—R.W. Emerson
What manner of person is Heraud? Do you read Landor, or know him, O seeing man? Farewell!
XLIX. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 6 January, 1840
My Dear Emerson,—It is you, I surely think, that are in my debt now;* nevertheless I must fling you another word: may it cross one from you coming hither—as near the Lizard Point as it likes!
————- * The preceding letter had not yet arrived. ————-
Some four sheets making a Pamphlet called Chartism addressed to you at Concord are, I suppose, snorting along through the waters this morning, part of the Cargo of the "British Queen." At least I gave them to Mr. Brown (your unseen friend) about ten days ago, who promised to dispose of them; the "British Queen," he said, was the earliest chance. The Pamphlet itself (or rather booklet, for Fraser has gilt it, &c., and asks five shillings for it as a Book) is out since then; radicals and others yelping considerably in a discordant manner about it; I have nothing other to say to you about it than what I said last time, that the sheets were yours to do with as you saw good,—to burn if you reckoned that fittest. It is not entirely a Political Pamphlet; nay, there are one or two things in it which my American Friends specially may like: but the interests discussed are altogether English, and cannot be considered as likely to concern New-Englishmen very much. However, it will probably be itself in your hand before this sheet, and you will have determined what is fit.
A copy of Wilhelm Meister, two copies, one for Stearns Wheeler, are probably in some of the "Line Ships" at this time too: good voyage to them! The French Revolutions were all shipped, invoiced, &c.; they have, I will suppose, arrived safe, as we shall hear by and by. What freightages, landings, and embarkments! For only two days ago I sent you off, through Kennet, another Book: John Sterling's Poems, which he has collected into a volume. Poor John has overworked himself again, or the climate without fault on his side has proved too hard for him: he sails for Madeira again next week! His Doctors tell me there is no intrinsic danger; but they judge the measure safe as one of precaution. It is very mortifying he had nestled himself down at Clifton, thinking he might now hope to continue there; and lo! he has to fly again.—Did you get his letter? The address to him now will be, for three months to come, "Edward Sterling, Esq., South Place, Knightsbridge, London," his Father's designation.
Farther I must not omit to say that Richard Monckton Milnes purposes, through the strength of Heaven, to review you! In the next Number of the London and Westminster, the courageous youth will do this feat, if they let him. Nay, he has already done it, the Paper being actually written he employed me last week in negotiating with the Editors about it; and their answer was, "Send us the Paper, it promises very well." We shall see whether it comes out or not; keeping silence till then. Milnes is a Tory Member of Parliament; think of that! For the rest, he describes his religion in these terms: "I profess to be a Crypto-Catholic." Conceive the man! A most bland-smiling, semi- quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianized little man, who has long olive-blond hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society! Let us hear now what he will say, of the American Vates.*
————- * The end of this letter has been cut off. ————-
L. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 17 January, 1840
Dear Emerson,—Your Letter of the 12th of December, greatly, to my satisfaction, has arrived; the struggling Steamship, in spite of all hurricanes, has brought it safe across the waters to me. I find it good to write you a word in return straightway; though I think there are already two, or perhaps even three, messages of mine to you flying about unacknowledged somewhere under the moon; nay, the last of them perhaps may go by the same packet as this, —having been forwarded, as this will be, to Liverpool, after the "British Queen" sailed from London.
Your account of the French Revolution packages, and prognosis of what Little and Brown will do with them, is altogether as it should be. I apprised Fraser instantly of his invoiceless Books, &c.; he answers, that order has been taken in that long since, "instructions" sent, and, I conclude, arrangements for bills least of all forgotten. I mentioned what share of the duty was his; and that your men meant to draw on him for it. That is all right. As to the French Revolution, I agree with your Booksellers altogether about it; the American Edition actually pleases myself better for looking at; nor do I know that this new English one has much superiority for use: it is despicably printed, I fear, so far as false spellings and other slovenlinesses can go. Fraser "finds the people like it"; credat Judaeus;—as for me, I have told him I will not print any more with that man, but with some other man. Curious enough, the price Little and Brown have fixed upon was the price I remember guessing at beforehand, and the result they propose to realize for me corresponds closely with my prophecy too. Thanks, a thousand thanks, for all the trouble you never grudge to take. We shall get ourselves handsomely out of this export and import speculation; and know, taught at a rather cheap rate, not to embark in the like again.
