My Dear Emerson,--Two Letters of yours are here, the latest of
them for above a week: I am a great sinner not to have answered
sooner. My way of life has been a thing of petty confusions,
uncertainties; I did not till a short while ago see any definite
highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me,
even for the next few months. Partly I was busy; partly too, as
my wont is, I was half asleep:--perhaps you do not know the
_combination_ of these two predicables in one and the same
unfortunate human subject! Seeing my course now for a little, I
must speak.
According to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that I
do _not_ go to America for the present. Alas, no! It was but a
dream of the fancy; projected, like the French shoemaker's fairy
shoes, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The nervous flutter of May
Lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of
all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for
me; that I ought devoutly to thank Heaven there is no absolute
compulsion laid on me at present to speak! My notion in general
was but an absurd one: I fancied I might go across the sea, open
my lips wide; go raging and lecturing over the Union like a very
lion (too like a frothy mountebank) for several months;--till I
had gained, say a thousand pounds; therewith to retire to some
small, quiet cottage by the shore of the sea, at least three
hundred miles from this, and sit silent there for ten years to
come, or forever and a day perhaps! That was my poor little day
dream;--incapable of being realized. It appears, I have to stay
here, in this brick Babylon; tugging at my chains, which will
not break for me: the less I tug, the better. Ah me! On the
whole, I have written down my last course of lectures, and shall
probably print them; and you, with the aid of proof-sheets, may
again print them; that will be the easiest way of lecturing to
America! It is truly very weak to speak about that matter so
often and long, that matter of coming to you; and never to come.
_Frey ist das Herz,_ as Goethe says, _doch ist der Fuss
gebunden._ After innumerable projects, and invitations towards
all the four winds, for this summer, I have ended about a week
ago by--simply going nowhither, not even to see my dear aged
Mother, but sitting still here under the Autumn sky such as I
have it; in these vacant streets I am lonelier than elsewhere,
have more chance for composure than elsewhere! With Sterne's
starling I repeat to myself, "I can't get out."--Well, hang it,
stay in then; and let people alone of it!
I have parted with my horse; after an experiment of seven or
eight months, most assiduously prosecuted, I came to the
conclusion that, though it did me some good, there was not
_enough_ of good to warrant such equestrianism: so I plunged
out, into green England, in the end of July, for a whole week of
riding, an _explosion_ of riding, therewith to end the business,
and send off my poor quadruped for sale. I rode over Surrey,--
with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very
singular to see: over Sussex, down to Pevensey where the Norman
Bastard landed; I saw Julius Hare (whose _Guesses at Truth_ you
perhaps know), saw Saint Dunstan's stithy and hammer, at
Mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the Devil by the
nose;--finally I got home again, a right wearied man; sent my
horse off to be sold, as I say; and finished the writing of my
Lectures on Heroes. This is all the rustication I have had, or
am like to have. I am now over head and ears in _Cromwellian_
Books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see
if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance
with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left
forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness
were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man.
Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve
months, actually, as it were, to _see_ that this Cromwell was one
of the greatest souls ever born of the English kin; a great
amorphous semi-articulate _Baresark;_ very interesting to me. I
grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here
a glimpse and there a glimpse. This is to be my reading for
some time.
The _Dial_ No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest;
it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land;
pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet--you
know me--for me it is _too_ ethereal, speculative, theoretic:
all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue,
unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all
things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to
have my sympathy. I have a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf,
sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings,
even Hebrew ones,--Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations
eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in! Nevertheless go
on with this, my Brothers. The world has many most strange
utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and
this surely is worth listening to among the rest. Do you know
English Puseyism? Good Heavens! in the whole circle of History
is there the parallel of that,--a true worship rising at this
hour of the day for Bands and the Shovel-hat? Distraction
surely, incipience of the "final deliration" enters upon the poor
old English Formulism that has called itself for some two
centuries a Church. No likelier symptom of its being soon about
to leave the world has come to light in my time. As if King
Macready should quit Covent-Garden, go down to St. Stephen's, and
insist on saying, _Le roi le veut!_--I read last night the
wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism
on myself, in the _Quarterly Review._ It seems to be by one
Sewell, an Oxford doctor of note, one of the chief men among the
Pusey-and-Newman Corporation. A good man, and with good notions,
whom I have noted for some years back. He finds me a very worthy
fellow; "true, most true,"--except where I part from Puseyism,
and reckon the shovel-hat to be an old bit of felt; then I am
false, most false. As the Turks say, _Allah akbar!_
I forget altogether what I said of Landor; but I hope I did not
put him in the Heraud category: a cockney windbag is one thing;
a scholar and bred man, though incontinent, explosive, half-true,
is another. He has not been in town, this year; Milnes
describes him as _eating_ greatly at Bath, and perhaps even
cooking! Milnes did get your Letter: I told you? Sterling has
the Concord landscape; mine is to go upon the wall here, and
remind me of many things. Sterling is busy writing; he is to
make Falmouth do, this winter, and try to dispense with Italy.
He cannot away with my doctrine of _Silence;_ the good John. My
Wife has been better than usual all summer; she begins to shiver
again as winter draws nigh. Adieu, dear Emerson. Good be with
you and yours. I must be far gone when I cease to love you.
"The stars are above us, the graves are under us." Adieu.
--T. Carlyle