My Dear Sir,--There are some purposes we delay long to execute
simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such
an one has been for many weeks, I may say months, my design of
writing you an epistle.
Some chance wind of Fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years
ago, as the author of papers which I had already distinguished
(as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of English
periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound
essays of the day,--the works of a man of Faith as well as
Intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the
despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to
hope and to speak sincerely. Like somebody in _Wilhelm Meister_,
I said: This person has come under obligations to me and to all
whom he has enlightened. He knows not how deeply I should grieve
at his fall, if, in that exposed England where genius always
hears the Devil's whisper, "All these kingdoms will I give thee,"
his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age.
When therefore I found myself in Europe, I went to your house
only to say, "Faint not,--the word you utter is heard, though in
the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails."
Drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers I went to see his
person, and as he might say his environment at Craigenputtock.
Yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much
hope of gratifying him,--in the spirit of "If I love you, what is
that to you?" Well, it happened to me that I was delighted with
my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon
the sea in my homeward voyage I remembered with joy the favored
condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his
fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of
happiness;--not that I had the remotest hope that he should so
far depart from his theories as to expect happiness. On my
arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I had
seen and heard, and they with joy received it.
In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I
have now received four numbers of the _Sartor Resartus,_ for
whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar
is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever
were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by
himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be
offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund.
And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms,
our politics, and schools, and religion. I say _our,_ for it
cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written
for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the
brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings.
But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle
chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the
form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not
appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever
wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if
society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it
beforehand with an objection to the form. Can it be that this
humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience,
and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll
sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon
one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore
Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then admit, as you
will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that
all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that
(at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide
your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond
graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one
revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your
epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved
glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of
variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us
the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should
lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths.
Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they
can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is
rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to
consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I
look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy
of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as
resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words
will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find
suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath
the plague in his house"? Yet all men are _potentially_ (as
Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not
in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;*
and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of
diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.
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* This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition
of _Sartor Resartus_ have been sold.
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I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it
is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more
than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in
this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't
is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I
would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly
retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately
espy you as a man, myself as another.
And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my
temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of
will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of
Necessity, and _could_ the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best
Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must
not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato
has erred?
I wish I could gratify you with any pleasing news of the
regeneration, education, prospects, of man in this continent.
But your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted, that present
evils give you less solicitude. In the last six years government
in the United States has been fast becoming a job, like great
charities. A most unfit person in the Presidency has been doing
the worst things; and the worse he grew, the more popular. Now
things seem to mend. Webster, a good man and as strong as if he
were a sinner, begins to find himself the centre of a great and
enlarging party and his eloquence incarnated and enacted by them;
yet men dare not hope that the majority shall be suddenly
unseated. I send herewith a volume of Webster's that you may see
his speech on Foot's Resolutions, a speech which the Americans
have never done praising. I have great doubts whether the book
reaches you, as I know not my agents. I shall put with it the
little book of my Swedenborgian druggist,* of whom I told you.
And if, which is hardly to be hoped, any good book should be
thrown out of our vortex of trade and politics, I shall not fail
to give it the same direction.
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* _Observations on the Growth of the Mind,_ by Sampson Reed,
first published in 1825. A fifth edition of this thoughtful
little treatise was published in 1865. Mr. Reed was a graduate
of Harvard College in 1818; he died in 1880, at the age
of eighty.
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I need not tell you, my dear sir, what pleasure a letter from you
would give me when you have a few moments to spare to so remote a
friend. If any word in my letter should provoke you to a reply,
I shall rejoice in my sauciness. I am spending the summer in the
country, but my address is Boston, care of Barnard, Adams, & Co.
Care of O. Rich, London. Please do make my affectionate respects
to Mrs. Carlyle, whose kindness I shall always gratefully
remember. I depend upon her intercession to insure your writing
to me. May God grant you both his best blessing.
Your friend,
R. Waldo Emerson