There went off a Wilhelm Meister for you, and a letter to announce it, several weeks ago; that was message first. Your traveling neighbor, Brown, took charge of a Pamphlet named Chartism, to be put into the "British Queen's" Letter-bag (where I hope, and doubt not, he did put it, though I have seen nothing of him since); that and a letter in reference to it was message second. Thirdly, I sent off a volume of Poems by Sterling, likewise announced in that letter. And now this that I actually write is the fourth (it turns out to be) and last of all the messages. Let us take Arithmetic along with us in all things.—Of Chartism I have nothing farther to say, except that Fraser is striking off another One Thousand copies to be called Second Edition; and that the people accuse me, not of being an incendiary and speculative Sansculotte threatening to become practical, but of being a Tory,—thank Heaven. The Miscellanies are at press; at two presses; to be out, as Hope asseverates, in March: five volumes, without Chartism; with Hoffmann and Tieck from German Romance, stuck in somewhere as Appendix; with some other trifles stuck in elsewhere, chiefly as Appendix; and no essential change from the Boston Edition. Fraser, "overwhelmed with business," does not yet send me his net result of those Two Hundred and Fifty Copies sold off some time ago; so soon as he does, you shall hear of it for your satisfaction.—As to German Romance, tell my friends that it has been out of print these ten years; procurable, of late not without difficulty, only in the Old-Bookshops. The comfort is that the best part of it stands in the new Wilhelm Meister: Fraser and I had some thought of adding Tieck's and Richter's parts, had they suited for a volume; the rest may without detriment to anybody perish.
Such press-correctings and arrangings waste my time here, not in the agreeablest way. I begin, though in as sulky a state of health as ever, to look again towards some new kind of work. I have often thought of Cromwell and Puritans; but do not see how the subject can be presented still alive. A subject dead is not worth presenting. Meanwhile I read rubbish of Books; Eichhorn, Grimm, &c.; very considerable rubbish; one grain in the cart load worth pocketing. It is pity I have no appetite for lecturing! Many applications have been made to me here;—none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine, innocent-looking Scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other Booksellers' shopmen eastward in the City! I cannot get them out of my head. Poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to me.—For you, good friend, I account you luckier; I do verily: lecture there what innumerable things you have got to say on "The Present Age";—yet withal do not forget to write either, for that is the lasting plan after all. I have a curious Note, sent me for inspection the other day; it is addressed to a Scotch Mr. Erskine (famed among the saints here) by a Madame Necker, Madame de Stael's kinswoman, to whom he, the said Mr. Erskine, had lent your first Pamphlet at Geneva. She regards you with a certain love, yet a shuddering love. She says, "Cela sent l'Americain qui apres avoir abattu les forets a coup de hache, croit qu'on doit de meme conquerir le monde intellectuel"! What R.M. Milnes will say of you we hope also to see.—I know both Heraud and Landor; but alas, what room is here! Another sheet with less of "Arithmetic" in it will soon be allowed me. Adieu, dear friend.
Yours, ever and ever,
T. Carlyle
LI. Emerson to Carlyle*
New York, 18 March, 1840
My Dear Friend,—I have just seen the steamer "British Queen" enter the harbor from sea, and here lies the "Great Western," to sail tomorrow. I will not resist hints so broad upon my long procrastinations. You shall have at least a tardy acknowledgment that I received in January your letter of December, which I should have answered at once had it not found me absorbed in writing foolish lectures which were then in high tide. I had written you, a little earlier, tidings of the receipt of your French Revolution. Your letter was very welcome, as all your letters are. I have since seen tidings of the Essay on Chartism in an English periodical, but have not yet got my proof-sheets. They are probably still rolling somewhere outside of this port, for all our packetships have had the longest passages: only one has come in for many a week. We will be as patient as we can.
———— * This letter appeared in the Athenaeum, for July 22, 1882 ————
I am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city, and lives at Staten Island, at a distance of half an hour's sail. The city has such immense natural advantages and such capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of delectation, that I see that the poor fellows that live here do get some compensation for the sale of their souls. And how they multiply! They estimate the population today at 350,000, and forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000. But I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other's secret and each to keep the other's madness in countenance. You can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason. I believe in the spade and an acre of good ground. Whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of God in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an universal workman. He solves the problem of life, not for one, but for all men of sound body. I wish I may one day send you word, or, better, show you the fact, that I live by my hands without loss of memory or of hope. And yet I am of such a puny constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps I never shall. We will see.
