5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London
7 November, 1838
My Dear Friend,--It is all right; all your Letters with their
inclosures have arrived in due succession: the last, inquiring
after the fate of the others, came this morning. I was in
Scotland, as you partly conjecture; I wrote to you already
(though not without blamable delay), from my Mother's house in
Annandale, a confused scrawl, which I hope has already got to
hand, and quieted your kind anxieties. I am as well as usual in
health, my Wife better than usual; nothing is amiss, except my
negligence and indolence, which has put you to this superfluous
solicitude on my account. However, I have an additional Letter
by it; you must pardon me, you must not grudge me that
undeserved pleasure, the reward of evil-doing. I may well say,
you are a blessing to me on this Earth; no Letter comes from you
with other than good tidings,--or can come while you live there
to love me.
The Bill was thrust duly into Baring's brass slit "for
acceptance," on my return hither some three weeks ago; and will,
no doubt, were the days of grace run, come out in the shape of
Fifty Pounds Sterling; a very curious product indeed. Do you
know what I think of doing with it? _Dyspepsia,_ my constant
attendant in London, is incapable of help in my case by any
medicine or appliance except one only, Riding on horseback. With
a good horse to whirl me over the world for two hours daily, I
used to keep myself supportably well. Here, the maintenance of a
Horse far transcends my means; yet it seems hard I should not
for a little while be in a kind of approximate health in this
Babylon where I have my bread to seek it is like swimming with a
millstone round your neck,--ah me! In brief, I am about half
resolved to buy myself a sharp little nag with Twenty of these
Transatlantic Pounds, and ride him till the other Thirty be
eaten: I will call the creature "Yankee," and kind thoughts of
those far away shall be with me every time I mount him. Will not
that do? My Wife says it is the best plan I have had for years,
and strongly urges it on. My kind friends!
As to those copies of the Carlyle Miscellanies, I unfortunately
still can say nothing, except what was said in the former
(Scotch) letter, that you must proceed in the business with an
eye to America and not to us. My Booksellers, Saunders and
Ottley, have no money for me, no definite offer in money to make
for those Two Hundred copies, of which you seem likely to make
money if we simply leave them alone. I have asked these
Booksellers, I have asked Fraser too: What will you _give me in
ready money_ for Two Hundred and Fifty copies of that work, sell
it afterwards as you can? They answer always, We must see it
first. Now the copy long ago sent me has never come to hand; I
have asked for it of Kennet, but without success; I have nothing
for it but to wait the winds and chances. Meanwhile Saunders and
Ottley want forsooth a _Sketches of German Literature_ in three
volumes: then a _Miscellanies_ in three volumes: that is their
plan of publishing an English edition; and the outlook they hold
out for me is certain trouble in this matter, and recompense
entirely uncertain. I think on the whole it is extremely likely
I shall apply to you for Two Hundred and Fifty copies (that is
their favorite number) of these four volumes, (nay, if it be of
any moment, you can bind me down to it _now,_ and take it for
sure,) but I cannot yet send you the title-page; no bookseller
purchasing till "we see it first." But after all, will it suit
America to print an _unequal_ number of your two pairs of
volumes? Do not the two together make one work? On the whole,
consider that I shall in all likelihood want Two Hundred and
Fifty copies, and consider it certain if that will serve the
enterprise: we must leave it here today. I will stir in it
now, however, and take no rest till in one way or other you do
get a title-page from me, or some definite deliverance on the
matter. O Athenians, what a trouble I _give,_ having _got_
your applauses!
Kennet the Bookseller gave me yesterday (on my way to "the City"
with that Brother of mine, the Italian Doctor who is here at
present and a great lover of yours) ten copies of your Dartmouth
Oration: we read it over dinner in a chop-house in Bucklersbury,
amid the clatter of some fifty stand of knives and forks; and a
second time more leisurely at Chelsea here. A right brave
Speech; announcing, in its own way, with emphasis of full
conviction, to all whom it may concern, that great forgotten
truth, _Man is still man._ May it awaken a pulsation under the
ribs of Death! I believe the time is come for such a Gospel.
They must speak it out who have it,--with what audience there may
be. I have given away two copies this morning; I will take care
of the rest. Go on, and speed.--And now where is the heterodox
Divinity one, which awakens such "tempest in a washbowl," brings
Goethe, Transcendentalism, and Carlyle into question, and on the
whole evinces "what [difference] New England also makes between
_Pan_-theism and _Pot_-theism"? I long to see that; I expect to
congratulate you on that too. Meanwhile we will let the washbowl
storm itself out; and Emerson at Concord shall recognize it for
a washbowl storming, and hold on his way. As to my share in it,
grieve not for half an instant. Pantheism, Pottheism, Mydoxy,
Thydoxy, are nothing at all to me; a weariness the whole jargon,
which I avoid speaking of, decline listening to: _Live,_ for
God's sake, with what Faith thou couldst get; leave off
_speaking_ about Faith! Thou knowest it not. Be _silent,_ do
not speak.--As to you, my friend, you are even to go on, giving
still harder shocks if need be; and should I come into censure
by means of you, there or here, think that I am proud of my
company; that, as the boy Hazlitt said after hearing Coleridge,
"I will go with that man"; or, as our wild Burns has it,
"Wi' sic as he, where'er he be,
May I be saved or damned!"
Oime! what a foolish goose of a world this is! If it were not
[for] here and there an articulate-speaking man, one would be
all-too lonely.
This is nothing at all like the letter I meant to write you; but
I will write again, I trust, in few days, and the first paragraph
shall, if possible, hold all the business. I have much to tell
you, which perhaps is as well not written. O that I did see you
face to face! But the time shall come, if Heaven will. Why not
you come over, since I cannot? There is a room here, there is
welcome here, and two friends always. It must be done one way or
the other. I will take, care of your messages to Sterling. He
is in Florence; he was the Author of _Montaigne._* The _Foreign
Quarterly_ Reviewer of _Strauss_ I take to be one Blackie, an
Advocate in Edinburgh, a frothy, semi-confused disciple of mine
and other men's; I guess this, but I have not read the Article:
the man Blackie is from Aberdeen, has been roaming over Europe,
and carries more sail than ballast. Brother John, spoken of
above, is knocking at the door even now; he is for Italy again,
we expect, in few days, on a better appointment: know that you
have a third friend in him under this roof,--a man who quarrels
with me all day in a small way, and loves me with the whole soul
of him. My Wife demanded to have "room for one line." What she
is to write I know not, except it be what she has said, holding
up the pamphlet, "Is it not a noble thing? None of them all but
he," &c., &c. I will write again without delay when the stray
volumes arrive; before that if they linger. Commend me to all
the kind household of Concord: Wife, Mother, and Son.
Ever yours,
T. Carlyle
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* See _ante,_ p. 184. Sterling's essay on Montaigne was his
first contribution, in 1837, to the _London and Westminster
Review._ It is reprinted in "Essays and Tales, by John Sterling,
collected and edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius
Charles Hare," London, 1848, Vol. I. p. 129.
----------
_"Forgotten you?"_ O, no indeed! If there were nothing else to
remember you by, I should never forget the Visitor, 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. When I think of America, it
is of you,--neither Harriet Martineau nor any one else succeeds
in giving me a more extended idea of it. When I wish to see
America it is still you, and those that are yours. I read all
that you write with an interest which I feel in no other writing
but my Husband's,--or it were nearer the truth to say there is no
other writing of living men but yours and his that I _can_ read.
God Bless you and Weib and Kind. Surely I shall some day see you
all.
Your affectionate
Jane Carlyle