The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872 Volume I Part 16

But I was going to say, my neglect of your request will show you how little saliency is in my weeks and months. They are hardly distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray... I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,--for it yields to no engineering,--are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quant.i.ty of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'T is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. Our few fine persons are apt to die. Horatio Greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be multiplied into millions. "The beautiful is never plentiful."

On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus believe that Heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that heroes do not succ.u.mb.

Clough is here, and comes to spend a Sunday with me, now and then. He begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out, will have as many as he wants.... I have written hundreds of pages about England and America, and may send them to you in print. And now be good and write me once more, and I think I will never cease to write again. And give my homage to Jane Carlyle.

Ever yours, R.W. Emerson

CLII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 13 May, 1853

Dear Emerson,--The sight of your handwriting was a real blessing to me, after so long an abstinence. You shall not know all the sad reflections I have made upon your silence within the last year. I never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practically _Old Age_ had come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one must make up one's mind to know that all this likewise had fallen silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new terms. Alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the regions of the Immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also inexpressibly sad. I have not many voices to commune with in the world. In fact I have properly no voice at all; and yours, I have often said, was the _unique_ among my fellow-creatures, from which came full response, and discourse of reason: the _solitude_ one lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all, is very great in these epochs!--The truth is, moreover, I bought spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candle- light having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in that! "The buying of your first pair of spectacles," I said to an old Scotch gentleman, "is an important epoch; like the buying of your first razor."--"Yes," answered he, "but not quite so joyful perhaps!"--Well, well, I have heard from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal _snoring_ hum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then?

Watchman, what of the night?--

Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of the _epic_ in them,--_ganz nach meinem Sinne._ I see you do not dissent from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of _un_peaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a "republic of the Mediocrities," and always was;--you may see what _its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weatherc.o.c.ks atop) that now _is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand "suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--I was much struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy: mere Latter-Day Pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the G.o.ds!-- I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible and even d.a.m.nable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest n.o.bleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated:--alas, the _reverse_ of all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world,--and will _reappear_ conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old, first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy "Uncle Tommery" is got all well put by! Which will take some time yet, I think.--And so we will leave it.

I went to Germany last autumn; not _seeking_ anything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them,--and no return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!--In Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth, I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe, and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age: such an image of calm _power_ (to say nothing of its other properties) I find I had never seen before. The old Cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and your _despatch-of-business_ talents,--a really painful defect in the long run. I was on two of Fritz's Battle-fields, moreover: Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that. Schiller's death-chamber, Goethe's sad Court-environment; above all, Luther's little room in the _Wartburg_ (I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was not at present so _holy_ a spot as that same. Of human souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,--such my sad fate! Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was more than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of him. But on the whole _Universal Puseyism_ seemed to me the humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers;--and I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,--unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power! Truly and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligent _silence,_ with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the cla.s.s of people that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out! I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as to writing,--_Ach Gott!_ Never, never.--Clough is coming home, I hope.--Write soon, if you be not enchanted!

Yours ever, T. Carlyle

CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 10 August, 1853

My Dear Carlyle,--Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not count back to,--perhaps it was May,--I have just read again, to be deeply touched by its n.o.ble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me. My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circ.u.mstance is not worth stating, because, if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you. I believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page. For I have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts--and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking--outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special h.e.l.l provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fas.h.i.+on. With such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friends.h.i.+p, and who had some great permanent values for me. Had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, I should have done what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture--rare enough here--with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. He had just established his valise at my house, and was to come--the gay deceiver--once a fortnight for his Sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me. I beseech you not to commend his unheroic retreat.

I have lately made, one or two drafts on your goodness,--which I hate to do, both because you meet them so generously, and because you never give me an opportunity of revenge,--and mainly in the case of Miss Bacon, who has a private history that ent.i.tles her to high respect, and who could be helped only by facilitating her Shakespeare studies, in which she has the faith and ardor of a discoverer. Bancroft was to have given her letters to Hallam, but gave one to Sir H. Ellis. Everett, I believe, gave her one to Mr. Grote; and when I told her what I remembered hearing of Spedding, she was eager to see him; which access I knew not how to secure, except through you. She wrote me that she prospers in all things, and had just received at once a summons to meet Spedding at your house. But do not fancy that I send any one to you heedlessly; for I value your time at its rate to nations, and refuse many more letters than I give. I shall not send you any more people without good reason.

