5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London
29 April, 1836
My Dear Emerson,--Barnard is returning across the water, and must
not go back without a flying salutation for you. These many
weeks I have had your letter by me; these many weeks I have felt
always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer; and,
alas! also that I could give it none. It is impossible for you
to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought, That Book! that
weary Book! occupies me continually: wreck and confusion of all
kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me; but to wreck
and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, I turn
a deaf ear; and have life only for this one thing,--which also
in general I feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went
about possessed with. Have compassion for me! It is really very
miserable: but it will end. Some months more, and it is
ended; and I am done with French Revolution, and with
Revolution and Revolt in general; and look once more with
free eyes over this Earth, where are other things than mean
internecine work of that kind: things fitter for me, under the
bright Sun, on this green Mother's-bosom (though the Devil does
dwell in it)! For the present, really, it is like a Nessus'
shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched Enterprise; nay,
it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable,
insensible, to all other mischiefs.
I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way,
after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a
whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest.
Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so "spectral" to
me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have
seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME.
Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume
got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three
days. There is but a Third now: one pull more, and then! It
seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world,
and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. The mind is weary, the
body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the
left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and
striking work): I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance
there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done. My
familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong,
style cramp, &c., &c.: my friends, I answer, you are very right;
but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help.--In such sort
do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all.
For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City
is without some sort of charm for me. It leaves one alone, to go
his own road unmolested. Deep in your soul you take up your
protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not
divide yourself from it for that. Worthy individuals are glad to
hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not
exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time
for such a thing. Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this
magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one
thinks how, in the words of Schiller, "the very Gods fight
against it in vain"; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations
there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a Fact in the
world, let theory object as it will. Brown-stout, in quantities
that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men;
and the roaring flood of life pours on;--over which Philosophy
and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest
were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. I grow daily to honor
Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems
to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then
at least by the Devil;--neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer
had a hand in that.
There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for
long: I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,--a
stranger and a pilgrim. These friends expect mainly that the
Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather
coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a
living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. I must
altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much. Coleridge is
the Father of all these. Ay de mi!
But to look across the "divine salt-sea." A letter reached me,
some two months ago, from Mobile, Alabama; the writer, a kind
friend of mine, signs himself James Freeman Clarke.* I have
mislaid, not lost his Letter; and do not at present know his
permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at
Mobile); but you, doubtless, do know it. Will you therefore
take or even find an opportunity to tell this good Friend that it
is not the wreckage of the Liverpool ship he wrote by, nor
insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from
me; that I see him, and love him in this Letter; and hope we
shall meet one day under the Sun, shall live under it, at any
rate, with many a kind thought towards one another.
* Now the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Boston.
The North American Review you spoke of never came (I mean that
copy of it with the Note in it); but another copy became rather
public here, to the amusement of some. I read the article
myself: surely this Reviewer, who does not want in [sense]*
otherwise, is an original: either a thrice-plied quiz
(Sartor's "Editor" a twice-plied one); or else opening on you
a grandeur of still Dulness, rarely to be met with on earth.
* The words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter.
My friend! I must end here. Forgive me till I get done with
this Book. Can you have the generosity to write, without an
answer? Well, if you cannot, I will answer. Do not forget me.
My love and my Wife's to your good Lady, to your Brother, and all
friends. Tell me what you do; what your world does. As for my
world, take this (which I rendered from the German Voss, a tough
old-Teutonic fellow) for the best I can say of it:--
"As journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces,
And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests,
Falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or stormgirt
So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force,
Goal, and Time, go still onwards."
Adieu, my dear friend! Believe me ever Yours,
Thomas Carlyle |
