overwhelmed with work and imaginary responsibility. Plutarch goes on,
though with huge interruptions. And I was very glad to see Felton. And
I obeyed your vermilion edict, and sent some verse by him; if you do
think it worth while to be at the trouble, I will not be ashamed. I
have some few Elegiacs and Hexameters, written at Rome during my visit
there in the time of the siege.
Politics here are rather colourless. Scotch education is thrown
overboard by a coalition between the landowners, establishmentarians,
and voluntaries, who have defeated Government by eight votes. The
Oxford Bill will pass with a few scratches in committee rather damaging
to it, but not very momentous. Gladstone, I think, has done himself
great honour by refusing to borrow for the war, but the bankers and
great capitalists have been abusing him furiously. By this time you are
all scattering to the seas and the hills, and Boston will be getting
hot and empty, and the shadow of the pines an object of exceeding
desire, but for the mosquitoes.
_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._
Downing Street: June 10, 1854.
It is now nearly a twelvemonth since I fled in that precipitate,
half-voluntary manner from Massachusetts. Another fortnight will
complete the year: and another two days from this will, in all
probability, see me married.
You in the meantime, are in all the turmoil of a renewed slavery
contest. From this distance it almost looks as if the aggression would
be of more use in breaking down the idea of compromise than of harm in
its actual results.
I am going on here, working in the office in the ordinary routine,
which, however, after years of Greek tuition, is really a very great
relief. All education is in England, and I think in America, so mixed
up with religious matters, that it is a great difficulty.
_To C. E. Norton, Esq._
Lea Hurst, Matlock: June 28, 1854.
Your letter of congratulation arrived, curiously enough, on the very
morning of our marriage, and was a very pleasant incident of the day.
Felton’s letter, announcing a variety of kind remembrances, came three
or four days after, and was, I assure you, a very pleasant surprise
indeed. This place strangely reminds me of Shady Hill last summer;
though it is not really very like it, being a house on a broad open
bank, a considerable height above the river Derwent, the valley of
which it looks down as it flows from Matlock to Derby. Nor have we
any of those scorching heats which had begun before I left you, now
twelve months ago exactly. I am doing Plutarch, and living in an
in-and-out-of-doors sort of way.
_To the same._
Combe Hurst: August 19, 1854.
I have almost chosen a house, and in six weeks expect to be a
householder, with goods and chattels, and the _post_ householder
_sedens atra cura_.
Cholera is amongst us, as you see, and laying low lords even; Lord
Beaumont (but not by cholera) in the last three weeks, besides Lord
Jocelyn.
Did you see the ‘Examiner’ on Mrs. Stowe’s ‘Sunny Memories’? _quite_ a
severe article, and _quite_ unnecessarily so, I should say. The use of
quite is a peculiarity which I quite remarked myself, but I think you
have quite a right to use it as a substitute, if you please, for our
less exact ‘very,’ and in colloquial writing no one ought to object. I
don’t see that the old-country English are to have the exclusive right
of introducing new expressions.
_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._
Council Office, Whitehall: August 22, 1854.
My dear Emerson,--Your letter about a week ago was very welcome, and
the silver candlestick which came in Felton’s box of treasures was very
much appreciated, and I am to send the kindest possible thanks for it.
I only hope fortune may indeed some day waft us over, at least for a
visit, to your Northern Vinland.
Carlyle is, I believe, ruralising at Addiscombe, a few miles out of
London, which always does him a great deal of good. I dare say we shall
not meet till London begins to consider itself alive again in October.
This country has, as you say, its concentrated civilization to hold
one to it--it seems waste of opportunity to leave such a mass of old
knowledge. But I think you are better and more happily off in America,
where the vastness of the machinery does not destroy the sense of
individual purpose. The ship here is really so big that one cannot
see that it moves, or that any one of the little petty services which
people are for the dear bread’s sake set to do, can have any effect one
way or another on its motion. If one has a place or business here, one
is only standing in some other person’s shoes, who really could very
likely do the thing as well.
You are so infinitely more plastic, again, as to opinions than, except
in talk, the English are. As for your politics, certainly they do
not look well at present, and one is afraid that New York may after
all acquiesce in the _fait accompli_, and go back to its farm and
its country-house without concerning itself further. I am afraid the
English theory is, when one has done a wrong thing, to forget it as
soon as possible. Farewell!
