The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I · Thomas Carlyle
IV. Carlyle to Emerson
5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 3 February, 1835 My Dear Sir,--I owe you a speedy answer as well as a grateful one; for, in spite of the swift ships of the Americans, our communings pass too slowly. Your letter, written in November, did not reach me till a few days ago; your Books or Papers have not yet come,--though the ever-punctual Rich, I can hope, will now soon get them for me. He showed me his _way-bill_ or invoice, and the consignment of these friendly effects "to another gentleman," and undertook with an air of great fidelity to bring all to a right bearing. On the whole, as the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah's Dove? Let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us. Time was when "they that feared the Lord spake _often_ one to another." A friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man. "Speech" also, they say, "is cheerfuler than light itself."
The date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of Space and Time. As you know my whereabout, will you throw a little light on your own? I can imagine Boston, and have often seen the musket volleys on Bunker Hill; but in this new spot there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of retirement, peace, and winter seclusion. Alas! I can too well fancy one other thing: the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and sacred. Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us; Society and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without it. Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone. He is, in very deed and truth, with God,--_where_ you and I both are. What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead! In still nights, as Jean Paul says, "the limbs of my Buried Ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin." Let us turn back into Life.
That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me. It is a great truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one sit: another great truth which you feel without saying it is that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly worse than none. To speak with perhaps ill-bred candor, I like as well to fancy you _not_ preaching to Unitarians a Gospel after their heart. I will say farther, that you are the only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in "faint possible Theism," which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat....
Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? For the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. But till _ill health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in conscience; understanding well that no man, that God only knows _what_ we are working, and will show it one day; that such and such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hammering and troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable; while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_ are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a thousand years." I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive.
Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you nearer me: nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German Language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly! I do not assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so: but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty was _infinite,_--Knox would have passed on, wondering not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe: his is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it _done_): Behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man! For which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful?
On the whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic); but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that one far better. Rich showed me a Compilation* in green cloth boards that you had beckoned across the water: pray read the fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling say whether that was a Parasite or a Prophet.--And then as to "misery" and the other dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself,--alas! consider whether misery is not _ill health_ too; also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad; and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane,--as Light, the Naturalists say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning. And so I appeal to Philip sober;--and indeed have hardly said as much about Goethe since I saw you, for nothing reigns here but twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on that subject, and I feel that the most suffer nothing thereby, having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but with you, who are not "seeking recipes for happiness," but something far higher, it is not so, and _therefore_ I have spoken and appealed; and hope the new curiosity, if I have awakened any, will do you no mischief.
The hope I have however is sure: if life is lent me, I shall be _done with_ the business; I will write this "History of Sansculottism," the notablest phenomenon I meet with since the time of the Crusades or earlier; after which my part is played. As for the future, I heed it little when so busy; but it often seems to me as if one thing were becoming indisputable: that I must seek another craft than literature for these years that may remain to me. Surely, I often say, if ever man had a finger-of-Providence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with: quit it in God's name, shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead. The truth is, I believe literature to be as good as dead and gone in all parts of Europe at this moment, and nothing but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations; I do not see how a man can honestly live by writing in another dialect than that, in England at least; so that if you determine on not living dishonestly, it will behove you to look several things full in the face, and ascertain what is what with some distinctness.
I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a kind of passion with me, to feel myself among my brothers. And then, How? Alas! I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay I feel it to be a wretched necessity, unfit for me; Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two are the grand Categories under which all English spiritual activity that so much as thinks remuneration possible must range itself. I look around accordingly on a most wonderful vortex of things; and pray to God only, that as my day, is so my strength may be. What will come out of it is wholly uncertain: for I have possibilities too; the possibilities of London are far from exhausted yet: I have a brave brother, who invites me to come and be quiet with him in Rome; a brave friend (known to you) who opens the door of a new Western world,--and so we will stand considering and consulting, at least till the Book be over. Are all these things interesting to you? I know they are.
As for America and Lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn over, but never yet with any seriousness. What your friend says of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no Tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, I can most readily understand it. But apart from that, I should rather fancy America mainly a new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry,--little more or little less. The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or money's worth; namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a _purse_-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree one? Or perhaps it is not a whit worse; only rougher, more substantial; on the whole better? At all events ours is fast becoming identical with it; for the pedigree ingredient is as near as may be gone: _Gagnez de l'argent, et ne vous faites pas pendre,_ this is very nearly the whole Law, first Table and second. So that you see, when I set foot on American land, it will be on no Utopia; but on a _conditional_ piece of ground where some things are to be expected and other things not.
I may say, on the other hand, that Lecturing (or I would rather it were _speaking_) is a thing I have always had some hankering after: it seems to me I could really _swim_ in that element, were I once thrown into it; that in fact it would develop several things in me which struggle violently for development. The great want I have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at: want of a _rubric,_ of a title to name my speech by. Could any one but appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh's science,-- "Things in general"! To discourse of Poets and Poetry in the Hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the Spirit of the Age, were most unedifying: one knows not what to call himself. However, there is no doubt that were the child born it _might_ be christened; wherefore I will really request you to take the business into your consideration, and give me in the most rigorous sober manner you can some scheme of it. How many Discourses; what Towns; the probable Expenses, the probable net Income, the Time, &c., &c.: all that you can suppose a man wholly ignorant might want to know about it. America I should like well enough to visit, much as I should another part of my native country: it is, as you see, distinctly possible that such a thing might be; we will keep it hanging, to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide.
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