The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I | Page 7

so far depart from his theories

as to expect happiness. On my arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I
had seen and heard, and they with joy received it.
In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I have now received four
numbers of the _Sartor Resartus,_ for whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one
living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before;
who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens."
And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. And 't
is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and
religion. I say _our,_ for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics
written for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the brave stand you
have made for Spiritualism in these writings. But has literature any parallel to the oddity
of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which
my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry
discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if
society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it beforehand with an
objection to the form. Can it be that this humor proceeds from a despair of finding a
contemporary audience, and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll
sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon one of your broad hills,
that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then
admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed
thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself)
nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your
diamond graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel;
that men are waiting to hear your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive
involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations. 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. Bacon and Plato
have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists. You are
dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to
consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I look for the hour with
impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit,--when the word will be as
simple, and so as resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words will be one
with things. I have no hope that you will find suddenly a large audience. Says not the
sarcasm, "Truth hath the plague in his house"? Yet all men are potentially (as Mr.
Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not in very Mephistophelism repel
and defy them, shall be actually;* and whatever the great or the small may say about the
charm of diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.
------------ * This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition of Sartor
Resartus have been sold. -------------
I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical
truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that
there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't is hence
hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I would stand well with my Poet, yet
if I offend I shall quietly retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately
espy you as a man, myself as another.
And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my

charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great
Circle of Necessity, and could the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the
Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue
rather than that Cato has erred?
I wish I could gratify you with any pleasing news of the regeneration, education,
prospects, of man in this continent. But your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted,
that present evils give you less solicitude. In the last six years government in the United
States