_To F. J. Child, Esq., of Cambridge, Massachusetts._
Downing Street: September 2, 1854.
I hope the Chaucer is going on prosperously. I think you should
adopt means to make the metre quite obvious, at any sacrifice of
typographical prettiness. Yet I don’t like the grave accent, ‘When
Zephyrus eke with his sotè breth,’ and should almost prefer the ˘,
sotĕ, but that it seems unmeaning to use a mark of quantity. Yet
it is not a case of accent, either. I think I should in one way or
another mark every syllable that would not now be pronounced, grevĕs
and levès and Emperourè’s daughter--the most correct mark would be ë:
Emperourë’s; sotë. And I should prefix to the whole a very plain and
short statement of the usage in these points.
I suppose there is not much doubt about a few general rules, though
Chaucer did not regularly observe them, as, for example, the use of the
ĕ in adjectives after definite articles, which it seems to me he omits
occasionally, with French adjectives, as if it was a matter of ear
rather than rule. So also with such Saxon dissyllables as tymĕ, which
is not invariably a dissyllable, I think. And yet it would be worth
while giving a list of such words as are liable to be dissyllables.
However, ere this, I dare say you have settled all these preliminaries.
I don’t quite see what you should do about the Miller’s and the Reve’s
tales. I think explanation might be a little retrenched there, so
as to leave them in the ‘decent obscurity of a learned language.’
They are thoroughly English stories, but I don’t know whether they
are New English. They are just what would be relished to this day
in public-houses in farming districts, but I can’t say that I could
wish them urged upon any palate that does not already fancy them, and
I don’t much admire the element in the English character that does
relish them. It is a great thing, no doubt, to do dirty _work_, and the
English are pretty good at it; but when it ceases to be work, it is a
different thing, and I don’t see much good in it.
I think the Americans have the advantage of being less ‘farceurs’ than
the British subject is apt to be. There is a sort of servants’-hall
facetiousness which predominates in the cockney world, and finds its
way into literature, which I think deserves no sort of imitation or
admiration.
I have just been taking a house in the extreme skirts of the Regent’s
Park, not far from the Zoological Gardens, with a canal underneath
it, and some very un-Venetian gondolas, called here coal-barges,
passing to and fro upon it in the foreground, while in the distance
rise the suburban Alps of ’Ampstead and ’Ighgate--‘Oh breathe on them
softly’--and a little to one side swells the pastural eminence of
Primrose Hill.
_To C. E. Norton, Esq._
London: September 1854.
I have never acknowledged yet, except per Professor Child, Ph.D., your
letter from Newport. Your description was somewhat amusing, as, in
point of fact, I have been in Newport, and have not been in the Isle
of Wight. I was at Newport at the age of six or seven, and passed by
it, moreover--scarcely, however, realising the scenes of my infancy--in
that swift transit commenced under your auspices, from Boston viâ Fall
River to New York and the ‘Asia’ steamer.
London is empty, of course, and only excited by the terror of cholera,
which is however, I believe, subsiding. Positively, for two or three
days last week, in the district between Leicester Square and Oxford
Street, north and south, and Soho Square and Regent Street, east and
west, there were scenes not unlike those of the old Plague. It has
often been asserted that this was one of the great burying-places of
the old 1665 Plague, and this outbreak is by some ascribed to this.
However, virulent as it was, it was as brief; and fortunately, perhaps,
it came just at the beginning of a new Health Report week, so that it
did not get into the papers till it was pretty well over.
Tell me a little about politics, as the weather gets cooler. I am at
the mercy of the ‘Times,’ and don’t believe that it knows much about
anything. Are there really any ‘Know-nothings,’ and is it really a
matter of importance? That the Whigs will not, as a body, join as yet
in political alliance with the Free Soil party, I suppose, is true.
I send a little volume, ‘Scaliger’s Poetics,’ with Johnson’s autograph
(pretty certain, I believe), for your own antiquarian appropriation, if
you will have it.
_To the same._
Downing Street: October 24, 1854.
I went over to Calais last Saturday night, to see Florence Nightingale
so far on her way to Scutari. She has ten Sisters of Mercy proper,
eight of Miss Sellon’s, six of a sort of Via Media institution, and ten
other nurses under her charge.
