BOOKS.

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON.*

THIS correspondence is less interesting as a correspondence, than it is as affording traits of the two correspondents. On the whole, we have seldom read any correspondence between men of the same mark in which there is less real answering of one mind to the other. We do not mean, of course, that either Carlyle or Emerson is wanting in interest for the other. Quite the reverse. Each is supremely interesting to the other. But they live in such different planes that neither really helps the other at all with the thoughts with which he is struggling, so that the letters appear to be written rather in the hope of affording each a glimpse into the world in which the other is living,—a glimpse which each knows that the other will valne,—than with any hope of contributing what shall help the other in his thoughts, or what will elicit from the other what shall help the writer. Con- sidering that Carlyle is always telling Emerson that no other person on this planet appears to understand him so well as Emerson,—a compliment, by the way, which Emerson never reciprocates,—it is a great evidence of the supreme loneliness of which Carlyle so constantly complains, that he never once appeals to Emerson to help him in any train of thought, and that it never seems to occur to either that any such help would be possible on either side. This correspondence is not so much a correspondence in any true intellectual sense as a deli- berate exchange of monologues (so far as it is not an elabor- ate series of beneficent business arrangements for Carlyle's benefit promoted by the disinterested and generous care of Emerson). Each is content to exhibit his own state of mind to the other, well convinced of the interest with which the exhibition of that state of mind will be received, but apparently without any expectation or wish that his friend will be able to offer any effectual aid. In part, this is due to the fact,—which Emerson had apparently more or less clearly grasped,—that Carlyle is not so much a thinker as an imaginer, —one who fills in the detail and colour of all such physical and spiritual scenery as is suited to his genius, bat who deliberately refuses to apply his mind at all to any kind of scenery—physical or spiritual—which it does not suit his genius to take into account. For instance, one would have supposed that one who in theory had so much respect for the dumb inarticu- late side of man, as Carlyle, would not have counted it the great sin of the universe that there was so little of articulate speech in it, and so much speech that missed its true mark altogether. Yet, as a matter of fact, this charge against the universe that it hardly even dimly guesses its own wants, and at all events cannot articulately state them, is a sort of parrot-cry with Carlyle that is repeated in nine- tenths of his letters with more or less vehemence, and reiterated in many of them till we are quite sick of it. " In Carlyle, as in Byron," wrote Emerson, " one is more struck with the rhetoric than the matter. He has manly superiority rather than in- tellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." That is perfectly true, but there is also more imagining power,—within a specific and rather limited area,—than even character. Hence Carlyle's letters, like his books, are not so much embodied thoughts as efforts at in- sight and at picturesque delineation of what he saw. Emer- son, on the contrary, though not, in the opinion of the present writer, a great philosophic thinker, was a very admirable critic. He could not only see lucidly,—more widely, • The Corre•pondooce of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18314= 2 vols. London Chatto and Windus. though with less wealth of imaginative vivacity than Carlyle; but he could try a man by his own standard, and by the standard of his peers, and see where he fell short either of him- self or of them. Emerson's criticisms are charming in their nicety and shrewd culture. Carlyle truly charges him with being at bottom an aristocrat, and an aristocrat of refined culture he certainly was ; while Carlyle is at bottom a sans-culotte, with a huge contempt for refined culture, and for everything- almost except masculine energy and fire. What could be a finer- criticism on Carlyle than the very first here given,—" Be pleased," writes Emerson, "to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of varia- tions. At least, in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should lavish, in that spendthrift style of yours, celestial truths." Carlyle might have answered that Emerson was much more com- petent to give the world the theory of his (Carlyle's) rhetoric than Carlyle himself was, that, indeed, though his genius was the proper subject for a true speculative theory, there was. hardly a man alive so little likely to come at it as himself, or- so competent to come at it as Emerson.