Did I tell you that we hope shortly to send you some American verses and prose of good intent? My vivacious friend Margaret Fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for the 1st of July next, which I think will be written with a good will if written at all. I saw some poetical fragments which charmed me,—if only the writer consents to give them to the public.
I believe I have yet little to tell you of myself. I ended in the middle of February my ten lectures on the Present Age. They are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people, and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask me so many questions, that I assume all the airs of Age and Sapience. I am very happy in the sympathy and society of from six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect everything from my countrymen. We shall have many Richmonds in the field presently. I turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this summer I mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance. I left my wife, and boy, and girl,—the softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle with head erect all about the house,—well at home a week ago. The boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which I gladly peer when I am tired. Ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb, but I believe I love her better than ever I did the boy. I brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with William Emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years. All these persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge and years.
My letter will find you, I suppose, meditating new lectures for your London disciples. May love and truth inspire them! I can see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that. having waited until your Fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not now see you at all on western shores. Our saintly Dr. T—-, I am told, had a letter within a year from Lord Byron's daughter, informing the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful genius in London named Thomas Carlyle, and all his astonishing workings on her own and her friends' brains, and him the very monster whom the Doctor had been honoring with his best dread and consternation these five years. But do come in one of Mr. Cunard's ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich. If they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the Yankees will pay for. Give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your wife, and my wife's also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may thank her for the beautiful Guido.
You told me to send you no more accounts. But I certainly shall, as our financial relations are grown more complex, and I wish at least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers' accounts and long delays, by sharing them. I have had one of their estimates by me a year, waiting to send. Farewell.
LII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 1 April, 1840
My Dear Emerson,—A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some week or two. I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a settlement effected. The traveling Sumner being about to return into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a D'Orsay Portrait of myself, I see not what there is! Do you read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world. Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you would.—As to the D'Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity: Count D'Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown, grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts; every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature likeness of some object or other; a dashing man, who might, some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte's Marshals, and is, alas,—Count D'Orsay! The Portrait he dashed off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor); we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.—Now if I do not send you the Portrait, after all?
Fraser's account of the Miscellanies stood legibly extended over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to look upon. I trouble you only with the result. Two Hundred and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two "imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November, he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. Well, of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that belonged to me was L239,—the L261 had been the expense of handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in the coin for it! "Rules of the Trade";—it is a Trade, one would surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However,—not to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of it,—let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America, that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. Without Friendship, without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there had been no sixpence of that money here. Thanks, and again thanks. This earth is not an unmingled ball of Mud, after all. Sunbeams visit it;—mud and sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old consisted of.—I hasten away from the Ledger, with the mere good- news that James is altogether content with the "progress" of all these Books, including even the well-abused Chartism Book. We are just on the point of finishing our English reprint of the Miscellanies; of which I hope to send you a copy before long.
And now why do not you write to me? Your Lectures must be done long ago. Or are you perhaps writing a Book? I shall be right glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in you is best. Certainly, I think, a right Book does lie in the man! It is to be remembered also always that the true value is determined by what we do not write! There is nothing truer than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. He whom it concerns can consider it.—You have doubtless seen Milnes's review of you. I know not that you will find it to strike direct upon the secret of Emerson, to hit the nail on the head, anywhere at all; I rather think not. But it is gently, not unlovingly done;—and lays the first plank of a kind of pulpit for you here and throughout all Saxondom: a thing rather to be thankful for. It on the whole surpassed my expectations. Milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of a man.
You asked me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as "wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing." To me he is chiefly remarkable as being still—with his entirely enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty—out of Bedlam. He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago; and has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an empty bladder, and calling on the world to "List the Music of the spheres." He escapes assassination, as I calculate, chiefly by being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.—You cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing you. John Mill said, "I forgive him freely for interpreting the Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the h's!" Really this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, "The highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible."— "That is precisely what I am doing!" answered the aspiring, unaspirating.*—Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding,—expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,—as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object; and sides of an object are all that he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy, with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that! They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion's-providers; but consider them a worthless species.—When will you write, then? Consider my frightful outlook with a Course of Lectures to give "On Heroes and Hero-worship,"—from Odin to Robert Burns! My Wife salutes you all. Good be in the Concord Household!