According to Lord Burghersh, the aide-de-camp, who is just come home
with despatches, Lord Raglan is everything out there; neither St.
Arnaud nor Canrobert at all compare with him. His advice carried it
for landing where they did, both the Frenchmen being for other places,
which experience afterwards showed would have been impossible. His
character has risen greatly in reputation. In the middle of the
fighting, when he rode up into very dangerous places, looking after
things, his aides-de-camp remonstrated, and were answered by ‘Be quiet,
I’m busy.’ Fortunately he is so wise as to wear nothing but a plain
foraging cap, and so is scarcely observed.
You, meantime, must be thinking more of the Arctic than of the Crimea.
When I came over from New York last summer, I remember the probability
of some such calamity happening being discussed on board the ‘Asia,’
when we met the ‘Andes’ right upon our track, fortunately on a clear
day.
_To the same._
Downing Street: November 1854.
About this time two years we were very likely walking about the streets
of Boston together; at present, I may call myself just re-established
in London. We took possession of our abode in the Regent’s Park two
nights ago.
There is an immense interest, or rather anxiety, about our little army
in the Crimea. I passed some recruits the other day, and a man looking
on said, ‘They’ll all be killed; every man Jack of them; I’m sorry for
it.’ Generally the feeling is of apprehension, or even worse, on the
arrival of untoward news.
_To ----_
Downing Street: January 18, 1855.
Of wars and rumours of wars we have of course enough. The ‘Times’ is
blamed and believed; the Ministry is blamed and continued. I saw a
Queen’s messenger who had just come from Constantinople with one set
of despatches and was just returning with another. The journey as
performed by Queen’s messenger is, it appears, at the quickest, from
Constantinople to Marseilles, six and a half days; from Marseilles to
London, forty-seven hours.
This new Indian Civil Service scheme may, I dare say, interest you.
I rather regret that so little is made of Eastern languages. I think
Persian might be allowed as a study almost co-ordinate with Latin and
Greek, and quite with French, German, and Italian, as at present valued
in the scheme.
_To Professor F. J. Child._
London: January 31, 1855.
Here we are with, I am just told, the Tories in once again. When they
last came in, they drove me from England into New England. I don’t know
how it will be now.
Our literature, at present, is the war column in the newspaper. The
best military reports are those of the ‘Morning Herald,’ I am told; but
Macdonald, the hospital correspondent at Constantinople, has been more
successful practically than ever newspaper correspondent yet had the
glory of being.
February 2.
This steamer, it appears, will not quite certainly tell you ‘under
which’ Prime Minister we are to ‘do our duty,’ but Palmerston must
manage somehow we suppose. Yesterday we believed that Lord Derby would
be our king, and Disraeli our foreign minister, Palmerston holding the
war department; but that seems over altogether.
_To the same._
London: May 3, 1855.
Last week we had Emperor and Empress passing by here under our windows,
with Queen and Prince, in the midst of applauding multitudes, and
certainly there is no denying Louis Napoleon’s courage.
Unless Sebastopol gets taken before long, it will, I think, upset the
present ministry, and perhaps the present aristocracy along with them;
and Laing, Layard, and Lowe, if they can provide themselves with a
sufficient Co., may come in as the new parliamentary firm. The war,
which the great people, lords and statesmen, thought would be unpopular
in a few months, is more likely, I think, to become a popular question
_versus_ lords and statesmen. There is no murmuring at the new taxes,
but a great deal at the old politicians.
Here is an authentic anecdote from Vienna. The French and English
Plenipotentaries urged how natural the arrangement would be that the
Euxine should, like the American lakes, be common to both nations; to
which Prince Gortschakoff answered that he should not object to that,
were there only a Niagara at the Dardanelles.
_To C. E. Norton, Esq._
London: September 14, 1855.
So we have at last taken the besieged city. We here took it very
unconcernedly, when the great news gradually oozed out and then spread
abroad, on Monday evening last. It is, however, an immense relief,
privately as well as publicly, and I do not doubt is felt as such. I
confess to my own feeling that Russia should be let off easily. What
other power can bring North Asia into discipline? I could be thankful
to see her hold some port or have some means of exit to the Atlantic,
now that she has learnt that the maritime powers are strong enough to
check her encroachments when they please.
_To Professor F. J. Child._
London: October 29, 1855.
