My Dear. Emerson,--This, morning your new Letter, of the 15th
August, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old: thanks to the
gods and steam-demons! I already, perhaps six weeks ago,
answered your former Letter,--acknowledging the manna-gift of the
L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been
lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself.
Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of
petty business: however, I will throw you one word, were it only
to lighten my own heart a little. You are a kind friend to me,
and a precious;--and when I mourn over the impotence of Human
Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to
stand _dumb,_ cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his
unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I
could soonest _try_ to speak with,--were I within reach of him!
Well; we must be content. A pen is a pen, and worth something;
though it expresses about as much of a _man's_ meaning perhaps as
the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse's meaning; a very
poor expression indeed!
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* This letter of 15th August is missing.
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Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be
carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book! But I
have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute
with the _Manes,_ as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever
more see day. I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help
it. One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot
write _two Books at once;_ cannot be in the seventeenth century
and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which
excels even that of the Irishman's bird: "Nobody but a bird can
be in two places at once!" For my heart is sick and sore in
behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the
one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new
Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand
related to me, the seventeenth _worthless_ except precisely in so
far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try
that enterprise! Heaven help me.--I believe at least that I
ought _to hold my tongue;_ more especially at present.
Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the _Dial._ Had such
a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing
through my head,--march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn,
scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing
through Coventry with such a set!)--some one of which, snatched
out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might
perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the _Dial._
In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your _Dial,_ and
yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of
dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in
which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring
away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,--into
perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual
frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression
you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof.
Surely I could wish you _returned_ into your own poor nineteenth
century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but
gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to
evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;--that
seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so
easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes
of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the
everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet,
and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy
for _you,_ for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To
inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!--"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"--
Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to
his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It
is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning,
dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation
of ours. Come back into it, I tell you;--and so for the present
will "stamp" no more....
Adieu, my friend; I must not add a word more. My Wife is out on
a visit; it is to bring her back that I am now setting forth for
Suffolk. I hope to see Ely too, and St. Ives, and Huntingdon,
and various _Cromwelliana._ My blessings on the Concord
Household now and always. Commend me expressly to your Wife and
your Mother. Farewell, dear friend.
--T. Carlyle