Take these two volumes as a whole, and we should say that they are a little disappointing. We find in them a few very graphic portraits by Carlyle, a few very shrewd and sometimes- humorous literary criticisms by Emerson, but of the spiritual and moral exchange of deep convictions• between the two which we had vaguely looked for, hardly anything at all. Here is a specimen of the kind of insight in which Carlyle's letters most abound, in this sketch of O'Connell's tail :— " We are a singular people, in a singular condition. Not many nights ago, in one of those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to see the countenance of O'Connell and Com- pany (the Tail was a peacock's tail, with blonde-muslin women and heroic Parliamentary men), one of the company, a distinguished-- female' (as we call them), informed my Wife O'Connell was the master-spirit of this age.' If so, then for what we have received let • us be thankful,—and enjoy it without criticism."

Here is Richard Monckton Milnes (now Lord Houghton), in 1840 :—

" Milnes is a Tory Member of Parliament ; think of that ! For the- reat, he describes his religion in these terms : I profess to be a Crypto-Catholic.' Conceive the man ! A most bland-smiling, semi- quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianiaed little man, who has long,. olive-blond hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society ! Let us hear now what he will say of the American Vales. . . . . . You have doubtless- seen Milnes's review of you. I know not that you will find it to strike direct upon the secret of Emerson, to hit the nail on the head, any- where at all ; I rather think not. Bat it is gently, not unlovingly done ;—and lays the first plank of a kind of pulpit for you hers and throughout all Saxondom : a thing rather to be thankful for It on the whole surpassed my expectations. Mines tells me he is sending you a copy and a Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little - robin-redbreast of a man 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 Dillettantism 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 !"

In 1843, Monckton Milnes, grown in worldly wisdom, has learnt an irony of his own :-

" I said to Richard Mines, Now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative before the verb, and otherwise entangling the- syntax ; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing- within you, for God's sake let me have it the shortest way, and I will so cheerfully excuse the omission of the Single at the end : cannot I do without that ?' Mines answered, Ah, my dear fellow, it is because we have no thought, or almost none ; a little thought goes a great way when you put it into rhyme !' " Here is Monckton Mines in 1847 :— " This morning Richard Mines writes to me for your address ;. which I have sent. He is just returned out of Spain ; home swiftly to vote for the Jew Bill ;' is doing hospitalities at Woburn Abbey ;- and I suppose will be in Yorkshire (home, near Pontefract) before long. See him if you have opportunity : a man very easy to see and get into flowing talk with; a man of much sharpness of faculty, well tempered by several inches of ' Christian fat' he has upon his ribs- for covering. One of the idlest, cheeriest, most gifted of fat little men."

Or, take Herand and Landor :-

" Yon ask me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. Herand is a loqua- cious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing.' To me he is chiefly remarkable as being still—with his entirely enormous- vanity and very small stock of faculty—out of Bedlam. He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago ; and has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an empty bladder, and calling on the world to 'List the Music of the spheres.' He eacapes assassination, as I calculate, chiefly by being the oheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.—Yon cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing you. John Mill said, I forgive him freely for interpreting the Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the h's ! Really this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, The highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible.'—' That is precisely what I am doing!' answered the aspiring, nnaspirating.—Of Landor I have not got muoh benefit -either. We met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here : a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes ; of the moat restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding,—expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, 'indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery ; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame ! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper : the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,—as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object ; and aides of an object are all that he sees. He is not an original man ; in most -oases one but sighs over the spectacle of common-place torn to rags. I find him painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing into the Ather, yet never doing it, ever splashing web-footed in the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he strives ! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the fatalest staff I have seen for long : not an ingot ; ah no, a distracted coil of wire- drawings salable in no market. Poor Lander has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy, with his children, who would not quit her ; but it seems he has honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity for furnished lodgings ; and now lives at Bath, a solitary sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May ; but says always it would kill him soon : alas, I can well believe that! They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely : a per- fectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such hallucina- tions, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he has. Enough -of him ! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to him ; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and undone."