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle
———— * There is an account of Heraud by an admirer in the Dial for October, 1842, p. 241. It contrasts curiously and instructively with Carlyle's sketch. ————
LIII. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 21 April, 1840
My Dear Friend,—Three weeks ago I received a letter from you following another in the week before, which I should have immediately acknowledged but that I was promised a private opportunity for the 25th of April, by which time I promised myself to send you sheets of accounts. I had also written you from New York about the middle of March. But now I suppose Mr. Grinnell—a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in Providence, R.I., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and, though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such— is packing his trunk to go to England. He offered to carry any letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to Providence I was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning Thomas Carlyle, I thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters, and companions' sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that wonderful man. Let him see thy face and pass on his way. I who cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must even betake me to this paper to repay the best I can the love of the Scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more.
Your letter announces Wilhelm Meister, Sterling's Poems, and Chartism. I am very rich, or am to be. But Kennet is no Mercury. Wilhelm and Sterling have not yet made their appearance, though diligently inquired after by Stearns Wheeler and me. Little and Brown now correspond with Longman, not with Kennet. But they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived.
Chartism arrived at Concord by mail not until one of the last days of March, though dated by you, I think, the 21st of December. I returned home on the 3d of April, and found it waiting. All that is therein said is well and strongly said, and as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot choose but carry them whithersoever men go. And yet I thought the book itself instructed me to look for more. We seemed to have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it. Their estimate is:—
Printing page for page with copy ……. $63.35
Paper ……………………………….44.00
Binding ……………………………. 90.00
Total ……………………………… $197.35
Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound. The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller's commission twenty percent on the Retail price. The author's profit fifteen cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published,— no unlikely event,—to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days. I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am expecting hourly from Munroe's clerk an entire account of R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful experiments myself.
I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger.—I am sad to hear that Sterling sails again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to him, as his letter was very welcome to me. I will not promise again until I do it. I received a note last week forwarded by Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few friends of mine there. But my brother writes me that he had left New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings. I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face.
22 April.—Last evening came true the promised account drawn up by Munroe's clerk, Chapman. I have studied it with more zeal than success. An account seems an ingenious way of burying facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. I am far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as I have promised it so long, I will send it now, and study a copy of it at my leisure. It is intended to begin where the last account I sent you, viz. of French Revolution, ended, with a balance of $9.53 in your favor…. I send you also a paper which Munroe drew up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the first and second volumes [of the Miscellanies] were concerned, the result had accorded with the promise that you should have $1,000 profit from the edition. We prosper marvelously on paper, but the realized benefit loiters. Will you now set some friend of yours in Fraser's shop at work on this paper, and see if this statement is true and transparent. I trust the Munroe firm,— chiefly Nichols, the clerical partner,—and yet it is a duty to understand one's own affair. When I ask, at each six months' reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent profits at last. By sending you this account I make it entirely an affair between you and them. You will have all the facts which any of us know. I am only concerned as having advanced the sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for Munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. For the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. One word more and I have done with this matter, which shall not be weary if it comes to good,—the account of the London five hundred French Revolution is not yet six months old, and so does not come in. Neither does that of the second edition of the first and second volumes of the Miscellanies, for the same reason. They will come in due time. I have very good hope that my friend Margaret Fuller's Journal—after many false baptisms now saying it will be called The Dial, and which is to appear in July— will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you have had. I will see that it goes to you when the sun first shines on its face. You asked me if I read German, and I forget if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else: but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time. There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books, least of all on his books; but in a lecture on Literature, in my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject, and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and send it to you? I know not.
A Bronson Alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has come to Concord with his wife and three children and taken a cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of God and his own spade. I see that some of the Education people in England have a school called "Alcott House" after my friend. At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was ever Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks, and I am glad and proud of my neighbor. He is interested more than need is in the Editor Heraud. So do not fail to tell me of him. Of Landor I would gladly know your knowledge. And now I think I will release your eyes.
