At the beginning of his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson, writing of
his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says
that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of
whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe. Carlyle's name
was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson's mental
attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius,
and felt sympathy with it.
The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in
English thought and imagination. All the great literary
reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron,
Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say.
The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found
expression. But toward the end of this time a series of
articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh
and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another
on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled "Characteristics,"
displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy
with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its
time, and capable of giving them expression. Here was a writer
whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words
stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet
Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his
contemporaries.
He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope,"
at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his
Journal as follows: "I am left here the solitariest, stranded,
most helpless creature that I have been for many years.....
Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is
quite other than an article... In _all_ times there is a word
which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would
thrill their inmost soul. But the way to find that word? The
way to speak it when found?" The next entry in his Journal shows
that Carlyle had found the word. It is the name "Ralph Waldo
Emerson," the record of Emerson's unexpected visit. "I shall
never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards,
"who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds
as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us,
and left me weeping that it was only one day."
At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less
solitary than Carlyle; he was still less known; his name had
been unheard by his host in the desert. But his voice was soon
to become also the voice of a leader. With temperaments sharply
contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances
radically different, with views of life and of the universe
widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in
sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same
foundation of principle. In their independence and their
sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in
spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. Their modes of
thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent,
and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference,
they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata,
miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one"