I have been astonished and delighted at once to see Shady Hill reposing
itself in St. James’s Street. I had hardly faith, I confess, to expect
the removal of that mountain to this side of our common sea.
I congratulate you on having achieved Spenser. I hope I shall see the
work. Let me confess to having never yet read one quarter of the ‘Faery
Queen.’ But you are a much more literary nation that we. Few people,
I fear, will return in England to the study of Plutarch’s Lives, and
in working to the end of that attempt I can only look forward to the
readers of America. I hope it will be pretty tolerably readable and
correct when it does at last present itself. Certainly, if I had tried
to translate it myself, it would have had a more Greek tone; but I
don’t think we any of us write so idiomatically now as my friends of
Charles II.’s time.
You see that we, that is our newspapers, after considerable bluster,
mean decidedly to back out of any quarrelling with you. The ‘Times,’ I
think, decidedly feels that it took a wrong step, and is walking out of
its front position with all possible celerity.
I hear you have undertaken the kind labour of putting my ‘Reliquiæ’
through the press. If you like to add epigraphs on fly-leaves, you
might put before ‘The Bothie’:
Pauperis et tuguri congestum cespite culmen;
or,
Ite, meæ, felix quondam pecus, ite camenæ:
and before the Roman verses--
Navibus atque
Quadrigis petimus bene vivere.
_To C. E. Norton, Esq._
London: July 11, 1856.
There is a severe review of Macaulay in to-day’s ‘Times.’ I myself like
this better than the first pair of volumes, chiefly, perhaps, because
it has a more European subject to deal with. I have only detected
one error myself, but it is a very Macaulayesque one. He speaks of
‘the oaks of Magdalen’: they are _elms_. There was no occasion to say
anything but trees, but the temptation to say something particular
was too strong. It makes one distrust all his descriptions, and that
of Glencoe certainly is thoroughly exaggerated without being at all
characteristic.
_To Professor F. J. Child._
London: January 16, 1856.
I hope I shall get your Spenser ballads. I am not enthusiastic, but
the Chaucer I really think you may bring to better shape than anyone
has hitherto done. I like ‘Hiawatha’; and I think it is liked here
generally, and none the worse for being Indian. Are you really, any
of you, going to fight with your ancestors, about Costa Rica, and the
Clayton-Bulwer treaty? I hope not; not even the ambitious Franklin
Pierce himself. But Palmerston is a sad haggler, and may, I dare say,
go on insisting about his Mosquito Protectorate, till he gets a warning.
I am examining among others for appointments in the Engineers and
Artillery, which are open to general competition, and the candidates
examined _inter alia_ in English composition, literature, and history.
Hence, I can more than pay my income tax, and, like the farmers,
rejoice in the war. But at present we all more than half expect peace.
Louis Napoleon is said to be pacific. For many good reasons I also am
pacific; for if the war went on even two years longer, we should kill
Turkey with our kindness, and have to encounter all the difficulties
and disgrace of a partition of her. The sick man is really very sick
after all, and doesn’t get at all better, but rather worse.
_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._
Council Office, Downing Street: September 12, 1856.
My dear Emerson,--_Your_ copy of the ‘English Traits’ has just reached
me. I am very glad to have it, for it is a far prettier book than Mr.
Routledge’s, not to mention any other circumstances. I think you praise
us too highly. I was anxious for more rebuke and profitable reprimand.
I don’t think your friend who said that no ill-dressed person ever
came to church spoke within proper bounds. The labouring country
population do to a certain extent come to church, and you may see
old beggar-looking people in the cathedrals on week-days. The rural
population in agricultural parts belongs to the Church and attends ‘at
times.’ It is the town church that is so entirely abandoned to the
upper and middle people.
Charles Norton showed me ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which certainly seems
remarkable, but is it not rather a waste of power and observation? The
tree is tapped, and not left to bear flower and fruit in perfect form
as it should. This standing aside and looking on does not seem to me to
be the thing that really produces.
_To Professor F. J. Child._
London: November 13, 1856.
I must send a few lines to thank you for the Spenser, which I am very
much pleased to have. I am only sorry that the notes are so very
unobtrusive.
How is Cambridge? which Lowell reports so changed that he should not
have known it. I still retain a dollar note, with the portraiture of
the college buildings, flanked by the faces of Judge Story and some
other eminence; but all this I suppose, eminences included, will have
become obsolete by this time.
