Carlyle and Emerson

THAT one day which Emerson made “ look like enchantment,” in the poor house of the lonely hill-country where Carlyle was biding his time, may well be reckoned memorable and fortunate in the annals of literature. It knit together, at the beginning of their career, the two men who were to give, each in his own land, the most significant and impressive utterance of spiritual truth in their age. Mutual respect and open sympathy arose in their hearts at first sight, and soon became a loyal and trustful affection, which, endeared by use and wont, proved for almost fifty years one of the best earthly possessions that fell to their lot. Throughout this period, except for a few brief weeks, they lived separate, and hence this Correspondence¹ is a nearly complete record of their friendship as it was expressed in words and acts. On our side of the ocean was Emerson, at Concord : freed from pressing care by his competency of twenty thousand dollars; serene in his philosophy of “ acquiescence and optimism ; ” working in his garden or walking by Walden Pond ; discovering geniuses among the townspeople ; lecturing in the neighborhood, or jotting down essays for his readers, — “ men and women of some religious culture and aspirations, young or else mystical.” On the other side was Carlyle, “ the poorest man in London ; ” hag-ridden by spirits of revolt and despair ; wrestling with his books as with the demon, " in desperate hope ; ” finding the face of nature spectral, and the face of man tragically burlesque ; saying to himself, “ Surely, if ever man had a finger-of-Providence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither yield the bread nor a stomach to digest bread with ; quit it in God’s name, — shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead;” yet heartening himself with his mother’s words, “ They cannot take God’s providence from thee.” The letters of these two friends, so sharply contrasted by circumstances and nature, must be, one thinks, of extraordinary interest, and possibly some wonder may spring up at finding the talk in them about every-day matters, — family, work, business, friends, and the like; but to us the special charm of the correspondence lies in this fact, in its being human rather than literary, in its naturalness of speech, man to man, whether the theme, in Emerson’s phrase, “ savor of eternity,” or concern the proper mode of cooking Indian meal. It is difficult to give in brief compass an adequate idea of the multifarious subjects discussed, or of the modification of the general estimate of Carlyle that the total contents of the volume make necessary. We can only select what seems of leading importance, and trust our readers to criticise and generalize for themselves.

In the earlier portion there is much about “ a New England book,” as Carlyle, putting Old England to the blush, called it, — Sartor Resartus, — and of its welcome to Cape Cod and Boston Bay, which made Fraser “ shriek.” We are proud of that; and now we can be glad to know of the money that went to Carlyle from us for this and other books, when he needed money, and can feel a sympathetic indignation against the “ gibbetless thief,” Appleton, whose piracies troubled Emerson in his good work, even though we get a cheap satisfaction in knowing that a “ brother corsair ” in England did the like when Carlyle tried to reciprocate his friend’s good offices. There is much, too, about Carlyle’s coming to America to lecture : details of probable costs and profits ; assurances that, advertised as “ the personal friend of Goethe,” he would, merely “ for the name’s sake,” be “ certain of success for one winter, but not afterwards ; ” congratulations that “ Dr. Channing reads and respects you, a fact of importance ; ” probabilities of “ the cordial opposition ” of the university. (Ah, poor Harvard ! But what can be expected from a son of thine who writes, “ The educated class are of course less fair-minded than others”?) Nothing came of all this, though Carlyle did not yield his wish to visit us until he was an old man. Glimpses of humorous sights and things are given from the first: of Dr. Furness, “ feeding Miss Martineau with the Sartor; ” of “ Alcott’s English Tail of bottomless imbeciles ” in London; of Brook Farm days, — “not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket; ” of Carlyle himself (a sight, one would think, to stir Rabelaisian laughter) at a water-cure, — “ wet wrappages, solitary sad steepages, and other singular procedures.” Now and then, too, they praise each other, as friends should. Thus Carlyle, on reading the Phi Beta Kappa oration, breaks out, “ I could have wept to read that speech ; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart. I said to my wife, ‘There, woman ! ’ ” But they praise with reservations, as befitted their independence and differences. Carlyle is shy of his friend’s genius as of a possible will-o’the-wisp (beautiful, but leading whither?), and Emerson looks askance at the Harlequinries of his Teufelsdröckh. They confide their bereavements to each other, simply, manfully : now it is Emerson’s little boy, “ the bud of God,” who is gone; and soon it is Carlyle’s tenderly loved mother, and at last the wife. They send their friends to each other, — Emerson, of course, by far the larger number,—and they talk them over. In these criticisms and characterizations is the principal literary interest of the collection. Most of them are by Carlyle, and they exhibit the same power as similar passages of his Reminiscences, but more wisely used.

Here is Alcott, whom Emerson had sent on “ with his more than a prophet’s egotism, a great man if he cannot write well;” whom Carlyle found “a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity, — the good Alcott, with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray-worn temples and mild, radiant eyes, all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age ; . . . let him love me as he can, and live on vegetables in peace, and I living partly on vegetables will continue to love him ! ” Margaret Fuller Emerson describes as “without beauty or genius,”—“with a certain wealth and generosity of nature.” Carlyle had larger language for her: “Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her ‘ mountain-me,’indeed! — but her courage, too, is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great, her veracity in its deepest sense à toute épreuve.” In briefer strokes, Miss Martineau, “ swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy formulas, and yet verily alive in the inside of that ; ” the “ pretty little robin-redbreast of a man,” Lord Houghton ; Dr. Hedge, — “a face like a rock; a voice like a howitzer;” Southey,— “ the shovel-hat is grown to him ; ” Macready, who “ puts to shame our Bishops and Archbishops.” The list is a long one, and it is pleasing to notice that, except in one case (Heraud, whose cause we abandon), Carlyle recognizes and appreciates good qualities in those of whom he writes. Two more of these portraits cannot be spared. Of Webster he writes, “ As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous, crag like face, the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown, the mastiff - mouth accurately closed, — I have not traced so much of silent Berserkir rage that I remember of in any other man.” Finally, of Tennyson, before he was taken up “ in the top of the wave,” — “ Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures who are and remain beautiful to me ; a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother! . . . a man solitary and sad as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom. . . . One of the finestlooking men in the world; a great shock of rough, dusty-dark hair ; brightlaughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic, — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between ; speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe.” Elsewhere, with the Carlyle touch, “ He wants a task! ”

