"Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner
Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one
apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be
serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and
road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good-will, is
frugality for gods and heroes."
This was the sort of frugality that Thoreau practised in his hut on
Walden Pond, and it is a frugality which has made him famed throughout
the hero-worshipping world.
The charm of Emerson's home life lay largely in his manners, which were
simple, yet faultless. He greeted his friends with all the mildness and
serenity of the very god of repose, and induced in them that most
enjoyable sensation, a feeling of entire contentment with all the world.
No heat, no fret, no hurry, no great call to strenuous exertion to
appear well or make a fine impression. All was ease, calm, unstudied
attention to every little want, and talk fit for the noblest and the
best. He was an example of what he himself honored most.
"I honor that man whose ambition it is, not to win laurels in the
state or the army, not to be a jurist or a naturalist, not to be a
poet or a commander, but to be a master of living well, and to
administer the offices of master or servant, of husband, father,
and friend."
In all these relations Emerson shone resplendently, and in the
old-fashioned relation of neighbor he was always at his best. To the
family of his old friend Alcott he was as a special providence for many
years, and beautiful indeed was the affection in which he was held by
them. When, during Emerson's absence in Europe, his house was partly
burned, his neighbors promptly rebuilt it, ready for his return. Of
these helpers Emerson wrote, in accepting their gift:--
"Judge Hoar has up to this time withheld from me the names of my
benefactors; but you may be sure I shall not rest till I have
learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at night and at
morning."
Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar and the descendant
of scholars,--tall, slender, and with the complexion which is bred in
the alcove and not in the open air. His hair was brown, fine, and thick.
His eyes were of the deepest blue. His mode of living was very simple,
but he was constitutionally fastidious, and very much averse to vulgar
or commonplace companionship. He loved all children and simple-minded
people, and the very babies in Concord knew and loved him. "Incorrigible
spouting Yankee" he called himself; but he was rather a silent man in
reality, and did not care to talk excepting when he had somewhat to say.
He did not prate eternally of silence, as Carlyle did, while wreaking
himself upon speech in the most frantically vehement manner all his
days, but he knew when and how to be silent. The glimpses he gives of
Mrs. Emerson, in the long correspondence with Carlyle, are all of the
most pleasing nature, and his home life was apparently as perfect as
music all his life long. Of the boy Waldo, who died, he was fond of
speaking, and he evidently mourned him very deeply for a long time. Of
his other children he never boasted, but always spoke most kindly. The
most entire revelation that Emerson ever made of himself was doubtless
in the letters to Carlyle; and it must be said that nowhere else has
Carlyle appeared to so good advantage as in this correspondence with
Emerson. One loves the grim, sardonic old man better after seeing that
he could love his friend faithfully and loyally for so many years, and
after reading all the tender and touching things he puts into his
letters to him. Especially is this the case in the later days, when both
had grown to be old men, and had been saddened by their life experience.
Carlyle's letters after his wife's death are very touching. In the first
after the sad event he says:--
"By the calamity of last April I lost my little all in this world,
and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a
_home_ for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true, and noble was
that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in
all the rocky ways and climbings; I am forever poor without her.
She was snatched from me in a moment as by a death from the gods.
Very beautiful her death was; radiantly to those who understood it,
had all her life been: _quid plura?_"
This which follows in the same letter, written while Carlyle was still
in the unbroken possession of his faculties, makes us not only sad but
indignant that his determination had not been allowed to be carried out;
and that the poor old man, when broken down by age, should have been
permitted to expose to view all those sacred things which, when sane and
sound, he would so carefully have covered from the prying eyes of the
world. He says:--
"All summer last my one solacement in the form of work was writing
and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out
again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without
return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of
worship,--the only devout time I had had for a great while past.
These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the
way before I myself die; but such continues still mainly my
employment, to me if to no other useful. To reduce matters to
writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins
and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better
than you ever did before. To set about writing my own life would be
no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be
done. The common, impious, vulgar of this earth--what has it to do
with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant
azure of eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that verily is
the handsomest or one handsome way of settling my poor account with
the _canaille_ of mankind, extant and to come."
How would his sad old heart have been torn could he have foreseen that
in the weakness of senility he would expose to the 'impious vulgar' all
the most sacred secrets of his home life! Oh, the pity of it! As a
slight offset to the sad revelations thus made, let us accept this
little note in Emerson's diary during one of his visits to Chelsea:--
"C. and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very
engaging, and in her bookcase all his books are inscribed to her as
they came, year by year, each with some significant lines."
Emerson's regard for Mrs. Carlyle was very great, and there is not one
of the many letters but sends a kindly and a warm greeting to her over
the sea.
For the rest, this correspondence exhibits Emerson in the light of a
true and very useful friend to Carlyle,--taking infinite trouble in the
early days to introduce Carlyle's books in America, and to secure to the
author in his poverty some return for their publication here. In this he
was successful, and sent with great delight little sums of money to his
friend. The books met with a quicker recognition in America than in
England; and after Emerson had said something to Carlyle of a new
edition of "Sartor Resartus," Carlyle writes:--
"As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new edition is frightful to
him, or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired
for a 'Sartor.' In his whole wonderful world of Tory pamphleteers,
Conservative younger brothers, Regent-street lawyers, Crockford
gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous
unclean persons (whom water and much soap will not make clean), not
a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. He shrieks at the
idea."
There is also much writing, on both sides, of Carlyle's coming to
America. For years this was the most enchanting topic, of which they
never grew weary. In one of his saddest moods, while yet almost unknown
and very poor, Carlyle wrote:--
"In joy, in grief, a voice says to me, 'Behold, there is one that
loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a
hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart
watches!' It is very good and precious to me."
There is, of course, a great deal of mutual admiration of each other's
work, very genuine, ever pleasant to hear about, expressed in the
warmest language,--even in those superlatives which Emerson derided.
There are also lovely bits of home life upon both sides,--faultless
interiors over which the mind will linger with delight in times far away
from these, when the students of another age strive to make to
themselves a picture of what sort of men these the great of the
nineteenth century really were. There is nothing told in these volumes
that will detract from the fame of either, but much that will add to the
kindly impression which they have made upon their time. One cannot but
think, as the letters grow more infrequent, and are written with greater
labor, of how old age was a weariness to these great men as to
others,--how the very grasshopper became a burden, and how
inexpressibly sad was the decay of their great powers. Emerson begins to
lag first, although a few years younger than Carlyle, and Carlyle
implores him, almost piteously, to write. There is an interval of one,
two, and even three years in the correspondence toward the end; and
after Emerson's last visit to England they wrote no more. Carlyle's
gentleness and tenderness show themselves very beautifully in these last
letters to his one best friend. When he finds that it has become hard
for Emerson to write, he begs at first that he be not forsaken, but
after a little says in effect: Never mind, my friend, if it wearies you
to write, write to me no more. I will still write to you, and thus our
friendship shall not lack for a voice. When the sweet bells had become a
little jangled in Emerson's brain, when memory had left him or played
him false, and there was a weakening of all his powers,--he sat still in
his own home among his friends and kindred, his household intact, and
surrounded by the fondest care and affection; while his old friend over
the seas--the broken giant, the god of thunder, now grown silent--sat in
utter desolation in the home he had reared after infinite struggle and
endeavor, and wrapped in a solitude so utter and so black that the heart
which can look upon it without pity must be a heart of stone. Carlyle
died on the 5th of April, 1881, being eighty-five years old. Emerson
died on the 27th of April, 1882, at the age of seventy-nine. In death
they were not long divided.
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