Thomas Carlyle

THOMAS “IF PAUPERS ARE MADE MISERABLE, 1 PAUPERS WILL NEED DECLINE IN NUMBERS” CARLYLE

One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments, — with a turn for Nigger Melodies, and the like: — he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant. Under penalty of Heaven’s curse, neither party to this pre-appointment shall neglect or misdo his duties therein; — and it is certain (though as yet widely unknown), Servantship on the nomadic principle, at the rate of so many shillings per day, cannot be other than misdone. The whole world rises in shrieks against you, on hearing of such a thing.

1790 1791 1792 1793 1794 BORN 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 DIED

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

1.It is a little-known fact that Ronald and Nancy learned all they knew about politics in a 1950s seance with the spirit of Thomas Carlyle. The spirit which appeared to them had little respect for individuals who insisted on doing poorly in this world of God’s plenty. The starving Irish peasant families he had dismissed, in 1839 in CHARTISM, with the epithet “Sanspotatoes,” because to him, with the “Earth all lying round” crying out “Come and till me, come and reap me,” the “enchanted” Irish seemed to be merely sitting in their workhouse pretending to be “in silent despair,” waiting for some fool of an Englishman to come along so that they could induce in his genteel soul the emotion of pity, and thus obtain his charity. Carlyle the Englishman had no intention of being fooled by a fool of an Irishman into wasting his substance upon someone who would not help himself. Ronald and Nancy were quite impressed, to say the least. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1795

December 4, Friday: Thomas Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, in southern Scotland, oldest of what would turn out to be a family of nine children, of Calvinist parents who would teach him frugality and discipline: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THOREAU’S ESSAY

“THOMAS CARLYLE AND HIS WORKS”

[COMPOSED 1845-46, PUBLISHED 1847]

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 25, Tuesday, 1845, at 7PM Concord MA; Unitarian Church, Vestry “Concord River” February 4, Wednesday, 1846, at 7PM Concord MA; Unitarian Church, Vestry “The Writings and Style of Thomas Carlyle” January 19, Tuesday, 1847, at 7PM Lincoln MA; Brick or Centre School “A History of Myself” (?) House HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thomas Carlyle is a Scotchman, born about fifty years ago, “at Ecclefechan, Annandale,” according to one authority. “His parents ‘good farmer people,’ his father an elder in the Secession church there, and a man of strong native sense, whose words were said to ‘nail a subject to the wall.’” We also hear of his “excellent mother,” still alive, and of “her fine old covenanting accents, converting with his transcendental tones.” He seems to have gone to school at Annan, on the shore of the Solway Firth, and there, as he himself writes, “heard of famed professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole Wonderland of Knowledge,” from Edward Irving, then a young man “fresh from Edinburgh, with college prizes, ... come to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his.” From this place, they say, you can look over into Wordsworth’s country. Here first he may have become acquainted with Nature, with woods, such as are there, and rivers and brooks, some of whose names we have heard, and the last lapses of Atlantic billows. He got some of his education, too, more or less liberal, out of the University of Edinburgh, where, according to the same authority, he had to “support himself,” partly by “private tuition, translations for the booksellers, etc.,” and afterward, as we are glad to hear, “taught an academy in Dysart, at the same time that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy,” the usual middle passage of a literary life. He was destined for the Church, but not by the powers that rule man’s life; made his literary début in Fraser’s Magazine, long ago; read here and there in English and French, with more or less profit, we may suppose, such of us at least as are not particularly informed, and at length found some words which spoke to his condition in the German language, and set himself earnestly to unravel that mystery — with what success many readers know. After his marriage he “resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and for a year or two at Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farmhouse in the upper part of Dumfriesshire,” at which last place, amid barren heather hills, he was visited by our countryman, Emerson. With Emerson he still corresponds. He was early intimate with Edward Irving, and continued to be his friend until the latter’s death. Concerning this “freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul,” and Carlyle’s relation to him, those whom it concerns will do well to consult a notice of his death in Fraser’s Magazine for 1835, reprinted in the Miscellanies. He also corresponded with Goethe. Latterly, we hear, the poet Sterling was his only intimate acquaintance in England. He has spent the last quarter of his life in London, writing books; has the fame, as all readers know, of having made England acquainted with Germany, in late years, and done much else that is novel and remarkable in literature. He especially is the literary man of those parts. You may imagine him living in altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a quiet part of London, called Chelsea, a little out of the din of commerce, in “Cheyne Row,” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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there, not far from the “Chelsea Hospital.” “A little past this, and an old ivy-clad church, with its buried generations lying around it,” writes one traveler, “you come to an antique street running at right angles with the Thames, and, a few steps from the river, you find Carlyle’s name on the door.” “A Scotch lass ushers you into the second story front chamber, which is the spacious workshop of the world maker.” Here he sits a long time together, with many books and papers about him; many new books, we have been told, on the upper shelves, uncut, with the “author’s respects” in them; in late months, with many manuscripts in an old English hand, and innumerable pamphlets, from the public libraries, relating to the Cromwellian period; now, perhaps, looking out into the street on brick and pavement, for a change, and now upon some rod of grass ground in the rear; or, perchance, he steps over to the British Museum, and makes that his studio for the time. This is the fore part of the day; that is the way with literary men commonly; and then in the afternoon, we presume, he takes a short run of a mile or so through the suburbs out into the country; we think he would run that way, though so short a trip might not take him to very sylvan or rustic places. In the meanwhile, people are calling to see him, from various quarters, few very worthy of being seen by him; “distinguished travelers from America,” not a few; to all and sundry of whom he gives freely of his yet unwritten rich and flashing soliloquy, in exchange for whatever they may have to offer; speaking his English, as they say, with a “broad Scotch accent,” talking, to their astonishment and to ours, very much as he writes, a sort of Carlylese, his discourse “coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.” He goes to Scotland sometimes, to visit his native heath-clad hills, having some interest still in the earth there; such names as Craigenputtock and Ecclefechan, which we have already quoted, stand for habitable places there to him; or he rides to the seacoast of England in his vacations, upon his horse Yankee, bought by the sale of his books here, as we have been told. How, after all, he gets his living; what proportion of his daily bread he earns by day-labor or job-work with his pen, what he inherits, what steals — questions whose answers are so significant, and not to be omitted in his biography — we, alas! are unable to answer here. It may be worth the while to state that he is not a Reformer in our sense of the term — eats, drinks, and sleeps, thinks and believes, professes and practices, not according to the New England standard, nor to the Old English wholly. Nevertheless, we are told that he is a sort of lion in certain quarters there, “an amicable centre for men of the most opposite opinions,” and “listened to as an oracle,” “smoking his perpetual pipe.” A rather tall, gaunt figure, with intent face, dark hair and complexion, and the air of a student; not altogether well in body, from sitting too long in his workhouse — he, born in the Border Country and descended from moss-troopers, it may be. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We have seen several pictures of him here; one, a full-length portrait, with hat and overall, if it did not tell us much, told the fewest lies; another, we remember, was well said to have “too combed a look;” one other also we have seen in which we discern some features of the man we are thinking of; but the only ones worth remembering, after all, are those which he has unconsciously drawn of himself. When we remember how these volumes came over to us, with their encouragement and provocation from month to month, and what commotion they created in many private breasts, we wonder that the country did not ring, from shore to shore, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with its greeting; and the Boones and Crocketts of the West make haste to hail him, whose wide humanity embraces them too. Of all that the packets have brought over to us, has there been any richer cargo than this? What else has been English news for so long a season? What else, of late years, has been England to us — to us who read books, we mean? Unless we remembered it as the scene where the age of Wordsworth was spending itself, and a few younger muses were trying their wings, and from time to time as the residence of Landor, Carlyle alone, since the death of Coleridge, has kept the promise of England. It is the best apology for all the bustle and the sin of commerce, that it has made us acquainted with the thoughts of this man. Commerce would not concern us much if it were not for such results as this. New England owes him a debt which she will be slow to recognize. His earlier essays reached us at a time when Coleridge’s were the only recent words which had made any notable impression so far, and they found a field unoccupied by him, before yet any words of moment had been uttered in our midst. He had this advantage, too, in a teacher, that he stood near to his pupils; and he has no doubt afforded reasonable encouragement and sympathy to many an independent but solitary thinker. It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism. It is plain that the reviewers, both here and abroad, do not know how to dispose of this man. They approach him too easily, as if he were one of the men of letters about town, who grace Mr. Somebody’s administration, merely; but he already belongs to literature, and depends neither on the favor of reviewers, nor the honesty of booksellers, nor the pleasure of readers for his success. He has more to impart than to receive from his generation. He is another such a strong and finished workman in his craft as Samuel Johnson was, and, like him, makes the literary class respectable; since few are yet out of their apprenticeship, or, even if they learn to be able writers, are at the same time able and valuable thinkers. The aged and critical eye, especially, is incapacitated to appreciate the works of this author. To such their meaning is impalpable and evanescent, and they seem to abound only in obstinate mannerisms, Germanisms, and whimsical ravings of all kinds, with now and then an unaccountably true HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and sensible remark. On the strength of this last, Carlyle is admitted to have what is called genius. We hardly know an old man to whom these volumes are not hopelessly sealed. The language, they say, is foolishness and a stumbling-block to them; but to many a clear- headed boy they are plainest English, and dispatched with such hasty relish as his bread and milk. The fathers wonder how it is that the children take to this diet so readily, and digest it with so little difficulty. They shake their heads with mistrust at their free and easy delight, and remark that “Mr. Carlyle is a very learned Man;” for they, too, not to be out of fashion, have got grammar and dictionary, if the truth were known, and with the best faith cudgeled their brains to get a little way into the jungle, and they could not but confess, as often as they found the clue, that it was as intricate as Blackstone to follow, if you read it honestly. But merely reading, even with the best intentions, is not enough: you must almost have written these books yourself. Only he who has had the good fortune to read them in the nick of time, in the most perceptive and recipient season of life, can give any adequate account of them. Many have tasted of this well with an odd suspicion, as if it were some fountain Arethuse which had flowed under the sea from Germany, as if the materials of his books had lain in some garret there, in danger of being appropriated for waste-paper. Over what German ocean, from what Hercynian forest, he has been imported, piecemeal, into England, or whether he has now all arrived, we are not informed. This article is not invoiced in Hamburg nor in London. Perhaps it was contraband. However, we suspect that this sort of goods cannot be imported in this way. No matter how skillful the stevedore, all things being got into sailing trim, wait for a Sunday, and aft wind, and then weigh anchor, and run up the main-sheet — straightway what of transcendent and permanent value is there resists the aft wind, and will doggedly stay behind that Sunday — it does not travel Sundays; while biscuit and pork make headway, and sailors cry heave-yo! It must part company, if it open a seam. It is not quite safe to send out a venture in this kind, unless yourself go supercargo. Where a man goes, there he is; but the slightest virtue is immovable — it is real estate, not personal; who would keep it, must consent to be bought and sold with it. However, we need not dwell on this charge of a German extraction, it being generally admitted, by this time, that Carlyle is English, and an inhabitant of London. He has the English for his mother-tongue, though with a Scotch accent, or never so many accents, and thoughts also, which are the legitimate growth of native soil, to utter therewith. His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated. It resounds with emphatic, natural, lively, stirring tones, muttering, rattling, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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exploding, like shells and shot, and with like execution. So far as it is a merit in composition that the written answer to the spoken word, and the spoken word to a fresh and pertinent thought in the mind, as well as to the half thoughts, the tumultuary misgivings and expectancies, this author is, perhaps, not to be matched in literature. He is no mystic, either, more than Newton or Arkwright or Davy, and tolerates none. Not one obscure line, or half line, did he ever write. His meaning lies plain as the daylight, and he who runs may read; indeed, only he who runs can read, and keep up with the meaning. It has the distinctness of picture to his mind, and he tells us only what he sees printed in largest English type upon the face of things. He utters substantial English thoughts in plainest English dialects; for it must be confessed, he speaks more than one of these. All the shires of England, and all the shires of Europe, are laid under contribution to his genius; for to be English does not mean to be exclusive and narrow, and adapt one’s self to the apprehension of his nearest neighbor only. And yet no writer is more thoroughly Saxon. In the translation of those fragments of Saxon poetry, we have met with the same rhythm that occurs so often in his poem on the French Revolution. And if you would know where many of those obnoxious Carlyleisms and Germanisms came from, read the best of Milton’s prose, read those speeches of Cromwell which he has brought to light, or go and listen once more to your mother’s tongue. So much for his German extraction. Indeed, for fluency and skill in the use of the English tongue, he is a master unrivaled. His felicity and power of expression surpass even his special merits as historian and critic. Therein his experience has not failed him, but furnished him with such a store of winged, ay and legged words, as only a London life, perchance, could give account of. We had not understood the wealth of the language before. Nature is ransacked, and all the resorts and purlieus of humanity are taxed, to furnish the fittest symbol for his thought. He does not go to the dictionary, the word-book, but to the word-manufactory itself, and has made endless work for the lexicographers. Yes, he has that same English for his mother-tongue that you have, but with him it is no dumb, muttering, mumbling faculty, concealing the thoughts, but a keen, unwearied, resistless weapon. He has such command of it as neither you nor I have; and it would be well for any who have a lost horse to advertise, or a town-meeting warrant, or a sermon, or a letter to write, to study this universal letter-writer, for he knows more than the grammar or the dictionary. The style is worth attending to, as one of the most important features of the man which we at this distance can discern. It is for once quite equal to the matter. It can carry all its load, and never breaks down nor staggers. His books are solid and workmanlike, as all that England does; and they are graceful and readable also. They tell of huge labor done, well done, and all HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the rubbish swept away, like the bright cutlery which glitters in shop windows, while the coke and ashes, the turnings, filings, dust, and borings lie far away at Birmingham, unheard of. He is a masterly clerk, scribe, reporter, writer. He can reduce to writing most things — gestures, winks, nods, significant looks, patois, brogue, accent, pantomime, and how much that had passed for silence before does he represent by written words. The countryman who puzzled the city lawyer, requiring him to write, among other things, his call to his horses, would hardly have puzzled him; he would have found a word for it, all right and classical, that would have started his team for him. Consider the ceaseless tide of speech forever flowing in countless cellars, garrets, parlors; that of the French, says Carlyle, “only ebbs toward the short hours of night,” and what a drop in the bucket is the printed word. Feeling, thought, speech, writing, and, we might add, poetry, inspiration — for so the circle is completed; how they gradually dwindle; at length, passing through successive colanders, into your history and classics, from the roar of the ocean, the murmur of the forest, to the squeak of a mouse; so much only parsed and spelt out, and punctuated, at last. The few who can talk like a book, they only get reported commonly. But this writer ports a new lieferung. One wonders how so much, after all, was expressed in the old way, so much here depends upon the emphasis, tone, pronunciation, style, and spirit of the reading. No writer uses so profusely all the aids to intelligibility which the printer’s art affords. You wonder how others had contrived to write so many pages without emphatic or italicized words, they are so expressive, so natural, so indispensable here, as if none had ever used the demonstrative pronouns demonstratively before. In another’s sentences the thought, though it may be immortal, is as it were embalmed, and does not strike you, but here it is so freshly living, even the body of it not having passed through the ordeal of death, that it stirs in the very extremities, and the smallest particles and pronouns are all alive within it. It is not simple dictionary it, yours or mine, but it. The words did not come at the command of grammar, but of a tyrannous, inexorable meaning; not like standing soldiers, by vote of Parliament, but any able-bodied countryman pressed into the service, for “Sire, it is not a revolt, it is a revolution.” We have never heard him speak, but we should say that Carlyle was a rare talker. He has broken the ice, and streams freely forth like a spring torrent. He does not trace back the stream of his thought, silently adventurous, up to its fountain-head, but is borne away with it, as it rushes through his brain like a torrent to overwhelm and fertilize. He holds a talk with you. His audience is such a tumultuous mob of thirty thousand as assembled at the University of Paris, before printing was invented. Philosophy, on the other hand, does not talk, but write, or, when it comes personally before an audience, lecture HDT WHAT? INDEX

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or read; and therefore it must be read tomorrow, or a thousand years hence. But the talker must naturally be attended to at once; he does not talk on without an audience; the winds do not long bear the sound of his voice. Think of Carlyle reading his “French Revolution” to any audience. One might say it was never written, but spoken; and thereafter reported and printed, that those not within sound of his voice might know something about it. Some men read to you something which they have written in a dead language, of course, but it may be in a living letter, in Syriac, or Roman, or Runic character. Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one. We do not live in those days when the learned used a learned language. There is no writing of Latin with Carlyle; but as Chaucer, with all reverence to Homer, and Virgil, and Messieurs the Normans, sung his poetry in the homely Saxon tongue, and Locke has at least the merit of having done philosophy into English, so Carlyle has done a different philosophy still further into English, and thrown open the doors of literature and criticism to the populace. Such a style — so diversified and variegated! It is like the face of a country; it is like a New England landscape, with farmhouses and villages, and cultivated spots, and belts of forests and blueberry swamps round about, with the fragrance of shad-blossoms and violets on certain winds. And as for the reading of it, it is novel enough to the reader who has used only the diligence, and old line mail-coach. It is like traveling, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a gig tandem; sometimes in a full coach, over highways, mended and unmended, for which you will prosecute the town; on level roads, through French departments, by Simplon roads over the Alps; and now and then he hauls up for a relay, and yokes in an unbroken colt of a Pegasus for a leader, driving off by cart-paths, and across lots, by corduroy roads and gridiron bridges; and where the bridges are gone, not even a string-piece left, and the reader has to set his breast and swim. You have got an expert driver this time, who has driven ten thousand miles, and was never known to upset; can drive six in hand on the edge of a precipice, and touch the leaders anywhere with his snapper. With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world, and fathers the rest, often quite as defensible, only more modest, or plain-spoken, or insinuating, upon “Sauerteig,” or some other gentleman long employed on the subject. Rolling his subject how many ways in his mind, he meets it now face to face, wrestling with it at arm’s length, and striving to get it down, or throw it over his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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head; and if that will not do, or whether it will do or not, tries the back stitch and side hug with it, and downs it again, scalps it, draws and quarters it, hangs it in chains, and leaves it to the winds and dogs. With his brows knit, his mind made up, his will resolved and resistless, he advances, crashing his way through the host of weak, half-formed, dilettante opinions, honest and dishonest ways of thinking, with their standards raised, sentimentalities and conjectures, and tramples them all into dust. See how he prevails; you don’t even hear the groans of the wounded and dying. Certainly it is not so well worth the while to look through any man’s eyes at history, for the time, as through his; and his way of looking at things is fastest getting adopted by his generation. It is not in man to determine what his style shall be. He might as well determine what his thoughts shall be. We would not have had him write always as in the chapter on Burns, and the Life of Schiller, and elsewhere. No; his thoughts were ever irregular and impetuous. Perhaps as he grows older and writes more he acquires a truer expression; it is in some respects manlier, freer, struggling up to a level with its fountain-head. We think it is the richest prose style we know of. Who cares what a man’s style is, so it is intelligible — as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock’s feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives. We believe that Carlyle has, after all, more readers, and is better known today for this very originality of style, and that posterity will have reason to thank him for emancipating the language, in some measure, from the fetters which a merely conservative, aimless, and pedantic literary class had imposed upon it, and setting an example of greater freedom and naturalness. No man’s thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never- failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men. If we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all, and that the former is, for the most part, the mere effigies of a language, not the best method of concealing one’s thoughts even, but frequently a method of doing without thoughts at all. In his graphic description of Richter’s style, Carlyle describes his own pretty nearly; and no doubt he first got his own tongue loosened at that fountain, and was inspired by it to equal freedom and originality. “The language,” as he says of Richter, “groans with indescribable metaphors and allusions to all HDT WHAT? INDEX

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things, human and divine, flowing onward, not like a river, but like an inundation; circling in complex eddies, chafing and gurgling, now this way, now that;” but in Carlyle, “the proper current” never “sinks out of sight amid the boundless uproar.” Again: “His very language is Titanian — deep, strong, tumultuous, shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand elements, and winding in labyrinthic mazes.” In short, if it is desirable that a man be eloquent, that he talk much, and address himself to his own age mainly, then this is not a bad style of doing it. But if it is desired rather that he pioneer into unexplored regions of thought, and speak to silent centuries to come, then, indeed, we could wish that he had cultivated the style of Goethe more, that of Richter less; not that Goethe’s is the kind of utterance most to be prized by mankind, but it will serve for a model of the best that can be successfully cultivated. But for style, and fine writing, and Augustan ages, that is but a poor style, and vulgar writing, and a degenerate age, which allows us to remember these things. This man has something to communicate. Carlyle’s are not, in the common sense, works of art in their origin and aim; and yet, perhaps, no living English writer evinces an equal literary talent. They are such works of art only as the plow and corn-mill and steam-engine — not as pictures and statues. Others speak with greater emphasis to scholars, as such, but none so earnestly and effectually to all who can read. Others give their advice, he gives his sympathy also. It is no small praise that he does not take upon himself the airs, has none of the whims, none of the pride, the nice vulgarities, the starched, impoverished isolation, and cold glitter of the spoiled children of genius. He does not need to husband his pearl, but excels by a greater humanity and sincerity. He is singularly serious and untrivial. We are everywhere impressed by the rugged, unwearied, and rich sincerity of the man. We are sure that he never sacrificed one jot of his honest thought to art or whim, but to utter himself in the most direct and effectual way — that is the endeavor. These are merits which will wear well. When time has worn deeper into the substance of these books, this grain will appear. No such sermons have come to us here out of England, in late years, as those of this preacher — sermons to kings, and sermons to peasants, and sermons to all intermediate classes. It is in vain that John Bull, or any of his cousins, turns a deaf ear, and pretends not to hear them: nature will not soon be weary of repeating them. There are words less obviously true, more for the ages to hear, perhaps, but none so impossible for this age not to hear. What a cutting cimeter was that “Past and Present,” going through heaps of silken stuffs, and glibly through the necks of men, too, without their knowing it, leaving no trace! He has the earnestness of a prophet. In an age of pedantry and dilettantism, he has no grain of these in his composition. There is nowhere else, surely, in recent readable English, or other HDT WHAT? INDEX

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books, such direct and effectual teaching, reproving, encouraging, stimulating, earnestly, vehemently, almost like Mahomet, like Luther; not looking behind him to see how his Opera Omnia will look, but forward to other work to be done. His writings are a gospel to the young of this generation; they will hear his manly, brotherly speech with responsive joy, and press forward to older or newer gospels. We should omit a main attraction in these books, if we said nothing of their humor. Of this indispensable pledge of sanity, without some leaven of which the abstruse thinker may justly be suspected of mysticism, fanaticism, or insanity, there is a superabundance in Carlyle. Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible. In his later and longer works it is an unfailing accompaniment, reverberating through pages and chapters, long sustained without effort. The very punctuation, the italics, the quotation marks, the blank spaces and dashes, and the capitals, each and all are pressed into its service. Carlyle’s humor is vigorous and titanic, and has more sense in it than the sober philosophy of many another. It is not to be disposed of by laughter and smiles merely; it gets to be too serious for that: only they may laugh who are not hit by it. For those who love a merry jest, this is a strange kind of fun — rather too practical joking, if they understand it. The pleasant humor which the public loves is but the innocent pranks of the ballroom, harmless flow of animal spirits, the light plushy pressure of dandy pumps, in comparison. But when an elephant takes to treading on your corns, why then you are lucky if you sit high, or wear cowhide. His humor is always subordinate to a serious purpose, though often the real charm for the reader is not so much in the essential progress and final upshot of the chapter as in this indirect side-light illustration of every hue. He sketches first, with strong, practical English pencil, the essential features in outline, black on white, more faithfully than Dryasdust would have done, telling us wisely whom and what to mark, to save time, and then with brush of camel’s-hair, or sometimes with more expeditious swab, he lays on the bright and fast colors of his humor everywhere. One piece of solid work, be it known, we have determined to do, about which let there be no jesting, but all things else under the heavens, to the right and left of that, are for the time fair game. To us this humor is not wearisome, as almost every other is. Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume — it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist, indeed, is a most unhappy man; and his readers are most unhappy also. Humor is not so distinct a quality as, for the purposes of criticism, it is commonly regarded, but allied to every, even the divinest faculty. The familiar and cheerful conversation about every hearthside, if it be analyzed, will be found to be sweetened by this principle. There is not only a never-failing, pleasant, and earnest humor kept up there, embracing the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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domestic affairs, the dinner, and the scolding, but there is also a constant run upon the neighbors, and upon Church and State, and to cherish and maintain this, in a great measure, the fire is kept burning, and the dinner provided. There will be neighbors, parties to a very genuine, even romantic friendship, whose whole audible salutation and intercourse, abstaining from the usual cordial expressions, grasping of hands, or affectionate farewells, consists in the mutual play and interchange of a genial and healthy humor, which excepts nothing, not even themselves, in its lawless range. The child plays continually, if you will let it, and all its life is a sort of practical humor of a very pure kind, often of so fine and ethereal a nature, that its parents, its uncles and cousins, can in no wise participate in it, but must stand aloof in silent admiration, and reverence even. The more quiet the more profound it is. Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man seems sometimes to be the sport. But, after all, we could sometimes dispense with the humor, though unquestionably incorporated in the blood, if it were replaced by this author’s gravity. We should not apply to himself, without qualification, his remarks on the humor of Richter. With more repose in his inmost being, his humor would become more thoroughly genial and placid. Humor is apt to imply but a half satisfaction at best. In his pleasantest and most genial hour, man smiles but as the globe smiles, and the works of nature. The fruits dry ripe, and much as we relish some of them in their green and pulpy state, we lay up for our winter store, not out of these, but the rustling autumnal harvests. Though we never weary of this vivacious wit, while we are perusing its work, yet when we remember it from afar, we sometimes feel balked and disappointed, missing the security, the simplicity, and frankness, even the occasional magnanimity of acknowledged dullness and bungling. This never-failing success and brilliant talent become a reproach. Besides, humor does not wear well. It is commonly enough said, that a joke will not bear repeating. The deepest humor will not keep. Rumors do not circulate but stagnate, or circulate partially. In the oldest literature, in the Hebrew, the Hindoo, the Persian, the Chinese, it is rarely humor, even the most divine, which still survives, but the most sober and private, painful or joyous thoughts, maxims of duty, to which the life of all men may be referred. After time has sifted the literature of a people, there is left only their scripture, for that is writing, par excellence. This is as true of the poets, as of the philosophers and moralists by profession; for what subsides in any of these is the moral only, to reappear as dry land at some remote epoch. We confess that Carlyle’s humor is rich, deep, and variegated, in direct communication with the backbone and risible muscles of the globe — and there is nothing like it; but much as we relish this jovial, this rapid and delugeous way of conveying one’s views and impressions, when we would not converse but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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meditate, we pray for a man’s diamond edition of his thought, without the colored illuminations in the margin — the fishes and dragons and unicorns, the red or the blue ink, but its initial letter in distinct skeleton type, and the whole so clipped and condensed down to the very essence of it, that time will have little to do. We know not but we shall immigrate soon, and would fain take with us all the treasures of the East; and all kinds of dry, portable soups, in small tin canisters, which contain whole herds of English beeves boiled down, will be acceptable. The difference between this flashing, fitful writing and pure philosophy is the difference between flame and light. The flame, indeed, yields light; but when we are so near as to observe the flame, we are apt to be incommoded by the heat and smoke. But the sun, that old Platonist, is set so far off in the heavens, that only a genial summer heat and ineffable daylight can reach us. But many a time, we confess, in wintry weather, we have been glad to forsake the sunlight, and warm us by these Promethean flames. Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it. He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself. Certainly, no critic has anywhere said what is more to the purpose than this which Carlyle’s own writings furnish, which we quote, as well for its intrinsic merit as for its pertinence here. “It is true,” says he, thinking of Richter, “the beaten paths of literature lead the safeliest to the goal; and the talent pleases us most which submits to shine with new gracefulness through old forms. Nor is the noblest and most peculiar mind too noble or peculiar for working by prescribed laws; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and, in Richter’s own age, Goethe, how little did they innovate on the given forms of composition, how much in the spirit they breathed into them! All this is true; and Richter must lose of our esteem in proportion.” And again, in the chapter on Goethe, “We read Goethe for years before we come to see wherein the distinguishing peculiarity of his understanding, of his disposition, even of his way of writing, consists! It seems quite a simple style — that of his; remarkable chiefly for its calmness, its perspicuity, in short, its commonness; and yet it is the most uncommon of all styles.” And this, too, translated for us by the same pen from Schiller, which we will apply not merely to the outward form of his works, but to their inner form and substance. He is speaking of the artist. “Let some beneficent divinity snatch him, when a suckling, from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time, that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence, but, dreadful, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present, but their form he will derive from a nobler time; nay, from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his own nature.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But enough of this. Our complaint is already out of all proportion to our discontent. Carlyle’s works, it is true, have not the stereotyped success which we call classic. They are a rich but inexpensive entertainment, at which we are not concerned lest the host has strained or impoverished himself to feed his guests. It is not the most lasting word, nor the loftiest wisdom, but rather the word which comes last. For his genius it was reserved to give expression to the thoughts which were throbbing in a million breasts. He has plucked the ripest fruit in the public garden; but this fruit already least concerned the tree that bore it, which was rather perfecting the bud at the foot of the leaf- stalk. His works are not to be studied, but read with a swift satisfaction. Their flavor and gust is like what poets tell of the froth of wine, which can only be tasted once and hastily. On a review we can never find the pages we had read. Yet they are in some degree true natural products in this respect. All things are but once, and never repeated. These works were designed for such complete success that they serve but for a single occasion. But he is willfully and pertinaciously unjust, even scurrilous, impolite, ungentlemanly; calls us “Imbeciles,” “Dilettantes,” “Philistines,” implying sometimes what would not sound well expressed. If he would adopt the newspaper style, and take back these hard names — But where is the reader who does not derive some benefit from these epithets, applying them to himself? He is, in fact, the best tempered, and not the least impartial of reviewers. He goes out of his way to do justice to profligates and quacks. There is somewhat even Christian, in the rarest and most peculiar sense, in his universal brotherliness, his simple, childlike endurance, and earnest, honest endeavor, with sympathy for the like. Carlyle, to adopt his own classification, is himself the hero as literary man. There is no more notable workingman in England, in Manchester or Birmingham, or the mines round about. We know not how many hours a day he toils, nor for what wages, exactly: we only know the results for us. Notwithstanding the very genuine, admirable, and loyal tributes to Burns, Schiller, Goethe, and others, Carlyle is not a critic of poetry. In the book of heroes, Shakespeare, the hero as poet, comes off rather slimly. His sympathy, as we said, is with the men of endeavor; not using the life got, but still bravely getting their life. “In fact,” as he says of Cromwell, “everywhere we have to notice the decisive practical eye of this man, how he drives toward the practical and practicable; has a genuine insight into what is fact.” You must have very stout legs to get noticed at all by him. He is thoroughly English in his love of practical men, and dislike for cant, and ardent, enthusiastic heads that are not supported by any legs. He would kindly knock them down that they may regain some vigor by touching their mother earth. We have often wondered how he ever found out Burns, and must still refer a good share of his delight HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in him to neighborhood and early association. The Lycidas and Comus, appearing in Blackwood’s Magazine, would probably go unread by him, nor lead him to expect a Paradise Lost. The condition-of-England question is a practical one. The condition of England demands a hero, not a poet. Other things demand a poet; the poet answers other demands. Carlyle in London, with this question pressing on him so urgently, sees no occasion for minstrels and rhapsodists there. Kings may have their bards when there are any kings. Homer would certainly go a-begging there. He lives in Chelsea, not on the plains of Hindostan, nor on the prairies of the West, where settlers are scarce, and a man must at least go whistling to himself. What he says of poetry is rapidly uttered, and suggestive of a thought, rather than the deliberate development of any. He answers your question, What is poetry? by writing a special poem, as that Norse one, for instance, in the Book of Heroes, altogether wild and original; — answers your question, What is light? by kindling a blaze which dazzles you, and pales sun and moon, and not as a peasant might, by opening a shutter. Carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and reviewer; not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens. He does not live in the present hour, and read men and books as they occur for his theme, but having chosen this, he directs his studies to this end. If we look again at his page, we are apt to retract somewhat that we have said. Often a genuine poetic feeling dawns through it, like the texture of the earth seen through the dead grass and leaves in the spring. The “History of the French Revolution” is a poem, at length translated into prose — an Iliad, indeed, as he himself has it — “The destructive wrath of Sansculottism, this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing.” One improvement we could suggest in this last, as indeed in most epics — that he should let in the sun oftener upon his picture. It does not often enough appear, but it is all revolution, the old way of human life turned simply bottom upward, so that when at length we are inadvertently reminded of the “Brest Shipping,” a St. Domingo colony, and that anybody thinks of owning plantations, and simply turning up the soil there, and that now at length, after some years of this revolution, there is a falling off in the importation of sugar, we feel a queer surprise. Had they not sweetened their water with revolution then? It would be well if there were several chapters headed “Work for the Month,” — Revolution-work inclusive, of course — “Altitude of the Sun,” “State of the Crops and Markets,” “Meteorological Observations,” “Attractive Industry,” “Day Labor,” etc., just to remind the reader that the French peasantry did something beside go without breeches, burn châteaus, get ready knotted cords, and embrace and throttle one another by turns. These things are sometimes hinted at, but they deserve a notice more in proportion to their importance. We want HDT WHAT? INDEX