Yours always,
R.W. Emerson
LIV. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 30 June, 1840
My Dear Carlyle,—Since I wrote a couple of letters to you,—I know not exactly when, but in near succession many weeks ago,— there has come to me Wilhelm Meister in three volumes, goodly 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!
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 English Puseyism? Good Heavens! in the whole circle of History is there the parallel of that,—a true worship rising at this hour of the day for Bands and the Shovel-hat? Distraction surely, incipience of the "final deliration" enters upon the poor old English Formulism that has called itself for some two centuries a Church. No likelier symptom of its being soon about to leave the world has come to light in my time. As if King Macready should quit Covent-Garden, go down to St. Stephen's, and insist on saying, Le roi le veut!—I read last night the wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism on myself, in the Quarterly Review. It seems to be by one Sewell, an Oxford doctor of note, one of the chief men among the Pusey-and-Newman Corporation. A good man, and with good notions, whom I have noted for some years back. He finds me a very worthy fellow; "true, most true,"—except where I part from Puseyism, and reckon the shovel-hat to be an old bit of felt; then I am false, most false. As the Turks say, Allah akbar!
I forget altogether what I said of Landor; but I hope I did not put him in the Heraud category: a cockney windbag is one thing; a scholar and bred man, though incontinent, explosive, half-true, is another. He has not been in town, this year; Milnes describes him as eating greatly at Bath, and perhaps even cooking! Milnes did get your Letter: I told you? Sterling has the Concord landscape; mine is to go upon the wall here, and remind me of many things. Sterling is busy writing; he is to make Falmouth do, this winter, and try to dispense with Italy. He cannot away with my doctrine of Silence; the good John. My Wife has been better than usual all summer; she begins to shiver again as winter draws nigh. Adieu, dear Emerson. Good be with you and yours. I must be far gone when I cease to love you. "The stars are above us, the graves are under us." Adieu.
—T. Carlyle
LVIII. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 30 October, 1840
My Dear Friend,—My hope is that you may live until this creeping bookseller's balance shall incline at last to your side. My rude ciphering, based on the last account of this kind which I sent you in April from J. Munroe & Co., had convinced me that I was to be in debt to you at this time L40 or more; so that I actually bought L40 the day before the "Caledonia" sailed to send you; but on giving my new accounts to J.M. & Co., to bring the statement up to this time, they astonished me with the above written result. I professed absolute incredulity, but Nichols* labored to show me the rise and progress of all my blunders. Please to send the account with the last to your Fraser, and have it sifted. That I paid, a few weeks since, $481.34, and again, $28.12, for printing and paper respectively, is true.—C.C. Little & Co. acknowledge the sale of 82 more copies of the London Edition French Revolution since the 187 copies of July 1; but these they do not get paid for until January 1, and we it seems must wait as long. We will see if the New-Year's-day will bring us more pence.
————- * Partner in the firm of J. Munroe & Co. ————-
I received by the "Acadia" a letter from you, which I acknowledge now, lest I should not answer it more at large on another sheet, which I think to do. If you do not despair of American booksellers send the new proofs of the Lectures when they are in type to me by John Green, 121 Newgate Street (I believe), to the care of J. Munroe & Co. He sends a box to Munroe by every steamer. I sent a Dial, No. 2, for you, to Green. Kennet, I hear, has failed. I hope he did not give his creditors my Miscellanies, which you told me were there. I shall be glad if you will draw Cromwell, though if I should choose it would be Carlyle. You will not feel that you have done your work until those devouring eyes and that portraying hand have achieved England in the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps you cannot do it until you have made your American visit. I assure you the view of Britain is excellent from New England.
We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.* One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.
—————- * Preliminary to the experiment of Brook Farm, in 1841. —————-
I am ashamed to tell you, though it seems most due, anything of my own studies, they seem so desultory, idle, and unproductive. I still hope to print a book of essays this winter, but it cannot be very large. I write myself into letters, the last few months, to three or four dear and beautiful persons, my country-men and women here. I lit my candle at both ends, but will now be colder and scholastic. I mean to write no lectures this winter. I hear gladly of your wife's better health; and a letter of Jane Tuckerman's, which I saw, gave the happiest tidings of her. We do not despair of seeing her yet in Concord, since it is now but twelve and a half days to you.
