My Dear Emerson,--A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by
palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some
week or two. I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a
settlement effected. The traveling Sumner being about to return
into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a
message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to
send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a
D'Orsay _Portrait_ of myself, I see not what there is! Do you
read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German
volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world.
Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you
would.--As to the D'Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity:
Count D'Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the
Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither
one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement
of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown,
grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and
contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man
worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts;
every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature
_likeness_ of some object or other; a dashing man, who might,
some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte's
Marshals, and _is,_ alas,--Count D'Orsay! The Portrait he dashed
off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor);
we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to
undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.--Now
if I do not send you the Portrait, after all?
Fraser's account of the _Miscellanies_ stood legibly extended
over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to
look upon. I trouble _you_ only with the result. Two Hundred
and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two
"imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and
sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November,
he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. Well,
of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that
belonged to me was L239,--the L261 had been the expense of
handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in
the coin for it! "Rules of the Trade";--it is a Trade, one would
surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However,--not
to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of
it,--let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America,
that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly
the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. Without
Friendship, without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there had been no
sixpence of that money here. Thanks, and again thanks. This
earth is not an unmingled ball of Mud, after all. Sunbeams
visit it;--mud _and_ sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old
consisted of.--I hasten away from the Ledger, with the mere good-
news that James is altogether content with the "progress" of all
these Books, including even the well-abused _Chartism_ Book. We
are just on the point of finishing our English reprint of the
_Miscellanies;_ of which I hope to send you a copy before long.
And now why do not _you_ write to me? Your Lectures must be done
long ago. Or are you perhaps writing a Book? I shall be right
glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry
yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in
you is best. Certainly, I think, a right Book does lie in the
man! It is to be remembered also always that the true value is
determined by what we _do not_ write! There is nothing truer
than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. He
whom it concerns can consider it.--You have doubtless seen
Milnes's review of you. I know not that you will find it to
strike direct upon the secret of _Emerson,_ to hit the nail on
the head, anywhere at all; I rather think not. But it is
gently, not unlovingly done;--and lays the first plank of a kind
of pulpit for you here and throughout all Saxondom: a thing
rather to be thankful for. It on the whole surpassed my
expectations. Milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a
Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of
a man.
You asked me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely
vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a
loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled
greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as "wavering in the most
astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing." To me
he is chiefly remarkable as being still--with his entirely
enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty--out of Bedlam.
He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago; and
has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an
empty bladder, and calling on the world to "List the Music of the
spheres." He escapes _assassination,_ as I calculate, chiefly by
being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.--You
cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing
you. John Mill said, "I forgive him freely for interpreting the
Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the _h's!_" Really
this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in
your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, "The
highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible."--
"That is precisely what I am doing!" answered the aspiring,
unaspirating.*--Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We
met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall,
broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes;
of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by
the most perfect breeding,--expressing itself in high-colored
superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a
dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no
extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual
faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of
temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be
wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or
the other of the object; and _sides_ of an object are all that
he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs
over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him
painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing
into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in
the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he
strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the
fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a
distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor
Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy,
with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has
honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity
for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary
sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says
always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that!
They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a
perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such
hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he
has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to
him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and
undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion's-_providers;_
but consider them a worthless species.--When will you write,
then? Consider my frightful outlook with a Course of Lectures to
give "On Heroes and Hero-worship,"--from Odin to Robert Burns!
My Wife salutes you all. Good be in the Concord Household!
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle
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* There is an account of Heraud by an admirer in the _Dial_ for
October, 1842, p. 241. It contrasts curiously and instructively
with Carlyle's sketch.
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