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not only a background to the picture, but a ground under the feet also. We remark, too, occasionally, an unphilosophical habit, common enough elsewhere, in Alison’s History of Modern Europe, for instance, of saying, undoubtedly with effect, that if a straw had not fallen this way or that, why then — but, of course, it is as easy in philosophy to make kingdoms rise and fall as straws. The poet is blithe and cheery ever, and as well as nature. Carlyle has not the simple Homeric health of Wordsworth, nor the deliberate philosophic turn of Coleridge, nor the scholastic taste of Landor, but, though sick and under restraint, the constitutional vigor of one of his old Norse heroes, struggling in a lurid light, with Jötuns still, striving to throw the old woman, and “she was Time” — striving to lift the big cat, and that was “the Great World-Serpent, which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps up the whole created world.” The smith, though so brawny and tough, I should not call the healthiest man. There is too much shopwork, too great extremes of heat and cold, and incessant ten-pound-ten and thrashing of the anvil, in his life. But the haymaker’s is a true sunny perspiration, produced by the extreme of summer heat only, and conversant with the blast of the zephyr, not of the forge-bellows. We know very well the nature of this man’s sadness, but we do not know the nature of his gladness. The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives. Philosophia practica est eruditionis meta — Philosophy practiced is the goal of learning; and for that other, Oratoris est celare artem, we might read, Herois est celare pugnam — the hero will conceal his struggles. Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when be has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes. Carlyle speaks of Nature with a certain unconscious pathos for the most part. She is to him a receded but ever memorable splendor, casting still a reflected light over all his scenery. As we read his books here in New England, where there are potatoes enough, and every man can get his living peacefully and sportively as the birds and bees, and need think no more of that, it seems to us as if by the world he often meant London, at the head of the tide upon the Thames, the sorest place on the face of the earth, the very citadel of conservatism. In his writings, we should say that he, as conspicuously as any, though with little enough expressed or even conscious sympathy, represents the Reformer class, and all the better for not being the acknowledged leader of any. In him the universal plaint is most settled, unappeasable, and serious. Until a thousand named and nameless grievances are righted, there will be no repose for him in the lap of nature, or the seclusion of science and literature. By foreseeing it, he hastens the crisis in the affairs of England, and is as good as many years added to her history. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To do himself justice, and set some of his readers right, he should give us some transcendent hero at length, to rule his demigods and Titans; develop, perhaps, his reserved and dumb reverence for Christ, not speaking to a London or Church of England audience merely. Let not “sacred silence meditate that sacred matter” forever, but let us have sacred speech and sacred scripture thereon. Every man will include in his list of worthies those whom he himself best represents. Carlyle, and our countryman Emerson, whose place and influence must ere long obtain a more distinct recognition, are, to a certain extent, the complement of each other. The age could not do with one of them, it cannot do with both. To make a broad and rude distinction, to suit our present purpose, the former, as critic, deals with the men of action — Mahomet, Luther, Cromwell; the latter with the thinkers — Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe; for, though both have written upon Goethe, they do not meet in him. The one has more sympathy with the heroes, or practical reformers, the other with the observers, or philosophers. Put their worthies together, and you will have a pretty fair representation of mankind; yet with one or more memorable exceptions. To say nothing of Christ, who yet awaits a just appreciation from literature, the peacefully practical hero, whom Columbus may represent, is obviously slighted; but above and after all, the Man of the Age, come to be called workingman, it is obvious that none yet speaks to his condition, for the speaker is not yet in his condition. Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West — In the East fames are won, In the West deeds are done. One merit in Carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. He removes many cartloads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. His writings are all unfenced on the side of the future and the possible. Though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broadly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumerable pools and lakes. These volumes contain not the highest, but a very practicable wisdom, which startles and provokes, rather than informs us. Carlyle does not oblige us to think; we have thought enough for him already, but he compels us to act. We accompany him rapidly through an endless gallery of pictures, and glorious reminiscences of experiences unimproved. “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth — how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else. A rare preacher, with prayer, and psalm, and sermon, and benediction, but no contemplation of man’s life from the serene Oriental ground, nor yet from the stirring Occidental. No thanksgiving sermon for the holydays, or the Easter vacations, when all men submit to float on the full currents of life. When we see with what spirits, though with little heroism enough, woodchoppers, drovers, and apprentices take and spend life, playing all day long, sunning themselves, shading themselves, eating, drinking, sleeping, we think that the philosophy of their life written would be such a level natural history as the Gardener’s Calendar and the works of the early botanists, inconceivably slow to come to practical conclusions. There is no philosophy here for philosophers, only as every man is said to have his philosophy; no system but such as is the man himself — and, indeed, he stands compactly enough; — no progress beyond the first assertion and challenge, as it were, with trumpet blast. One thing is certain — that we had best be doing something in good earnest henceforth forever; that’s an indispensable philosophy. The before impossible precept, “Know thyself,” he translates into the partially possible one, “Know what thou canst work at.” “Sartor Resartus” is, perhaps, the sunniest and most philosophical, as it is the most autobiographical of his works, in which he drew most largely on the experience of his youth. But we miss everywhere a calm depth, like a lake, even stagnant, and must submit to rapidity and whirl, as on skates, with all kinds of skillful and antic motions, sculling, sliding, cutting punch-bowls and rings, forward and backward. The talent is very nearly equal to the genius. Sometimes it would be preferable to wade slowly through a Serbonian bog, and feel the juices of the meadow. Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems. Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest. It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing. He will prophesy, tell what is to be, or, in other words, what alone is, under appearances, laying little stress on the boiling of the pot, or, the condition-of-England question. He has no more to do with the condition of England than with her national debt, which a vigorous generation would not inherit. The philosopher’s conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men’s, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. To live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other HDT WHAT? INDEX

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men, but wisely and according to universal laws. If Carlyle does not take two steps in philosophy, are there any who take three? Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain. It would be hard to surprise him by the relation of any important human experience, but in some nook or corner of his works you will find that this, too, was sometimes dreamed of in his philosophy. To sum up our most serious objections in a few words, we should say that Carlyle indicates a depth — and we mean not impliedly, but distinctly — which he neglects to fathom. We want to know more about that which he wants to know as well. If any luminous star or undissolvable nebula is visible from his station which is not visible from ours, the interests of science require that the fact be communicated to us. The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude. We want to hear more of his inmost life; his hymn and prayer more; his elegy and eulogy less; that he should speak more from his character, and less from his talent; communicate centrally with his readers, and not by a side; that he should say what he believes, without suspecting that men disbelieve it, out of his never- misunderstood nature. His genius can cover all the land with gorgeous palaces, but the reader does not abide in them, but pitches his tent rather in the desert and on the mountain-peak. When we look about for something to quote, as the fairest specimen of the man, we confess that we labor under an unusual difficulty; for his philosophy is so little of the proverbial or sentential kind, and opens so gradually, rising insensibly from the reviewer’s level, and developing its thought completely and in detail, that we look in vain for the brilliant passages, for point and antithesis, and must end by quoting his works entire. What in a writer of less breadth would have been the proposition which would have bounded his discourse, his column of victory, his Pillar of Hercules, and ne plus ultra, is in Carlyle frequently the same thought unfolded; no Pillar of Hercules, but a considerable prospect, north and south, along the Atlantic coast. There are other pillars of Hercules, like beacons and lighthouses, still further in the horizon, toward Atlantis, set up by a few ancient and modern travelers; but, so far as this traveler goes, he clears and colonizes, and all the surplus population of London is bound thither at once. What we would quote is, in fact, his vivacity, and not any particular wisdom or sense, which last is ever synonymous with sentence (sententia), as in his contemporaries Coleridge, Landor, and Wordsworth. We have not attempted to discriminate between his works, but have rather regarded them all as one work, as is the man himself. We have not examined so much as remembered them. To do otherwise would have required a more indifferent, and perhaps even less just review than the present. All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch HDT WHAT? INDEX

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behind. Such intimate and living, such loyal and generous sympathy with the heroes of history, not one in one age only, but forty in forty ages, such an unparalleled reviewing and greeting of all past worth, with exceptions, to be sure — but exceptions were the rule before — it was, indeed, to make this the age of review writing, as if now one period of the human story were completing itself, and getting its accounts settled. This soldier has told the stories with new emphasis, and will be a memorable hander- down of fame to posterity. And with what wise discrimination he has selected his men, with reference both to his own genius and to theirs! — Mahomet, Dante, Cromwell, Voltaire, Johnson, Burns, Goethe, Richter, Schiller, Mirabeau — could any of these have been spared? These we wanted to hear about. We have not, as commonly, the cold and refined judgment of the scholar and critic merely, but something more human and affecting. These eulogies have the glow and warmth of friendship. There is sympathy, not with mere fames, and formless, incredible things, but with kindred men — not transiently, but lifelong he has walked with them. No doubt, some of Carlyle’s worthies, should they ever return to earth, would find themselves unpleasantly put upon their good behavior, to sustain their characters; but if he can return a man’s life more perfect to our hands than it was left at his death, following out the design of its author, we shall have no great cause to complain. We do not want a daguerreotype likeness. All biography is the life of Adam — a much-experienced man — and time withdraws something partial from the story of every individual, that the historian may supply something general. If these virtues were not in this man, perhaps they are in his biographer — no fatal mistake. Really, in any other sense, we never do, nor desire to, come at the historical man — unless we rob his grave, that is the nearest approach. Why did he die, then? He is with his bones, surely. No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing: he has most of that material. This we allow in all its senses, and in one narrower sense it is not so convenient. Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes. There is very little of what is called criticism here; it is love and reverence, rather, which deal with qualities not relatively, but absolutely great; for whatever is admirable in a man is something infinite, to which we cannot set bounds. These sentiments allow the mortal to die, the immortal and divine to survive. There is something antique, even, in his style of treating his subject, reminding us that heroes and Demi-gods, Fates and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Furies, still exist; the common man is nothing to him, but after death the hero is apotheosized and has a place in heaven, as in the religion of the Greeks. Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration. What else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy? The lightning is an exaggeration of the light. Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration. He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth. No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, so that for the time there seemed to be no other. Moreover, you must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing, and so you acquire a habit of shouting to those who are not. By an immense exaggeration we appreciate our Greek poetry and philosophy, and Egyptian ruins; our Shakespeares and Miltons; our Liberty and Christianity. We give importance to this hour over all other hours. We do not live by justice, but by grace. As the sort of justice which concerns us in our daily intercourse is not that administered by the judge, so the historical justice which we prize is not arrived at by nicely balancing the evidence. In order to appreciate any, even the humblest man, you must first, by some good fortune, have acquired a sentiment of admiration, even of reverence, for him, and there never were such exaggerators as these. To try him by the German rule of referring an author to his own standard, we will quote the following from Carlyle’s remarks on history, and leave the reader to consider how far his practice has been consistent with his theory. “Truly, if History is Philosophy teaching by Experience, the writer fitted to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. The Experience itself would require All-knowledge to record it, were the All-wisdom, needful for such Philosophy as would interpret it, to be had for asking. Better were it that mere earthly Historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for Omniscience than for human science; and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will at best be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret; or, at most, in reverent faith, far different from that teaching of Philosophy, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History, and in Eternity, will clearly reveal.” Carlyle is a critic who lives in London to tell this generation who have been the great men of our race. We have read that on some exposed place in the city of Geneva, they have fixed a brazen indicator for the use of travelers, with the names of the mountain summits in the horizon marked upon it, “so that by taking sight across the index you can distinguish them at once. You will not mistake Mont Blanc, if you see him, but until you get accustomed to the panorama, you may easily mistake one of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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his court for the king.” It stands there a piece of mute brass, that seems nevertheless to know in what vicinity it is: and there perchance it will stand, when the nation that placed it there has passed away, still in sympathy with the mountains, forever discriminating in the desert. So, we may say, stands this man, pointing as long as he lives, in obedience to some spiritual magnetism, to the summits in the historical horizon, for the guidance of his fellows. Truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap. To have our sunlight without paying for it, without any duty levied — to have our poet there in England, to furnish us entertainment, and, what is better, provocation, from year to year, all our lives long, to make the world seem richer for us, the age more respectable, and life better worth the living — all without expense of acknowledgment even, but silently accepted out of the east, like morning light, as a matter of course. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Thomas Carlyle “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1809

A man who would later admire Thomas Carlyle, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was born in Besancon, France, in a peasant family.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Thomas Carlyle finished Annan Grammar School, then walked 90 miles to enter Edinburgh University — where he presumed he would be preparing for the ministry. Thomas Carlyle is a Scotchman, born about fifty years ago, “at Ecclefechan, Annandale,” according to one authority. “His parents ‘good farmer people,’ his father an elder in the Secession church there, and a man of strong native sense, whose words were said to ‘nail a subject to the wall.’” We also hear of his “excellent mother,” still alive, and of “her fine old covenanting accents, converting with his transcendental tones.” He seems to have gone to school at Annan, on the shore of the Solway Firth, and there, as he himself writes, “heard of famed professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole Wonderland of Knowledge,” from Edward Irving, then a young man “fresh from Edinburgh, with college prizes, ... come to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his.” From this place, they say, you can look over into Wordsworth’s country. Here first he may have become acquainted with Nature, with woods, such as are there, and rivers and brooks, some of whose names we have heard, and the last lapses of Atlantic billows. He got some of his education, too, more or less liberal, out of the University of Edinburgh, where, according to the same authority, he had to “support himself,” partly by “private tuition, translations for the booksellers, etc.,” and afterward, as we are glad to hear, “taught an academy in Dysart, at the same time that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy,” the usual middle passage of a literary life. He was destined for the Church, but not by the powers that rule man’s life; made his literary début in Fraser’s Magazine, long ago; read here and there in English and French, with more or less profit, we may suppose, such of us at least as are not particularly informed, and at length found some words which spoke to his condition in the German language, and set himself earnestly to unravel that mystery — with what success many readers know.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1811

According to Simon Heffer’s MORAL DESPERADO: A LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), page 42: In the ten years between the 1811 and 1821 censuses the population of Britain rose by 17%, from 12,000,000 to 14,000,000. Wages, which had risen steadily in real terms since the start of the Napoleonic Wars, were now beginning a downward progress that would not be stopped until after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 — three years after Thomas Carlyle had railed against the economic and social conditions in England in PAST AND PRESENT. The political establishment was unsteady, the King mad, his son the Prince Regent dissolute and disliked. High stamp duties, of 4d on a newspaper, limited the circulation of opinions hostile to the Tory government or Lord Liverpool. A rash of prosecutions for seditious libel, and for the defamation of the King and his ministers, also occurred in 1817, as another means of encouraging conformity. A fall in demand immediately after the war led to a great rise in unemployment, exacerbated by the reduction in manpower of the army and navy. Sporadic rioting, and disturbances even among the middle classes, fed the Tory establishment’s fear of the mob. In 1817 parliament suspended Habeas Corpus and passed bills forbidding potentially seditious meetings; this was two years before Peterloo and the Six Acts.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Thomas Carlyle “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1814

Thomas Carlyle left Edinburgh University without a degree to teach mathematics at Annan Academy and other grammar schools while devouring German literature and philosophy. He developed a friendship with Edward Irving. He seems to have gone to school at Annan, on the shore of the Solway Firth, and there, as he himself writes, “heard of famed professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole Wonderland of Knowledge,” from Edward Irving, then a young man “fresh from Edinburgh, with college prizes, ... come to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his.” From this place, they say, you can look over into Wordsworth’s country. Here first he may have become acquainted with Nature, with woods, such as are there, and rivers and brooks, some of whose names we have heard, and the last lapses of Atlantic billows. He got some of his education, too, more or less liberal, out of the University of Edinburgh, where, according to the same authority, he had to “support himself,” partly by “private tuition, translations for the booksellers, etc.,” and afterward, as we are glad to hear, “taught an academy in Dysart, at the same time that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy,” the usual middle passage of a literary life. He was destined for the Church, but not by the powers that rule man’s life; made his literary début in Fraser’s Magazine, long ago; read here and there in English and French, with more or less profit, we may suppose, such of us at least as are not particularly informed, and at length found some words which spoke to his condition in the German language, and set himself earnestly to unravel that mystery — with what success many readers know. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1817

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

August: On a long walking tour to the Trossachs and back by way of Loch Lomond and Glasgow with some other teachers, Thomas Carlyle sighted for the first time, on the waters off Greenock, the phenomenon of a ship being driven by fuel power and a steam engine rather than being pushed along by the force of wind upon sails, which is to say — a “steamer.”

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Carlyle HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1818

May: Thomas Carlyle commented that he was “now pretty well convinced that a body projected by the earth with a velocity of 39,000 feet per second will never return.” SKY EVENT

At approximately this point this projectile schoolmaster nicely turned an epigram of Lucian on his spit by offering to another of his tutor friends that “when the Gods have determined to render a man ridiculously miserable, they make a schoolmaster of him.”

Clearly, at this point Carlyle had entered into the spiritual crisis which would consume his life until 1822, and in which he would abandon his Christianity by embracing the secular nature of theuniverseofmatter.

THOMAS CARLYLE

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Carlyle HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 23, Monday: Thomas Carlyle asked to be relieved of his duties as a schoolmaster of Kirkcalky so he could go on to read law and literature at Edinburgh University and Mainhill. This would be the beginning of what, looking back from a vantage point in later life, he would term his “four or five most miserable, dark, sick and heavy-laden years.”

His younger brother “Jack,” John Aitken Carlyle, would succeed him as schoolmaster at Annan Academy.

SCOTLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1819

March: Thomas Carlyle wrote to his mother that he was reading his “favourite,” the book of JOB. It appears that he was reading also in the CONFESSIONS of Rousseau and not finding them nearly so congenial. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1820

May: Thomas Carlyle, staying alone in an inn at Muirkirk, by getting up at four in the morning and walking all day, managed to cover a distance of 54 miles, arriving at eight in the evening at Dumfries. But it was a “mournful” exercise; our hiker was so desperate he was even contemplating getting back into the profession of teaching.

November: Thomas Carlyle traveled from his family’s home to Edinburgh, on this return journey not hiking it but taking the public stagecoach. To cut the expense of this he arranged to be one of the coach’s roof-sitters. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1821

The first meeting of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, at Haddington.

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June: While in Leith Walk2 at Edinburgh, just below Pilrig Street, on his way toward his “daily bathe on the sands between Lieth [sic] and Portobello,” Thomas Carlyle achieved the spiritual transformation appropriate to a close reader of the book of Job which he would characterize, in his SARTOR RESARTUS, as the “Everlasting No.”

2. Leith Walk was a cheap commercial thoroughfare connecting Edinburgh with its port. Robert Chambers at one early point in his life had had a book stall on this street. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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[P]erhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when all at once there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: “What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet and defy it!” And as so I thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever, I was strong, of unknown strength, a spirit, almost a god. Even from that time, the temper of my misery was changed; not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus has the EVERLASTING NO (das ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)”; to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Carlyle also recounted in his book that his inspiration for a Philosophy of Clothes occurred “when, turning the corner of a lane, in the Scottish Town of Edinburgh, I came upon a Signpost.” The sign was a trade sign consisting of a painted depiction of a pair of leather breeches, with between their knees painted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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3 “these memorable words, SIC ITUR AD ASTRA”: It was in this high moment, when the soul, rent, as it were, and shed asunder, is open to inspiring influence, that I first conceived this Work on Clothes: the greatest which I can ever hope to do; which has already, after long retardations, occupied, and will yet occupy, so large a section of my Life.

Later on, Thomas Carlyle would match this EVERLASTING NO up with a corresponding EVERLASTING YEA: So true is it, what I then say, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write: “It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin”... there is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness!... Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.

3. We may remind ourself here of Thomas Carlyle’s treatment of leathern-suited George Fox of the Quakers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1822

Dr. John Aitken Carlyle assisted his brother Thomas Carlyle in a translation into English of Adrien Marie Legendre’s ÉLÉMENTS DE GÉOMÉTRIE — AVEC DES NOTES (this 1794 French treatise in mathematics had already been translated in 1819 by Professor John Farrar of Harvard College; the new translation would be paid for by David Brewster, LL.D. and would make no mention of the Carlyle brothers).

During this year and the following one, Thomas would be tutoring in the Buller family. ENGLISH EVENTS OF 1822

June: It was a year after the spiritual breaking point which Thomas Carlyle would characterize, in his SARTOR RESARTUS, as the “Everlasting No”: ... all at once there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: “What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet and defy it!” And as so I thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever, I was strong, of unknown strength, a spirit, almost a god. Even from that time, the temper of my misery was changed; not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus has the EVERLASTING NO (das ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)”; to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.

At this point Carlyle wrote home to his mother: I have also books to write, and things to say and do in this world, which few wot of. This has the air of vanity, but it is not altogether so. I consider that my Almighty Author has given me some glimmerings of superior understanding and mental gifts; and I should reckon it the worst treason against him to neglect improving & using to the very utmost of my power these his bountiful mercies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Thomas Carlyle “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1823

During this year and the following one Thomas Carlyle’s initial important work, “The Life of Schiller,” was appearing in London Magazine.

January: Presumably by this point, since Thomas Carlyle had completed his work for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, he had completed composition of his article “Quakers” which would be appearing in its 1825 volume.4

4. The date of publication for this encyclopaedia is commonly given as 1830 but that was merely the date of issue of its last volume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1824

Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP appeared in the London Magazine, and was reviewed there by Thomas De Quincey.

Goethe’s 1811-1813 autobiography AUS MEINEM LEBEN: DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT was presented in English as MEMOIRS OF GOETHE: WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

June: Samuel Taylor Coleridge met Thomas Carlyle.

Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley’s edition of her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s POSTHUMOUS POEMS was published by John Hunt.

NEW POETRY OF 1824 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1825

Thomas Carlyle’s THE LIFE OF SCHILLER.