Your visit to Germany will stand you in stead, when the annoyances of the journey are forgotten, and, in spite of your disclaimers, I am preparing to read your history of Frederic.

You are an inveterate European, and rightfully stand for your polity and antiquities and culture: and I have long since forborne to importune you with America, as if it were a humorous repet.i.tion of Johnson's visit to Scotland. And yet since Thackeray's adventure, I have often thought how you would bear the pains and penalties; and have painted out your march triumphal. I was at New York, lately, for a few days, and fell into some traces of Thackeray, who has made a good mark in this country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in various companies, where so much honesty was rare and useful. I am sorry never once to have been in the same town with him whilst he was here. I hope to see him, if he comes again. New York would interest you, as I am told it did him; you both less and more.

The "society" there is at least self-pleased, and its own; it has a contempt of Boston, and a very modest opinion of London.

There is already all the play and fury that belong to great wealth. A new fortune drops into the city every day; no end is to palaces, none to diamonds, none to dinners and suppers. All Spanish America discovers that only in the U. States, of all the continent, is safe investment; and money gravitates therefore to New York. The Southern naphtha, too, comes in as an ingredient, and lubricates manners and tastes to that degree, that Boston is hated for stiffness, and excellence in luxury is rapidly attained. Of course, dining, dancing, equipaging, etc. are the exclusive beat.i.tudes,--and Thackeray will not cure us of this distemper. Have you a physician that can? Are you a physician, and will you come? If you will come, cities will go out to meet you.

And now I see I have so much to say to you that I ought to write once a month, and I must begin at this point again incontinently.

Ever yours, R.W. Emerson

CLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 9 September, 1853

Dear Emerson,--Your Letter came ten days ago; very kind, and however late, surely right welcome! You ought to stir yourself up a little, and actually begin to speak to me again. If we are getting old, that is no reason why we should fall silent, and entirely abstruse to one another. Alas, I do not find as I grow older that the number of articulate-speaking human souls increases around me, in proportion to the inarticulate and palavering species! I am often abundantly solitary in heart; and regret the old days when we used to speak oftener together.

I have not quitted Town this year at all; have resisted calls to Scotland both of a gay and a sad description (for the Ashburtons are gone to John of Groat's House, or the Scottish _Thule,_ to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)--I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts _settle_ (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here I am and remain. London is not a bad place at all in these months,--with its long clean streets, green parks, and n.o.body in them, or n.o.body one has ever seen before. Out of La Trappe, which does not suit a Protestant man, there is perhaps no place where one can be so perfectly alone. I might study even but, as I said, there are noises going on; a _last_ desperate spasmodic effort of building,--a new top-story to the house, out of which is to be made one "s.p.a.cious room" (so they call it, though it is under twenty feet square) where there shall be air _ad libitum,_ light from the sky, and no _sound,_ not even that of the Cremorne Cannons, shall find access to me any more! Such is the prophecy; may the G.o.ds grant it! We shall see now in about a month;--then adieu to mortar-tubs to all Eternity:--I endure the thing, meanwhile, as well as I can; might run to a certain rural retreat near by, if I liked at any time; but do not yet: the worst uproar here is but a trifle to that of German inns, and horrible squeaking, choking railway trains; and one does not go to seek this, _this_ is here of its own will, and for a purpose!

Seriously, I had for twelve years had such a sound-proof inaccessible apartment schemed out in my head; and last year, under a poor, helpless builder, had finally given it up: but Chelsea, as London generally, swelling out as if it were mad, grows every year noisier; a _good_ builder turned up, and with a last paroxysm of enthusiasm I set him to. My notion is, he will succeed; in which case, it will be a great possession to me for the rest of my life. Alas, this is not the kind of _silence_ I could have coveted, and could once get,--with green fields and clear skies to accompany it! But one must take such as can be had,--and thank the G.o.ds. Even so, my friend. In the course of about a year of that garret sanctuary, I hope to have swept away much litter from my existence: in fact I am already, by dint of mere obstinate quiescence in such circ.u.mstances as there are, intrinsically growing fairly sounder in nerves. What a business a poor human being has with those nerves of his, with that crazy clay tabernacle of his! Enough, enough; there will be all Eternity to rest in, as Arnauld said: "Why in such a fuss, little sir?"

