My Dear Friend,--Three weeks ago I received a letter from you
following another in the week before, which I should have
immediately acknowledged but that I was promised a private
opportunity for the 25th of April, by which time I promised
myself to send you sheets of accounts. I had also written you
from New York about the middle of March. But now I suppose Mr.
Grinnell--a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in Providence,
R.I., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and,
though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such--
is packing his trunk to go to England. He offered to carry any
letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to Providence
I was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning Thomas Carlyle,
I thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters,
and companions' sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that
wonderful man. Let him see thy face and pass on his way. I who
cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must
even betake me to this paper to repay the best I can the love of
the Scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more.
Your letter announces _Wilhelm Meister,_ Sterling's _Poems,_ and
_Chartism._ I am very rich, or am to be. But Kennet is no
Mercury. _Wilhelm_ and _Sterling_ have not yet made their
appearance, though diligently inquired after by Stearns Wheeler
and me. Little and Brown now correspond with Longman, not with
Kennet. But they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived.
_Chartism_ arrived at Concord by mail not until one of the last
days of March, though dated by you, I think, the 21st of
December. I returned home on the 3d of April, and found it
waiting. All that is therein said is well and strongly said, and
as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot
choose but carry them whithersoever men go. And yet I thought
the book itself instructed me to look for more. We seemed to
have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and
humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever
probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have
been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a
preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is
riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have
influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent
it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London
book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it.
Their estimate is:--
Printing page for page with copy ....... $63.35
Paper .....................................44.00
Binding .................................. 90.00
Total .................................... $197.35
Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound.
The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller's commission
twenty percent on the Retail price. The author's profit fifteen
cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published,--
no unlikely event,--to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it
at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days.
I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am
expecting hourly from Munroe's clerk an entire account of
R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the
facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his
craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful
experiments myself.
I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord
out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture
that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be
possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our
advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find
what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that
betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I
shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine,
that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still
extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men
read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek
Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before
such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a
better, certainly a bigger.--I am sad to hear that Sterling sails
again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to
him, as his letter was very welcome to me. I will not promise
again until I do it. I received a note last week forwarded by
Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good
messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few
friends of mine there. But my brother writes me that he had left
New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings.
I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face.
_22 April._--Last evening came true the promised account drawn up
by Munroe's clerk, Chapman. I have studied it with more zeal
than success. An account seems an ingenious way of burying
facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. I am
far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as I have
promised it so long, I will send it now, and study a copy of it
at my leisure. It is intended to begin where the last account I
sent you, viz. of _French Revolution,_ ended, with a balance of
$9.53 in your favor.... I send you also a paper which Munroe drew
up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the
first and second volumes [of the _Miscellanies_] were concerned,
the result had accorded with the promise that you should have
$1,000 profit from the edition. We prosper marvelously on paper,
but the realized benefit loiters. Will you now set some friend
of yours in Fraser's shop at work on this paper, and see if this
statement is true and transparent. I trust the Munroe firm,--
chiefly Nichols, the clerical partner,--and yet it is a duty to
understand one's own affair. When I ask, at each six months'
reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still
remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent
profits at last. By sending you this account I make it entirely
an affair between you and them. You will have all the facts
which any of us know. I am only concerned as having advanced the
sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper
and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for
Munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. For
the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. One word
more and I have done with this matter, which shall not be weary
if it comes to good,--the account of the London five hundred
_French Revolution_ is not yet six months old, and so does not
come in. Neither does that of the second edition of the first
and second volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ for the same reason.
They will come in due time. I have very good hope that my friend
Margaret Fuller's Journal--after many false baptisms now saying
it will be called _The Dial,_ and which is to appear in July--
will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you
have had. I will see that it goes to you when the sun first
shines on its face. You asked me if I read German, and I forget
if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume
of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else:
but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time.
There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books,
least of all on _his_ books; but in a lecture on Literature, in
my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject,
and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and
send it to you? I know not.
A Bronson Alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has
come to Concord with his wife and three children and taken a
cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of
God and his own spade. I see that some of the Education people
in England have a school called "Alcott House" after my friend.
At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was
ever Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks, and I am
glad and proud of my neighbor. He is interested more than need
is in the Editor Heraud. So do not fail to tell me of him. Of
Landor I would gladly know your knowledge. And now I think I
will release your eyes.
Yours always,
R.W. Emerson