Thomas Carlyle’s article “Quakers” in this year’s volume of the Edinburgh Encyclopædia contained materials 5 on George Fox which he would later incorporate into his SARTOR RESARTUS. “Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern History,” says [Diogenes] Teufelsdröckh, “is not the Diet of Worms, still less the Battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an incident passed carelessly over by most Historians, and treated with some degree of ridicule by others: namely, George Fox’s making to himself a suit of Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a Shoemaker, was one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, the Divine Idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself; and, across all the hulls of Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, in unspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls: who therefore are rightly accounted Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced. Sitting in his stall; working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had, nevertheless, a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, as through a window, it could look upwards, and discern its Celestial Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even with some prospect of victuals, and an honourable Mastership in Cordwainery, and perhaps the post of Thirdborough in his hundred, as the crown of long faithful sewing, — was nowise satisfaction enough to such a mind: but ever amid the boring and hammering came tones from that far country, came Splendours and Terrors; for this poor Cordwainer, as we said, was a Man; and the Temple of Immensity, wherein as Man he had been sent to minister, was full of holy mystery to him. “The Clergy of the neighbourhood, the ordained Watchers and Interpreters of that same holy mystery, listened with unaffected tedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to ‘drink beer and dance with the girls.’ Blind leaders of the blind! For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were their shovel-hats scooped-out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt-on; and such a church- repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held over that spot of God’s Earth, — if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality? Fox turned from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings and his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance, higher than Ætna, had been heaped over that Spirit: but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried there. Through long days and nights of 5. The date of publication for this encyclopaedia is commonly given as 1830 but that was merely the date of issue of its last volume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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silent agony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man’s force, to be free: how its prison-mountains heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven! That Leicester shoe- shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine.— ‘So bandaged and hampered, and hemmed in,’ groaned he, ‘with thousand requisitions, obligations, straps, tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move: not my own am I, but the World’s; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought! Why not; what binds me here? Want, want! —Ha, of what? Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light? Only Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods: the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild-berries feed me; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather!’ “Historical Oil-painting,” continues [Diogenes] Teufelsdröckh, “is one of the Arts I never practiced; therefore shall I not decide whether this subject were easy of execution on the canvas. Yet often has it seemed to me as if such first outflashing of man’s Freewill, to lighten, more and more into Day, the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf him in its hindrances and its horrors, were properly the only grandeur there is in History. Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding heart, picture George Fox on that morning, when he spreads-out his cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cowhides by unwonted patterns, and stitches them together into one continuous all-including Cast, the farewell service of his awl! Stitch away, thou noble Fox: every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of Slavery, and World- worship, and the Mammon-god. Thy elbows jerk, and in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he! “Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the loftiest height; and, for the Poor also a Gospel has been published. Surely if, as D’Alambert asserts, my illustrious namesake, Diogenes, was the greatest man of Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then by stronger reason is George Fox the greatest of the Moderns; and greater than Diogenes himself: for he too stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting aside all props and shoars; yet not, in half-savage Pride, undervaluing the Earth; valuing it rather, as a place to yield him warmth and food, he looks Heavenward from his Earth, and dwells in an element of Mercy and Worship, with a still Strength, such as the Cynic’s Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was that Tub; a temple from which man’s dignity and divinity was scornfully preached abroad: but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love.” George Fox’s “perennial suit,” with all that it held, has been worn quite into ashes for nigh two centuries.... For us, aware HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of his deep Sansculottism, there is more meant in this passage than meets the ear.... Does [Diogenes] Teufelsdröckh anticipate that, in this age of refinement, any considerable class of the community, by way of testifying against the “Mammon-god,” and escaping from what he calls “Vanity’s Workhouse and Ragfair,” where doubtless some of them are toiled and whipped and hoodwinked sufficiently, — will sheathe themselves in close- fitting cases of Leather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majesty lay aside its robes of state, and Beauty its frills and train-gowns, for a second-skin of tanned hide? By which change Huddersfield and Manchester, and Coventry and Paisley, and the Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hungry solitudes; and only Day and Martin could profit. For neither would [Diogenes] Teufelsdröckh’s mad daydream, here as we presume covertly intended, of levelling Society (levelling it indeed with a vengeance, into one huge drowned marsh!), and so attaining the political effects of Nudity without its frigorific or other consequences, — be thereby realised. Would not the rich man purchase a waterproof suit of Russia Leather; and the high-born Belle step-forth in red or azure morocco, lined with shamoy: the black cowhide being left to the Drudges and Gibeonites of the world; and so all the old Distinctions be re-established? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1826

October 17, Tuesday: Gioachino Rossini was named Premier Compositeur du Roi and Inspecteur General du Chant en France by King Charles X.

Celebration of the opening of the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay Canal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Baillie Welsh, the popular daughter of a doctor, were wed.6 After his marriage he “resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and for a year or two at Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farmhouse in the upper part of Dumfriesshire,” at which last place, amid barren heather hills, he was visited by our countryman, Emerson. With Emerson he still corresponds. He was early intimate with Edward Irving, and continued to be his friend until the latter’s death. Concerning this “freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul,” and Carlyle’s relation to him, those whom it concerns will do well to consult a notice of his death in Fraser’s Magazine for 1835, reprinted in the Miscellanies. He also corresponded with Goethe. Latterly, we hear, the poet Sterling was his only intimate acquaintance in England. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE WALDO EMERSON

October 18, Wednesday: Professor John Hough of Middlebury College opinioned, in a sermon before the Vermont Colonization Society at Montpelier, Vermont, that:

6. Eventually someone would commit a particularly vicious and telling piece of humor, by commenting that it had been good of God to marry Thomas and Jane Carlyle together, “and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

The state of the free colored population of the United States, is one of extreme and remediless degradation, of gross irreligion, of revolting profligacy, and, of course, deplorable wretchedness.... They are found in vast numbers in the haunts of riot and dissipation and intemperance where they squander in sin the scanty earnings of their toil, contract habits of grosser iniquity and are prepared for acts of daring outrage and of enormous guilt.

(Please pardon me for pointing out here, that the conclusion that the audience would be driven of necessity to derive from this professor’s description of the situation, would be that the kindest thing to be done with these unfortunate people from whom labor had been extracted for generations without compensation would be that now, when we don’t need their free labor anymore, to ship them off back to Africa and forget about them, it being clear that, failing some kind solution in that genre, it would eventually be necessary for us to rise up in our righteous wrath and put them out of their misery once and for all by a resolute act of genocide. If you don’t get that by reading the passage above, please go back and read the passage again, more slowly, and savor the final part about how we need to get them before they get us.)

The last lottery was held in England. ENGLISH EVENTS OF 1826

Thomas Carlyle arose from his wedding bed and with great vehemence tore up a flowerbed in the yard. One suspicion is that he had discovered himself to be hopelessly impotent. Another suspicion is that his eroticism had become anally fixated. Another suspicion is that he was exclusively homosexual (there is doubt that he ever became able to consummate his union with Jane Welsh, Mrs. Carlyle).7

THOMAS CARLYLE

Albert Gallatin wrote to John Quincy Adams:

DEAR SIR, LONDON, October 18, 1826 I had intended next spring, before my return to America, to have an excursion to Paris once more to see some of my friends. Mr. Canning’s absence and the dispersion of the other members of the Cabinet having left me literally without anything to do here, I embraced what was the most favourable opportunity of making that journey, from which I have just returned. My letter of yesterday HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to the Secretary of State contains the substance of the information I was able to collect there; and I will now add some particulars which, as they involve the names of individuals, I did not wish to remain on record in the Department of State. In the course of a long conversation with Pozzo di Borgo the state of our relations with Great Britain was alluded to. I told him that the Emperor’s decision in the case of slaves carried away and the convention relative thereto had not been carried into effect by Great Britain in conformity with what we considered their real intention and meaning; that the British Government had offered to compromise the matter by payment of a sum of money which fell short of our expectations; but that we were nevertheless inclined to accept it, principally on account of the reluctance we felt to trouble the Emperor by an appeal, asking from him further explanation of his decision. Pozzo immediately expressed his wish that we might compromise or otherwise adjust the matter without making such an appeal, which, particularly at this time, would be, as he thought, extremely inconvenient to the Emperor; and speaking of the Maine Boundary question, with which and its possible consequences he appeared well acquainted, he appeared also desirous, though he did not express himself as positively as on that of slaves, that Russia should not be selected as the umpire. I only observed that if there was any inconvenience in being obliged to make decisions which might not please both parties, that inconvenience was less to Russia than to any other Power, and that a compensation for it was found in the additional degree of consideration accruing to the Monarch in whom such confidence was placed. All this, however, corroborates what I have stated in my official letter respecting an approximation between Russia and Great Britain, and the disposition of the Emperor to interfere less than his predecessor in affairs in which he has no immediate interest. The most remarkable change discoverable to France is the extinction of Bonapartism, both as relates to dynasty and to the wish of a military Government. This, I am happy to say, appears to have had a favourable effect on our friend Lafayette, who was very ungovernable in all that related to petty plots during my residence at Paris as Minister, and to whom I had again spoken on the same subject in the most forcible manner whilst he was 7. According to the early biographer James Anthony Froude, Carlyle had intended that there be no biography written of him because “there was a secret connected with him unknown to his closest friends, that no one knew and no-one would know it, and that without a knowledge of it no true biography of him was possible.” Jane Carlyle had related the secret to Geraldine Jewsbury, but Victorian reticence was such that when it came time to pass this on to Froude, all Jewsbury was able to communicate was “she had something to tell me which I ought to know. I must have learnt that the state of things had been most unsatisfactory; the explanation of the whole of it was that ‘Carlyle was one of those persons who ought never to have married.’” It was clear to Froude on the basis of this communication only that the secret was not that Mrs. Carlyle had been incapable of becoming pregnant, but that the secret had to do rather with an “injury which she believed herself to have received. She had often resolved to leave Carlyle. He, of course, always admitted that she was at liberty to go if she pleased.” Froude inferred that Carlyle had been impotent, and that this was the reason why, on the morning after his wedding night, he “tore to pieces the flower garden at Comely Bank in a fit of ungovernable fury.” Frank Harris, not your paragon of truthfulness, would later allege that in a casual conversation Carlyle had indicated that the marriage had not been consummated: “The body part, he pleaded, seemed so little to him.” On the basis of little other than Freudian theology, Dr. James Halliday had been able to propose that the author of a set of writings such as Carlyle’s could only had been anally fixated, inclined toward homosexually, and sado-masochistic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in America. His opinions and feelings are not changed; but he appears to be thoroughly satisfied of the hopelessness of any attempt to produce a change at present; and he confines his hopes to a vague expectation that, after the death of the present King and of the Dauphin, the Duc d’Orleans will dispute the legitimacy of the Duke of Bordeaux and become a constitutional King. This is such a doubtful and distant contingency as is not likely to involve Lafayette in any difficulties. Mr. de Villele complained to me of those expressions in the President’s message which declared Hayti to have placed herself in a state of vassalage to France, as calculated to increase the dissatisfaction amongst the people of the island at the late arrangement. He said that he was aware of the objections of a very different nature which we had to a recognition of the independence of Hayti, but did not see the necessity of alleging the reason alluded to. As I did not wish and did not think it at all proper to enter into any discussion of the subject, I answered, as if in jest, “Qu’un tribut, impose a une colonie cornme le prix de son independance, etait contraire aux grands principes.” I forgot to mention the circumstance to Mr. Brown, and do not know whether the thing had already been complained of to him. If so, its being repeated to me-and they were almost the first words Mr. de Villele addressed to me-shows that it must have made a deep impression on the French Government. This reminds me that I received here a communication from a respectable quarter stating that, a few days before the publication of the order in council of July last, one of the King’s Ministers had complained to a confidential friend of the general tone of the American (United States) diplomacy towards England, still more so as respected manner than matter, and added that it was time to show that this was felt and resented. As to manner, the reproach cannot certainly attach either to Mr. Rush’s or Mr. King’s correspondence; and I know, from a conversation with Mr. Addington, that in that respect Mr. Clay’s has been quite acceptable. On looking at your own communications, I am satisfied that those to the British Ministers can have given no offence whatever, and that what they allude to and which has offended them is your instructions to Mr. Rush, printed by order of the Senate, and which have been transmitted both to Mr. Canning and to Mr. Huskisson; a circumstance, by the by, not very favourable to negotiations still pending. That they have no right to complain of what you wrote to our own Minister is obvious; still, I think the fact to be so. I forgot to mention in my letter of yesterday to the Secretary of State that there is some alarm amongst the legitimates about a plan of Metternich to change the line of succession in Austria, or a plea of the presumed incapacity of the heir presumptive; and that the King of the Netherlands has at last, by his unabated and exclusive attention to business and by his perfect probity and sincerity, so far conquered the prejudices of the Belgians as to have become highly respected and almost popular amongst HDT WHAT? INDEX

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them. I have the honour, &c., ALBERT GALLATIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1827

Thomas Carlyle began his friendships with Francis Jeffrey and with Thomas De Quincey. ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY

BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES preserves for us the following snippets of Carlyle dating to this year:

• Literary men are... a perpetual priesthood. — STATE OF GERMAN LITERATURE. Edinburgh Review, 1827. • Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying, — imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics, — “Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of — the air!” — RICHTER. Edinburgh Review, 1827. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1828

Margaret [Wilson] Oliphant was born in Wallyford.

Dugald Stewart died in Bo’ness.

The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor of Dalkeith, Moir.

Lockhart’s LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. SCOTLAND

In order to economize while writing for periodicals, Thomas Carlyle moved to a farm at Craigenputtoch: After his marriage he “resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and for a year or two at Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farmhouse in the upper part of Dumfriesshire,” at which last place, amid barren heather hills, he was visited by our countryman, Emerson. With Emerson he still corresponds. He was early intimate with Edward Irving, and continued to be his friend until the latter’s death. Concerning this “freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul,” and Carlyle’s relation to him, those whom it concerns will do well to consult a notice of his death in Fraser’s Magazine for 1835, reprinted in the Miscellanies. He also corresponded with Goethe. Latterly, we hear, the poet Sterling was his only intimate acquaintance in England. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

His ESSAY ON BURNS appeared in the Edinburgh Review. ROBERT BURNS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

Thomas Carlyle was able to place his SIGNS OF THE TIMES in the Edinburgh Review. This would constitute perhaps that decade’s most cogent articulation of the suspicion that machines were on their way toward the estrangement of humankind from, as Carlyle put the matter, our “mysterious springs of Love ... and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry....”

In addition, BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES preserves for us the following snippet from Carlyle’s output of this year:8 We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.... We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that “ridicule is the test of truth.” — Volt aire. Foreign Review, 1829.

8. This would seem to be based upon the following comments by Shaftesbury:

How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule? —CHARACTERISTICS. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, section 2

Truth, ’t is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself. —ESSAY ON THE FREEDOM OF WIT AND HUMOUR, section 1

’T was the saying of an ancient sage (Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” lib. iii. c. 18), that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit. —ESSAY ON THE FREEDOM OF WIT AND HUMOUR, section 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1830

June: Joseph Smith, Jr. began a revision of the BIBLE (he would work on this into 1833; about half the revelations in the Mormon Church’s “Doctrine and Covenants” would in some way be connected to this translation effort). While this entire effort has been published, only extracts from it now appear at the back of Mormon editions of the BIBLE.

Thomas Carlyle jotted down about SARTOR RESARTUS that “It will be one of the strangest volumes ever offered to the English world, whether worth anything is another question.”

THOMAS CARLYLE STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

Summer: Thomas Carlyle posed, in his journal, an abstract question, what the “idle rich do for their wages.” The answer he managed to come up with was that in England, some noble who had an income of £200,000 a year and thus was earning the same as 6,666 ordinary Englishmen, was justifying such a benefit by killing partridges.

Over the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road, tracks which were ordinarily used for horse-drawn 1 carriages, a strange new experimental machine puffed as far as Ellicott Mills (12 /2 miles). This was the Tom Thumb, which had been built in 1829 by Peter Cooper:

John Ruskin spent the summer touring the Lake District of England, writing a 2,000-line poem as a record of this. He was eleven years of age. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Bronson Alcott wrote OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF INFANT INSTRUCTION:

Infant happiness should be but another name for infant progress.

The Quaker philanthropist Robert Vaux, president of the board of directors of the public schools of Philadelphia, would be impressed by this and would help Alcott find a publisher.

It was winter in the Southern Hemisphere. The Europeans in Tasmania were alarmed because 20 Europeans had recently been killed by members of the Big River group of Tasmanians in the Ouse district. All the aboriginals were equally guilty, it goes without saying, since they cannot be told apart. A number like “20” is a rather significant number, when it is deaths among Europeans who are important not only to themselves but also to the world at large, although it is a number of no significance when it is deaths among aboriginals, who are not important except to themselves, and whose deaths therefore go unremarked. There was talk, that Something Needed To Be Done. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

August: Professor François Pierre Guillaume Guizot became the French minister of the interior.

After SIGNS OF THE TIMES had appeared in the Revue Britannique, Thomas Carlyle received in the post a packet of socialist books from Gustave d’Eichthal, representing the remaining Saint-Simonians of Paris. He responded warmly to the religious sincerity of these radicals, that “Religion is the only bond and life of societies, so the only real Government were a Hierarchy.” One explanation for Carlyle’s brief flirtation with such socialism was that because Saint-Simon had shunned democracy, extolled duty, and believed in a natural class of rulers, Carlyle had reacted to it as if it were an attempt to construct a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of merit and of service. However, when the Saint-Simonians would in 1831 send “missionaries” to England, and when then in 1832 these emissaries would be tried for such offenses as the advocacy of free love, Carlyle would be keeping his distance from the sect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

September: Thomas Carlyle began his SARTOR RESARTUS writings (although not yet under that name, and although as yet the author did not know whether the writings were going to appear in the form of a book or in the form of a series of magazine article), extrapolating on the idea that the institutions and forms of everyday life are analogous to the clothing with which people mask their nakedness. These appurtenances conceal the “open secret” of reality, that God is immanent in everything.9 I am going to write — Nonsense. It is on “Clothes.” Heaven be my comforter!

THOMAS CARLYLE STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

9. He would be working over these materials under the title “Teufelsdreck” until November. He would submit this to, and then withdraw it from, Fraser’s Magazine, and it would not achieve first publication in any form until 1833-1834. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

October 28, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle jotted down that he had “Written a strange piece ‘On Clothes’ know not what will come of it.”10 “Custom,” continues the Professor, “doth make dotards of us all. Consider well, thou wilt find that Custom is the greatest of Weavers; and weaves air-raiment for all the Spirits of the Universe; whereby indeed these dwell with us visibly, as ministering servants, in our houses and workshops; but their spiritual nature becomes, to the most, forever hidden. Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

SARTOR RESARTUS

(Incidentally, you will notice that he here fully defines for us this term “Transcendentalism.”)

Hector Berlioz petitioned the Minister of the Interior for “authorization to enjoy in Paris the grant which the government in its munificence accords to laureates of the Academy.” He included support from four eminent musicians including Gaspare Spontini and Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Although in the previous year the British Slave Trade Commission had taken over the administration of Fernando Po, using this African island as a base for its suppression of the international slave trade, the British government gave an assurance to the Spanish government that it fully recognized that nation’s right to the sovereignty, property, and possession of the island (in 1833 the British would in fact withdraw). THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

10. He would submit this to, and then withdraw it from, Fraser’s Magazine, and it would not achieve first publication in any form until 1833-1834. The fifty manuscript sheets he had created at this point probably would account for perhaps the first third of SARTOR RESARTUS as eventually published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1831

Dr. John Aitken Carlyle had but 7s. to his name when on the recommendation of Thomas Carlyle’s friend Francis Jeffrey, Lady Clare selected him as her travelling physician at a salary of 300 guineas a year plus expenses.11 This was an ideal post for such a disorganized and basically lazy man. He would be in Italy with the countess of Clare for nearly the following seven years.

January: Thomas Carlyle had a piece entitled “Cruthers and Jonson; or, The Outskirts of Life” on pages 691- 705 of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (Henry Thoreau would refer to this piece in his journal for Summer 1845). CRUTHERS AND JONSON

11. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February: Thomas Carlyle recalled his “strange piece ‘On Clothes’” from publication in Fraser’s Magazine, and due to this recall it would not achieve first publication in any form until 1833-1834. The fifty manuscript sheets he had created at this point probably would account for perhaps the first third of SARTOR RESARTUS as eventually published.

Why? “The thing is not right, not Art.”

SARTOR RESARTUS

This questionable little Book was undoubtedly written among the mountain solitudes, in 1831; but, owing to the impediments natural and accidental, could not, for seven years more, appear as a Volume in England; —and had at last to clip itself in pieces, and be content to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous Magazine that offered. Whereby now, to certain idly curious readers, and even to myself till I make study, the insignificant but at last irritating question, What its real history and chronology are, is, if not insoluble, considerably involved in haze. To the first English Edition, 1838, which an American, or two American had now opened the way for, there was slightingly prefixed, under the title “Testimonies of Authors,” some straggle of real documents, which, now that I find it again, sets the matter into clear light and sequence; —and shall here, for removal of idle stumbling- blocks and nugatory guessings from the path of every reader, be reprinted as it stood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

August 4, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle left Craigenputtock on his way to Longman’s, the publisher, carrying the manuscript of his spiritual autobiography, SARTOR RESARTUS. A unique work, combining novel, essay and autobiography, it will be published only in part in Fraser’s Magazine, but Carlyle will be able to place his “Characteristics” in the Edinburgh Review and to meet John Stuart Mill, the intellectual and essayist who was recognized as the opposition to Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1832

July: Thomas Carlyle’s article on Ebenezer Elliott appeared in the Edinburgh Review. The poet was granted points for sincerity and impact but his poetry was noticed to be imitative of the style of others, his political philosophy was considered to be preposterous, and he was condemned as possessing neither a sense of proportion nor a sense of humor.

“Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington” began publication in New Monthly Magazine (installments from July 1832 to December 1833). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1833

August 25, Sunday: Felix Mendelssohn and his father left England after a stay of six weeks, heading for Rotterdam.

C.G. Jarvis recommended a new working arrangement in regard to Charles Babbage’s project for a Calculational Engine. Since his attention was the limiting item, to finish within a reasonable time all the designs and drawings needed to be at his residence under his supervision. The working drawings and work orders should go out to different workshops so that the work might proceed more quickly in parallel.

Waldo Emerson spent a nice day with Thomas Carlyle at Craigenputtock.12 After his marriage he “resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and for a year or two at Craigenputtock, a wild and desolate farm-house in the upper part of Dumfriesshire,” at which last place, amid barren heather hills, he was visited by our countryman Emerson. With Emerson he still corresponds. He was early intimate with Edward Irving, and continued to be his friend until the latter’s death. Concerning this “freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul,” and Carlyle’s relation to him, those whom it concerns will do well to consult a notice of his death in Fraser’s Magazine for 1835, reprinted in the Miscellanies. He also corresponded with Goethe. Latterly, we hear, the poet Sterling was his only intimate acquaintance in England.

12. [I have not yet been able to resolve this entry against the entry for August 28, which is from Heffer.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

August 28, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson had met, while in Rome, the Gustave d’Eichthal who had sent Saint- Simonian materials to Thomas Carlyle, and this scion of a Jewish banking family had given to the American tourist a letter of introduction to the sympathetic Scottish author. On this August day, therefore, Emerson showed up on the doorstep of the farmhouse at Craigenputtock — this is how Emerson would describe, later, how the visit had gone down, in his ENGLISH TRAITS: From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return, I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated every thing he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, “not a person to speak to within sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore;” so that books inevitably made his topics. [continued on following screen] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. “Blackwood’s” was the “sand magazine;” “Fraser’s” nearer approach to possibility of life was the “mud magazine;” a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was the “grave of the last sixpence.” When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero’s death, “Qualis artifex pereo!” better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor’s principle was mere rebellion, and that he feared was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart’s book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey. We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after ROBINSON CRUSOE, and Robertson’s America an early favorite. Rousseau’s CONFESSIONS had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted. He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy. He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. “Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.” We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country. There we sat down, and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle’s fault that we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. “Christ died on the tree: that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.” He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar’s appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker’s boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

In this year and the following year, in England, after Thomas Carlyle’s having labored over his SARTOR 13 RESARTUS manuscript since the late 1820s, it achieved a distribution of sorts by being serialized in a London journal, Fraser’s Magazine. Since this wasn’t readily available in Boston, Waldo Emerson would need to take out a subscription in order to read his new friend’s work.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

Lee Sterrenburg points out in A NARRATIVE OVERVIEW: THE MAKING OF THE CONCEPT OF THE GLOBAL “ENVIRONMENT” IN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE that the word “environment” was first used in its current sense by Carlyle in this manuscript, at a point at which he was parodying the construct of the “economy of nature” and those who might espouse such a construct. Rather than construing human culture in the usual manner as a small part of a greater natural whole, nature being originary and human nature developing derivatively within it, Carlyle chose to construe human nature as the greater whole of which general nature was but a part. For Carlyle, our spirit is a play of Force which dissolves mere material and bears it along in its irresistible surge. Our human Spirit is primary and originatory and controlling: “Earth’s mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive?” This spiritual vision of Carlyle’s eventually would become a new sort of human global imperialism. It is one of those constructs which we would like to imagine that the spirit of young David Henry Thoreau found inherently offensive.

Note how carefully in this work the author masked his attitude toward change and permanence through a pretense that it amounted to a concern over the nature of space and time: Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, which when he put on, and wished himself Anywhere, behold he was There. By this means had Fortunatus triumphed over Space, he had annihilated Space; for him there was no Where, but all was Here. Were a Hatter to establish himself, in the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for all mankind, what a world we should have of it! Still stranger, should, on the opposite side of the street, another Hatter establish himself; and as his fellow- craftsman made Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-annihilating! Of both would I purchase, were it with my last groschen; but 13. Perhaps it will be helpful to indicate what “Sartor Resartus” means. It offers three possible, somewhat overlapping translations: “the tailor retailored, “the patcher patched,” and “clothes volume edited.” The volume deals with an elaborate analogy between Vesture, Body, and Spirit. As clothing is to the body, in covering it, and as the body is to the soul, constituting for it a habitat, so the world which we perceive is to be understood to stand in relation to a non-evident realm the animating spirit of which is Deity. Religious observances are to be compared, in accordance with such an analogy, with the old rags collected by Jewish rag pickers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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chiefly of this latter. To clap-on your felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next to clap-on your other felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhen, straightway to be Then! This were indeed the grander: shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its Fire- Consummation; here historically present in the First Century, conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depth of that late Time! Or thinkest thou it were impossible, unimaginable? Is the Past annihilated, then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer: already through those mystic avenues, thou the Earth-blinded summonest both Past and Future, and communest with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of Tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and Tomorrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal. Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man’s Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: that Time and Space are not God, but creations of God; that with God as it is a universal HERE, so it is an everlasting NOW.

November: The 1st of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. Since this wasn’t readily available in Boston, Waldo Emerson would need to take out a subscription in order to read his new friend’s work. The several chapters were thankfully received, as they came out, and now we find it impossible to say which was best; perhaps each was best in its turn. They do not require to be remembered by chapters —that is a merit— but are rather remembered as a well- known strain, reviving from time to time, when it has nearly died away, and always inspiring us to worthier and more persistent endeavors. “The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament.” “He who first shortened the labour of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most TYPE Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of Printing.”

December: The 2d of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. The several chapters were thankfully received, as they came out, and now we find it impossible to say was best; perhaps each was best in its turn. They do not require to be remembered by HDT WHAT? INDEX

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chapters —that is a merit— but are rather remembered as a well- known strain, reviving from time to time, when it has nearly died away, and always inspiring us to worthier and more persistent endeavors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

Thomas Carlyle began to read about Oliver Cromwell in preparation for a biography he would author in 1841. From sometime this year through 1836 he would be writing away on a history of the French revolution which he would complete on January 12, 1837.

His initial published remarks on the life of the prophet Mohammed (such remarks would later be made part of his HEROES AND HERO WORSHIP.)

January: No installment of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in this month’s issue of Fraser’s Magazine.

February: The 3d of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. The several chapters were thankfully received, as they came out, and now we find it impossible to say which was best; perhaps each was best in its turn. They do not require to be remembered by chapters —that is a merit— but are rather remembered as a well- known strain, reviving from time to time, when it has nearly died away, and always inspiring us to worthier and more persistent endeavors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

February: Over the next seven months Bronson Alcott would read Plato,14 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth in the Loganian Library in Philadelphia, and gradually be weaned out of his Lockean empiricism and 18th-Century rationalism into the Platonic idealism which he would maintain for the duration of his long life. The pre-existence of the soul and its inherently good godlikeness were at the core of all his subsequent thought. Plato’s doctrine of the paideutic drawing out of pre-existent, half-forgotten ideas became the basis of his educational efforts, and he began his manuscript OBSERVATIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL NURTURE OF MY CHILDREN. Unfortunately, over these months of study, he became practically estranged for a time from his wife and his little girls, and remained so until Abba Alcott had a miscarriage.

Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely désillusionnée, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo’s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing ‘evolved from her inner consciousness’ was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

March 12, Wednesday: In this month appeared the 4th of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS. Though he had not yet received any of the issues of Fraser’s Magazine containing this, Waldo Emerson wrote to the Reverend James Freeman Clarke to inform him of the series.

14. Eventually a group of English educators would come to consider Bronson to be “the Concord Plato.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The several chapters were thankfully received, as they came out, and now we find it impossible to say which was best; perhaps each was best in its turn. They do not require to be remembered by chapters —that is a merit— but are rather remembered as a well- known strain, reviving from time to time, when it has nearly died away, and always inspiring us to worthier and more persistent endeavors.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

April 7, Monday: Felix Mendelssohn’s overture Melusine, or the Mermaid and the Knight was performed for the initial time, in London. It would become known as “Die schone Melusine.”

In this month appeared the 5th of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS. The Reverend James Freeman Clarke copied the letter he had received from Waldo Emerson about this strange text and sent it to his cousin Margaret Fuller in Groton. Fuller would be reading the work in Fraser’s Magazine eventually as that magazine came out in bound multiple-issue volumes.15

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

The Boston and Worcester Rail-Road experimented with a run of their locomotive “Meteor” from Boston as far as Davis’s tavern in Newton, a distance of 8½ miles, under the observation of a party of Directors and some 50 or 60 other spectators. Caroline J. Barker of West Newton described the engine as looking like “an old boiler.” A top speed of 20 miles per hour was found to be feasible, and an average speed of 18 miles per hour.16

15. Another Transcendentalist who was reading along serially in SARTOR RESARTUS was Bronson Alcott. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May: No installment of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in this month’s issue of Fraser’s Magazine.

June: The 6th of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in Fraser’s Magazine.

