a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his "bastard
Christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than
almost any of you!--Not so much as Oliver Cromwell ("the Hero as
King") would I allow to have been a Quack. All quacks I asserted
to be and to have been Nothing, _chaff_ that would not grow: my
poor Mahomet "was _wheat_ with barn sweepings"; Nature had
tolerantly hidden the barn sweepings; and as to the _wheat,_
behold she had said Yes to it, and it was growing!--On the whole,
I fear I did little but confuse my esteemed audience: I was
amazed, after all their reading of me, to be understood so ill;--
gratified nevertheless to see how the rudest _speech_ of a man's
heart goes into men's hearts, and is the welcomest thing there.
Withal I regretted that I had not six months of preaching,
whereby to learn to preach, and explain things fully! In the
fire of the moment I had all but decided on setting out for
America this autumn, and preaching far and wide like a very lion
there. Quit your paper formulas, my brethren,--equivalent to old
wooden idols, _un_divine as they: in the name of God, understand
that you are alive, and that God is alive! Did the Upholsterer
make this Universe? Were you created by the Tailor? I tell you,
and conjure you to believe me literally, No, a thousand times No!
Thus did I mean to preach, on "Heroes, Hero-worship, and the
Heroic"; in America too. Alas! the fire of determination died
away again: all that I did resolve upon was to write these
Lectures down, and in some way promulgate them farther. Two of
them accordingly are actually written; the Third to be begun on
Monday: it is my chief work here, ever since the end of May.
Whether I go to preach them a second time extempore in America
rests once more with the Destinies. It is a shame to talk so
much about a thing, and have it still hang _in nubibus:_ but I
was, and perhaps am, really nearer doing it than I had ever
before been. A month or two now, I suppose, will bring us back
to the old nonentity again. Is there, at bottom, in the world or
out of it, anything one would like so well, with one's whole
heart _well,_ as PEACE? Is lecturing and noise the way to get at
that? Popular lecturer! Popular writer! If they would
undertake in Chancery, or Heaven's Chancery, to make a wise man
Mahomet Second and Greater, "Mahomet of Saxondom," not reviewed
only, but worshiped for twelve centuries by all Bulldom, Yankee-
doodle-doodom, Felondom New Zealand, under the Tropics and in
part of Flanders,--would he not rather answer: Thank you; but
in a few years I shall be dead, twelve Centuries will have become
Eternity; part of Flanders Immensity: we will sit still here if
you please, and consider what quieter thing we can do! Enough
of this.
Richard Milnes had a Letter from you, one morning lately, when I
met him at old Rogers's. He is brisk as ever; his kindly
_Dilettantism_ looking sometimes as if it would grow a sort of
Earnest by and by. He has a new volume of Poems out: I advised
him to try Prose; he admitted that Poetry would not be generally
read again in these ages,--but pleaded, "It was so convenient for
veiling commonplace!" The honest little heart!--We did not know
what to make of the bright Miss --- here; she fell in love with
my wife;--the _contrary,_ I doubt, with me: my hard realism
jarred upon her beautiful rose-pink dreams. Is not all that very
morbid,--unworthy the children of Odin, not to speak of Luther,
Knox, and the other Brave? I can do nothing with vapors, but
wish them _condensed._ Kennet had a copy of the English
_Miscellanies_ for you a good many weeks ago: indeed, it was
just a day or two _before_ your advice to try Green henceforth.
Has the _Meister_ ever arrived? I received a Controversial
Volume from Mr. Ripley: pray thank him very kindly. Somebody
borrowed the Book from me; I have not yet read it. I did read a
Pamphlet which seems now to have been made part of it. Norton*
surely is a chimera; but what has the whole business they are
jarring about become? As healthy _worshiping_ Paganism is to
Seneca and Company, so is healthy worshiping Christianity to--I
had rather not work the sum!--Send me some swift news of
yourself, dear Emerson. We salute you and yours, in all
heartiness of brotherhood.
Yours ever and always--
T. Carlyle
---------
* Professor Andrews Norton. The controversy was that occasioned
by Professor Norton's Discourse on "The Latest Form of
Infidelity."
---------
LVI. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 30 August, 1840
My Dear Carlyle,--I fear, nay I know, that when I wrote last to
you, about the 1st of July, I promised to follow my sheet
immediately with a bookseller's account. The bookseller did
presently after render his account, but on its face appeared the
fact--which with many and by me unanswerable reasons they
supported--that the balance thereon credited to you was not
payable until the 1st of October. The account is footed "Net
sales of _French Revolution_ to 1 July, 1840, due October 1,
$249.77." Let us hope then that we shall get, not only a new
page of statement, but also some small payment in money a month
hence. Having no better story to tell, I told nothing.
But I will not let the second of the Cunard boats leave Boston
without a word to you. Since I wrote by Calvert came your letter
describing your lectures and their success: very welcome news,
for a good London newspaper, which I consulted, promised reports,
but gave none. I have heard so oft of your projected trip to
America, that my ear would now be dull, and my faith cold, but
that I wish it so much. My friend, your audience still waits for
you here willing and eager, and greatly larger no doubt than it
would have been when the matter was first debated.
Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism,
and the _Dial,_ poor little thing, whose first number contains
scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored
by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at
least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good
public. But they would hardly be able to fasten on so huge a man
as you are any party badge. We must all hear you for ourselves.
