My Dear Emerson,--About a week ago I wrote to you, after too long
a silence. Since that there has another Letter come, with a
Draft of L100 in it, and other comfortable items not pecuniary;
a line in acknowledgment of the money is again very clearly among
my duties. Yesterday, on my first expedition up to Town, I gave
the Paper to Fraser; who is to present the result to me in the
shape of cash tomorrow. Thanks, and again thanks. This L100, I
think, nearly clears off for me the outlay of the second _French
Revolution;_ an ill-printed, ill-conditioned publication, the
prime cost of which, once all lying saved from the Atlantic
whirlpools and hard and fast in my own hand, it was not perhaps
well done to venture thitherward again. To the new trouble of my
friends withal! We will now let the rest of the game play itself
out as it can; and my friends, and my one friend, must not take
more trouble than their own kind feelings towards me will reward.
The Books, the _Dial_ No. 4, and Appleton's pirated _Lectures,_
are still expected from Green. In a day or two he will send
them: if not, we will jog him into wakefulness, and remind him
of the _Parcels Delivery Company,_ which carries luggage of all
kinds, like mere letters, many times a day, over all corners of
our Babylon. In this, in the universal British _Penny Post,_ and
a thing or two of that sort, men begin to take advantage of their
crowded ever-whirling condition in these days, which brings such
enormous disadvantages along with it _un_sought for.--
Bibliopolist Appleton does not seem to be a "Hero,"--except after
his own fashion. He is one of those of whom the Scotch say,
"Thou wouldst do little for God if the Devil were dead!" The
Devil is unhappily dead, in that international bibliopolic
province, and little hope of his reviving for some time;
whereupon this is what Squire Appleton does. My respects to him
even in the Bedouin department, I like to see a complete man, a
clear decisive Bedouin.
For the rest, there is one man who ought to be apprised that I
can now stand robbery a little better; that I am no longer so
very poor as I once was. In Fraser himself there do now lie
vestiges of money! I feel it a great relief to see, for a year
or two at least, the despicable bugbear of Beggary driven out of
my sight; for _which_ small mercy, at any rate, be the Heavens
thanked. Fraser himself, for these two editions, One thousand
copies each, of the Lectures and _Sartor,_ pays me down on the
nail L150; consider that miracle! Of the other Books which he
is selling on a joint-stock basis, the poor man likewise promises
something, though as yet, ever since New-Year's-day, I cannot
learn what, owing to a grievous sickness of his,--for which
otherwise I cannot but be sorry, poor Fraser within the Cockney
limits being really a worthy, accurate, and rather friendly
creature. So you see me here provided with bread and water for a
season,--it is but for a season one needs either water or bread,
--and rejoice with me accordingly. It is the one useful, nay, I
will say the one _innoxious,_ result of all this trumpeting,
reviewing, and dinner-invitationing; from which I feel it
indispensable to withdraw myself more and more resolutely, and
altogether count it as a thing not there. Solitude is what I
long and pray for. In the babble of men my own soul goes all to
babble: like soil you were forever _screening,_ tumbling over
with shovels and riddles; in _which_ soil no fruit can grow! My
trust in Heaven is, I shall yet get away "to some cottage by the
sea-shore"; far enough from all the mad and mad making things
that dance round me here, which I shall then look on only as a
theatrical phantasmagory, with an eye only to the _meaning_ that
lies hidden in it. You, friend Emerson, are to be a Farmer, you
say, and dig Earth for your living? Well; I envy you that as
much as any other of your blessednesses. Meanwhile, I sit shrunk
together here in a small _dressing-closet,_ aloft in the back
part of the house, excluding all cackle and cockneys; and,
looking out over the similitude of a May grove (with little brick
in it, and only the minarets of Westminster and gilt cross of St.
Paul's visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of London
softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will
betide. I am busy with Luther in one Marheinecke's very long-
winded Book. I think of innumerable things; steal out westward
at sunset among the Kensington lanes; would this _May_ weather
last, I might be as well here as in any attainable place. But
June comes; the rabid dogs get muzzles; all is brown-parched,
dusty, suffocating, desperate, and I shall have to run! Enough
of all that. On my paper there comes, or promises to come,
as yet simply nothing at all. Patience;--and yet who can
be patient?
Had you the happiness to see yourself not long ago, in _Fraser's
Magazine,_ classed _nominatim_ by an emphatic earnest man, not
without a kind of splay-footed strength and sincerity,--among the
chief Heresiarchs of the--world? Perfectly right. Fraser was
very anxious to know what I thought of the Paper,--"by an
entirely unknown man in the country." I counseled "that there
was something in him, which he ought to improve by holding his
peace for the next five years."
Adieu, dear Emerson; there is not a scrap more of Paper. All
copies of your _Essays_ are out at use; with what result we
shall perhaps see. As for me I love the Book and man, and their
noble rustic herohood and manhood:--one voice as of a living man
amid such jabberings of galvanized corpses: _Ach Gott!_
Yours evermore,
T. Carlyle