June 10, Tuesday: David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, John Marshall (1755-1835)’s A HISTORY OF THE COLONIES PLANTED BY THE ENGLISH ON THE CONTINENT OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM THEIR SETTLEMENT, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THAT WAR WHICH TERMINATED IN THEIR INDEPENDENCE.... (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824).

More than 3,000 gathered at Brown’s Race to celebrate Jonathan Child’s inauguration as Rochester, New York’s first mayor.

HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin sailed up the Pacific coast of the South American continent.

In Leipzig, Richard Wagner’s 1st published essay “Die deutsche Oper” appeared in Zeitung fur die elegante Welt.

In Oxford, England, “Captivity of Judah,” an oratorio by William Crotch to words of Schomberg and Owen, was performed for the initial time, at ceremonies installing the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor of the university (also performed was the premiere of Crotch’s ode “When these are days of old” to words of Keble).

Oxford

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle moved to 5 Great Cheyne Row (now 24 Cheyne Row) in the Chelsea district of London near the Thames River. He has spent the last quarter of his life in London, writing books; has the fame, as all readers know, of having made England acquainted with Germany, in late years, and done much else that is novel and remarkable in literature. He especially is the literary man of those parts. You may imagine him living in altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a 16. I have an attestation that this Boston and Worcester Railroad was later to be using passenger engines named “Nathan Hale” and David Henshaw” (this one with a straight smokestack), but that freight engines had names such as “Elephant,” “Lion,” “Tiger,” “Bison,” “Camel,” “Leopard,” “Mercury,” “Ajax,” “Hercules,” “Vesuvius,” “Aetna,” “Hecla,” “Fury” (had a bad rep for constantly breaking down), and “Comet” (with an old-style funnel-shaped smokestack). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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quiet part of London, called Chelsea, a little out of the din of commerce, in “Cheyne Row,” there, not far from the “Chelsea Hospital.” “A little past this, and an old ivy-clad church, with its buried generations lying around it,” writes one traveller, “you come to an antique street running at right angles with the Thames, and, a few steps from the river, you find Carlyle’s name on the door.” With the exception of the soundproofed room which the writer would have constructed at the top of the house during the 1850s, the building now preserved by the Carlyle’s House Memorial Trust and by the National Trust still very much echoes this contemporary description, which is of Carlyle’s penning: The House itself is eminent, antique; wainscotted to the very ceiling, and has been all new-painted and repaired; broadish stair, with massive balustrade (in the old style) corniced and as thick as one’s thigh; floors firm as a rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanness, and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor. And then as to room ... Three stories besides the sunk story; in every one of them three apartments in depth (something like 40 feet in all; for it was 13 of my steps!): Thus there is a front dining room (marble chimney-piece &c); then a back dining room (or breakfast-room) a little narrower (by reason of the kitchen stair); then out from this, and narrower still (to allow a back- window, you consider), a china room, or pantry, or I know not what, all shelved, and fit to hold crockery for the whole street. Such is the ground-area, which of course continues to the top, and furnishes every Bedroom with a dressing room, or even with a second bedroom ... a most massive, roomy, sufficient old house; with places, for example, to hang say three dozen hats or cloaks on; and as many crevices, and queer old presses, and shelved closets (all tight and new painted in their way) as would gratify the most covetous Goody. Rent £35!

July: The 7th of the eight installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. The several chapters were thankfully received, as they came out, and now we find it impossible to say which was best; perhaps each was best in its turn. They do not require to be remembered by chapters —that is a merit— but are rather remembered as a well- known strain, reviving from time to time, when it has nearly died away, and always inspiring us to worthier and more persistent endeavors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 12, Tuesday: In this month appeared the 8th and last of the installments of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS in Fraser’s Magazine. As part of the publication deal 58 sets of the complete work had been stitched together for the author’s personal distribution. The author sent off to Waldo Emerson a packet containing four stitched pamphlet copies of the complete work: “one copy for your own behoof” as he phrased it, plus “three others you can perhaps find fit readers for.” Of the total 58, Carlyle would manage to find homes for 38 and would be forced to retain 20. (If for some reason you would like to see this, the copy which would be presented by Carlyle to Harriet Taylor is at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.) “Sartor Resartus” is, perhaps, the sunniest and most philosophical, as it is the most autobiographical of his works, in which he drew most largely on the experience of his youth. But we miss everywhere a calm depth, like a lake, even stagnant, and must submit to rapidity and whirl, as on skates, with all kinds of skillful and antic motions, sculling, sliding, cutting punch-bowls and rings, forward and backward. The talent is very nearly equal to the genius. Sometimes it would be preferable to wade slowly through a Serbonian bog, and feel the juices of the meadow.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT TUESDAY EVENING, AUGUST 12 Burning of the Charlestown Convent The subject of universal interest in the city today has been the work of destruction accomplished by a mob, last night and this morning, at and about the Ursuline Convent, on Mount Benedict, in Charlestown — resulting in the complete sacking of the principal building itself — a four-story handsome brick edifice, with wings, and front about eighty feet — together with the farm house, cottage, and every other building upon the premises, and also with the demolition or consumption by fire of all the furniture and chattels of every description, appurtenant to the whole. The circumstances which have led to the commission of this horrible outrage need not be discussed at length. We shall confine ourselves principally to a statement of facts, ascertained from witnesses of the scene, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from personal observation, and application to all the authorities in whom most confidence may be placed. It is sufficient, perhaps, to introduce the statement of the Selectmen of Charlestown, in regard to this subject, as it appeared in this morning's Gazette: “To the Public. Whereas erroneous statements have appeared in the public papers, intimating that the liberty of a young lady was improperly and unlawfully restrained at the Convent in this town, and believing that said publications were intended to excite the public mind against that Institution, and might result in unpleasant or serious consequences, the Selectmen, considering it their duty to endeavor to allay any such excitement, have, at the request of the Government of the Institution, fully examined into the circumstances of the case, and were conducted by the lady in question throughout the premises, and into every apartment of the place — the whole of which is in good order, and nothing appearing to them to be in the least objectionable; and they have the satisfaction to assure the public, that there exists no cause of complaint on the part of said female, as she expresses herself to be entirely satisfied with her present situation, it being that of her own choice, and that she has no desire or wish to alter it. “THOS HOOPER, ABIJAH MONROE, SAMUEL POOR, STEPHEN WILEY, JOHN RUNEY, SELECTMEN “Charlestown, Aug. 11, 1834” The Post of this morning, also published a card from Mr. Edward Cutter, a respectable and well known citizen of Charlestown —not a Catholic— equally calculated, as that paper remarks, (had it come in season) “to allay the unjust excitement about the Nun.” Mr. Cutter says: “On the afternoon of Monday, the 28th inst, the lady in question came to my house, appeared to be considerably agitated, and expressed her wish to be conveyed to the residence of an acquaintance in West Cambridge. I lent her my assistance; and on the succeeding day, I called, with the purpose of inquiring for the causes which had induced her to leave the Institution. I was informed that she had returned to the Nunnery, in company with the Bishop, with a promise that she should be permitted to leave in two or three weeks, if it was her wish. Since that time, various rumors have been in circulation, calculated to excite the public in mind, and to such an extent as induced me to attempt to ascertain their foundation; accordingly on Saturday the 9th inst, I called at the Nunnery, and requested of the Superior an interview with the lady referred to. I obtained it; and was informed by her that she was at liberty to leave the Institution at any time she chose. The same statement HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was also made by the Superior, who farther remarked, that, in the present state of public feeling, she should prefer to have her leave.” The attention of our citizens was first called to the proceedings at Mount Benedict, by an alarm fire given from the vicinity of the Convent a little after eleven o'clock, and caused by tar-barrels and other combustible materials having been set on fire, as is supposed, to draw together those who had undertaken to aid in the work of destruction, or whose aid was expected to be obtained by the display of this signal. We have been informed that some time previous to this is a small party, of the same description with those who subsequently constituted the mass of the assailants, had ascended the hill, reconnoitered the premises pretty carefully, and apparently satisfied themselves that no suspicion was entertained, or, at all events, no defence prepared within the walls, from which serious difficulty or delay might be apprehended in the prosecution of the plan. This was no doubt suggested by the circumstance of certain, or rather uncertain, designs against the Convent having been for some days the subject of general report. Immediate action or attempts, however, on the part of the disaffected, were not anticipated either by the municipal authorities, or the citizens generally; and this impression of at least present security had been artfully confirmed by a hand- bill yesterday posted up and extensively circulated in Charlestown, which intimated, substantially, that what was proposed to be done would be done on Thursday evening next. A few moments after the signal was given, as above described, a gang of about fifty persons —as nearly as we can ascertain— but certainly at no time exceeding sixty — having gathered about the front door of the Convent, and made considerable noise by way of warning the inmates to flee, proceeded to affect a forcible entrance. The whole party, we should observe here, were disguised. All of them, so far as we can learn, had their faces painted — some after an Indian fashion, and others in other ways; and a part of the number employed devices and disguises of various other descriptions, adapted to conceal the individuals concerned in the outrage, from recognition, at the time of its execution, and of course from punishment hereafter. Meanwhile, the inmates of the Convent had all, we believe, effected their escape from the house, as admonished to do by the assailants in their first demonstrations about the entrance. These were the Lady Superior, five or six Nuns, three servant maids, and fifty-five or fifty-six children, the latter being HDT WHAT? INDEX

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pupils under the instruction of the Nuns, and placed there by their parents and other friends — the majority of whom we understand to be Protestants — belonging in this city and other places in Massachusetts generally, but some of them resident at greater distance. All of the inmates had retried when the alarm was given, and most were probably asleep; but the Nuns exerted themselves in rousing the children as fast as possible, and were successful in getting them all out of the Convent, whence they fled in great haste, through the rear of the building, and the garden attached to it, over the garden wall, scattering themselves in various directions, but most of them finding shelter in some of the houses not far distant from the premises. Those only who delayed most for the assistance of the younger part of the number were personally molested, among whom it is said was the Lady Superior, upon whom some persons laid rude hands to hasten her movements. The efforts of this lady and the nuns who aided here were doubtless increased by the absence of three or four of their number, who at the earliest alarm devoted themselves to the removal of a sister sometime confined to her bed by a disease from which there is no hope of her recovery. Others perhaps were occupied in the care of one of their companions who is deranged, and who, in the phrenzy occasioned by the consternation and confusion of the horrid scene which surrounded her, and the frightful sounds of disorder which assailed her ears, attempted to throw herself headlong from one of the upper windows of the house, and was not without difficulty restrained, and in some degree pacified, by her sisters. It is stated by some that the invalid was actually conveyed from the house by some of the assailants, (to a neighboring dwelling) and that she was treated by them with comparative tenderness. It is exceedingly difficult today to ascertain precisely the facts in regard to this point, and indeed in regard to the whole subject. This city and Charlestown are both full of contradictory rumors. We profess only to get as near the truth as we can. Of the destruction of all the buildings by fire, however, there is no doubt. The fire was set, in different parts of the Convent, probably about 12 o'clock, after considerable time had been spent in breaking up the furniture, including three pianos, an elegant costly harp, and other musical instruments. The whole establishment was in a blaze before one, and was reduced to ashes in the course of an hour or two. There was an insurance at the American office, on the building, to the amount of $12,000, and $2,000 also on the furniture; but no part of this will be available to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the proprietors under the circumstances of this occasion. The policy does not apply to occasions of this kind. Great numbers of people were attracted to the scene of destruction in the course of the night, most of whom probably arrived too late to prevent much of the harm which was done, had they been disposed and able to interfere to advantage. As many as ten or eleven engines from this city, besides five from Charlestown, and some from Cambridge, repaired to the spot, but only to swell the crowd of spectators. Our firemen were of course under the control of the Charlestown Engineers, and by these were requested, as we are told, not to play upon the buildings, no water was thrown by any of the engines. The nearest which could be used to much extent was that of the Middlesex Canal. In reference to all this part of the transaction which relates to the firemen, we presume that correct information will be furnished hereafter; meanwhile, we insert, by request, the following card, to counteract an impression circulated in some quarters today, to the prejudice of Company No. 13: “Boston, Aug. 12th, 1834 “This is to certify that I was with No. 13 Engine Company on their way to the fire, and during their stay there, and hearing the command of the officer for the members not to leave the Engine, took particular notice that not a member left, and that the utmost order was preserved whilst there. “CHARLES S. CLARK, Assistant Engineer” The Nuns, and those of the pupils whose relatives do not reside in the neighborhood, are now quartered with the Sisters of Charity in Hamilton street. Mr. Cutter, we understand, gave an asylum to a large number of them during the night. We are told this afternoon by one of the pupils, that the only one of their number who saved any clothing, was a little girl about 12 years of age, who had packed up some dresses in a larger handkerchief some time before the alarm was given, supposing there might be trouble sooner or later, and carried them away in safety. We cannot learn, indeed, that any of the children were personally injured or insulted in any manner. The city is full of excitement upon this affair, and our readers must, as we intimated above, be patient till the “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” shall be sifted out of the multitude of rumors which now besets us on every side. We agree only in the utter HDT WHAT? INDEX

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condemnation of the outrage. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ “Great Meeting at Faneuil Hall,” Boston Evening Transcript. An immense multitude assembled at Faneuil Hall, in pursuance of an invitation from the Mayor, this day, at one o’clock, (although the notice was give but two hours previous,) to take measures relative to the riot at Charlestown. Hon. Theodore Lyman, Mayor of the city, presided, and Z Cook, Jr, Esq, was appointed Secretary. The resolutions were offered by Josaiah Quincy, Jr, Esq, who prefaced them with a few most eloquent remarks. After the resolutions were read, Hon. Harrison Gray Otis was called for, who rose, and with much feeling addressed the assembly with his usual brilliancy and elegance. On making an allusion to the good Bishop Cheverus, he was interrupted by loud and continued applause. There was an excellent feeling pervaded the vast multitude, and the resolutions were unanimously adopted, amid applause never before exceeded within the walls of Faneuil.

Resolved, That in the opinion of the citizens of Boston, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the late attack on the Urseline Convent in Charlestown, occupied only by defenceless females, was a base and cowardly act, for which, the perpetrators deserve the contempt and detestation of the community. Resolved, That the destruction of property and danger of life caused thereby, calls loudly on all good citizens to express individually and collectively the abhorrence they feel for this high-handed violation of the laws. Resolved, That we, the protestant citizens of Boston, do pledge ourselves, collectively and individually, to unite with our Catholic brethren in protecting their persons, their property, and their civil and religious rights. Resolved. That the Mayor and Alderman be requested to take all measures consistent with law, to carry the foregoing resolution into effect, and as citizens, we tender our personal services to support the laws under the direction of the city authorities. Resolved. That the mayor be requested to nominate a committee from the citizens at large, to investigate the proceedings of the last night, and to adopt every suitable mode of bringing the authors and abettors of this outrage to justice. The following Committee was nominated by the Mayor: H.G. Otis, John D. Williams, James T. Austin, Henry Lee, James Clark, Cyrus Atger, John Henshaw, Francis J. Oliver, Mark Healy, Charles G. Loring, C.G. Greene, Isaac Harris, Thomas H. Perkins, John Rayner, Henry Gussett, Daniel D. Brodhead, Noah Brooks, H.F. Baker, Z. Cook Jr., George Darracott, Samuel Hubbard, Henry Farnam, Benjamin F. Hallet, John K. Simpson, John cotton, Benjamin Rich, William Sturgis, Charles P. Curtis. On motion of Mr. George Bond, the committee of twenty eight were requested to consider the expediency of providing funds to repair the damage done to the Convent. &c. On motion of John C. Park Esq, it was Resolved, That the Mayor be authorized and request to offer a very liberal reward to any individual who, in case of further excesses, will arrest and bring to punishment a leader in such outrages.

THEODORE LYMAN Jr, Chairman. ZEBEDEE COOKE Jr, Secretary HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: Jack, Thomas Carlyle’s brother, witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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<200,000 BCE Eruptions began in a fold of the ocean floor between the island of Capri and Mt. Massico

x BCE eruption (Avellino pliniana)

25,000 BCE eruption (Codola pliniana)

17,000 BCE eruption (Sarno-Pomici Basali pliniana)

15,500 BCE eruption (Pomici Verdoline pliniana)

7,900 BCE eruption (Mercato pliniana)

5,960 BCE eruption, one of the largest known of Europe

3,580 BCE eruption (Avellino pliniana), one of the largest known of Europe

1,000 BCE eruption (subpliniana)

700 BCE eruption (subpliniana) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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73 CE The escaped gladiator Spartacus was trapped for a time by the praetor Publius Claudius Pulcher on the barren wasteland of Mount Somma, the high ridge next to Mount Vesuvius, which at that time amounted to a wide, flat depression walled by rugged rocks coated over by wild vines. Spartacus would manage to escape this trap by stealth.

79 CE Explosion buried Pompeii and Stabiae under ashes and lapilli and buried Herculaneum under a mud flow (the pit left in the side of the cone by this explosion has long since disappeared).

203 CE explosive eruption

472 CE eruption (Pollena subpliniana)

512 CE eruption so severe Theodoric the Goth temporarily released inhabitants of slopes from taxation

685 CE strong eruption

787 CE grand eruption

968 CE strong eruption

991 CE eruption

999 CE strong eruption

1007 CE strong eruption

1036 CE a grand eruption followed by a long period of quiescence during which there would be forests inside the crater, and three lakes there from which pasturing herds might drink

1139 CE explosive eruption

1500 CE strong eruption

December 16, A devastating explosion after six months of gradually intensifying earthquakes marked a major 1631CE change in the behavior of this volcano. From this point to the present the behavior would be char- acterizable as stages of quiescence during which the volcano’s maw was obstructed, alternating with stages of eruption during which its maw would be almost continuously open. Recording of 1 eruptions began, and it would be noted that the eruptive stages would be varying from /2 year to 1 1 almost 31 years, while the quiescent stages would be varying from 1 /2 years to 7 /2 years. 1660 CE eruptive stage

1682 CE eruptive stage

1694 CE eruptive stage

1698 CE eruptive stage

1707 CE eruptive stage

1737 CE eruptive stage

1760 CE eruptive stage

1767 CE eruptive stage

1779 CE eruptive stage HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1794 CE eruptive stage

1822 CE eruptive stage

September eruptive stage witnessed by Thomas Carlyle’s brother Jack 1834 CE

1839 CE eruptive stage

1845 CE the local Mount Vesuvius volcano-watch station opened

1850 CE eruptive stage

1855 CE eruptive stage

1861 CE eruptive stage

1868 CE eruptive stage

1872 CE eruptive stage

1906 CE eruptive stage

1944 CE eruptive stage

May 11, Mount Vesuvius signalled the beginning of a new eruptive stage 1964 CE (during such periods the vegetation on the slopes typically dies off due to poisonous gasses).

October 16, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle witnessed the virtual destruction of the old Houses of the British Parliament at Westminster by fire (they were not to be rebuilt until 1840): HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Not earlier than Thursday, November 13: The Reverend Waldo Emerson received Thomas Carlyle’s packet containing the four stitched pamphlet copies of the complete SARTOR RESARTUS: “one copy for your own behoof” as the author had phrased it, plus “three others you can perhaps find fit readers for.” Emerson would pass on these extras to the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge in West Cambridge, to Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley in Waltham, and to Lydia Jackson in Plymouth. Mrs. Ripley’s home in Waltham was functioning not only as a school for young women and a parsonage for her husband the Reverend Samuel Ripley, but also as a general clearinghouse for Transcendental thought. Carlyle’s opus would be read aloud there on winter evenings, and the Reverend Ripley definitely read it. Young Lydia’s circle in Plymouth included not less than seven other youths (Elizabeth Davis, Abby Hedge, Eunice Hedge, Hannah Hedge, Andrew Russell, LeBaron Russell, and Nathaniel Russell) all of whom would presumably read or be hearing much about Carlyle’s opus. Lydia’s friend George Partridge Bradford, Mrs. Ripley’s younger brother and thus Emerson’s half-uncle, would definitely be reading it. It is a wonder these enthusiasts didn’t wear the print right off the page!

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

On this day the remains of Francois-Adrien Boieldieu were being laid to rest in Rouen, his birthplace.

November 17, Monday: Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington replaced William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge wrote to Margaret Fuller indicating that he had just finished reading SARTOR RESARTUS.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

November 30, Sunday: Margaret Fuller wrote to the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge about SARTOR RESARTUS:

SARTOR RESARTUS

“I got a volume of Frazer’s Mag and read all the Sartors I could find.” STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1835 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

January 23, Sunday: Waldo Emerson wrote his former student Benjamin Hunt to advise him “If you have not seen it [SARTOR RESARTUS by Thomas Carlyle] pray make inquiry after it.”

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. went fishing in Monterey bay. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: The next day being Sunday, which is the liberty-day among merchantmen, when it is usual to let a part of the crew go ashore, the sailors had depended upon a day on land, and were already disputing who should ask to go, when, upon being called in the morning, we were turned-to upon the rigging, and found that the topmast, which had been sprung, was to come down, and a new one to go up, and top-gallant and royal- masts, and the rigging to be set up. This was too bad. If there is anything that irritates sailors and makes them feel hardly used, it is being deprived of their Sabbath. Not that they would always, or indeed generally, spend it religiously, but it is their only day of rest. Then, too, they are often necessarily deprived of it by storms, and unavoidable duties of all kinds, that to take it from them when lying quietly and safely in port, without any urgent reason, bears the more hardly. The only reason in this case was, that the captain had determined to have the custom-house officers on board on Monday, and wished to have his brig in order. Jack is a slave aboard ship; but still he has many opportunities of thwarting and balking his master. When there is danger, or necessity, or when he is well used, no one can work faster than he; but the instant he feels that he is kept at work for nothing, no sloth could make less headway. He must not refuse his duty, or be in any way disobedient, but all the work that an officer gets out of him, he may be welcome to. Every man who has been three months at sea knows how to “work Tom Cox’s traverse”– “three turns round the long-boat, and a pull at the scuttled-butt.” This morning everything went in this way. “Sogering” was the order of the day. Send a man below to get a block, and he would capsize everything before finding it, then not bring it up till an officer had called him twice, and take as much time to put things in order again. Marline-spikes were not to be found; knives wanted a prodigious deal of sharpening, and, generally, three or four were waiting round the grindstone at a time. When a man got to the mast-head, he would come slowly down again to get something which he had forgotten; and after the tackles were got up, six men would pull less than three who pulled “with a will.” When the mate was out of sight, nothing was done. It was all uphill work; and at eight o’clock, when we went to breakfast, things were nearly where they were when we began. During our short meal, the matter was discussed. One proposed refusing to work; but that was mutiny, and of course was rejected at once. I remember, too, that one of the men quoted “Father Taylor,” (as they call the seamen’s preacher at Boston,) who told them that if they were ordered to work on Sunday, they must not refuse their duty, and the blame would not come upon them. After breakfast, it leaked out, through the officers, that if we would get through our work soon, we might have a boat in the afternoon and go fishing. This bait was well thrown, and took with several who were fond of fishing; and all began to find that as we had one thing to do, and were not to be kept at work for the day, the sooner we did it, the better. Accordingly, things took a new aspect; and before two o’clock this work, which was in a fair way to last two days, was done; and five of us went a fishing in the jolly-boat, in the direction of Point Pinos; but leave to go ashore was refused. Here we saw the Loriotte, which sailed with us from Santa Barbara, coming slowly in with a light sea-breeze, which sets in towards afternoon, having been becalmed off the point all the first part of the day. We took several fish of various kinds, among which cod and perch abounded, and F______(the ci-devant second mate,) who was of our number, brought up with his hook a large and beautiful pearl-oyster shell. We afterwards learned that this place was celebrated for shells, and that a small schooner had made a good voyage, by carrying a cargo of them to the United States. We returned by sun-down, and found the Loriotte at anchor, within a cable’s length of the Pilgrim. The next day we were “turned-to” early, and began taking off the hatches, overhauling the cargo, and getting everything ready for inspection. At eight, the officers of the customs, five in number, came on board, and began overhauling the cargo, manifest, etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

THE REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR DANA, CONCLUDED: The Mexican revenue laws are very strict, and require the whole cargo to be landed, examined, and taken on board again; but our agent, Mr. R______, had succeeded in compounding with them for the two last vessels, and saving the trouble of taking the cargo ashore. The officers were dressed in the costume which we found prevailed through the country. A broad-brimmed hat, usually of a black or dark-brown color, with a gilt or figured band round the crown, and lined inside with silk; a short jacket of silk or figured calico, (the European skirted body-coat is never worn;) the shirt open in the neck; rich waistcoat, if any; pantaloons wide, straight, and long, usually of velvet, velveteen, or broadcloth; or else short breeches and white stockings. They wear the deer-skin shoe, which is of a dark-brown color, and, (being made by Indians,) usually a good deal ornamented. They have no suspenders, but always wear a sash round the waist, which is generally red, and varying in quality with the means of the wearer. Add to this the never-failing cloak, and you have the dress of the Californian. This last garment, the cloak, is always a mark of the rank and wealth of the owner. The “gente de razon,” or aristocracy, wear cloaks of black or dark blue broadcloth, with as much velvet and trimmings as may be; and from this they go down to the blanket of the Indian; the middle classes wearing something like a large table-cloth, with a hole in the middle for the head to go through. This is often as coarse as a blanket, but being beautifully woven with various colors, is quite showy at a distance. Among the Mexicans there is no working class; (the Indians being slaves and doing all the hard work;) and every rich man looks like a grandee, and every poor scamp like a broken-down gentleman. I have often seen a man with a fine figure, and courteous manners, dressed in broadcloth and velvet, with a noble horse completely covered with trappings; without a real in his pocket, and absolutely suffering for something to eat. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

February or March: In this month or the next, the Reverend William Ellery Channing asked the Reverend Waldo Emerson to lend him one of the copies of SARTOR RESARTUS to read.

THOMAS CARLYLE STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

March 7, Saturday: Thomas Carlyle described, in his journal, a now-famous incident. The thing that is left out of the story, at least as it commonly appears in our glossy-paper textbooks, is that it is very likely that John Stuart Mill had incautiously left that ms of the 1st volume of THE FRENCH REVOLUTION on the kitchen table simply because all of a sudden he and his landlady Mrs Taylor had gotten an urge to go off into privacy and diddle one another. That may or may not have been what accounts for the lapse but it seems that some key players in this little drama certainly credited at the time and afterward, that it is what had happened: Mill’s rap was heard at the door: he entered pale, unable to speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor; and came forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very picture of desperation. After various inarticulate and articulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading it) was, except for four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED! I remember and still can remember less of it than anything I ever wrote with such toil: it is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring that back: nay the old spirit too is fled. I find that it took five months of steadfast occasionally excessive and always sickly and painful toil. It is gone; and will not return. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

March 12, Thursday:Waldo Emerson wrote to inform Thomas Carlyle that by that point “some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and highly appreciate” the four stitched copies of SARTOR RESARTUS which had been posted to America.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

Achille Charles Leonce Victor, Duc de Broglie replaced Edouard Adolphe Casimir Joseph Mortier, Duc de Treviso as prime minister of France.

At the Theatre-Italien of Paris, Gaetano Donizetti’s tragedia lirica Marino Faliero to words of Bidera after Delavigne was performed for the initial time.

April: In West Cambridge, Miss Mary Moody Emerson, who, since she had been living in Concord, obviously had perused Waldo Emerson’s copy of SARTOR RESARTUS, was discussing Thomas Carlyle with the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge just as he was departing to take up his new ministry in Maine. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Harriet Martineau was being “[fed] with the SARTOR” by the Reverend William Henry Furness out of the copy he had just received from Emerson.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

April 30, Thursday: Waldo Emerson’s letter to Thomas Carlyle identified some of the readers of SARTOR RESARTUS: among them were the Reverend Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham of the highly prestigious 1st Church in Boston MA; Emerson’s cousin and childhood friend the Reverend William Henry Furness of the 1st Congregational Unitarian Church in Philadelphia; Gamaliel Bradford, who was the father of George Partridge Bradford and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley and a superintendent of the Massachusetts General Hospital; and Ellis Gray Loring, an abolitionist and trial lawyer based in Boston, who had been Emerson’s classmate at both the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, and in 1838 would help edit Carlyle’s MISCELLANIES.

SARTOR RESARTUS

May: While vacationing with Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley and the Reverend George Ripley, Harriet Martineau “made the Sartor her constant companion.”

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

June: While visiting the Reverend James Freeman Clarke in Lexington, Kentucky Harriet Martineau confessed to him that what she was up to was:

SARTOR RESARTUS

“preparing the people for Carlyleism.”

STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Summer: Waldo Emerson sent one of the four copies of SARTOR RESARTUS to the Reverend James Freeman Clarke in Louisville, Kentucky and probably also lent another of the copies to Alexander H. Everett, editor of Boston’s North American Review. At this point a second set of four copies from Thomas Carlyle in England were languishing at the Boston Custom Shed, mired in bureaucracy and quite unretrievable.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

At the end of his Sophomore year David Henry Thoreau walked home to Concord with Charles Stearns Wheeler, and evidently there was a problem with his shoes for he had to walk the last two miles in his stockings, the last miles taking him literally hours. (One wonders whether, without shoes with, perhaps, something wadded into the toe of the right shoe, a young man without a right big toe would have trouble in balancing.)17

Karl Friedrich Schimper, while studying the mosses on erratic boulders in the alpine upland of Bavaria, found himself wondering where the hell these great blocks of stone had come from. Indeed they were so huge, and out of place, this was marvelous! During a summer excursion to the Bavarian Alps he brought himself to a conviction that only ice could have been the means of transport for the boulders in the alpine upland. THE SCIENCE OF 1835 OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION

17. In regard to the difficulty of balancing, when one attempts to walk without a big toe, I can offer the following personal experience, obtained from an anonymous individual on the internet: “I wear a size 7 on my right foot and size 6 on my left due to a partially amputated big toe. My dilemma is this: The smallest shoe size I can find is a size 7, so obviously the shoe is too big on my left foot. Do you sell a product or have an idea as to how I can fill the space (toe cap) as to where I can wear a size 7 shoe comfortably. I am possibly looking for a hard toe cap that would fit over my half toe but extend to measure up to a size 7 shoe. I am starting to have great difficulties in my walking. I see that you sell the Toe Silopad Digital Cap. Would this work? It appears to be a soft fabric, so if I was to wear a sock over the toe cap, would it flatten the toe cap and not give me the support I need?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Late Summer: The Reverend George Ripley wrote Thomas Carlyle anent the wondrous reception which his work SARTOR RESARTUS was receiving in New England, proclaiming it to be “a huge, mysterious, magnificent Symbol of the Time upon which we have fallen. It is the cry of the Heart & the Flesh for the living God.”18

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

August: While Harriet Martineau was visiting the Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s cousin Margaret Fuller they had “some talk about Carlyleism.”

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS I don’t know where would be the right point in the timeline in which to introduce this material, but at some point in time, Martineau and Fuller had some discussions about slavery. Paula Blanchard, in MARGARET FULLER – FROM TRANSCENDENTALISM TO REVOLUTION (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987), has commented on this: Miss Martineau was a necessitarian and a social reformer, with little esthetic feeling and no tolerance of the more speculative flights of philosophy and literature. Her chief interest in the United States was the abolition of slavery, and she made a determined effort to bring Margaret into the abolitionist party. But Margaret, like her father, belonged to the group which called itself “antislavery” rather than “abolitionist,” and 18. During this early period of his career, Carlyle was popular in New England but not in the American South. It would only be the later Carlyle, author of CROMWELL and of FREDERICK THE GREAT, who would become immensely popular in our South — the white man crowd-pleaser-crowd-appeaser who was proclaiming “the natural propensity of men to grovel or to rule” (to have recourse to a sublimely descriptive phrase which would eventually be coined, by Van Wyck Brooks). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

which advocated the gradual phasing out of slavery. Nevertheless, their discussions sharpened Margaret’s awareness HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

of social issues, and in Miss Martineau and the women abolitionists of Boston she saw members of her sex assuming leadership, defying social convention, and facing down real physical danger in a totally new kind of role.

Fall: Harriet Martineau met with Waldo Emerson several times as he exercised himself in behalf of Thomas Carlyle.

SARTOR RESARTUS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

October 6, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson received the second set of four offprints of SARTOR RESARTUS from the Boston Custom Shed, which Thomas Carlyle had dispatched to him in June, and set out quite as enthusiastically to disseminate these as he had the previous set of four.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

One he would dispatch to the Reverend Convers Francis in Watertown. We can be pretty sure that Francis’s sister Lydia Maria Child perused that copy, for she was departing for a tour of England and asked Emerson for a letter of introduction to its author. Francis would pass this copy on to Theodore Parker, then a student at the Theological School in Cambridge, and Parker would then loan it to his “most intimate friend,” another student, William Silsbee.

Another copy Emerson would dispatch to the Reverend William Ellery Channing in Newport, Rhode Island. With the Reverend when that copy arrived was Harriet Martineau.

Meanwhile a long anonymous review (written by Alexander H. Everett and made possible by the copy that Emerson had made available to the editor during the late summer) was appearing in the North American Review.19

Sam Houston purchased a general’s uniform in New Orleans after being named Commander-in-Chief by the Nacogdoches “Committee of Vigilance.”

TEXAS

19. “Thomas Carlyle,” North American Review 41: 454-482 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

October 7, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle and mentioned his discourse upon Concord’s most recent two centuries of history as “my first adventure in print which I shall send you.”

Samuel Sebastian Wesley entered upon duties as organist at Exeter Cathedral.

Watson Brown was born at Franklin, Ohio.

(He would marry with Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. His son by this marriage would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him, because when he would be sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate, he would be gunned down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He would manage to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and live on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period. He would expire on October 18, 1859. His widow would remarry with his brother Salmon Brown.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Young Lydia Jackson’s friend LeBaron Russell in Plymouth “determined to publish an American edition” of SARTOR RESARTUS and approached the firm of James Munroe and Company, which of course stipulated that he come up somehow with the usual list of 150 paying subscribers — to ensure recovery of the cost of setting the type for such a printing. Much of this successful subscription gathering would be undertaken by William Silsbee and Theodore Parker in Cambridge, as well of course as by Russell himself.

THOMAS CARLYLE

This by way of contrast with the customary story which appears in our storybooks, which tend to simplify accounts to the greatest convenience by assigning meretricious actions to famous names: “Regular book publication of SARTOR did not take place until 1836, when Emerson arranged for publication in Boston and wrote an enthusiastic preface.” WALDO EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1836

According to a claim made by Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, Emerson realized $350 in lecture fees during this year. That would have been for the period a good fulltime wage for a skilled working man with a family to support. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

January: Thomas Carlyle’s struggle of a decade with his SARTOR RESARTUS: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF HERR TEUFELSDRÖCKH (a treatise on the need for new forms to replace the worn-out and patched ones of conventional religious expression, loosely disguised as a study of the “philosophy of clothing”) would soon come to its completion with his manuscript’s adequate publication in the form of a book, She took to writing sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all- perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a ‘thrilling tale,’ and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the WEEKLY VOLCANO. She had never read SARTOR RESARTUS, but she had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners. So she dressed herself in her best, and trying to persuade herself that she was neither excited nor nervous, bravely climbed two pairs of dark and dirty stairs to find herself in a disorderly room, a cloud of cigar smoke, and the presence of three gentlemen, sitting with their heels rather higher than their hats, which articles of dress none of them took the trouble to remove on her appearance. Somewhat daunted by this reception, Jo hesitated on the threshold, murmuring in much embarrassment,—

“Excuse me, I was looking for the WEEKLY VOLCANO office. I wished to see Mr. Dashwood.”

SARTOR RESARTUS

for the American edition, which had been initiated by LeBaron Russell, was in press in Boston. At this point Russell asked Waldo Emerson to write up a short preface, which he would complete in March. While Emerson was preparing the preface, the compositors at Metcalf, Torrey, and Ballou Company in Cambridge would be typesetting on the basis of the offprint which had been supplied to Emerson by Carlyle. The press operations were being overseen by Charles Stearns Wheeler, who was working part time for the printers. STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

April: The 1st full edition of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF HERR TEUFELSDRÖKH was finally for sale, for $1.00 the copy, in Boston. “Regular book publication of SARTOR did not take place until 1836, when Emerson arranged for publication in Boston and wrote an enthusiastic preface.”

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

September 17, Saturday: Birth in New-York of Lawrence Kip, first child of Maria Elizabeth Lawrence Kip and Deacon William Ingraham Kip.

Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle that “the five hundred copies of the SARTOR are all sold, and read with great delight by many persons.” “Regular book publication of SARTOR did not take place until 1836, when Emerson arranged for publication in Boston and wrote an enthusiastic preface.”

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 17th of 9 M 1836 / Recd a letter & parcell from my friend Thos Thompson 8 M 6 1836 — The state of Society in England is such as to call for Mourning & lamentation - The ways of Zion Mourn & the Curtains of Middean tremble — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

September 19, Monday: Formation of “Hedge’s Club” centering around the visits of the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge to Boston from Bangor, Maine.20 In September 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself [Frederic Henry Hedge], with one other [who was this fourth person: would it have been an unnamed woman, an unnamed wife, specifically Sophia Ripley??], chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking was very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from John Locke, on which our Christian theology was based. The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh [Henry Nelson Coleridge had only at this point initiated publication of THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE], and some of Thomas Carlyle’s earlier essays, especially the “Characteristics” and “SIGNS OF THE TIMES,” had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together in the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. Among them I recall the name of Orestes Augustus Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stearns Wheeler and Robert Bartlett, tutors in Harvard College. There was some discussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question whether it were best to start a new journal as the organ of our views, or to work through those already existing. The next meeting, in the same month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his house in Concord. A large number assembled; besides some of those who met at Boston, I remember Mr. Alcott, [Bronson Alcott] John Sullivan Dwight, Ephraim Peabody, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. Jones Very was one of those who occasionally attended; H.D. Thoreau another. There was no club, properly speaking; no organization, no presiding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name “Transcendental,” given to these gatherings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated, I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first-hand acquaintance with German transcendental philosophy, at the start. THE DIAL was the product of the movement, and in some sort its organ.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

November: Thomas Carlyle and Jane Carlyle met Harriet Martineau, who would be able to introduce them, among others, to Charles Darwin. She pleased us beyond expectation. She is very intelligent-looking, really of pleasant countenance; was full of talk, tho’ unhappily deaf almost as a post, so that you have to speak to her thro’ an ear-trumpet.

20. This would become the Transcendental Club. It was at this first regular meeting that the Reverend Convers Francis first met Bronson Alcott. Francis would also be present for the second meeting, in Alcott’s home in Boston. As the eldest member of the Club, it would become the lot of the Reverend Francis to announce the principal topic for conversation, and to preside. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

After December 8, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau supplemented his borrowings from the Harvard Library by checking out, at various times before March 13th, from the library of the “Institute of 1770”, both volumes of John Hoole’s translations of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595)’s LA GIERVSALEMME LIBERATA DI TORQVATO TASSO. CON LE FIGURE DI BERNARDO CASTELLO, E LE ANNOTATIONI DI SCIPIO GENTILI, E DI GIULIO GVASTAVINI (Genova: G. Bartoli, 1590) and GOFFREDO, OVERO GIERUSALEMME LIBERATA, POEMA HEROICO DEL S.TORQUATO TASSO, NEL QUALE SONO STATE AGGIUNTE MOLTE STANZE LEUATE, CON LE VARIE LETTIONI; & POSTIUI GLI ARGOMENTI, & ALLEGORIE A CIASCUN CANTO D’INCERTO AUTTORE. CON L’AGGIUNTA DE’ CINQUE CANTI DEL SIG. CAMILLO CAMILLI, & I LORO ARGOMENTI, DEL SIG. FRANCESO MELCHIORI OPITERGINO (Vinegia: heirs of Francesco de’Franceschi, 1600), published as JERUSALEM DELIVERED (London, 1764, 1783, 1797; Exeter, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

New Hampshire: 1810),

and then the 3d, 4th, and 5th of the five volumes of Professor Adam Ferguson’s THE HISTORY OF THE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

PROGRESS AND TERMINATION OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC (1773, new edition, Edinburgh, 1813).

THE ROMAN REPUBLIC, III THE ROMAN REPUBLIC, IV THE ROMAN REPUBLIC, V Also, Thoreau would check out, from the library of his club “Institute of 1770”, Volume 35 of the North American Review containing: • Mrs. William Minot’s “Cousin’s Philosophy,” reviewing among other works by Professor Victor Cousin the Henning Gottfried Linberg translation of his INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (Boston, 1832) • a review of Ebenezer Henderson’s ICELAND (ITS NATURAL PHENOMENA, MANNERS AND CUSTOMS) • William H. Prescott’s article on “English Literature of the Nineteenth Century” • a review of the great Romantic poets • William B.O. Peabody’s article on the “Habits of Insects” • “History of the Italian Language and Dialects” • a review of D.J. Browne’s SYLVA AMERICANA, entitled “American Forest Trees” • a review of Sir James Macintosh’s GENERAL VIEW OF THE PROGRESS OF ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY

At some point before March 13th Thoreau checked out Volume 41 of the North American Review containing:

•“THE AMERICAN ALMANAC,” in regard to the philosophy of time, and the recording of time • “Machiavelli” • a review of Mrs. Lydia Maria Child’s APPEAL IN FAVOR OF THAT CLASS OF AMERICANS CALLED AFRICANS, entitled “Slavery” • “Audubon’s Biography of Birds,” about John James Audubon’s ORNITHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY, OR AN ACCOUNT OF THE HABITS OF THE BIRDS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ACCOMPANIED BY DESCRIPTIONS OF THE OBJECTS REPRESENTED IN THE WORK ENTITLED THE BIRDS OF AMERICA, AND INTERSPERSED WITH DELINEATIONS OF AMERICAN SCENERY AND MANNERS (Edinburgh: Adam Black, Vol. I - 1831, Vol. II - 1835, Vol. III - 1835...) • “Webster’s Speeches” • Professor Georg Heinrich Bode’s “Classic Mythology” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

• a review of William Swainson’s PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY (London: Longman, 1834), entitled “Study of Natural History” • a review of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF HERR TEUFELSDRÖKH

At some point before March 13th Thoreau checked out Issue 120 of the Edinburgh Review made up of an article on the new book by Professor Victor Cousin in relation to the Sutras, the Vedas, the researches of Colebrooke, mysticism, Socrates, Plato, and Kant, entitled “Cousin on the History of Philosophy” At some point before March 13th Thoreau checked out the first two of the five volumes of Maximilien de Bethune, duc de Sully (1560-1641)’s MEMOIRS (Edinburgh, 1770, 1773), Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s VOYAGE OF THE UNITED STATES FRIGATE POTOMAC ... DURING THE CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE, IN THE YEARS 1831, 1832, 1833 AND 1834 (New-York, 1834-1835), the 1st volume of Edward Gibbon’s THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (London 1807, 1820, 1821), GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL I

the first two of the volumes of Sully’s MEMOIRS (again), George Combe’s LECTURES ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY (Boston: Marsh, Capen, & Lyon; New-York: D. Appleton & Co., 1836), GEORGE COMBE LECTURES

the 1st of the three volumes of Bishop Thomas Percy (1729-1811)’s RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY (compiled 1765, reprinted Philadelphia, 1823),

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/percyleg.htm

William Hazlitt’s LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETS (Philadelphia, 1818; London, 1819), and the 1st volume (again) of Edward Gibbon’s THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (London 1807, 1820, 1821).

GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL I HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1837

Thomas Carlyle’s THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH SCHILLER. COMPREHENDING AN EXAMINATION OF HIS WORKS. ... FROM THE LONDON EDITION. (New York: George Dearborn & Co.). A copy of this would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library. THE LIFE OF SCHILLER

From this year into 1840 Carlyle would be offering four courses of lectures in London, on German Literature and on Heroes.

The argument for the almost magical growth of this Scottish author’s reputation was first made by the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

peripatetic English reformer, Harriet Martineau, in her controversial travelogue SOCIETY IN AMERICA: No living writer exercises so enviable a sway, so far as it goes, as Mr. Carlyle ... [whose] remarkable work SARTOR RESARTUS, issued piecemeal through Fraser’s Magazine, has been republished in America and is exerting an influence proportioned to the genuineness of the admiration it has excited. Perhaps this is the first instance of the Americans having taken to their hearts an English work that came to them anonymous, unsanctioned by any recommendation and even absolutely neglected at home. It has regenerated the preaching of more than one of the clergy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

This English author’s published account of the situation, above, is of course entirely disingenuous, is a deliberate act of mystification of her audience. She had herself already become part of the American movement for this book by Carlyle before she had returned to England.

SARTOR RESARTUS

In April 1835 she had been had been “[fed] with the SARTOR” by the Reverend William Henry Furness in Philadelphia out of the copy he had just received from Waldo Emerson in Boston. In May 1835 while vacationing with Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley and the Reverend George Ripley she had “made the SARTOR her constant companion.” In June 1835 while visiting the Reverend James Freeman Clarke in Lexington, Kentucky she had told him that what she was up to was “preparing the people for Carlyleism.” In August 1835 while visiting the Reverend Clarke’s cousin Margaret Fuller they had had “some talk about Carlyleism.” During Fall 1835 she had met with Emerson himself several times as he exercised himself in behalf of Thomas Carlyle. She had visited several times with Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley in Waltham, and in October 1835 she had been staying with the Reverend William Ellery Channing in Newport, Rhode Island when Emerson had sent the Reverend Channing a copy of SARTOR RESARTUS.

January 13, Friday: At 10PM Thomas Carlyle finished his manuscript of THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: “I could almost have returned thanks audibly to Heaven with tears.” He would be going for some long walks around London, even some 20 miles, to clear his head. Jane Carlyle would assist in the celebration by baking bread pudding. FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

April 3, Monday: David Henry Thoreau passed the final exams in German and in Italian at Harvard College (he took the Italian exam along with 13 other students who also had been brought forward by Pietro Bachi).

After this slam-dunk he checked out Waldo Emerson’s NATURE from the library of his debating club, “Institute of 1770” (soon he would purchase a copy for himself).

Thoreau supplemented his borrowings by at the same time checking out from his club’s library the 1st and 2d of the dozen volumes of Edward Gibbon’s THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (London 1807, 1820, 1821),21 GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL I GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL II

and the 1st of the three volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP (Edinburgh, 1824) (Thoreau would have in his personal library the edition that had been printed in Boston by Wells and Lilly in 1828). WILHELM MEISTER I WILHELM MEISTER II WILHELM MEISTER III

John Burroughs was born near Roxbury, New York.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 21. We have reason to believe that this was as far as Thoreau got into the famous or infamous “Decline & Fall,” before becoming so distressed with Gibbon that he would switch over entirely to other historical sources having to do with the Roman Empire, and this of course brings to mind the Duke of Gloucester’s remark to Edward Gibbon, upon being presented in 1787 with this 2d volume: “Another damned thick square book! Always scribble scribble scribble — eh, Mr. Gibbon?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

2nd day 3rd of 4 M / This day, I believe this day, I have paid all my debts of a pecuniary nature, which I owe on my own account - it is a comfortable thing to feel clear of the World & I believe I am truly thankful therefor — My God has been very good to me all my life long

May 1, Monday: A new low. Thomas Carlyle the drawing-room curmudgeon began to turn his penchant for bullshit racist and sexist and triumphalist diatribe toward the making of an income, by haranguing an English paying audience apparently all too eager already for such bullshit racist and sexist and triumphalist diatribe: “I have got my first lecture over. I had a pretty audience; mostly of quality. It was not a breakdown; this is all that can be said of it: the next will be better we hope.” He had lectured upon the character of the German folk, characterizing it the Spectator reported as consisting of “the only genuine European people, unmixed with strangers. They have in fact never been subdued; and considering the great, open, and fertile country which they inhabit, this fact at once demonstrates the masculine and indomitable character of the race. They have not only not been subdued, but been themselves by far the greatest conquerors of the earth.” PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

May 9, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle’s THE FRENCH REVOLUTION began to come off the presses: The work’s message must not be over-simplified: but it does seem a clear statement of Carlyle’s belief in the effects of the destruction of God’s natural order. When the leaders of French society neglected their duties, they found the political order challenged, and feudalism, then monarchy, abandoned. As faithlessness broke out and society broke down, the duty of ruling was passed to those unfitted for it, and finally to a mob. Anarchy, which Carlyle regarded as the manifestation of divine punishment, continued more and more violently until (as personified by Danton and Robespierre) exhausted with its own excesses; in the absence of a natural order came, too, rampant injustice. Humanity and civilization were wrecked, and the effects spread far beyond France. Carlyle explained this with unrestrained passion. He saw history as a continuum, and what had driven him on was the belief that the lessons of half a century earlier with which he lectured his readers were, like all experience, still vital today. This, like so much else of Carlyle’s thought, had German roots. Talking to his friend William Allingham in 1871, Carlyle said: “I often think of Immanuel Kant’s notion —no real Time or Space, these are only appearances— and think it is true.” This is the “natural supernaturalism” of SARTOR RESARTUS. To make the proper didactic point, he communicates facts with, as in Oliver Cromwell eight years later, “elucidations” that reflect his own prejudices. Like most of Carlyle’s works, it is self-centered because it is more about Carlyle than about its notional subject.... A central passage outlines not just the effects of the betrayal of feudal principles, but also sets out Carlyle’s own agenda for the next fifteen years. It is strong meat, too, for those who believe that Carlyle was some sort of proto-fascist who made a rule of siding with the oppressor: Fancy, then, some Five full-grown Millions of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces (figures hâves); in wollen jupes, with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots, — starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed Upper Classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question: How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames, over the nightly summer- sky. This is the feeding and leading we have had of you; EMPTYNESS, — of pocket, of stomach, of head and of heart. Behold there is nothing in us; nothing but what Nature gives her wild children in the desert: Ferocity and Appetite: Strength grounded on Hunger. Did ye mark among your Rights of Man, that man was not to die of starvation, while there was bread reaped by him? It is among the Mights of Man. ... But the ultimate message points ahead, from England in 1837 when Carlyle finished writing: “Out of a world of Unwise nothing but an Unwisdom can be made. Arrange it, constitution-build it, sift it through ballot-boxes as thou wilt, it is and remains an Unwisdom.” This belief was to dominate his thinking, producing within him a pessimism that alternated between comedy and ferocity.

FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

October: The North American Review published a blistering anonymous 40-page attack on the work of Thomas Carlyle and on Harriet Martineau’s book sponsoring it, obviously by the Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, that Harvard University Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature scourge of the Transcendentalists, the Reverend John G. Palfrey: “No living writer ...,” continues Miss Martineau, “exercises so enviable a sway, as far as it goes, as Mr. Carlyle.” There is much virtue in that clause, as far as it goes, inasmuch as, to supply this nation of fifteen millions, over which the author of the “SARTOR RESARTUS” “exercises so enviable a sway,” that work, — a work, too, which they have “taken to their hearts,” and which “is acting upon them with wonderful force,” — has, according to information on which we have the best reason to rely, been printed in but two editions, the first consisting of five hundred copies, and the second, after an interval of more than a year, being only twice as large.

SARTOR RESARTUS OCT. 1837, N.A. REVIEW SOCIETY OF TH. CARLYLE

Not only had the Transcendentalists sustained the American dissemination and publication of SARTOR RESARTUS, for they had proceeded directly to sponsor the publication here of his following book, his THE FRENCH REVOLUTION of 1837, and they would compound their error by proceeding directly to sponsor the publication here of his next work as well, his CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS of 1838. Carlyle’s American reputation would persist until, by denouncing the Union cause during the Civil War as mere niggerocracy, he would entirely alienate this Northern support group. (Those who had so eagerly bought and championed his writings in the 1830s and 1840s would conclude to their sorrow during the 1860s that they should all along have been distancing themselves from such a spirit.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

November: Thomas Carlyle oer’reached himself at a dinner party in London, outraging a gent, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had been the foreign editor of The Times of London and had known both Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, by advocating not only the US annexation of the Tejas province of Mejico but also the continuation of negro slavery. WAR ON MEXICO

Evidently this diatribe of his went on and on getting worse and worse, with his rationalization turning out to amount to that 1.) skin melanization reflected a natural hierarchy of worthiness and that 2.) it was not only natural but right that the strong should dominate the earth. Robinson took careful note of that dangerously twisted, even vicious, pattern of thought and applied your typical Brit solution to it: I found Carlyle so very outrageous in his opinions that I have no wish to see him again, and I avoided saying anything that looked like a desire to renew my acquaintance with him. RACISM [Hey, for once I’m siding with a dinner-party snob — I’d snub this Carlyle dude too. But hey, what can I tell you, I’m merely one of those iggerant “presentists” who so mistakenly retroject the values and PC attitudes of the present in easy condemnation of historical figures who were merely representing the usual sentiments of their time!22]

22. How could Waldo Emerson possibly correspond with this stone racist Thomas Carlyle fellow, treat him as a good ’ol buddy, and indeed attempt to model himself as “the Carlyle of America”? –Len Gougeon, in “Abolition, The Emersons, and 1837” (New England Quarterly 54 [1981]: 345-64), offers us some ideas on this topic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1838

BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES preserves for us the following snippets from Thomas Carlyle’s SIR WALTER SCOTT in the London and Westminster Review in this year: • There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed. • Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time. • To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents, — the tools to him that can handle them. [in his essay on Mirabeau of 1837, Carlyle had attributed this tools idiom to a “New England book.”] • Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one! • The uttered part of a man’s life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others. • Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls. • It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man’s life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.

And in addition it preserves the following from another essay placed in the same journal: • The eye of the intellect “sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.” — VARNHAGEN VON ENSE’S MEMOIRS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

The three volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A HISTORY were printed in Boston by the firm of C.C. Little and J. Brown, as two volumes. A copy of this set would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau and he would refer to the work in his journal. FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II

SARTOR RESARTUS was printed in England with its anonymous preface by Waldo Emerson touting it as “a Criticism on the Spirit of our Age” and characterizing it as philanthropic, as pure in its moral sentiment, and as commending itself to the heart of “every lover of virtue.” Per BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES here is the sum total of what this volume contains that is of continuing import for the quotemongers and toastmasters among us: As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden, — “Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;” or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. — Book III. Chapter III.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

February 17, Saturday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity & clear perception. How comic is simplicity in this doubledealing quacking world. Every thing that boy says makes merry with society though nothing can be graver than his meaning. I told him he should write out the history of his College life as Thomas Carlyle has his tutoring. We agreed that the seeing the stars through a telescope would be worth all the Astronomical lectures. Then he described Mr Quimby’s electrical lecture here & the experiment of the shock & added that “College Corporations are very blind to the fact that that twinge in the elbow is worth all the lecturing.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

May 10, Thursday: John Wilkes Booth was born in a log cabin, in the woods of northern Maryland near the Pennsylvania border.

Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle informing him that Henry Swasey McKean had volunteered to correct the proofs of his “Miscellanies” and that McKean had been handed “your Errata” to use during this task. After McKean had left Cambridge for New Hampshire, this editing would be completed by Charles Stearns Wheeler. The result was to be the initial American edition of Carlyle’s CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS: MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. I MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. II MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. III MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. IV

Copies of these volumes would of course be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 10th of 5th M / Meeting nearly silent - small, but some solemnity, & a little life — I feel much on account of Society - Oh that there may be more raised up to bear the burden & stand cloathed upon to move forward in support of the precious cause of Truth, which now suffers much, as Geo Fox used to say “The HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Seed suffers” & Oh may we have cause to exclaim with him, on the other hand, “The Seed reigneth. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

December 2, Sunday: Thomas Carlyle wrote to Waldo Emerson about the American publication of two volumes of his MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS: To my two young Friends Henry S. McKean (be so good as write these names more indisputably for me) and Charles Stearns Wheeler, in particular, I will beg you to express emphatically my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and made the correctest printing; a great service: had I known that there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, I would have scraped out the Editorial blotches too (notes of admiration, dashes, “we thinks” &c &c, common in Jeffrey’s time in the Edinr Review) and London misprints; which are almost the only deformities that remain now. It is extremely correct printing wherever I have looked, and many things are silently amended; it is the most fundamental service of all. MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. I MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. II HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Leverenz, David. “The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,” PMLA 101 (1986), 38-56. “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Starts out with an anecdote about a professor who tried to write a book about Emerson and never got it finished. Jonathan Bishop: “There is something at the heart of Emerson’s message profoundly recalcitrant to the formulations of the discursive intelligence. Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1838: “Here I sit & read & write with very little system, & as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible each sentence an infinitely repellent particle” (CORRESPONDENCE 185). Also picks up on Harold Bloom (Yale) and Woody Hayes (Ohio State) both tooling around the country talking about how Emerson is their spiritual leader, and gives them (us?) “access to manly power” (38). The main argument begins with the early essays (“Self-Reliance” etc.), where the word “man” should not be seen as inclusive. Emerson’s modern, democratic, individualized “man” is not king, and he is also not a woman — several JOURNAL passages emphasize that. Power should be in the man’s mind, not in government or property. The second section points to Emerson’s proposal that a “new cultural elite” should run things, and that you don’t have to be rich to get into that crowd. There’s a bit on how Waldo Emerson resented his minister father, the Reverend William Emerson, who favored Waldo’s brothers — Mary Moody Emerson helped him get free of his father. He developed an “evangelical political fantasy” (46) that the Smart People would have to counter more obviously powerful groups who were taking over the frontier — this matches typical New England fantasies. It also picks up on general social changes between 1825 and 1850, where shopkeeping and the Boston brahmins were replaced by managers and professionals. These new men took over. [cf. EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS for a similar history of these years. People simply stopped asking Adamses to be president.] The third section deals with Emerson’s later sense of powerlessness, in contrast to “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of dinner” (“Self-Reliance”). Several biographers blamed Emerson’s “inhibited” mother for his depressive strategy and emotional withdrawal. (Ruth Haskins Emerson died in 1853. ) Leverenz dislikes the evasiveness of “Experience,” not just Emerson’s inability to deal with his son’s death, but his “impersonal geometry” (52): “Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point” (“Experience”). The general conclusion is that Emerson’s obsession with power masks rivalry, fears of failure, and a shifting society that he could not control — “alienated liberalism” (53).