Year by year these letters go, and “the cleft of difference” grows wider between the two: Carlyle glowing more intense with the heat of a dark realism; Emerson becoming more ethereal in his ideality. Their mutual recognition is as generous as ever, but each wishes the other different. Carlyle calls for “ some concretion of these beautiful abstracta.” “ I love your Dial,” he writes, “ and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like, — into perilous altitudes beyond the curve of perpetual frost. ... I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, ‘ Be damned !' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you.” Again and again he repeats his warning, and calls, “ Come down and help us.” Emerson, on his side, speaks his own discontent with “ that spendthrift style of yours,” those “ sky-vaultings,” and the like, but easily tolerates his friend’s peculiarities, and at last takes him as “ a highly virtuous gentleman who swears ; ” while to the summons to leave the mountain-tops, and “ come down,” he replies, “ I don’t know what you mean.” The genius of each dominated him, and the world has not lost thereby. In the style of the one there was the aroma of Babylon, and in that of the other something of the day-dawn, as they said in their genuine compliments ; but the two men could coalesce as little as would the two metaphors. They advanced in age, and the letters grew more infrequent: the fault was Emerson’s. It is pitiful to read Carlyle’s appeals against his friend’s silence, the silence of that voice which was to him, he says over and over, the only human voice he ever heard in response to his own soul. He was wandering about his native country with that “ fatal talent of converting all nature into Preternaturalism,” or standing in Luther’s room in the Wartburg, — “ I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak table;” or he was struggling with Friedrich, and ever repeating, “I am lonely — I am lonely.” At the end of a long, impassioned protest (and the passion is next to tears) against the misapprehension of the phrase of “ the eighteen million fools,” he first makes his prayer, “ O my Friend, have tolerance for me, have sympathy with me ! ’ Again, as early as 1852, he writes, “ My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them, I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts ; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow, — as if I could have helped growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities! I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifullest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable æther; and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do. And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of correspondence with me again. To me, at any rate, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years ; deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents.” But the letters remained long unanswered upon Emerson’s table, in spite of this and other like appeals ; he had forgotten his early words, “Please God, I will never again sit six weeks of this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it.” When he does write he assures him of “ the old love with the old limitations,” counts it his “eminent happiness to have been your friend ” and discoverer, and may well say, “ There is no example of constancy like yours.” The fact remains. Emerson appreciated love as the comradeship of noble minds; but of the love that clings and yearns, and seeks only repose in the friend, he knew not. Every syllable he ever wrote of love or friendship is thought, not passion. Carlyle had the peasant’s heart, the heart of a simple man; learning had not dried it, nor flattery hardened it, nor the charities of a fortunate life lulled it. He knew Emerson’s fidelity ; what he wanted was not the knowledge, but the sense of love. He was not to have it in the fullness he desired : he grew older and more lonely, and the letters fewer, until they ceased, ten years before the death of the friends, in the business necessary for the conveyance of Carlyle’s bequest of books to Harvard College, in which he took great pleasure, as in “something itself connected with THE SPRING in a higher sense, — a little white and red lipped bit of Daisy, pure and poor, scattered into TIME’S Seed-field.” Here it seems fit to notice, once for all, the deep interest and friendliness of Carlyle toward America, as it is shown throughout these letters. To quote but one or two phrases, America is at the beginning “the other parish” — “the Door of Hope to distracted Europe.” Of the subduing of the Western prairies be exclaims, “ There is no myth of Athene or Herakles equal to that fact.” Finally, at the close of all, he confesses, “ I privately whisper to myself, ‘ Could any Friedrich Wilhelm, now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realize, guide forward what is America’s essential task at present faster or more completely than “anarchic America ” herself is now doing ? ’ Such ‘ Anarchy ’ has a great deal to say for itself (would to Heaven ours of England had as much !), and . . . toward grand anti-Anarchies in the future; . . . I hope, with the aid of centuries, immense things from it in my private mind.” Burke’s famous admission, in his Reflections on the French Revolution, that he might be wrong, after all, was not more creditable to his large wisdom than is this to Carlyle’s deep sincerity.

From what has been said, it will be seen that, in our judgment, the reputation of Carlyle has materially gained by this Correspondence, while Emerson remains the man we have always known. As in the Reminiscences, we see again the grimness, the frightful intensity, the solitude, of Carlyle’s life, which is already seen to be the most tragical in our literary history. It is marvelous to notice how exactly Carlyle’s account of his states of feeling, written from memory, agrees with the contemporary record of the letters. But beyond what was told us before, we possess now clearer proofs of his sympathy and tenderness ; his heart is laid bare, and we, being freed from the prejudices stirred by the praise or blame that came from it in particular cases, can better appreciate his humanity. His genius was of that kind which makes misapprehension and hatred easy ; this volume helps to show us the man as he truly was, one of the noblest of men. In this service to his friend, the editor, Professor Norton, whose work, it is almost superfluous to say, is unobtrusively and thoroughly done, has enjoyed a fortune given to few. The memory of a fine friendship, which may well prove hereafter the most notable in our literature, has been added to the spiritual inheritance of the world, and by its light genius, misunderstood and maligned, will be justified.