"Three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner,
procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here,
entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music
now, which does me no little good. Secondly, Major Irving, of
Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at
Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered
us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even
tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again.
Money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering
us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner
applicant, 'I cannot, sir; it is let.' Our third happiness was
the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson,
from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from
his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had
an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other
than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most
lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed
till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's
content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says
it is the first journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to
Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a
cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful."
On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the
following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland.
"I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became
acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of
hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us
most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely;
that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the
meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle
does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to
be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world.
I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage
in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature
(say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called
'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent
to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. My own
feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess
from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives
and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own
place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent
men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the
popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon,
--are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates,
the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and
Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has
given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has
not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even
his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will
cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks
finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much
at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I
could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife,
and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for
a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed
down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of
city society." *
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* _Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England_
By Alexander Ireland. London, 1882, p. 58.
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Twenty-three years later, in his "English Traits," Emerson once
more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of
Carlyle.
"From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came
from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter
which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It
was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles
distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private
carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery
hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart.
Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to
hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world,
unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own
terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary
powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern
accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a
streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. His
talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the
companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs,
and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a
pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not
a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of
Dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics.
"He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his
discourse. Blackwood's was the 'sand magazine'; Fraser's nearer
approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine'; a piece
of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave
of the last sixpence.' When too much praise of any genius
annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by
his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the
poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great
strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and
had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death,
_Qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history. He worships a
man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had
inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle
was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American
principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in
it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart's
book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he
had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own
house dining on roast turkey.
"We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged
Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a
hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to
the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy
was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's
America, an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten
years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who
told him he would find in that language what he wanted.
"He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this
moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the
great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper
is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on
the eve of bankruptcy.
"He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the
selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons
should perform. 'Government should direct poor men what to do.
Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes
it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies
his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres
which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor
Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so
found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.'
"We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then
without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we
sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not
Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the
natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself
against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step
can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the
subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event
affects all the future. 'Christ died on the tree that built
Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time
has only a relative existence.'
"He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's
appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said,
wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge
machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's boy brings
muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all
the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it
turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially
one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom
London had well served."
Such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between
Carlyle and Emerson. What place this friendship held in the
lives of both, the following Correspondence shows.
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