[DR 5/89] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1839

In America, volumes 3 and 4 of Thomas Carlyle’s CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS were being put through the presses: MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. III MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. IV

Copies of these volumes would of course be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

The Chartist petition presented in the previous year having gotten exactly nowhere, a “charter” of political reforms was presented to Parliament by workers and was likewise rejected. Ebenezer Elliott renounced Chartism. A pamphlet entitled CHARTISM was being produced in England: [Carlyle’s] “might is right” argument presupposes ultimately benevolent and uncorrupt aims behind the might; those reading Carlyle now find it hard to share such assumptions, as indeed many of his contemporaries did. He justified his view by saying that a purely brutal conquest would never last, but would be flung out; in modern times, the fate of Nazism and Stalinism supports his view, and the Terror in France had proved it to him. The true strong man, for that reason, was always wise; his strength lay in the soul rather than the body, and was drawn from God. One true inheritor of this tradition of thought:

“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” — Adolf Hitler

PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Charles Darwin saw the raw effects of this Carlylean reasoning process and the alleged or eponymous founder of “Social Darwinism” was at once fascinated and bemused — and repelled.23 The Fuegians ... struck Darwin as more like animals than men.... Thoreau’s single overt citation of Darwin in WALDEN refers to one of Darwin’s few concessions to the Fuegians’ superior powers, their adaptation to the cold climate (WALDEN, pages 12-13). This is but one among many spots where WALDEN undermines the hierarchies of civilization/barbarity (the villagers are bizarre penance-performing Brahmins) and humanity/animal (the villagers as prairie dogs, himself competing with squirrels for fall forage). Such instances of undermining do not reflect Thoreau’s attempt to quarrel with Darwin as much as Thoreau’s desire to accentuate tendencies already present in Darwin and other travelers’ accounts. ...Darwin, like Thoreau albeit to a lesser degree, was prepared to relativize moral distinctions between “advanced’ and “backward” cultures and between human and animal estates. “It is impossible to reflect on the state of the American continent without astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pygmies compared with the antecedent, allied races.”

February 8, Friday: Waldo Emerson wrote a note full of condescension-humor to Margaret Fuller about “my Henry Thoreau,” characterizing him in quasi-Old Testament terms not as “my protector” but as “my protester,” and evaluating that the young man had “broken out into good poetry & better prose.”

A letter from Thomas Carlyle to Emerson indicates that he had just received a bill of exchange for £100 from America in payment for some publications of his works, which had been arranged for by Emerson.

June 24, Monday: Egyptian forces routed Turkish forces at Nezib (Nizip), 100 kilometers north of Aleppo (Halab).

In England, Thomas Carlyle was the first Englishman to theorize the Saxon success, as due to innate racial superiority. He saw himself, a lowland Scott, as a Teuton, “a piece of the right Saxon stuff,” and he saw these Teutons like himself as the colonizers of the earth precisely because they were the saviors of the earth. I’m your great white hope, I’m God’s gift to you — best you hold still so’s I don’t need to whop you: And yet, if this small rim of Europe is overpeopled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant Earth as it were, call to us, Come and till me, come and reap me!

23. The guy who was absolutely fascinated by this hatemongering was not Darwin, a man who still had hope for human decency, but the headmaster of Rugby, Dr. Thomas Arnold. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

This racist genocidalist wrote to Waldo Emerson, on this date, about the possibility that it might be Boston, or New-York, rather than London, that would become the great Wen at which “all the Saxons” would assemble, upon which they could center their world of progress and development and civilization and great white “All Saxondom” race-soul. He found a sympathetic ear, of course, because Emerson was a fellow believer in worth.24

Rosetta Douglass, the 1st child of Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass, was “born free” in New Bedford.25

Or, at least, this is the official date proclaimed by the family: notice that June 24, 1839 is nine months and a week subsequent to the wedding ceremony and honeymoon, and note also that in the era before state-issued birth certificates, there was quite a bit of opportunity for creative reconstruction of family history. There are records that white persons in Douglass’s audience would amuse themselves, and perhaps others, by raising frank questions about Rosetta, suggesting that Anna was probably pregnant at the time of her wedding and that Rosetta was therefore possibly an illegitimate child.

(Poor little worthless dark Rosetta, in accordance with the racist theories that Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were corresponding about on this very day of her birth –read them and weep– in this world there was to be a Wen for all worthies like them who were “of the right Saxon stuff” but there was to be no Wen for her!)26

24. If you have begun to suspect I maybe am suggesting that what Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were up to was the formation of a 19th-Century Nazism, and that Emerson was a full co-conspirator in advancing what he himself termed “the best stock in the world” through genocide, then you’re paying attention. (If you didn’t know this about this gentleman, then you’ve obviously been paying attention to the Emersonians.)

“Emersonians are all alike; every Thoreauvian is Thoreauvian in his or her own way.” — Austin Meredith

25. “Born free” means about as much in this context, as it does in the context of a lion cub on the veldt, since in both cases white hunters might at any time trap the family, with total impunity and clearness of conscience, and carry it away. Nevertheless, even when free does not mean free from fear, it does mean something. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

August 8, Monday: Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle mentioning that Henry Thoreau “writes the truest verses.”

26. If you have begun to suspect I maybe am suggesting that what Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were up to was the formation of a 19th-Century Nazism, and that Emerson was a full co-conspirator in advancing what he himself termed “the best stock in the world” through genocide, then you’re paying attention. (If you didn’t know this about this gentleman, then you’ve obviously been paying attention to Emersonians.)

“Emersonians are all alike; every Thoreauvian is Thoreauvian in his or her own way.” — Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1840

Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney went abroad and was received by William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle, and was presented at the court of King Louis Philippe. When back home in America, she would of course write about all this.27

In London, Giuseppe Mazzini combined with Giuseppe Lamberti in Paris to revive the Young Italy movement. He became acquainted with Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle. James Bogardus, while on vacation in Italy “contemplating rich architectural designs of antiquity,” conceived the idea of emulating them in a novel material: cast iron.

27. I am not, however, aware that any of these Europeans returned the favor, by writing a book about having been granted the opportunity to receive this American poet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

April 30: Thomas Carlyle was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures, all but one of which would be taken down by a barrister in the audience, Thomas Anstey. These shorthand notes when interpreted would achieve publication in 1892 as ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY: Just as Carlyle hoped he was doing, his heroes used their intellects to see the truth, and to communicate truth to the people. Unheroic intellects —whether Charles I, or Luther’s opponents at the Diet of Worms— are routinely defeated. Sincerity was all. As a joke —one presumes— he includes his bête noire Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as if to prove that even the heroic intellect can go wrong at times, in Rousseau’s case through egotism; and the slavish adherence to such misguided heroism led, of course, to the French Revolution. Bertrand Russell, curiously, felt that Carlyle’s “cult of the hero” was a natural extension of Rousseau’s philosophy.... The work upholds all Carlyle’s views of what is necessary for the correctly ordered society. It shows him as a “moral desperado,” a frame of mind nowhere seen more clearly than in Carlyle’s support of John Knox’s attempt to establish a theocracy in which “Kings and Prime Ministers, and all manners of persons, in public or private, diplomatising or whatever else they might be doing, should walk according to the Gospel of Christ, and understand that this was their Law, supreme over all laws”; the creation of God’s Kingdom on earth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 5, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 1 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY.

This being the 1st Tuesday in May, it would have been May Training Day in the cities and villages of the USA, the day on which by law all men of due age 18 to 45 were required to appear with their personal arms in one or another of the militia formations. Thomas Van Rensselaer, a black man, had by mistake been sent a notice to appear for the annual New-York militia training. He appeared on this day, armed, at the proper place, and apparently got quite a sardonic chuckle out of the horror he excited. –For of course, this being America, all persons of color were potential enemies, and were rigidly excluded from all such community- protection agendas.

May 8, Friday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 2 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 12, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 3 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY.

May 15, Friday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 4 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY.

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. We have repeatedly endeavored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero,— the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in. The Priest too, as I understand it, is a kind of Prophet; in him too there is required to be a light of inspiration, as we must name it. He presides over the worship of the people; is the Uniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spiritual Captain of the people; as the Prophet is their spiritual King with many captains: he guides them heavenward, by wise guidance through this Earth and its work. The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can call a voice from the unseen Heaven; interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to men. The unseen Heaven,— the “open secret of the Universe,”— which so few have an eye for! He is the Prophet shorn of his more awful splendor; burning with mild equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, and in all times. One knows very well that, in reducing ideals to practice, great latitude of tolerance is needful; very great. But a Priest who is not this at all, who does not any longer aim or try to be this, is a character — of whom we had rather not speak in this place. Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and did HDT WHAT? INDEX

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faithfully perform that function in its common sense. Yet it will suit us better here to consider them chiefly in their historical character, rather as Reformers than Priests. There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, a light from Heaven into the daily life of their people; leading them forward, as under God’s guidance, in the way wherein they were to go. But when this same way was a rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual Captain, who led through that, becomes, especially to us who live under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any other. He is the warfaring and battling Priest; who led his people, not to quiet faithful labor as in smooth times, but to faithful valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismembered: a more perilous service, and a more memorable one, be it higher or not. These two men we will account our best Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers. Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals to Heaven’s invisible justice against Earth’s visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer. Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, building up Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theories of Life worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,— we are now to see the reverse process; which also is necessary, which also may be carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this should be necessary: yet necessary it is. The mild shining of the Poet’s light has to give place to the fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortunately the Reformer too is a personage that cannot fail in History! The Poet indeed, with his mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate adjustment of Reform, or Prophecy, with its fierceness? No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed. Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of music; be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic musical way, how good were it could we get so much as into the equable way; I mean, if peaceable Priests, reforming from day to day, would always suffice us! But it is not so; even this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable HDT WHAT? INDEX

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furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,— a business often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which once took in the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts of it to the highly discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the greatest in the world,— had in the course of another century become dubitable to common intellects; become deniable; and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as Odin’s Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and God’s ways with men, were all well represented by those Malebolges, Purgatorios; to Luther not well. How was this? Why could not Dante’s Catholicism continue; but Luther’s Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will continue. I do not make much of “Progress of the Species,” as handled in these times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can trace out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a learner but a doer: he learns with the mind given him what has been; but with the same mind he discovers farther, he invents and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely without originality there is no man. No man whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,— which is an infinite Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by any view or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat, I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfather incredible to him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has discovered or observed. It is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind we see it summed up into great historical amounts,— revolutions, new epochs. Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory does not stand “in the ocean of the other Hemisphere,” when Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,— all Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these. If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain, Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for revolution. At all turns, a man who will do faithfully, needs to believe firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world’s suffrage; if he cannot dispense with the world’s suffrage, and make his own suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him will be misdone. Every such man is a daily contributor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a new offence, parent of new misery to somebody or other. Offences accumulate till they become insupportable; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. Dante’s sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther, Shakspeare’s noble Feudalism, as beautiful as it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution. The accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periods, before matters come to a settlement again. Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter, and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that they were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is not so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence or soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was Valor; Christianism was Humility, a nobler kind of Valor. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of man but was an honest insight into God’s truth on man’s part, and has an essential truth in it which endures through all changes, an everlasting possession for us all. And, on the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in all countries and times except our own, as having spent their life in blind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations of men were lost and wrong, only that this present little section of a generation might be saved and right. They all marched forward there, all generations since the beginning of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we might march over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis. Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis; and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of individual men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo, sank into the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?— Withal, it is an important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven’s captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one another, fight not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor’s strong hammer smiting down Jotuns, shall be welcome. Luther’s battle-voice, Dante’s march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the same host.—Let us now look a little at this Luther’s fighting; what kind of battle it was, and how HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he comported himself in it. Luther too was of our spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time. As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be in place here. One of Mahomet’s characteristics, which indeed belongs to all Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the Divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have to denounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it is the chief of all the sins they see done under the sun. This is worth noting. We will not enter here into the theological question about Idolatry. Idol is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether any the most benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he did not think that the poor image his own hands had made was God; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was in it some way or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? Whether seen, rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye; or visible only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possible for him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:— we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous. Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship of those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet, and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of him in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you will; but cannot surely be an object of hatred. Let his heart be honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in one word, let him entirely believe in his Fetish,— it will then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily be made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era of the Prophets, no man’s mind is any longer honestly filled with his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little more. Condemnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubt has eaten out the heart of it: a human soul is seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it half feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are filled. “You do not believe,” said Coleridge; “you only believe that you believe.” It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours. No more immoral act can be done by a human creature; for it is the beginning of all immorality, or rather it is the impossibility henceforth of any morality whatsoever: the innermost moral soul is paralyzed thereby, cast into fatal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer sincere men. I do not wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with inextinguishable aversion. He and it, all good and it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatry is Cant, and even what one may call Sincere-Cant. Sincere-Cant: that is worth thinking of! Every sort of Worship ends with this phasis. I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than any other Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees-wax, were not more hateful to Mahomet than Tetzel’s Pardons of Sin, made of sheepskin and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him. Protestantism, too, is the work of a Prophet: the prophet-work of that sixteenth century. The first stroke of honest demolition to an ancient thing grown false and idolatrous; preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true, and authentically divine! At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were entirely destructive to this that we call Hero-worship, and represent as the basis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind. One often hears it said that Protestantism introduced a new era, radically different from any the world had ever seen before: the era of “private judgment,” as they call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every man became his own Pope; and learnt, among other things, that he must never trust any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any more! Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and subordination among men, henceforth an impossibility? So we hear it said.—Now I need not deny that Protestantism was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Popes and much else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revolt against earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it; that the enormous French Revolution itself was the third act, whereby all sovereignties earthly and spiritual were, as might seem, abolished or made sure of abolition. Protestantism is the grand root from which our whole subsequent European History branches out. For the spiritual will always body itself forth in the temporal history of men; the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality, Independence and so forth; instead of Kings, Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages: it seems made out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things temporal or things spiritual, has passed away forever from the world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. One of my deepest convictions is, that it is not so. Without sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see nothing possible but an anarchy; the hatefulest of things. But I find Protestantism, whatever anarchic democracy it have produced, to be the beginning of new genuine sovereignty and order. I find it to be a revolt against false sovereigns; the painful but indispensable first preparative for true sovereigns getting place among us! This is worth explaining a little. Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of “private judgment” is, at bottom, not a new thing in the world, but only new at that epoch of the world. There is nothing generically new or peculiar in the Reformation; it was a return to Truth and Reality in opposition to Falsehood and Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement and genuine Teaching are and have been. Liberty of private judgment, if we will consider it, must at all times have existed in the world. Dante had not put out his eyes, or tied shackles on himself; he was at home in that Catholicism of his, a free-seeing soul in it,— if many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel, and Dr. Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty of judgment? No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and believe there, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by some kind of conviction, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His “private judgment” indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The right of private judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. A true man believes with his whole judgment, with all the illumination and discernment that is in him, and has always so believed. A false man, only struggling to “believe that he believes,” will naturally manage it in some other way. Protestantism said to this latter, Woe! and to the former, Well done! At bottom, it was no new saying; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had been said. Be genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the meaning of it. Mahomet believed with his whole mind; Odin with his whole mind,— he, and all true Followers of Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“judged “—so. And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private judgment, faithfully gone about, does by no means necessarily end in selfish independence, isolation; but rather ends necessarily in the opposite of that. It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half-belief and untruth that make it. A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth. There is no communion possible among men who believe only in hearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; has no power of sympathy even with things,— or he would believe them and not hearsays. No sympathy even with things; how much less with his fellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic man. Only in a world of sincere men is unity possible;— and there, in the long-run, it is as good as certain. For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather altogether lost sight of in this controversy: That it is not necessary a man should himself have discovered the truth he is to believe in, and never so sincerely to believe in. A Great Man, we said, was always sincere, as the first condition of him. But a man need not be great in order to be sincere; that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of Time. A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another;— and with boundless gratitude to that other! The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages of Faith, are original; all men in them, or the most of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages: every worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance; every work issues in a result: the general sum of such work is great; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of it is additive, none of it subtractive. There is true union, true kingship, loyalty, all true and blessed things, so far as the poor Earth can produce blessedness for men. Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, or what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing him to reverence and believe other men’s truth! It only disposes, necessitates and invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men’s dead formulas, hearsays and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes open, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut them before he can love his Teacher of truth? He alone can love, with a right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him out of darkness into light. Is not such a one a true Hero and Serpent- queller; worthy of all reverence! The black monster, Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his valor; it was he that conquered the world for us!— See, accordingly, was not Luther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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being verily such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlasting in the world:— and there is this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your “private judgment;” no, but by opening them, and by having something to see! Luther’s message was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Potentates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine ones. All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. In all ways, it behooved men to quit simulacra and return to fact; cost what it might, that did behoove to be done. With spurious Popes, and Believers having no private judgment,— quacks pretending to command over dupes,— what can you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an association out of insincere men; you cannot build an edifice except by plummet and level,— at right-angles to one another! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism downwards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself: not abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero? A world all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like will again be,— cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippers for Heroes: never could the truly Better be so reverenced as where all were True and Good!— But we must hasten to Luther and his Life. Luther’s birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world there on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave this honor to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine- laborers in a village of that region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named MARTIN LUTHER. Strange enough to reflect upon it. This poor Frau Luther, she had gone with her husband to make her small merchandisings; perhaps to sell the lock of yarn she had been spinning, to buy the small winter-necessaries for her narrow hut or household; in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant- looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads us back to another Birth- hour, in a still meaner environment, Eighteen Hundred years ago,— of which it is fit that we say nothing, that we think only in silence; for what words are there! The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is forever here—! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I find it altogether suitable to Luther’s function in this Earth, and doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding over him and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought up poor, one of the poorest of men. He had to beg, as the school-children in those times did; singing for alms and bread, from door to door. Hardship, rigorous Necessity was the poor boy’s companion; no man nor no thing would put on a false face to flatter Martin Luther. Among things, not among the shows of things, had he to grow. A boy of rude figure, yet with weak health, with his large greedy soul, full of all faculty and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task to get acquainted with realities, and keep acquainted with them, at whatever cost: his task was to bring the whole world back to reality, for it had dwelt too long with semblance! A youth nursed up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate darkness and difficulty, that he may step forth at last from his stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a Christian Odin,— a right Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough Jotuns and Giant-monsters! Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, was that death of his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther had struggled up through boyhood, better and worse; displaying, in spite of all hindrances, the largest intellect, eager to learn: his father judging doubtless that he might promote himself in the world, set him upon the study of Law. This was the path to rise; Luther, with little will in it either way, had consented: he was now nineteen years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther people at Mansfeldt; were got back again near Erfurt, when a thunder-storm came on; the bolt struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther’s feet. What is this Life of ours?— gone in a moment, burnt up like a scroll, into the blank Eternity! What are all earthly preferments, Chancellorships, Kingships? They lie shrunk together— there! The Earth has opened on them; in a moment they are not, and Eternity is. Luther, struck to the heart, determined to devote himself to God and God’s service alone. In spite of all dissuasions from his father and others, he became a Monk in the Augustine Convent at Erfurt. This was probably the first light-point in the history of Luther, his purer will now first decisively uttering itself; but, for the present, it was still as one light-point in an element all of darkness. He says he was a pious monk, ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen; faithfully, painfully struggling to work out the truth of this high act of his; but it was to little purpose. His misery had not lessened; had rather, as it were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries he had to do, as novice in his Convent, all sorts of slave-work, were not his grievance: the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen into all manner of black scruples, dubitations; he believed himself likely to die soon, and far worse than die. One hears with a new interest for poor Luther that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakable misery; fancied that he was doomed to eternal HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reprobation. Was it not the humble sincere nature of the man? What was he, that he should be raised to Heaven! He that had known only misery, and mean slavery: the news was too blessed to be credible. It could not become clear to him how, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man’s soul could be saved. He fell into the blackest wretchedness; had to wander staggering as on the verge of bottomless Despair. It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. A brother monk too, of pious experience, was helpful. Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that; as through life and to death he firmly did. This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph over darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important of all epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness; that, unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him, he should rise to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be found more and more useful in all honest business of life, is a natural result. He was sent on missions by his Augustine Order, as a man of talent and fidelity fit to do their business well: the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a truly wise and just prince, had cast his eye on him as a valuable person; made him Professor in his new University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg; in both which capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in the peaceable sphere of common life, was gaining more and more esteem with all good men. It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sent thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the Second, and what was going on at Rome, must have filled the mind of Luther with amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God’s High-priest on Earth; and he found it— what we know! Many thoughts it must have given the man; many which we have no record of, which perhaps he did not himself know how to utter. This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed not in the beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture, is false: but what is it to Luther? A mean man he, how shall he reform a world? That was far from his thoughts. A humble, solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the world? It was the task of quite higher men than he. His business was to guide his own footsteps wisely through the world. Let him do his own obscure duty in it well; the rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in God’s hand, not in his. It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had Roman Popery happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wasteful orbit, and not come athwart his little path, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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force him to assault it! Conceivable enough that, in this case, he might have held his peace about the abuses of Rome; left Providence, and God on high, to deal with them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack irreverently persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to do his own duty; to walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, and save his own soul alive. But the Roman High-priesthood did come athwart him: afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck at, struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is worth attending to in Luther’s history. Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. We cannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would that do for him? The goal of his march through this world was the Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in a few years, he should either have attained that, or lost it forever! We will say nothing at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against the Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced the Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain it, if indeed any such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought by which it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with you. The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo Tenth,— who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest seems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was anything,— arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther’s flock bought Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church, people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, a false sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space of ground that was his own and no other man’s, had to step forth against Indulgences, and declare aloud that they were a futility and sorrowful mockery, that no man’s sins could be pardoned by them. It was the beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went; forward from this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October, 1517, through remonstrance and argument;— spreading ever wider, rising ever higher; till it became unquenchable, and enveloped all the world. Luther’s heart’s desire was to have this grief and other griefs amended; his thought was still far other than that of introducing separation in the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of Christendom.—The elegant Pagan Pope cared little about this Monk and his doctrines; wished, however, to have done with the noise of him: in a space of some three years, having tried various softer methods, he thought good to end it by fire. He dooms the Monk’s writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome,— probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon “three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long;” burnt the true voice of him out of this world; choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done! I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against the Pope. The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled into noble just wrath the bravest heart then living in this world. The bravest, if also one of the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human inability would allow, to promote God’s truth on Earth, and save men’s souls, you, God’s vicegerent on earth, answer them by the hangman and fire? You will burn me and them, for answer to the God’s-message they strove to bring you? You are not God’s vicegerent; you are another’s than his, I think! I take your Bull, as an emparchmented Lie, and burn it. You will do what you see good next: this is what I do.—It was on the 10th of December, 1520, three years after the beginning of the business, that Luther, “with a great concourse of people,” took this indignant step of burning the Pope’s fire-decree “at the Elster-Gate of Wittenberg.” Wittenberg looked on “with shoutings;” the whole world was looking on. The Pope should not have provoked that “shout”! It was the shout of the awakening of nations. The quiet German heart, modest, patient of much, had at length got more than it could bear. Formulism, Pagan Popeism, and other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had ruled long enough: and here once more was a man found who durst tell all men that God’s- world stood not on semblances but on realities; that Life was a truth, and not a lie! At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men and teachers. Mahomet said, These idols of yours are wood; you put wax and oil on them, the flies stick on them: they are not God, I tell you, they are black wood! Luther said to the Pope, This thing of yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else; it, and so much like it, is nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Fatherhood of God’s Church, is that a vain semblance, of cloth and parchment? It is an awful fact. God’s Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand on this, since you drive me to it. Standing on this, I a poor German Monk am stronger than you all. I stand solitary, friendless, but on God’s Truth; you with your tiaras, triple-hats, with your treasuries and armories, thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on the Devil’s Lie, and are not so strong—! The Diet of Worms, Luther’s appearance there on the 17th of April, 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which the whole HDT WHAT? INDEX

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subsequent history of civilization takes its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come to this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, are assembled there: Luther is to appear and answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The world’s pomp and power sits there on this hand: on that, stands up for God’s Truth, one man, the poor miner Hans Luther’s Son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered, “Were there as many Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on.” The people, on the morrow, as he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn words, not to recant: “Whosoever denieth me before men!” they cried to him,— as in a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality our petition too, the petition of the whole world, lying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted Chimera, calling itself Father in God, and what not: “Free us; it rests with thee; desert us not!” Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, distinguished itself by its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that. His writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless which it were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood on sound truth and the Word of God, he could not recant it. How could he? “Confute me,” he concluded, “by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!”— It is, as we say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present: the germ of it all lay there: had Luther in that moment done other, it had all been otherwise! The European World was asking him: Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome accursed death; or, with whatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live?— Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation; which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk and crimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable; but after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. When Hercules turned the purifying river into King Augeas’s stables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted was considerable all around: but I think it was not Hercules’s blame; it was some other’s blame! The Reformation might bring what results it liked when it came, but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the Reformation simply could not help coming. To all Popes and Popes’ advocates, expostulating, lamenting and accusing, the answer of the world is: Once for all, your Popehood has become untrue. No matter how good it was, how good you say it is, we cannot believe it; the light of our whole mind, given us to walk by from Heaven above, finds it henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believe it, we will not try to believe it,— we dare not! The thing is untrue; we were traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if we durst pretend to think it true. Away with it; let whatsoever likes come in the place of it: with it we can have no farther trade!— Luther and his Protestantism is not responsible for wars; the false Simulacra that forced him to protest, they are responsible. Luther did what every man that God has made has not only the right, but lies under the sacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it questioned him, Dost thou believe me?— No!— At what cost soever, without counting of costs, this thing behooved to be done. Union, organization spiritual and material, a far nobler than any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest days, I never doubt, is coming for the world; sure to come. But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one! And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante’s days it needed no sophistry, self- blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of “No Popery” is foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on the increase, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one of the idlest ever started. Very curious: to count up a few Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings,— to much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant, and say: See, Protestantism is dead; Popeism is more alive than it, will be alive after it!— Drowsy inanities, not a few, that call themselves Protestant are dead; but Protestantism has not died yet, that I hear of! Protestantism, if we will look, has in these days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon; German Literature and the French Revolution; rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom, what else is alive but Protestantism? The life of most else that one meets is a galvanic one merely,— not a pleasant, not a lasting sort of life! Popery can build new chapels; welcome to do so, to all lengths. Popery cannot come back, any more than Paganism can,— which also still lingers in some countries. But, indeed, it is with these things, as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; for minutes you cannot tell how it is going; look in half an hour where it is,— look in half a century where your Popehood is! Alas, would there were HDT WHAT? INDEX

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no greater danger to our Europe than the poor old Pope’s revival! Thor may as soon try to revive.—And withal this oscillation has a meaning. The poor old Popehood will not die away entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet; nor ought it. We may say, the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul of good that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical New. While a good work remains capable of being done by the Romish form; or, what is inclusive of all, while a pious life remains capable of being led by it, just so long, if we consider, will this or the other human soul adopt it, go about as a living witness of it. So long it will obtrude itself on the eye of us who reject it, till we in our practice too have appropriated whatsoever of truth was in it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no charm more for any man. It lasts here for a purpose. Let it last as long as it can.— Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars and bloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as he continued living. The controversy did not get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do we find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion, who does not himself perish, swept away in it! Such is the usual course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution; all Protestants, of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for guidance: and he held it peaceable, continued firm at the centre of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty: he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously on that, as a strong true man, that other true men may rally round him there. He will not continue leader of men otherwise. Luther’s clear deep force of judgment, his force of all sorts, of silence, of tolerance and moderation, among others, are very notable in these circumstances. Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguishes what is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very much as it will. A complaint comes to him that such and such a Reformed Preacher “will not preach without a cassock.” Well, answers Luther, what harm will a cassock do the man? “Let him have a cassock to preach in; let him have three cassocks if he find benefit in them!” His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt’s wild image-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the Peasants’ War, shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic violence. With sure prompt insight he discriminates what is what: a strong just man, he speaks forth what is the wise course, and all men follow him in that. Luther’s Written Works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther’s merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four- and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other HDT WHAT? INDEX

