My Dear Emerson,--Surely I am a sinful man to neglect so long
making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent
Arithmetic you sent me! It is many weeks, perhaps it is months,
since the worthy citizen--your Host as I understood you in some
of your Northern States--stept in here, one mild evening, with
his mild honest face and manners; presented me your Bookseller
Accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into
France. Much has come and gone since then; Letters of yours,
beautiful Disciples of yours:--I pray you forgive me! I have
been lecturing; I have been sick; I have been beaten about in
all ways. Nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that I got
the _Bibliopoliana_ back from Fraser; to whom, as you
recommended, I, totally inadequate like yourself to understand
such things, had straightway handed them for examination. I
always put off writing till Fraser should have spoken. I did not
urge him, or he would have spoken any day: there is my sin.
Fraser declares the Accounts to be made out in the most beautiful
manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as
he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of
money. A precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade;
mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet. So he
thinks. The only point on which I heard him make any criticism
was on what he called, if I remember, "the number of Copies
_delivered,_"--that is to say, delivered by the Printer and
Binder as actually available for sale. The edition being of a
Thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are "waste."
Our Printers, it appears, are in the habit of _adding_ one for
every fifty beforehand, whereby the _waste_ is usually made good,
and more; so that in One Thousand there will usually be some
dozen called "Author's copies" over and above. Fraser supposes
your Printers have a different custom. That is all. The rest is
apparently every-way _right;_ is to be received with faith;
with faith, charity, and even hope,--and packed into the bottom
of one's drawer, never to be looked at more except on the
outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men!
In that capacity it shall lie there.
My Lectures were in May, about _Great Men._ The misery of it was
hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful.
I had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience;
as if I had something to tell them, and would tell it them. At
times I felt as if I could, in the end, learn to speak. The
beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager
attention. I meant to tell them, among other things, that man
was still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true
men continued true to this hour,--Odin himself true, and the
Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on
Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet") astonished my worthy friends
beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not
a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his "bastard
Christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than
almost any of you!--Not so much as Oliver Cromwell ("the Hero as
King") would I allow to have been a Quack. All quacks I asserted
to be and to have been Nothing, _chaff_ that would not grow: my
poor Mahomet "was _wheat_ with barn sweepings"; Nature had
tolerantly hidden the barn sweepings; and as to the _wheat,_
behold she had said Yes to it, and it was growing!--On the whole,
I fear I did little but confuse my esteemed audience: I was
amazed, after all their reading of me, to be understood so ill;--
gratified nevertheless to see how the rudest _speech_ of a man's
heart goes into men's hearts, and is the welcomest thing there.
Withal I regretted that I had not six months of preaching,
whereby to learn to preach, and explain things fully! In the
fire of the moment I had all but decided on setting out for
America this autumn, and preaching far and wide like a very lion
there. Quit your paper formulas, my brethren,--equivalent to old
wooden idols, _un_divine as they: in the name of God, understand
that you are alive, and that God is alive! Did the Upholsterer
make this Universe? Were you created by the Tailor? I tell you,
and conjure you to believe me literally, No, a thousand times No!
Thus did I mean to preach, on "Heroes, Hero-worship, and the
Heroic"; in America too. Alas! the fire of determination died
away again: all that I did resolve upon was to write these
Lectures down, and in some way promulgate them farther. Two of
them accordingly are actually written; the Third to be begun on
Monday: it is my chief work here, ever since the end of May.
Whether I go to preach them a second time extempore in America
rests once more with the Destinies. It is a shame to talk so
much about a thing, and have it still hang _in nubibus:_ but I
was, and perhaps am, really nearer doing it than I had ever
before been. A month or two now, I suppose, will bring us back
to the old nonentity again. Is there, at bottom, in the world or
out of it, anything one would like so well, with one's whole
heart _well,_ as PEACE? Is lecturing and noise the way to get at
that? Popular lecturer! Popular writer! If they would
undertake in Chancery, or Heaven's Chancery, to make a wise man
Mahomet Second and Greater, "Mahomet of Saxondom," not reviewed
only, but worshiped for twelve centuries by all Bulldom, Yankee-
doodle-doodom, Felondom New Zealand, under the Tropics and in
part of Flanders,--would he not rather answer: Thank you; but
in a few years I shall be dead, twelve Centuries will have become
Eternity; part of Flanders Immensity: we will sit still here if
you please, and consider what quieter thing we can do! Enough
of this.
Richard Milnes had a Letter from you, one morning lately, when I
met him at old Rogers's. He is brisk as ever; his kindly
_Dilettantism_ looking sometimes as if it would grow a sort of
Earnest by and by. He has a new volume of Poems out: I advised
him to try Prose; he admitted that Poetry would not be generally
read again in these ages,--but pleaded, "It was so convenient for
veiling commonplace!" The honest little heart!--We did not know
what to make of the bright Miss --- here; she fell in love with
my wife;--the _contrary,_ I doubt, with me: my hard realism
jarred upon her beautiful rose-pink dreams. Is not all that very
morbid,--unworthy the children of Odin, not to speak of Luther,
Knox, and the other Brave? I can do nothing with vapors, but
wish them _condensed._ Kennet had a copy of the English
_Miscellanies_ for you a good many weeks ago: indeed, it was
just a day or two _before_ your advice to try Green henceforth.
Has the _Meister_ ever arrived? I received a Controversial
Volume from Mr. Ripley: pray thank him very kindly. Somebody
borrowed the Book from me; I have not yet read it. I did read a
Pamphlet which seems now to have been made part of it. Norton*
surely is a chimera; but what has the whole business they are
jarring about become? As healthy _worshiping_ Paganism is to
Seneca and Company, so is healthy worshiping Christianity to--I
had rather not work the sum!--Send me some swift news of
yourself, dear Emerson. We salute you and yours, in all
heartiness of brotherhood.
Yours ever and always--
T. Carlyle
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* Professor Andrews Norton. The controversy was that occasioned
by Professor Norton's Discourse on "The Latest Form of
Infidelity."
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