The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I LV. Carlyle to Emerson
by Thomas Carlyle
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, undivine 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."