I had a letter from Sterling, which I will answer. In all love and good hope for you and yours, your affectionate
—R.W. Emerson
LIX. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 9 December, 1840
Dear Emerson,—My answer on this occasion has been delayed above two weeks by a rigorous, searching investigation into the procedure of the hapless Book-conveyer, Kennet, in reference to that copy of the Miscellanies. I was deceived by hopes of a conclusive response from day to day; not till yesterday did any come. My first step, taken long ago, was to address a new copy of the Book, not to you, luckless man, but to Lydia Emerson, the fortunate wife; this copy Green now has lying by him, waiting for the January Steamer (we sail only once a month in this season); before the New Year has got out of infancy the Lady will be graciously pleased to make a few inches of room on her bookshelves for this celebrated performance. And now as to Kennet, take the brief outcome of some dozen visitations, judicial interrogatories, searches of documents, and other piercing work on the part of methodic Fraser, attended with demurrers, pleadings, false denials, false affirmings, on the part of innocent chaotic Kennet: namely, that the said Kennet, so urged, did in the end of the last week, fish up from his repositories your very identical Book directed to Munroe's care, duly booked and engaged for, in May last, but left to repose itself in the Covent-Garden crypts ever since without disturbance from gods or men! Fraser has brought back the Book, and you have lost it;—and the Library of my native village in Scotland is to get it; and not Kennet any more in this world, but Green ever henceforth is to be our Book Carrier. There is a history. Green, it seems, addresses also to Munroe; but the thing, I suppose, will now shift for itself without watching.
As to the bibliopolic Accounts, my Friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of Roman Catholicism,— when Papacy had indeed become a Dubiety, but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing as true as it could manage to be! That really may be the fact of this too. In any case what signifies it much? Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. Booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us. Of the truth of Waldo Emerson's heart to me, there is, God be thanked for it, no doubt at all.
My Hero-Lectures lie still in Manuscript. Fraser offers no amount of cash adequate to be an outward motive; and inwardly there is as yet none altogether clear, though I rather feel of late as if it were clearing. To fly in the teeth of English Puseyism, and risk such shrill welcome as I am pretty sure of, is questionable: yet at bottom why not? Dost thou not as entirely reject this new Distraction of a Puseyism as man can reject a thing,—and couldst utterly abjure it, and even abhor it,—were the shadow of a cobweb ever likely to become momentous, the cobweb itself being beheaded, with axe and block on Tower Hill, two centuries ago? I think it were as well to tell Puseyism that it has something of good, but also much of bad and even worst. We shall see. If I print the thing, we shall surely take in America again; either by stereotype or in some other way. Fear not that!—Do you attend at all to this new Laudism of ours? It spreads far and wide among our Clergy in these days; a most notable symptom, very cheering to me many ways; whether or not one of the fatalest our poor Church of England has ever exhibited, and betokening swifter ruin to it than any other, I do not inquire. Thank God, men do discover at last that there is still a God present in their affairs, and must be, or their affairs are of the Devil, naught, and worthy of being sent to the Devil! This once given, I find that all is given; daily History, in Kingdom and in Parish, is an experimentum crucis to show what is the Devil's and what not. But on the whole are we not the formalest people ever created under this Sun? Cased and overgrown with Formulas, like very lobsters with their shells, from birth upwards; so that in the man we see only his breeches, and believe and swear that wherever a pair of old breeches are there is a man! I declare I could both laugh and cry. These poor good men, merciful, zealous, with many sympathies and thoughts, there do they vehemently appeal to me, Et tu, Brute? Brother, wilt thou too insist on the breeches being old,—not ply a needle among us here?—To the naked Caliban, gigantic, for whom such breeches would not be a glove, who is stalking and groping there in search of new breeches and accoutrements, sure to get them, and to tread into nonentity whoever hinders him in the search,—they are blind as if they had no eyes. Sartorial men; ninth-parts of a man:—enough of them.