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than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one. I call him a great Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart already betokens that. Richter says of Luther’s words, “His words are half-battles.” They may be called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and conquer; that he was a right piece of human Valor. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valor. His defiance of the “Devils” in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther’s that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns up; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall; the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from food: there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work: Luther started up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary’s apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense: but the man’s heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists not on this Earth or under it.—Fearless enough! “The Devil is aware,” writes he on one occasion, “that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George,” of Leipzig, a great enemy of his, “Duke George is not equal to one Devil,”— far short of a Devil! “If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running.” What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into—! At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man’s courage was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises from the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! With Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this of mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger before a stronger foe — flies: the tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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child’s or a mother’s, in this great wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure as water welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all that down-pressed mood of despair and reprobation, which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and fine? It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze. In Luther’s Table-Talk, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and sayings collected by his friends, the most interesting now of all the Books proceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious displays of the man, and what sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of his little Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live;— follows, in awe-struck thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms. Awe-struck; most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere,— for after all dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know, or can know: His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; for Luther too that is all; Islam is all. Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of Coburg, in the middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it,— dumb, gaunt, huge:— who supports all that? “None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported.” God supports it. We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we cannot see.—Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest- fields: How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving there,— the meek Earth, at God’s kind bidding, has produced it once again; the bread of man!— In the garden at Wittenberg one evening at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night: That little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home: the Maker of it has given it too a home!— Neither are mirthful turns wanting: there is a great free human heart in this man. The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brother man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call these the two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things had room. Luther’s face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach’s best HDT WHAT? INDEX

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portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears also were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing: that God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest. They understand little of the man who cite this in discredit of him!— I will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,— so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven. The most interesting phasis which the Reformation anywhere assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther’s own country Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair: not a religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it sceptical contention: which indeed has jangled more and more, down to Voltaireism itself,— through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onwards to French-Revolution ones! But in our Island there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself established as a Presbyterianism and National Church among the Scotch; which came forth as a real business of the heart; and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In some senses, one may say it is the only phasis of Protestantism that ever got to the rank of being a Faith, a true heart-communication with Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in History as such. We must spare a few words for Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still more important as Chief Priest and Founder, which one may consider him to be, of the Faith that became Scotland’s, New England’s, Oliver Cromwell’s. History will have something to say about this, for some time to come! We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose, but would find it a very rough defective thing. But we, and all men, may understand that it was a genuine thing; for Nature has adopted it, and it has grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all goes by wager-of-battle in this world; that strength, well understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right thing. Look now at HDT WHAT? INDEX

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American Saxondom; and at that little Fact of the sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from Delft Haven in Holland! Were we of open sense as the Greeks were, we had found a Poem here; one of Nature’s own Poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great continents. For it was properly the beginning of America: there were straggling settlers in America before, some material as of a body was there; but the soul of it was first this. These poor men, driven out of their own country, not able well to live in Holland, determine on settling in the New World. Black untamed forests are there, and wild savage creatures; but not so cruel as Star-chamber hangmen. They thought the Earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch, there too, overhead; they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eternity by living well in this world of Time; worshipping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way. They clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little ship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail. In Neal’s History of the Puritans [Neal (London, 1755), i. 490] is an account of the ceremony of their departure: solemnity, we might call it rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went down with them to the beach, and their brethren whom they were to leave behind; all joined in solemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here.—Hah! These men, I think, had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews; it has firearms, war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains;— it is one of the strongest things under this sun at present! In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch: we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this Reformation by Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils, dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and destitution; little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry fierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with each other how to divide what they fleeced from these poor drudges; but obliged, as the Colombian Republics are at this day, to make of every alteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hanging the old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very singular significance! “Bravery” enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting in abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of their old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; whose exploits we have not found worth dwelling on! It is a country as yet without a soul: nothing developed in it but what is rude, external, semi- animal. And now at the Reformation, the internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward material death. A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself, like a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;— whereby the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ’s visible Church; a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man! Well; this is what I mean by a whole “nation of heroes;” a believing nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul! The like has been seen, we find. The like will be again seen, under wider forms than the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting good done till then.— Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not been, in this world, as a practiced fact? Did Hero-worship fail in Knox’s case? Or are we made of other clay now? Did the Westminster Confession of Faith add some new property to the soul of man? God made the soul of man. He did not doom any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and with the fatal work and fruit of such—! But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may really call a resurrection as from death. It was not a smooth business; but it was welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been far rougher. On the whole, cheap at any price!— as life is. The people began to live: they needed first of all to do that, at what cost and costs soever. Scotch Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns: I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart’s core of every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that without the Reformation they would not have been. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that of England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over all these realms;— there came out, after fifty years’ struggling, what we all call the “Glorious Revolution” a Habeas Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else!— Alas, is it not too true what we said, That many men in the van do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the honor? How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, bemired,— before a beautiful Revolution of Eighty- eight can step over them in official pumps and silk-stockings, with universal three-times-three! It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world; intrinsically for having been, in such way as it was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have crouched into the corner, like so many others; Scotland had not been delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the world owe a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would forgive him for having been worth to it any million “unblamable” Scotchmen that need no forgiveness! He HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bared his breast to the battle; had to row in French galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms; was censured, shot at through his windows; had a right sore fighting life: if this world were his place of recompense, he had made but a bad venture of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it is very indifferent, these two hundred and fifty years or more, what men say of him. But we, having got above all those details of his battle, and living now in clearness on the fruits of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought to look through the rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into the man himself. For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to his Nation was not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure, before he became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had got a college education; become a Priest; adopted the Reformation, and seemed well content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowise unduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen’s families; preaching when any body of persons wished to hear his doctrine: resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called to do it; not ambitious of more; not fancying himself capable of more. In this entirely obscure way he had reached the age of forty; was with the small body of Reformers who were standing siege in St. Andrew’s Castle,— when one day in their chapel, the Preacher after finishing his exhortation to these fighters in the forlorn hope, said suddenly, That there ought to be other speakers, that all men who had a priest’s heart and gift in them ought now to speak;— which gifts and heart one of their own number, John Knox the name of him, had: Had he not? said the Preacher, appealing to all the audience: what then is his duty? The people answered affirmatively; it was a criminal forsaking of his post, if such a man held the word that was in him silent. Poor Knox was obliged to stand up; he attempted to reply; he could say no word;— burst into a flood of tears, and ran out. It is worth remembering, that scene. He was in grievous trouble for some days. He felt what a small faculty was his for this great work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be baptized withal. He “burst into tears.” Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only can he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St. Andrew’s was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves,— some officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of the Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. Mother? Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother of God: this is “a pented bredd,”— a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for HDT WHAT? INDEX

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being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there: but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a pented bredd: worship it he would not. He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God’s making; it is alone strong. How many pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshipped!— This Knox cannot live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one;— a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. “He lies there,” said the Earl of Morton at his grave, “who never feared the face of man.” He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God’s truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for that; not require him to be other. Knox’s conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her own palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading the actual narrative of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must say one’s tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit! Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and Cause of Scotland. A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, and the Cause of God trampled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil’s Cause, had no method of making himself agreeable! “Better that women weep,” said Morton, “than that bearded men be forced to weep.” Knox was the constitutional opposition-party in Scotland: the Nobles of the country, called by their station to take that post, were not found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless Queen;— but the still more hapless Country, if she were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities: “Who are you,” said she once, “that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?”— “Madam, a subject born within the same,” answered he. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Reasonably answered! If the “subject” have truth to speak, it is not the “subject’s” footing that will fail him here.— We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has to tolerate the unessential; and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate! We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We do not “tolerate” Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish Falsehoods, and put an end to them, in some wise way! I will not quarrel so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant. A man sent to row in French Galleys, and such like, for teaching the Truth in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humor! I am not prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper; nor do I know that he had what we call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest affections dwelt in the much- enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That he could rebuke Queens, and had such weight among those proud turbulent Nobles, proud enough whatever else they were; and could maintain to the end a kind of virtual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild realm, he who was only “a subject born within the same:” this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close at hand, to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue: precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact, in regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine! Knox wanted no pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what then? Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the general sum-total of Disorder. Order is Truth,— each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together. Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence; march rapidly up, take to hustling one another, twitching one another’s rochets, and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him every way! Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone; though there is enough of that too. But a true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you would say, a laugh in the eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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sincere in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bourdeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh house of his; a cheery social man, with faces that loved him! They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of character we assign to the Scotch at present: a certain sardonic taciturnity is in him; insight enough; and a stouter heart than he himself knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over many things which do not vitally concern him,— “They? what are they?” But the thing which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of; and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear: all the more emphatic for his long silence. This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man! — He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight: but he won it. “Have you hope?” they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, “pointed upwards with his finger,” and so died. Honor to him! His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men’s; but the spirit of it never. One word more as to the letter of Knox’s work. The unforgivable offence in him is, that he wished to set up Priests over the head of Kings. In other words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. This indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin; for which what pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, at bottom, consciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, or Government of God. He did mean that Kings and Prime Ministers, and all manner of persons, in public or private, diplomatizing or whatever else they might be doing, should walk according to the Gospel of Christ, and understand that this was their Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once to see such a thing realized; and the Petition, Thy Kingdom come, no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when he saw greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church’s property; when he expostulated that it was not secular property, that it was spiritual property, and should be turned to true churchly uses, education, schools, worship;— and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the shoulders, “It is a devout imagination!” This was Knox’s scheme of right and truth; this he zealously endeavored after, to realize it. If we think his scheme of truth was too narrow, was not true, we may rejoice that he could not realize it; that it remained after two centuries of effort, unrealizable, and is a “devout imagination” still. But how shall we blame him for struggling to realize it? Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely the thing to be struggled for! All Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for that purpose. Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zealous men, whether called Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever HDT WHAT? INDEX

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else called, do essentially wish, and must wish? That right and truth, or God’s Law, reign supreme among men, this is the Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox’s time, and namable in all times, a revealed “Will of God”) towards which the Reformer will insist that all be more and more approximated. All true Reformers, as I said, are by the nature of them Priests, and strive for a Theocracy. How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, and at what point our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, is always a question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves as far as they can contrive to do it! If they are the true faith of men, all men ought to be more or less impatient always where they are not found introduced. There will never be wanting Regent Murrays enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, “A devout imagination!” We will praise the Hero-priest rather, who does what is in him to bring them in; and wears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God’s Kingdom of this Earth. The Earth will not become too godlike!

May 19, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as a Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 5 in ON HEROES, HERO- WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY. The lecturer cautioned those of his generation not to “sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched God-forgetting Unbelief; —you were miserable then, powerless, mad.” –He knew, of course, of what he spoke.

“It seems to me that if anything would make me an infidel, it would be the threats lavished against unbelief.” — Professor Maria Mitchell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 22, Friday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 6 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY.

June 30, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle calling to his attention Henry Thoreau’s contributions in THE DIAL: In this number what say you to the Elegy written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me, — Henry Thoreau? A criticism of Persius is his also.

“AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS”

June 30: I sailed from Fair Haven last evening as gently and steadily as the clouds sail through the atmosphere. The wind came blowing blithely from the southwest fields, and stepped into the folds of our sail like a winged horse, pulling with a strong and steady impulse. The sail bends gently to the breeze, as swells some generous impulse of the heart, and anon flutters and flaps with a kind of human suspense. I could watch the motions of a sail forever, they are so rich and full of meaning. I watch the play of its pulse, as if it were my own blood beating there. The varying temperature of distant atmospheres is graduated on its scale. It is a free, buoyant creature, the bauble of the heavens and the earth. A gay pastime the air plays with it. If it swells and tugs, it is because the sun lays his windy finger on it. The breeze it plays with has been outdoors so long. So thin is it, and yet so full of life; so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least serviceable. So am I blown on by God's breath, so flutter and flap, and fill gently out with the breeze. In this fresh evening each blade and leaf looks is if it had been dipped in an icy liquid greenness. Let eyes that ache come here and look, — the sight will be a sovereign eyewater, — or else wait and bathe them in the dark. We go forth into the fields, and there the wind blows freshly onward, and still on, and we must make new efforts not to be left behind. What does the dogged wind intend, that, like a willful cur, it will not let me turn aside to rest or content? Must it always reprove and provoke me, and never welcome me as an equal? The truth shall prevail and falsehood discover itself, as long as the wind blows on the hills.

A man’s life should be a stately march to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure; or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the melody runs into such depth and wildness, as to be no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times; for then the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.

I have a deep sympathy with war it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Value and effort are as much coincident as weight and a tendency to fall. In a very wide but true sense, effort is the deed itself, anti it is only when these sensible stuffs intervene, that our attention is distracted from the deed to the accident. It is never the deed men praise, but some marble or canvas which are only a staging to the real work. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

Thomas Carlyle found the QU’RAN to be a

wearisome, confused jumble, crude, … stupidity in short.

[You are able, of course,Holy Qu’ran to judge for yourself.]

WEARISOME, CRUDE

April 15, Thursday: Henry Thoreau read through the proof-sheets for the American edition of Thomas Carlyle’s ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 30, Sunday: Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle in regard to Henry Thoreau: One reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as I hope, for a twelvemonth to come, —Henry Thoreau,— a poet whom you may one day be proud of;— a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

During this year Henry Thoreau would be reading Thomas Carlyle. What would he be learning? Perhaps this: The Fraction of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January-June: Charles Dickens’s trip with his wife Catherine to the United States of America and to Canada, the stated purpose of which was to investigate our prison systems (visits to jails, asylums, and charitable institutions would form the framework of AMERICAN NOTES), had begun with a violent, stormy Atlantic crossing in

January. The diminutive author’s itinerary would include Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, Baltimore, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, and Canada. An appearance of distaste for matters American as perceived by readers of the 1st edition of AMERICAN NOTES (which appeared in two volumes in October) would prompt the author to remark for the 1859 edition that “to represent me as viewing America with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing: which is always a very easy one.”

The fruits of the earth have their growth in corruption. Out of the rottenness of these things, there has sprung up in Boston a sect of philosophers TRANSCENDENTALISM known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are THOMAS CARLYLE followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.

Waldo Emerson, hearing him read in Boston, commented that he simply didn’t know what to make of the man. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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For one thing this man turned out, unexpectedly, to be exceedingly short.

At about this point Catherine Dickens’s 15-year-old sister Georgina became a permanent member of the household of Charles Dickens. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 25, Saturday: Thomas Wilson Dorr returned to Chepachet, Rhode Island to reconvene the People’s Legislature

on the 4th of July. The Charter government would declare martial law, making such activities amount to READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT

treason. Only a few hundred of his supporters, including not one of the elected legislators, would ever make an appearance.

Design of the Rebellion’s flag

Bronson Alcott spent an hour with Thomas Carlyle, and found that

Twas a dark hour with him. His wit was sombre as it was pitiless; his merriment had madness in it; his humor tragical even to tears.... His conversation was cynical, trivial, and gave no pleasure.

Carlyle did, however, invite Alcott to return. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The editor of the New-York Courier and Enquirer, James Watson Webb, fought a duel with US Congressman Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky and the New-York Herald reported that: The duel between Thomas F. Marshall and James Watson Webb was fought this morning at four o’clock, at the old duelling ground, just this side of the State line, about seven miles north of this city. Mr. Marshall was attended by Dr. Carr of Baltimore, as second, and Dr. Gibson, of the same place, as surgeon. Mr. Morrel, of your city, acted as Webb’s friend. The parties exchanged one shot without injury. Marshall demanded immediately a second pistol, and wounded Webb upon that fire, in the fleshy part of the hip, sustaining no damage himself. Marshall, who came determined to fight it out, demanded a third shot, but Webb could not stand it and the matter was made up....

July 5, Tuesday: Bronson Alcott stayed a night at the Carlyle home. It must have been pretty bad. Alcott mushed up his strawberries in his mashed potatoes so bad, that Thomas Carlyle became nauseous and needed to leave the dinner table.

... we sped no better than at first. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 2, Tuesday: Bronson Alcott wrote Abba Alcott that on a 3rd visit to Thomas Carlyle, they had quarrelled outright.

I shall not see him again.

Carlyle wrote Waldo Emerson about the encounter, describing Alcott’s “long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes,” speaking of him as genial, innocent, simple-hearted, good, venerable, but declaring him a Don Quixote “bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age,”28 a man “whom nobody can even laugh at without loving” but nevertheless a “bottomless imbecile.”

He warned Emerson against allowing his public reputation in England to become entangled with that of such a person. Emerson, frightened for his reputation, wrote to Alcott in England, warning that while his English friends could trust his “theories” they could not trust his “statement of facts.” And Emerson ordered Alcott to show this letter to his English friends, and Alcott did this. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 2, Sunday: The Reverend George Gilfillan preached on the subject of “Hades, or the Unseen” (the Unseen State of the soul after separation from the body), and would soon publish that sermon, causing himself to come to be popularly known as “Gilfillan the Hades Minister.” This contained such novel thoughts before their time as to bring him under the scrutiny of his co-presbyters — and ultimately it would need to be withdrawn from circulation as having been somewhat too adventurous (Thomas Carlyle would comment “How he contrives to

28. Since Don Quijote was un hombre exageradamente grave y serio o puntilloso, this was a fine and accurate description of Concord’s own knight of the woebegone countenance. This is what John Brown looked like in 1842, as a failed businessman,

but the above description would also be a fine description, later, of a more mature John Brown: If Bronson Alcott could be said to have been a Quijote whose favorite reading was the New Testament, it could be said of Brown that he was a Quijote whose favorite reading was the Old. For Miguel de Cervantes put into the mouth of his antihero the following words:

These saints and knights were of the same profession as myself, which is the calling of arms. Only there is this difference between them and me, that they were saints, and fought with divine weapons, and I am a sinner and fight with human ones. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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hold such notions, and be a Burgher Minister, one cannot well say”).

The Reverend William Ellery Channing died at sundown in Old Bennington, Vermont. When news of the event was circulated, the Unitarian churches of course all tolled their funeral bells, but every other Protestant church was very noticeably silent. On this occasion, in Boston, only the bells of the Catholic cathedral chimed in with the bells of the Unitarians. Although his statue stands today at the Arlington Street and Boylston Street entrance to the Public Garden, the gravestone which bears his name is behind the Old First Church that fronts on the green in Old Bennington. It happens to be one of the few gravestones ever to refer to the hour of a person’s death: “In this Quiet Village Among the Hills William Ellery Channing Apostle of Faith and Freedom Died at Sunset October 2, 1842” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

Thomas Carlyle’s PAST AND PRESENT (Boston: C.C. Little & J. Brown), a volume that would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau. PAST AND PRESENT

By this point Dr. John Aitken Carlyle had saved enough coin as travelling physician to the duke of Buccleuch that he was able to forego the practice of medicine entirely, and so he begin to practice a life of utter shiftlessness and hopeless fecklessness. Lady Holland wanted him as her personal physician in attendance, but he went instead to live on his savings in lodgings near the home of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in Chelsea near London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 20, Thursday: Frederick Douglass was at the Town Hall of Dedham, Massachusetts for the annual meeting of the Norfolk County Anti-Slavery Society.

The Eastern Railroad stopped linking “Jim Crow” cars behind the engines of its trains, thus, effectively, desegregating itself.

At about this point in time a volley of poesy was being discharged from the pen of the promising Ellery Channing of Concord:

Oh! transient gleams yon hurrying noisy train, Its yellow carriages rumbling with might Of volleyed thunder on the iron rail Pieced by the humble toil of Erin’s hand Wood and lake the whistle shrill awakening.

(Notice in the above that the locomotive whistle is still of the “steam trumpet” model, that is, is still of the “whistle shrill” variety which we would associate with slumland factories rather than with bucolic railroads.)

In England, Thomas Carlyle obtained a finished copy of his new volume PAST AND PRESENT from his publishers. He had already forwarded a hand-copy by steamer to Waldo Emerson in Boston to arrange for HDT WHAT? INDEX

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legitimate publication here — and thus steal a march on the inevitable American pirate printers.29 The message of the book is of the nobility, and God-given necessity, of work. Carlyle holds up England, still then standing on medieval PEOPLE OF foundations of a King in parliament and a feudal system stretching down WALDEN from him, as an example of what divinely inspired heroes can create if allowed to do so. There is a sub-text about the importance of confronting problems in order to solve them, rather than pursuing compromise: “Double, double toil and trouble; that is the life of all governors that really govern; not the spoil of victory, only the glorious toil of battle can be theirs.” This cannot be achieved with “democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you,” but rather “despotism is essential in most enterprises.” Carlyle advises, however: Make your despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no “freedom” at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way; — and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!

WALDEN: What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather’s but our great- grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. If men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noon-day even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.

THOMAS PARR

29. When we attack the Chinese nowadays for pirating copyright American materials, we are attacking them for the precise practice which had been the very foundation of our own American printing industry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The only liberty worth having is the liberty to work, of securing “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”; other liberties would be protected because the leaders, or despots, would always remain the servants of God, who would hold them to account. Carlyle did not bother with economics. Those who had resources, whether landed or enriched by the industrial revolution, had an obligation to provide work with that money; it was everyone’s responsibility. This proto-socialism sits uneasily with Carlyle’s current reputation, but it —almost Saint- Simonian in its force— yells out of the pages of PAST AND PRESENT. Just as the Abbott of St Edmundsbury [Abbot Samson] emerged as leader because he was best fitted to lead, and just as he, with much effort and grief, provided for all in his charge, so should a modern governor. Necessary for this was the rediscovery of God after “these last two centuries of Atheistic Government”; then a government could proceed not on the greatest happiness principle —a liberal doctrine abhorred by Carlyle for its associations with atheism, and one of the causes of his growing estrangement from John Stuart Mill— but on the “Greatest- Nobleness Principle.” Happiness was neither here nor there: “Our highest religion is named the ‘Worship of Sorrow’.” As in earlier writings, he attacks the economic imperative for its effect on human loyalties and faith: “We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man.” “Might is right” is explicitly raised. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: Waldo Emerson’s “Ethnical Scriptures … from the DESATIR,” his “Gifts,” his poem “To Rhea,” his review of Thomas Carlyle’s PAST AND PRESENT, and five other of his reviews, were presented in this issue of THE DIAL. PAST AND PRESENT

Also in these pages was to be found, however, a noteworthy landmark in feminism: Margaret Fuller’s “The 30 Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women,” which amounts to a first version of WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

FEMINISM

THE DIAL, JULY 1843

In this essay Fuller insisted that as of 1843 the idea Man, however imperfectly realized, had been far more realized than the idea Woman, and that therefore the best way practically to aid the reformation of the sons of the age would be to improve the daughters of the age. While it is true that not all men have been given a fair chance, she pointed out, not one woman had been given a fair chance.

Fuller had seen, at the Allston Gallery in Boston in 1839, the statue of Orpheus that had been sculpted in Rome by Thomas Crawford. When the July issue of THE DIAL was read, it was notable that she had connected this

30. In 1844, when she republished this in expanded form as WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, she explained that by “Man” in this title she had meant both human males and human females, intending to “lay no especial stress on the welfare of either” because “the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other.” That is, she intended the same distinction, between “Man” and “Men,” that Neil Armstrong intended between “man” and “mankind” when he stepped on the surface of the moon and went “That’s a small step for [a] man, an giant leap for mankind.” Boy-type human beings and girl-type human beings were regarded by her not as opposites, nor as natural antagonists in the mode of the “man-hating” early years of the feminist movement, but as, in a luminous metaphor, “twins,” or “minds, partners in work and in life, sharing together on equal terms, public and private interests,” who “work together for a common purpose, and, in all these instances, with the same implement, the pen.” In other words, unlike certain later generation of feminists, Fuller was not sexist. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with Bronson Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” from the first issue of the journal in 1840, as “lessons in reverence.”

Orpheus was a lawgiver by theocratic commission. He understood nature, and made all her forms move to his music. He told her secrets in the form of hymns, nature as seen in the mind of God. Then it is the prediction, that to learn and to do, all men must be lovers, and Orpheus was, in a high sense, a lover. His soul went forth towards all beings, yet could remain sternly faithful to a chosen type of excellence. Seeking what he loved, he feared not death nor hell, neither could any presence daunt his faith in the power of the celestial harmony that filled his soul.

Referring to the statue’s posture, of shading its eyes with its hand and staring forward, she penned a sonnet which began:

Each Orpheus must to the depths descend; For only thus the Poet can be wise.

and which concluded with the following couplet:

If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

Samuel Laing translated into English the poet and historian Snorri Sturluson’s 1225 chronicle THE HEIMSKRINGLA; OR, CHRONICLE OF THE KINGS OF NORWAY from the Old Norse and Icelandic and Swedish and Latin in which it had previously appeared (London: Longman [et al.], three volumes). This was the 1st edition in English of the sagas which detailed the discovery of America by Norsemen, and would become HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thomas Carlyle’s principle source for his EARLY KINGS OF NORWAY.

THE HEIMSKRINGLA THE HEIMSKRINGLA THE HEIMSKRINGLA (Carlyle during this year would change the plan for a book that he would be completing in the following year, on Oliver Cromwell.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 10, Wednesday: Lidian gave birth to another boy, and Waldo bought some Concord property adjacent to Walden Pond and wrote Thomas Carlyle about a woodlot he had bought: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Edward we call him, and my wife calls him Edward Waldo. And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and woodlot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond?

LIDIAN EMERSON WALDO EMERSON DR.EDWARD WALDO EMERSON

WALDO’S RELATIVES

December 31: Waldo Emerson’s biographers have uniformly concluded that early in August of this year, in his “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES” address, he had committed himself to the cause of the abolition of human slavery. How am I so sure they have their collective heads up their collective asses? In a letter the Sage of Concord sent off to his buddy the stone racist Thomas Carlyle in Britain on this day, he denounced his own local oration in no uncertain terms: “though I sometimes accept a popular call, & preach on Temperance or the Abolition of slavery, as lately on the First of August, I am sure to feel before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere & so much loss of virtue in my own.” –What is happening here is that Emerson is reassuring this racist intimate correspondent, that in opposing human slavery he had been merely pandering to an audience. EMANCIPATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

Professor Walter Roy Harding. THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; enlarged and corrected edition, NY: Dover, 1982; Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 10 (1845-1847) -Thoreau began building his hut on Emerson’s newly purchased land adjacent to Walden Pond. Ellery Channing, who had advised Thoreau to move there and begin “the grand process of devouring himself alive,” described the cabin as “a wooden inkstand.” When he moved in on July 4, 1845, he furnished it very simply and added a fireplace in the fall. The site was not, as has been popularly presumed, isolated. “Hardly a day went by” when Thoreau didn’t have visitors such as his sister and mother, Channing, Emerson, Bronson Alcott and other locals, or go to town himself. He completed the first drafts of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and the first two drafts of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS as well as making several lyceum appearances in which he discussed Thomas Carlyle and his Walden experiment. But by 1847 Thoreau felt he had “exhausted the benefits of life there” and moved in with the Emerson family while Ralph Waldo was in Europe. However, Thoreau considered the Walden experiment a “resounding success” in which he advanced “confidently in the direction of his dreams.” (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Summer: Thomas Carlyle was completing his manuscript which would become THE LETTERS AND SPEECHES OF OLIVER CROMWELL: OLIVER CROMWELL, I OLIVER CROMWELL, II

“A Scotch lass ushers you into the second story front chamber, which is the spacious workshop of the world maker.” Here he sits a long time together, with many books and papers about him; many new books, we have been told, on the upper shelves, uncut, with the “author’s respects” in them; in late months, with many manuscripts in an old English hand, and innumerable pamphlets, from the public libraries, relating to the Cromwellian period; now, perhaps, looking out into the street on brick and pavement, for a change, and now upon some rod of grass ground in the rear; or, perchance, he steps over to the British Museum, and makes that his studio for the time. This is the fore part of the day; that is the way with literary men commonly; and then in the afternoon, we presume, he takes a short run of a mile or so through the suburbs out into the country; we think he would run that way, though so short a trip might not take him to very sylvan or rustic places. In the meanwhile, people are calling to see him, from various quarters, very few worthy of being seen by him, “distinguished travellers from America,” not a few, to all and sundry of whom he gives freely of his yet unwritten rich and flashing soliloquy, in exchange for whatever they may have to offer; speaking his English, as they say, with a “broad Scotch accent,” talking, to their astonishment and to ours, very much as he writes, a sort of Carlylese, his discourse “coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this timeframe Carlyle sat to have his Daguerreotype made. This would be the unbearded image he would forward to Emerson on April 30, 1846.