Emerson's reply about Landor shows much more of the critic than Carlyle, though much less of the painter :-

" Stunner has since brought me a gay letter from yourself, con- -oerning, in part, Landor and Herand ; in which as I know justice is not done to the ono, I suppose it is not done to the other. But Herand I give up freely to your tender mercies; I have no wish to save him. Lander can be shorn of all that is false and foolish, and yet leave a great deal for me to admire. Many years ago I have read a hundred fine memorable things in the Imaginary Conversations, though I know well the faults of that book, and the Pericles and Aspctsia within two years has given me delight. I was introduced to the man Lander when I was in Florence, and he was very kind to me in answering a multitude of questions. His speech, I remember, was below his writing. I love the rich variety of his mind, his proud taste, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of his senti- ment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though with the flight, I own, rather of a rocket than an orb, and terminated some- times by a sudden tumble. I suspect you of very short and dashing reading in his books; and yet I should think you would like him,— both of you such glorious haters of cant. Forgive me, I have put you two together twenty times in my thought as the only writers who have the old briskness and vivacity. But you must leave me to May bad-taste and my perverse and whimsical combinations."

Finally, as a specimen of Carlyle's description, take this -admirable portrait of Webster, the American statesman, whom Carlyle saw on Webster's visit to London :— " Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notableat of all your Notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen ; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in Yankeeland ! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that -amorphous crag-like face ; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like doll anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown ; the mastiff-month, accurately closed :—I have not traced as much of silent Berserkir-rage, that I remember of, in any other man. 'I guess I should not like to be your nigger !'—Webster is not loquacious, but be is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified perfectly bred man, though not English in breeding : a man worthy of the best reception from us ; and meeting such, I understand. He did not speak much with me that morning, but seemed not at all to dislike me : I meditate -whether it is fit or not fit that I should seek out his residence, and leave my card too, before I go ? Probably not ; for the man is . political, seemingly altogether ; has been at the Queen's levee, &c.,

: it is simply as a mastiff-mouthed man that he is interesting to me, and not otherwise at all."

To find Emerson at his best, one must look not for pure 4Iescription, but for what we may call speculative description,— description penetrated by reflective comment. The following is written at New York :— - "I always sewn to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other's secret, and -each to keep the other's madness in countenance. You can scarce • drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason." And this is a comment on Carlyle's essay called " The Diamond _Necklace " "I thought as I read this piece that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is this style : so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so endless in details. I think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages."

Emerson's reflections when visiting the seat of Congress at Washington are very striking :-

" Between my two speeches at Baltimore, I went to Washington, thirty-seven miles, and spent four days. The two poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil, self-increased by series on series of plates from Mexico to Canada, and from the sea westward to the Rocky Mountains, here meet and play, and make the air electric and violent. Yet one feels how little, more than how much, man is represented there. I think, in the higher societies of the Universe, it will turn out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always Titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and con- centrating."

One rises from this correspondence with a sense that these men, who believed themselves possessed of some of the most vital truths of the day, dwelt singularly little upon them in their correspondence. The nearest thing to a great truth which Carlyle anywhere expresses is the conviction that the value of literature is determined not after all by what is written, though

that is essential to it, but by what is not written,—by the

personal life which gives its depth and intensity to the convic- tion expressed. This is a real and great truth, and was deeply cherished by Carlyle. Bat in all these letters we have come on none other anywhere near so valuable, while of mere Carlylese jargon and formula of the following kind there is enough, and to spare :—

" Man, all men seem radically dumb ; jabbering mere jargons and noises from the teeth outwards; the inner meaning of them,—of them and of me, poor devils,—remaining shut, buried forever. If almost all Books were burnt (my own laid next the coal), I some- times in my spleen feel as if it really would be better with us !"

Surely, for men who were so willing to "put off their Jewdom. " as Carlyle and also Emerson, there is visible in this corre- spondence a wonderfully small residuum of vital truth by which to live and die. And it is very melancholy to find the two old men, with all their boasted transcendental faith, confiding to each other towards the last, the one that some euthanasia for old age, which should prevent its expiring in undignified imbecility, is desirable, the other that he is quite indifferent to the survival of his personal life beyond the grave. Obviously, the universal Mind which they worshipped was not the object of much indivi- dual trust or love. Emerson's nature, on the whole, comes out of this correspondence the more disinterested, saner, and wiser, though not the stronger and grander of the two.