But beside my own hunger to see and know you, and to hear you
speak at ease and at large under my own roof, I have a growing
desire to present you to three or four friends, and them to you.
Almost all my life has been passed alone. Within three or four
years I have been drawing nearer to a few men and women whose
love gives me in these days more happiness than I can write of.
How gladly I would bring your Jovial light upon this friendly
constellation, and make you too know my distant riches! We have
our own problems to solve also, and a good deal of movement and
tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in
social modes and in letters. I sometimes fancy our cipher is
larger and easier to read than that of your English society.
You will naturally ask me if I try my hand at the history of all
this,--I who have leisure, and write. No, not in the near and
practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write
philosophy, poetry, possibility,--anything but history. And yet
this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and
plain that every feature is apprehensible, and challenges a
painter. I can brag little of my diligence or achievement this
summer. I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every
knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get
a brick kiln instead of a house.--Consider, however, that all
summer I see a good deal of company,--so near as my fields are to
the city. But next winter I think to omit lectures, and write
more faithfully. Hope for me that I shall get a book ready to
send you by New-Year's-day.
Sumner came to see me the other day. I was glad to learn all the
little that he knew of you and yours. I do not wonder you set so
lightly by my talkative countryman. He has brought nothing home
but names, dates, and prefaces. At Cambridge last week I saw
Brown for the first time. I had little opportunity to learn what
he knew. Mr. Hume has never yet shown his face here. He sent me
his Poems from New York, and then went South, and I know no more
of him.
My Mother and Wife send you kind regards and best wishes,--to you
and all your house. Tell your wife that I hate to hear that she
cannot sail the seas. Perhaps now she is stronger she will be a
better sailor. For the sake of America will she not try the trip
to Leith again? It is only twelve days from Liverpool to Boston.
Love, truth, and power abide with you always!
--R.W.E.
LVII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 26 September, 1840
My Dear Emerson,--Two Letters of yours are here, the latest of
them for above a week: I am a great sinner not to have answered
sooner. My way of life has been a thing of petty confusions,
uncertainties; I did not till a short while ago see any definite
highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me,
even for the next few months. Partly I was busy; partly too, as
my wont is, I was half asleep:--perhaps you do not know the
_combination_ of these two predicables in one and the same
unfortunate human subject! Seeing my course now for a little, I
must speak.
According to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that I
do _not_ go to America for the present. Alas, no! It was but a
dream of the fancy; projected, like the French shoemaker's fairy
shoes, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The nervous flutter of May
Lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of
all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for
me; that I ought devoutly to thank Heaven there is no absolute
compulsion laid on me at present to speak! My notion in general
was but an absurd one: I fancied I might go across the sea, open
my lips wide; go raging and lecturing over the Union like a very
lion (too like a frothy mountebank) for several months;--till I
had gained, say a thousand pounds; therewith to retire to some
small, quiet cottage by the shore of the sea, at least three
hundred miles from this, and sit silent there for ten years to
come, or forever and a day perhaps! That was my poor little day
dream;--incapable of being realized. It appears, I have to stay
here, in this brick Babylon; tugging at my chains, which will
not break for me: the less I tug, the better. Ah me! On the
whole, I have written down my last course of lectures, and shall
probably print them; and you, with the aid of proof-sheets, may
again print them; that will be the easiest way of lecturing to
America! It is truly very weak to speak about that matter so
often and long, that matter of coming to you; and never to come.
_Frey ist das Herz,_ as Goethe says, _doch ist der Fuss
gebunden._ After innumerable projects, and invitations towards
all the four winds, for this summer, I have ended about a week
ago by--simply going nowhither, not even to see my dear aged
Mother, but sitting still here under the Autumn sky such as I
have it; in these vacant streets I am lonelier than elsewhere,
have more chance for composure than elsewhere! With Sterne's
starling I repeat to myself, "I can't get out."--Well, hang it,
stay in then; and let people alone of it!
I have parted with my horse; after an experiment of seven or
eight months, most assiduously prosecuted, I came to the
conclusion that, though it did me some good, there was not
_enough_ of good to warrant such equestrianism: so I plunged
out, into green England, in the end of July, for a whole week of
riding, an _explosion_ of riding, therewith to end the business,
and send off my poor quadruped for sale. I rode over Surrey,--
with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very
singular to see: over Sussex, down to Pevensey where the Norman
Bastard landed; I saw Julius Hare (whose _Guesses at Truth_ you
perhaps know), saw Saint Dunstan's stithy and hammer, at
Mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the Devil by the
nose;--finally I got home again, a right wearied man; sent my
horse off to be sold, as I say; and finished the writing of my
Lectures on Heroes. This is all the rustication I have had, or
am like to have. I am now over head and ears in _Cromwellian_
Books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see
if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance
with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left
forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness
were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man.
Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve
months, actually, as it were, to _see_ that this Cromwell was one
of the greatest souls ever born of the English kin; a great
amorphous semi-articulate _Baresark;_ very interesting to me. I
grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here
a glimpse and there a glimpse. This is to be my reading for
some time.
The _Dial_ No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest;
it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land;
pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet--you
know me--for me it is _too_ ethereal, speculative, theoretic:
all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue,
unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all
things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to
have my sympathy. I have a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf,
sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings,
even Hebrew ones,--Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations
eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in! Nevertheless go
on with this, my Brothers. The world has many most strange
utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and
this surely is worth listening to among the rest. Do you know