The second Number of the Dial has also arrived some days ago. I like it decidedly better than the first; in fact, it is right well worth being put on paper, and sent circulating;—I find only, as before that it is still too much of a soul for circulating as it should. I wish you could in future contrive to mark at the end of each Article who writes it, or give me some general key for knowing. I recognize Emerson readily; the rest are of [Greek] for most part. But it is all good and very good as a soul; wants only a body, which want means a great deal! Your Paper on Literature is incomparably the worthiest thing hitherto; a thing I read with delight. Speak out, my brave Emerson; there are many good men that listen! Even what you say of Goethe gratifies me; it is one of the few things yet spoken of him from personal insight, the sole kind of things that should be spoken! You call him actual, not ideal; there is truth in that too; and yet at bottom is not the whole truth rather this: The actual well-seen is the ideal? The actual, what really is and exists: the past, the present, the future no less, do all lie there! Ah yes! one day you will find that this sunny-looking, courtly Goethe held veiled in him a Prophetic sorrow deep as Dante's,—all the nobler to me and to you, that he could so hold it. I believe this; no man can see as he sees, that has not suffered and striven as man seldom did.— Apropos of this, Have you got Miss Martineau's Hour and Man? How curious it were to have the real History of the Negro Toussaint, and his black Sansculottism in Saint Domingo,—the most atrocious form Sansculottism could or can assume! This of a "black Wilberforce-Washington," as Sterling calls it, is decidedly something. Adieu, dear Emerson: time presses, paper is done. Commend me to your good wife, your good Mother, and love me as well as you can. Peace and health under clear winter skies be with you all.
—T. Carlyle
My Wife rebukes me sharply that I have "forgot her love." She is much better this winter than of old.
Having mentioned Sterling I should say that he is at Torquay
(Devonshire) for the winter, meditating new publication of Poems.
I work still in Cromwellism; all but desperate of any feasible
issue worth naming. I "enjoy bad health" too, considerably!
LX. Carlyle to Mrs. Emerson
Chelsea, London, 21 February, 1841
Dear Mrs. Emerson,—Your Husband's Letter shall have answer when some moment of leisure is granted me; he will wait till then, and must. But the beautiful utterance which you send over to me; melodious as the voice of flutes, of Aeolian Harps borne on the rude winds so far,—this must have answer, some word or growl of answer, be there leisure or none! The "Acadia," it seems, is to return from Liverpool the day after tomorrow. I shove my paper-whirlpools aside for a little, and grumble in pleased response.
You are an enthusiast; make Arabian Nights out of dull foggy London Days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper Castles out of London Fog! It is very beautiful of you;—nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. I have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair Alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the essential gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? I honor such Alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. Long may the talent abide with you; long may I abide to have it exercised on me! Except the Annandale Farm where my good Mother still lives, there is no House in all this world which I should be gladder to see than the one at Concord. It seems to stand as only over the hill, in the next Parish to me, familiar from boyhood. Alas! and wide-waste Atlantics roll between; and I cannot walk over of an evening!—I never give up the hope of getting thither some time. Were I a little richer, were I a little healthier; were I this and that—!—One has no Fortunatus' "Time-annihilating" or even "Space-annihilating Hat": it were a thing worth having in this world.
My Wife unites with me in all kindest acknowledgments: she is getting stronger these last two years; but is still such a sailor as the Island hardly parallels: had she the Space- annihilating Hat, she too were soon with you. Your message shall reach Miss Martineau; my Dame will send it in her first Letter. The good Harriet is not well; but keeps a very courageous heart. She lives by the shore of the beautiful blue Northumbrian Sea; a "many-sounding" solitude which I often envy her. She writes unweariedly, has many friends visiting her. You saw her Toussaint l'Ouverture: how she has made such a beautiful "black Washington," or "Washington-Christ-Macready," as I have heard some call it, of a rough-handed, hard-headed, semi- articulate gabbling Negro; and of the horriblest phasis that "Sansculottism" can exhibit, of a Black Sansculottism, a musical Opera or Oratorio in pink stockings! It is very beautiful. Beautiful as a child's heart,—and in so shrewd a head as that. She is now writing express Children's-Tales, which I calculate I shall find more perfect.
Some ten days ago there went from me to Liverpool, perhaps there will arrive at Concord by this very "Acadia," a bundle of Printed Sheets directed to your Husband: pray apprise the man of that. They are sheets of a Volume called Lectures on Heroes; the Concord Hero gets them without direction or advice of any kind. I have got some four sheets more ready for him here; shall perhaps send them too, along with this. Some four again more will complete the thing. I know not what he will make of it;— perhaps wry faces at it?