Here there is nothing very new, nor anything particularly true, to
tell. Until the next French revolution all things will continue.
Meantime, _omnes omnia mala dicere_, we anticipate no good. Charles
Norton dines with us this evening, valedictorily.
I have been reading pretty nearly through Crabbe lately. Have you
republished Crabbe? If not, you ought to do so. There is no one more
purely English (in the Dutch manner), no one who better represents
the general result through the country of the last century. His
descriptions remind even me of things I used to see and hear of in my
boyhood. And sometimes, though rarely, he has really the highest merit,
_e.g._ Ruth, in the ‘Tales of the Hall.’
_To Charles Norton, Esq._
London: January 22, 1857.
We are here going on much as usual, occupied with nothing else but
commerce and the money market. I do not think anyone is thinking
audibly of anything else. Some disaster, perhaps, in the realm of Dost
Mahomed may startle us out of our mercantile composure, but at present
the only danger we care to think about is that of being garotted,
and the main business of the new Parliament will be to see about
transportation of possible garotters.
I have read with more pleasure than anything I have seen lately
Kane’s ‘Arctic Explorations,’ which is certainly a wonderful story,
and the book, moreover, very well got up at Philadelphia. I think
I did see Kane at Boston in the spring before he started; I have
a distinct image of his figure. The whole narrative is, I think,
very characteristic of the difference between the English and the
American-English habits of command and obedience.
The first volume of Plutarch is to appear next month. I think the later
volumes are much better, or at least less open to criticism. The life
of Pericles was wretchedly done in the Dryden, and ought to have been
rewritten. Plutarch’s best life is Antony, I think.
_To the same._
London: August 1857.
I hope you really did arrive in Boston safe and sound. Our parliament
is at last going away. Indian news appears to create no sort of alarm,
scarcely so much as anxiety; for one reason, people _must_ take their
holiday even from their anxieties. The atrocities are of course felt
pretty strongly.
This town is hot, dusty, and of ill-odour, and very different from
Westmoreland, where we were together last.
September 3.
News from India, I think, is getting to be felt more seriously.
October 31.
Well, Delhi is taken, which is a happy thing, though one dreads to hear
of the details. Captures of cities are horrible at the best, and this
cannot have been at the best, with wild Sikhs, and no quarter, and a
wealthy and luxurious metropolis.
If you have read the letters in the ‘Times,’ you will have noticed
Indophilus, _i.e._ Sir Charles Trevelyan (who ought, in proper Greek,
to call himself Philindus; Indophilus would be more properly ‘beloved
of the Hindoos’). Leadenhall Street is full of the humane feeling, and
would back up Lord Canning’s proclamation, and Mr. Grant’s Allahabad
releases, with all its influence. It may be right, but it is not
discreet; it is not possible yet to enforce clemency. They should have
waited till Delhi had fallen, and Lucknow been relieved. So, at least,
we think here. The Company, however, is sadly at a discount, and will
have hard work to maintain any of its power. The War Department, I
believe, is very hard upon it. Sir Robert Vivian, who commanded the
Turkish Contingent, and who is one of the directors appointed by the
Crown, spoke the other day of the outbreak at Meerut and Delhi as a
thing that ought to have been put down at once. He believes there was
no sort of general conspiracy on foot, and urges the irregular and
utterly indiscreet way in which the regiments have mutinied, here
and there, and at the worst chosen times and places. Neill commanded
a brigade under him in the Crimea. He quite disapproved of Neill’s
outrages on the caste feeling at Cawnpore. I confess I don’t. I think
we may break down caste one way or other, and ally ourselves with the
Sikhs and the Buddhists of Nepaul, &c., whose religions are reasonable
and comparatively unceremonial.
I don’t believe Christianity can spread far in Asia unless it
will allow men more than one wife, which isn’t likely yet, out of
Utah. But I believe the old Brahmin touch-not-and-taste-not, and
I-am-holier-than-thou-because-I-don’t-touch-and-taste, may be got rid
of. As for Mahometanism, it is a crystallised theism, out of which no
vegetation can come. I doubt its being good even for the central negro.
_To J. R. Lowell, Esq., Cambridge._
Downing Street: January 5, 1858.