You "apologize" for sending people to me: O you of little faith!

Never dream of such a thing nay, whom _did_ you send? The Cincinnati Lecturer* I had provided for with Owen; they would have been glad to hear him, on the Cedar forests, on the pigs making rattlesnakes into bacon, and the general adipocere question, under any form, at the Albemarle Street rooms;--and he never came to hand. As for Miss Bacon, we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her solid character and strange enterprise, a real acquisition; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I have not in my life seen anything so tragically _quixotic_ as her Shakespeare enterprise: alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully what I can;--which is far more than she _asks_ of me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul);--but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up: and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least doc.u.ment that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquis.h.i.+ng the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly sorry about the poor lady: but she troubles n.o.body with her difficulties, with her theories; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far.

--------- * Mr. O.M. Mitch.e.l.l, the astronomer.

Clough is settled in his Office; gets familiarized to it rapidly (he says), and seems to be doing well. I see little of him hitherto; I did not, and will not, try to influence him in his choice of countries; but I think he is now likely to continue here, and here too he may do us some good. Of America, at least of New England, I can perceive he has brought away an altogether kindly, almost filial impression,--especially of a certain man who lives in that section of the Earth. More power to his elbow!--Thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the Hogarth line, with a dash of Sterne superadded), of enormous _appet.i.te_ withal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except his _outer breeding,_ which is fixed enough, and _perfect_ according to the modern English style. I rather dread explosions in his history. A _big,_ fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one. _Ay de mi!_ But I must end, I must end. Your Letter awakened in me, while reading it, one mad notion. I said to myself: Well, if I live to finish this Frederic impossibility, or even to fling it fairly into the fire, why should not I go, in my old days, and see Concord, Yankeeland, and that man again, after all!--Adieu, dear friend; all good be with you and yours always.

--T. Carlyle

CLIV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 11 March, 1854

My Dear Carlyle,--The sight of Mr. Samuel Laurence, the day before yesterday, in New York, and of your head among his sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be only cheer. For Mr. Laurence I hailed his arrival, on every account. I wish to see a good man whom you prize; and I like to have good Englishmen come to America, which, of all countries, after their own, has the best claim to them. He promises to come and see me, and has begun most propitiously in New York. For you,--I have too much const.i.tutional regard and ---, not to feel remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and I remember the maxim which the French stole from our Indians,--and it was worth stealing,--"Let not the gra.s.s grow on the path of friends.h.i.+p."

Ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and forbearances of such as are not giants. To those to whom we owe affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp in all men,--most in myself.

And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel Laurence; for I lately looked into _Jesuitism,_ a Latter-Day Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity was so manifest, that I felt that the over-G.o.ds had cleared their skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in 1850. And to do this alone.--You must even pitch your tune to suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers wear what astonis.h.i.+ng coats, and eat what meats--wheat or whale-- they like, without criticism.

I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets, without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others, sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for this poor world;--I too,--though I know its meltings to-me-ward.

Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River, Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own, until the end. It is very necessary that we should have mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think of home the heart is taken out.

Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious letter,--copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about you, and I have not written to him since his return to England.

You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin.

He lives on venison and quails. I was made much of, as the only man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth more than venison and quails.

Greeley of the _New York Tribune_ is the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day,--mult.i.tudes of them in these very parts. He had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year. Other than Colonists, I saw no man.

"There are no singing birds in the prairie," I truly heard. All the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. Younger and better, I had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their sense for them. Now I only gazed at them and their boundless land.

One good word closed your letter in September, which ought to have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at Was.h.i.+ngton. The politicians shall be sodden, the States escape, please G.o.d! The fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. Come and see. Wealth, which is always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced, is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally along sh.o.r.e from Canada to Cuba, and thence west to California again. John Bull interests you at home, and is all your subject. Come and see the Jonathanization of John. What, you scorn all this? Well, then, come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any other sh.o.r.e, who heartily and always greet you. There is a very serious welcome for you here. And I too shall wake from sleep.

My wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you.

Faithfully yours, R.W. Emerson

CLV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 8 April, 1854