Adieu, dear Mrs. Emerson. We salute you from this house. May all good which the Heavens grant to a kind heart, and the good which they never refuse to one such, abide with you always. I commend myself to your and Emerson's good Mother, to the mischievous Boys and—all the Household. Peace and fair Spring- weather be there!
Yours with great regard,
T. Carlyle
LXI. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 28 February, 1841
My Dear Carlyle,—Behold Mr. George Nichols's new digest and exegesis of his October accounts. The letter seems to me the most intelligible of the two papers, but I have long been that man's victim, semi-annually, and never dare to make head against his figures. You are a brave man, and out of the ring of his enchantments, and withal have magicians of your own who can give spell for spell, and read his incantations backward. I entreat you to set them on the work, and convict his figures if you can. He has really taken pains, and is quite proud of his establishment of his accounts. In a month it will be April, and be will have a new one to fender. Little and Brown also in April promise a payment on French Revolution,—and I suppose something is due from Chartism. We will hope that a Bill of Exchange will yet cross from us to you, before our booksellers fail.
I hoped before this to have reached my last proofsheet, but shall have two or three more yet. In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat.* Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,—no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together. I read to some Mechanics' Apprentices a long lecture on Reform, one evening, a little while ago. They asked me to print it, but Margaret Fuller asked it also, and I preferred the Dial, which shall have the dubious sermon, and I will send it to you in that.—You see the bookseller reverendizes me notwithstanding your laudable perseverance to adorn me with profane titles, on the one hand, and the growing habit of the majority of my correspondents to clip my name of all titles on the other. I desire that you and your wife will keep your kindness for
—R. W. Emerson
————— * The first series of Essays. —————
LXII. Emerson to Carlyle
Boston, 30 April, 1841
My Dear Carlyle,—Above you have a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds sterling drawn by T.W. Ward & Co. on the Messrs. Barings, payable at sight. Let us hope it is but the first of a long series. I have vainly endeavored to get your account to be rendered by Munroe & Co. to the date of the 1st of April. It was conditionally promised for the day of the last steamer (15 April). It is not ready for that which sails tomorrow and carries this. Little & Co. acknowledge a debt of $607.90 due to you 1st of April, and just now paid me; and regret that their sales have been so slow, which they attribute to the dulness of all trade among us for the last two years. You shall have the particulars of their account from Munroe's statement of the account between you and me. Munroe & Co. have a long apology for not rendering their own account; their book keeper left them at a critical moment, they were without one six weeks, &c.;—but they add, if we could give you it, to what use, since we should be utterly unable to make you any payment at this time? To what use, surely? I am too much used to similar statements from our booksellers and others in the last few years to be much surprised; nor do I doubt their readiness or their power to pay all their debts at last; but a great deal of mutual concession and accommodation has been the familiar resort of our tradesmen now for a good while, a vice which they are all fain to lay at the doors of the Government, whilst it belongs in the first instance, no doubt, to the rashness of the individual traders. These men I believe to be prudent, honest, and solvent, and that we shall get all our debt from them at last. They are not reckoned as rich as Little and Brown. By the next steamer they think they can promise to have their account ready. I am sorry to find that we have been driven from the market by the New York Pirates in the affair of the Six Lectures.* The book was received from London and for sale in New York and Boston before my last sheets arrived by the "Columbia." Appleton in New York braved us and printed it, and furthermore told us that he intends to print in future everything of yours that shall be printed in London,—complaining in rude terms of the monopoly your publishers here exercise, and the small commissions they allow to the trade, &c., &c. Munroe showed me the letter, which certainly was not an amiable one. In this distress, then, I beg you, when you have more histories and lectures to print, to have the manuscript copied by a scrivener before you print at home, and send it out to me, and I will keep all Appletons and Corsairs whatsoever out of the lists. Not only these men made a book (of which, by the by, Munroe sends you by this steamer a copy, which you will find at John Green's, Newgate Street), but the New York newspapers print the book in chapters, and you circulate for six cents per newspaper at the corners of all streets in New York and Boston; gaining in fame what you lose in coin.—The book is a good book, and goes to make men brave and happy. I bear glad witness to its cheering and arming quality.