Carlyle had had a piece entitled “Cruthers and Jonson; or, The Outskirts of Life” on pages 691-705 of the issue of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country for January 1831. During this summer Henry Thoreau made reference to this piece in his journal: CRUTHERS AND JONSON

To live to a good old age such as the ancients reached, serene and contented, dignifying the life of man, leading a simple, epic country life in these days of confusion and turmoil, — that is what Wordsworth has done. Retaining the tastes and the innocence of his youth. There is more wonderful talent, but nothing so cheering and world-famous as this. The life of man would seem to be going all to wrack and pieces, and no instance of permanence and the ancient natural health, notwithstanding Burns, and Coleridge, and Carlyle. It will not do for men to die young; the greatest genius does not die young. Whom the gods love most do indeed die young, but not till their life is matured, and their years are like those of the oak, for they are the products half of nature and half of God. What should nature do without old men, not children but men? The life of men, not to become a mockery and a jest, should last a respectable term of years. We cannot spare the age of those old Greek Philosophers. They live long who do not live for a near end, who still forever look to the immeasurable future for their manhood.

All dramas have but one scene. There is but one stage for the peasant and for the actor, and both on the farm and in the theatre the curtain rises to reveal the same majestic scenery. The globe of earth is poised in space for his stage under the foundations of the theatre, and the cope of heaven, out of reach of the scene-shifter, overarches it. It is always to be remembered by the critic that all actions are to be regarded at last as performed from a distance upon some rood of earth and amid the operations of nature. Rabelais, too, inhabited the soil of France in sunshine and shade in those years; and his life was no “farce” after all. ... Carlyle told R.W.E. that he first discovered that he was not a jackass on reading “Tristram Shandy” and Rousseau’s “Confessions,” especially the last. His first essay is an article in Fraser’s Magazine on two boys quarrelling. Youth wants something to look up to, to look forward to; as the little boy who inquired of me the other day, “How long do those old-agers live?” and expressed the intention of compassing two hundred summers at least. The old man who cobbles shoes without glasses at a hundred, and cuts a handsome swath at a hundred and five, is indispensable to give dignity and respectability to our life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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.From all points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heavens above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into essays. And at last they stand, like the cubes of Pythagoras, firmly on either basis; like statues on their pedestals, but the statues rarely take hold of hands. There is only such connection and series as is attainable in the galleries. And this affects their immediate practical and popular influence. Carlyle, we should say, more conspicuously than any other, though with little enough expressed or even conscious sympathy, represents the Reformer class. In him the universal plaint is most settled and serious. Until the thousand named and nameless grievances are righted, there will be no repose for him in the lap of Nature or the seclusion of science and literature. And all the more for not being the visible acknowledged leader of any class. All places, all positions — all things in short — are a medium happy or unhappy. Every realm has its centre, and the nearer to that the better while you are in it. Even health is only the happiest of all mediums. There may be excess, or there may be deficiency; in either case there is disease. A man must only be virtuous enough.

Winter: We have an indication in Henry Thoreau’s journal that in this season he was reading in the Reverend George Gilfillan’s new GALLERY OF LITERARY PORTRAITS (Edinburgh: James Hogg).

EMINENT LITERARY MALES

Winter 1845/1846 before February 22d: Then in dark winter mornings in short winter afternoons the pack of hounds –threading all woods with hounding cry & yelp unable to resist the instinct of the chace –and note of hunting horn at intervals showing that man too is in the rear– And the woods ring again and yet no fox bursts forth onto the open level of the pond and no following pack after their actaeon. But this small village –germ of something more –why did it fail while Concord grows apace– No natural advantages –no water privilege –only the Walden pond and Bristow’s spring privileges alas all unimproved by those men but to dilute their glass– Might not the basket making –broom mat-making corn parching –potters business have thrived here making the wilderness to blossom as the rose? Now all too late for commerce –this waste depopulated district has its rail road too. And transmitted the names of Bristows Catoes Hildas Zilphas to a remote and grateful posterity – Again nature will try –with me for a first settler –and my house to be the oldest in the settlement. The sterile soil would have been proof against any lowland degeneracy. Farmers far and near call it the Paradise of beans And here too on winter days while yet is cold January and snow and ice lie thick comes the prudent foreseeing land lord or housekeeper from the village to get ice –to cool his summer-drink –a grateful beverage if he should live, if time should endure so long– How few so wise so industrious to lay up treasures which neither rust nor melt –“to cool their summer drink” one day And cart off the solid pond the element and air of fishes held fast with chain & stake like corded wood –all through winter air to wintery cellar.– to underlie the summer there. And cut and saw the cream of the pond – unroof the house of fishes. And in early mornings come men with fishing reels and slender lunch –men of real faith and let down their fine HDT WHAT? INDEX

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lines & live minnows through the snowy field to hook the pickerel & perch. With buried well stones & strawberries raspberries thimbleberries growing there –some pitchy pine or gnarled oak in the chimney nook or the sweet scented black birch where the hearth was. Breeds –history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted there –let time intervene to assuage –and lend an azure tint to them. There is something pathetic in the sedentary life of men who have travelled. They must naturally die when they leave the road. From Gilfillan’s Sketches of Eminent Literary Men” I learn that Carlyle “was born at Ecclefechan, Anandale of parents who were “good farmer people” father of “strong native sense” Father dead mother still lives. “Intimate with Ed. Irving” from previous to his college life till the former’s death. At college had to “support himself” partly by “private tuition, translations, for the bookseller” &c. – corresponded with Goethe till the latter’s death. – Destined for the church. –– “Taught an academy in Dysart, at the same time that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy” after marriage “resided partly at Comely Bank Edinburg; and for a year or two at Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farm house in the upper part of Dumfriesshire” among barren heather-clad hills. here visited by our Countryman Emerson who passed one day with him. His conversation “coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter” “An amicable centre for men of the most opposite opinions”. “Smoking his perpetual pipe” “listened to as an oracle” —— “come to see our Scholmaster, who had also been his” The poet Stirling his only intimate acquaintance latterly in England. {One leaf missing} up the soil –or that there is a “Brest Shipping” that now at length only after some years of this revolution there should be some falling off in the importation of sugar– I am strangely surprised– Perhaps I had thought they sweetened their coffee? their water? with Revolution still. We want one or two chapters out of some English or German Almanac at least –headed “work for the month”– Including Revolution work of course– Altitude of the sun” –“State of the Crops” “State of the markets” “Meteorological observations” “Attractive Industry” “Day labor” just to remind the reader that the French peasantry –did something beside go without breeches –burning chateaus, or getting ready knotted cords – embrace & throttle one another ie we want not only a back ground and a fore ground to a picture –but literally HANGING a ground [written in over the line and not canceled: an underground] under the feet also.31 An omission common to most epics –a want of epic integrity What seems so fair and poetic in antiquity –almost fabulous –is realized too in Concord life– As poets and historians brought their work to the Grecian games –and genius wrestled there as well as strength of body –so have we seen works of kindred genius read at our Concord games –by their author in this our Concord Amphitheatre It is virtually repeated by all ages and nations. Moles nesting in your cellar & nibbling every third potatoe –a whole rabbit warren only separated from you by the flooring– To be saluted when you stir in the dawn by the hasty departure of Monsieur –thump thump thump striking his head against the floor timbers Squirrels & field mice that hold to a community of property in your stock of chestnuts. The blue jays suffered few chestnuts to reach the ground –resorting to your single tree in flocks in the early morning, and picking them out of the burs –at a great advantage The crop of blackberries small & vines not yet grown –ground nuts not dug. One wonders how so much after all was expressed in the old way – –so much here depends upon the emphasis –tone –pronunciation –style & spirit of the reading – No writer uses so profusely all the aids to intelligibility which the printers art affords – You wonder how others had contrived to write so many pages without emphatic Italicised words –they are so expressive so natural & indispensible here. As if none had ever used the demonstrative pronoun –demonstratively. In anothers sentences the thought though immortal is as it were embalmed and does not strike you –but here it is so freshly living –not purified by the ordeal of death –that it stirs in the very extremities –the smallest particles & pronouns are all alive with it– You must not say it –but it It is not simple it –your it –or mine, but it His books are solid workmanlike –like all that England does –they tell of endless labor –done –well done and 31. In 1847 this gallows humor would be inserted into the essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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all the rubbish swept away –like this bright cutlery in the windows while the coak & ashes –turnings –filings borings dust –lie far away at Birmingham unheard of. The words did not come at the command of grammar but –of an inexorable meaning not like the standing soldiers by vote of parliament –but any able bodied man pressed into the service It is no China war –but a revolution This style is worth attending to as one of the most important features of the man that we at this distance know. What are the men of N.E. about? I have travelled some in New England –especially in Concord –and I found that no enterprise was on foot which it would not disgrace a man to take part in. They seemed to be employed everywhere in shops and offices & fields– They seemed like the brahmins of the east to be doing penance in a thousand curious unheard of ways –their endurance surpassing anything I had ever seen or heard of –Simeon Stylites –Brahmen looking in the face of the sun –standing on one leg –dwelling at the roots of trees –nothing to it Any of the twelve labors of Hercules to be matched– The Nemaean Lion –Lernaean hydra –OEnoean stag –Erymathian boar –Augean stables –Stymphalian birds –Cretan bull –Diomedes’ mares –Amazonian girdle – monster Geryon –Hesperian apples –three headed Cerberus – Nothing at all in comparison –being only twelve and having an end– For I could never see that these men ever slew or captured any of their monsters –or finished any of their labors– They have no “friend Iolas to burn, with a hot iron, the root” of the Hydra’s head.– for as soon as one head is beaten, two spring up. Men labor under a mistake –they are laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt & thieves break through & steal– Northern slavery –or the slavery which includes the southern eastern western and all others. It is hard to have a southern over-seer it is worse to have a northern one but worst of all when you are yourself the slave driver. Look at the lonely teamster on the highway –wending to market by day –or night –is he a son the the morning –with somewhat of divinity in him –fearless because immortal –going to receive his birth-right –greeting the sun as his fellow bounding with youthful gigantic strength over his mother earth– See how he cowers & sneaks –how vaguely indefinitely all the day he fears –not being immortal not divine– The slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself –fame which he has earned by his own deeds – Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with private opinion– What I think of myself –that determines my fate. I see young men my equals –who have inherited from their spiritual father a soul –broad fertile uncultivated – from their earthly father –a farm –with cattle and barns and farming tools –the implements of the picklock –& the counterfeiter– Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf –or perhaps cradled in a manger –that they might have seen with clear eye what was the field they were called to labor in. The young man has got to live a man’s life then in this world pushing all these things before him and get on as well as he can– how many a poor immortal soul I have met well nigh crushed and smothered –creeping slowly down the road of life –pushing before him a barn 75 –by 40 feet and 100 acres of land tillage –pasture woodlot– This dull opaque garment of the flesh is load enough –for the strongest spirit –but with such an earthly garment superadded –the spiritual life is soon ploughed into the soil with compost. Its a fool’s life as they will all find when they get to the end of it. The man that goes on accumulating property when the bare necessaries of life are cared for is a fool –and knows better. There is a stronger desire to be respectable to one’s neighbors than to ones self – However such distinctions as Poet Philosopher –Literary man –&c do not much assist our final estimate– We do not lay much stress on them –’a man’s a man for a’ that-– Any man who interests us much is all and more than these – It is not simple dictionary it – Talent at making books –solid workman-like graceful –which may be read. Some Idyllic chapter or chapters are needed In the French Revolution are (Mirabeau –king of men) –(Danton –Titan of the Revolution) –(Camille Desmoulins –poetic Editor) –(Roland –heroic woman) –(Dumouriez –first efficient general) –on the other side (Marat friend of the people) (Robespierre) ( –Tinville Infernal judge) St. Just. &c &c Nutting & Le Gros –by the wall side– The Stratten house & Barn where the orchard covered all the slope of Brister’s hill –now killed out by the pines – Brister Freeman a handy negro –(slave once of Squire Cummings? and Fenda his hospitable pleasant wife) – large –round black –who told fortunes – Zilpha’s little house where ‘she was spinning linen” Making the walden woods ring with her shrill singing –a loud shrill remarkable voice –when once she was away to town –set on fire by English soldiers on parole in the last war –and cat and dog and hens all burned up. And Cato the Ginea negro –his house a little patch among the walnuts –who let the trees grow up till he should be old –& Richardson got them HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Where Breeds house stood –tradition says a tavern once stood, the well the same and all a swamp between the woods & town & and road made on logs {Five leaves missing} It makes a dull man’s dreams Bread I made pretty well for awhile while I remembered the rules –for I studied this art methodically –going clear back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind –and coming gradually down through that lucky accidental souring of the dough which taught men the leavening process –and all the various fermentations thereafter –till you get to “good sweet wholesome bread” the staff of life. I went on very well mixing ry & flour & Indian meal & potatoe with success till one morning I had forgotten the rules –and thereafter scalded the yeast –killed it out –and so after the lapse of a month was glad after all to learn that such palatable staff of life could be made out of the dead and scalt creature and risings that lay flat. I have hardly met with the housewife who has gone so far into this mystery– For all the farmers wives pause at yeast –give this and they can make bread –it is the axiom of their argument –what it is –where it came from –in what era bestowed on man –is wrapped in mystery– It is preserved religiously like the vestal fire –and its virtue is not yet run out –some precious bottle full first brought over in the May Flower –did the business for America –and its Influence is still rising –swelling –spreading like Atlantic billows over the land– The soul of bread –the spiritus –occupying its cellular tissue. The way to compare men is to compare their respective ideals– The actual man is too complex to deal with. Carlyle is an earnest honest heroic worker as Literary man –and sympathising brother of his race. Idealize a man and your notion takes distinctness at once. Carlyle’s talent is perhaps quite equal to his genius – Striving to live in reality –not a general critic –philosopher or poet – Wordsworth with very feeble talent has not so great and admirable as persevering genius heroism –heroism –is his word –his thing. He would realize a brave & adequate human life. & die hopefully at last. ——

December: A delay in producing a portrait of the Lord Protector to use as an illustration had held up publication, until this point, of Thomas Carlyle’s OLIVER CROMWELL’S LETTERS AND SPEECHES: WITH ELUCIDATIONS.

Mid-December: OLIVER CROMWELL’S LETTERS AND SPEECHES: WITH ELUCIDATIONS arrived in New England bookstores and Henry Thoreau began a study of Thomas Carlyle’s style and his attitude toward the “Great Man” in history.32 OLIVER CROMWELL, I OLIVER CROMWELL, II

32. During the earlier period of his career, Carlyle had been popular in New England but not in the American South. It would only be this later Carlyle, of this CROMWELL and then of FREDERICK THE GREAT, the Carlyle who would be proclaiming “the natural propensity of men to grovel or to rule” (a phrase by Van Wyck Brooks), who would become immensely popular in our South. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1846

A pamphlet appeared in Boston summarizing the munificence and beneficence of the 1,496 men in the commonwealth who were worth at least $50,000, each. BOSTON’S FIRST MEN

Strict rules were utilized for the determination of benevolence. Since Queen Victoria had given $900,000 for relief in the Irish Potato Famine out of her vast fortune, the size of which was approximately known — by computation a Boston laborer receiving an average wage would have needed to donate $0.80 in order “to be precisely as benevolent as Her Majesty.” Similarly, the editors knew of a Boston man with an annual income of $20.00 who annually gave $0.50 to charity. It was on the basis of this sort of “widow’s mite” high standard that only 375 of the 1,496 were being declared to be “more or less Benevolent”:

Amount of property owned $244,780,000

Number worth over one million dollars 18

Number worth just one million dollars 8

Number worth three fourths of a million dollars 10

Number worth half a million dollars 45

Number worth quarter of a million dollars 147

Number who began poor, or nearly so 705

Number who rec’d all, or the greater part, by inheritance or marriage 282

Number of rich Farmers 90

Number of rich Manufacturers (Cotton, Woolen, &c.) 53

Number of rich Merchants (and Various Traders) 463

Number of rich Lawyers (including Judges) 75

Number of rich Physicians 31

Number of rich Clergymen 12

Number of rich Brokers (including some speculators) 46

Number of rich Publishers 11

Number of rich Editors 4

Number of rich Shoe makers (and Dealers) 50

Number of rich Tailors (and Clothes-Dealers) 10

Number of rich Carpenters (and Ship-Builders) 15 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Number of rich Masons 9

Number of rich Butchers (and Provision-Dealers) 13

Number of rich Distillers 14

Number ascertained to be more or less Benevolent 375

Number of rich Old Bachelors 68

While this benevolence was going on in Boston in the New World, in Ireland the apparently sound and meaty white tubers of the new potato crop, upon which so very much depended, suddenly again disintegrated into stinking black slime — just as they had in the previous harvest season. This episode of the “late blight” of Phytophthora infestans was merely as bad as before but the population was already in an emaciated condition.

Therefore a visit which had been planned for Queen Victoria would obviously need to be postponed. Of over 100,000 malnourished, cholera-ridden Irish, off-loaded from the converted cargo holds of sailing ships into Canadian quarantine stations, one-third died within this year. Next to a wharf at Montréal, in a pit, 6,000 bodies were dumped and the cause of death was set down simply as “ship fever.” Spectators on the banks of the St. Lawrence noticed that, as survivors of the trans-Atlantic voyage were being barged upriver toward the Canadian interior, they appeared too weak to return the waves of children on shore.

We don’t know precisely how many people have starved to death or, weakened by starvation, succumbed to diarrhea and fever or to cholera in Ireland during the ensuing period, but we do know that the first great die- off would occur during the winter of 1846-1847. A table prepared after the fact by Census Commissioners, presented here, in all probability under-estimates the mortality because of the manner in which they collected data: for a family all of whose members succumbed zero deaths would be tabulated. Of the total number of deaths, which would be between 500,000 and 1,500,000, the percentage of that total which would occur in HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

each year probably worked out to something like this:

Mortality, expressed as %ages of the 1841 Population Year %

1842 5.1%

1843 5.2%

1844 5.6%

1845 6.4%

1846 9.1%

1847 18.5%

1848 15.4%

1849 17.9%

1850 12.2%

Prior to 1845 the average intake of an Irish adult during a winter had consisted of ten to twelve pounds of potatoes, with buttermilk, daily. In the oncoming winter it would consist of one pound of Indian meal or one bowl of soup with one slice of bread — and to prove oneself worthy to receive such sustenance one would need to be doing daily hard labor.

In this year a painting was made of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. The 5-year-old appears well enough nourished. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

A Mrs. Thynne brought some of the corals of Torquay to London “for the purpose of study and the entertainment of friends.” Each day, this lady’s housemaid33 would need to spend thirty to forty-five minutes pouring the six gallons of salt water of the aquarium backward and forward before an open window, in order to keep it fresh. The “aquarium craze,” something that Brits would be referring to as “sea-gardening,” had fairly begun.

On a related note (?), the “Boston Museum” was constructed on Tremont Street in Boston.34 Many edifices of this type were in this period becoming economically possible, due in part to the wealth being generated by the sea trade and in part to of the eagerness of these Irish unfortunates to part with their labor for ridiculously low wages. —Hey, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

At this point John Mitchel and other Young Irelanders who had come to disdain the doctrine of “moral force” broke with Daniel O'Connell and founded the Irish Confederation, devoted to an agenda of the doing of harm so that good might result. –Hey, let’s give terrorism a chance!

Thomas Carlyle would be doing his part, from this year into 1851, by making a study of the situation in Ireland in order to inform curious Englishmen what they ought to make of it.

33. Possibly, but of course not necessarily, an Irish woman. 34. This structure is not to be confused with the “Boston Museum of Natural History” which was constructed in 1863 in the newly filled Back Bay and which eventually became the Museum of Science. This structure wasn’t a museum at all, it was a 1,200-seat auditorium at which plays were regularly performed. It was termed a “museum” in order to reassure blue-blooded Boston clients who might have been reluctant to visit anything so vulgar as a “theater.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

January: Bronson Alcott wrote Charles Lane in New-York, mentioning that Henry Thoreau had prepared a lecture on Thomas Carlyle to deliver before the Concord Lyceum.

Frederick Douglass sailed from Ireland to Scotland. Until May he would be touring Scotland, on an unsuccessful campaign to persuade the Free Church of Scotland not to accept any funds from enslavers in the American South. (After this he would be putting in seven months of similar effort in England proper.) Guess what? The anti-slavery society of which he was an agent sent a white man along with him to handle the money. –They might be anti-slavery, but they weren’t fools, they knew one couldn’t trust a black man with one’s money. I don’t know how Douglass reacted to this unstudied insult.

The Town Council of Concord confirmed that

the public good does not require the licensing of any person as a retailer to sell distilled spirits of any kind in this town except for medicinal purposes and the arts.

Samuel Kneeland, Jr.’s On the contagiousness of puerperal fever” was published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences (11: 45-63), pointing out that puerperal fever could be produced by the inoculation of a woman with fluid from a sick woman or from the body of one who had died after labor, as well as from air vitiated by sick persons, especially when several women were together in a hospital ward, ill with puerperal fever. He asserted that this contagion could be carried by the physician, clothes, and everything that had been in contact with a woman already infected. This is said to have received the Harvard Medical School’s Boylston Prize of $50 or a gold medal of that value in 1843; however, I have been unable to verify this to be accurate HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

— and the following advertisement would seem to indicate that it is inaccurate.

This information, that “puerperal fever could be produced by the inoculation of a woman with fluid from a sick woman or from the body of one who had died after labor,” indicates to me that Dr. Kneeland was not a physician, but a murderer. It indicates to me that in the case of at least one healthy mother with healthy infant –a charity patient no doubt at the downtown Boston medical facility of Harvard College, expecting and needing nothing more than sanitation and respect– under the guise of “treatment” and under the guise of “care” fluids had been drawn with malice aforethought from the corpse of a mother who had just dies of the puerperal fever, and injected into her without her knowledge or consent, in order to demonstrate the accuracy of her physician’s prediction, that she would be killed and her infant left motherless.

We are not informed of the name of this mother who had been murdered, or of this infant who had been left motherless by this heartless monster of a medical practitioner, Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr.

February 4, Wednesday: A large party of Mormons left Nauvoo, Illinois for resettlement in the far west. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Lecture35

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 25, Tuesday, 1845, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “Concord River” February 4, Wednesday, 1846, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “The Writings and Style of Thomas Car- lyle” January 19, Tuesday, 1847, at 7PM Lincoln MA; Brick or Centre School House “A History of Myself” (?)

35. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Narrative of Event: In a January 1846 letter to Charles Lane, Bronson Alcott wrote, “Emerson will read these Lectures [Representative Men] to the Concord Lyceum, and Thoreau has a Lecture on Carlyle.”36 The lecture referred to was the tenth in a course of twenty-two and is noted as follows in the records of the Concord Lyceum: “Concord Feb 4, 1846. A lecture was read before the Society by Mr Henry D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject: THE WRITINGS & STYLE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Adjourned. Cyrus Stow Secretary.”37

Henry Thoreau had begun making notes on Carlyle’s works in 1842 but probably did not shape them into an essay until after he began living at Walden Pond. In the midst of journal passages on Carlyle written that summer of 1845, Thoreau inserted his well-known comment about his organic process of composition: “From all points of the compass from the earth beneath and the heavens above have come these inspirations and been entered duly in such order as they came in the Journal. Thereafter when the time arrived they were winnowed into Lectures — and again in due time from Lectures into Essays” (JOURNAL 1, 1837-1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. [1981], page 205). This was, indeed, the path that he took with the Carlyle piece, finally publishing it, after some difficulty, in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine in the spring of 1847.38

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: A journal entry by Thoreau, written in preparation for his next Concord Lyceum lecture, suggests that his February 1846 auditors, whatever they had learned about Thomas Carlyle, were left with an unfulfilled curiosity about their neighbor Henry Thoreau and his unusual life at Walden Pond:39 I expect of any lecturer that he will read me a more or less simple & sincere account of his life — of what he has done & thought. Not so much what he has read or heard of other mens lives — and actions …. Yet incredible mistakes are made — I have heard an Owl lecture with a perverse show of learning upon the solar microscope — and chanticlere upon nebulous stars When both ought to have been sound asleep in a hollow tree — or upon a hen roost. When I lectured here before this winter I heard that some of my towns men had expected of me some account of my life at the pond — this I will endeavor to give tonight Thoreau had anticipated giving this account of his life at the pond later, in the same season he delivered his Carlyle lecture. As events transpired, however, he did not lecture again in Concord until 10 February 1847, when he delivered “A History of Myself” to his still curious neighbors (see lecture 10 below).

Description of Topic: Like many of Thoreau’s other lectures, he delivered this one and almost immediately began moving it toward publication. Nevertheless, he probably revised the lecture text between the time he delivered the lecture and the date he submitted the essay for publication. In this instance, judging from its size, the essay appears to be simply a slightly revised and expanded version of the lecture.

36. THE LETTERS OF A. BRONSON ALCOTT, ed. Richard L. Herrnstadt (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969), pages 125- 26. 37. Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 161. 38. Graham’s American Monthly Magazine 30 (March 1847): 145-52, and 30 (April 1847): 238-45. See EARLY ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES, pages 406-409, for an account of the difficulties Thoreau experienced in getting the essay published and in getting paid for the publication. 39.JOURNAL 2, 1842-1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer [1984], pages 141-142. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

March: During this month Henry Thoreau would be turning his lecture notes on the works of Thomas Carlyle into an essay.

His information on the person of Carlyle had been abstracted from the biographical material provided by the Reverend George Gilfillan in his new GALLERY OF LITERARY PORTRAITS (Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1845).

EMINENT LITERARY MALES

“Thomas Carlyle is a Scotchman, born about fifty years ago, ‘at Ecclefechan, Annandale,’ according to one authority” [that authority being, of course, the Reverend Gilfillan].

Before March 13: Henry Thoreau may well have lectured at the Concord Lyceum on his experiences at Walden Pond: “After I lectured here before this winter,40 I heard that some of my townsmen had expected of me some account of my life at the pond. This I will endeavor to give to-night.”

... From all points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heavens above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into essays.... TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing:

40. February 4th, “Writings & style of Thomas Carlysle” (sic) in regard to CROMWELL and other Great Men of history, and in regard to the manner in which typical lists of Great Men exclude Jesus and exclude the working man: “Are we not all great men?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Here is Charles H, Overly’s version of Sister Sophia’s drawing:

March 13th The Songsparrow & Black bird heard today –the snow going off –the ice in the pond 1 foot thick. Men speak –or at least think much of cooperation nowadays –of working together to some worthy end– But what little there is, is as if it were not –being a simple result of which the means are hidden –a harmony inaudible to men– If a man has faith –he will cooperate with equal faith every where– If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world. To cooperate in the lowest & in the highest sense –thoroughly –is simply to get your living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world –the one making his way as he went, seeking his fortune, –before the mast –behind the plow –walking and sleeping on the ground –living from hand to mouth –and so come in immediate contact with all hands and nations –the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket as a resource in case of extremity– It was easy to see that they could not be companions to one another –or cooperate. They would part company at the first interesting crisis the most interesting point in their adventures I live about a mile from any neighbor no house is visible within a quarter of a mile or more– HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

April 16, Thursday: At this point Henry Thoreau was reading Anacreon, Alcaeus, and Homer on birds in the spring. Bronson Alcott delivered a Conversation at the home of Elizabeth Sherman Hoar in Concord,

attended by Thoreau, at which the hostess held forth upon the idea that the present teachers of the nations were Jesus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, and Waldo Emerson.

This of course would have been strong stuff directed against the evangelicals, who would then as now be offended at the lack of a categorical difference in kind, let alone a pronounced qualitative difference in degree, noticed between Christ Jesus and the influential others –mere humans– on that short list. Thoreau, however, slyly developed this in the other direction by suggesting that Jesus did not belong in the exalted company of these other three important teachers.41

41. One might imagine various good defenses of such a position: Jesus wrote nothing whereas the other three were writers, Jesus spoke only to the individual conditions of persons he encountered whereas the others addressed an unknown mass audience, Jesus took considerable risks in engaging in his activities and was eventually punished for them whereas the others engaged in absolutely safe activities and were never at risk of retribution, etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

April 18, Saturday: At Los Angeles in Alta California, Pío de Jesus Pico was sworn in as Mexican governor and Colonel José Antonio Castro was made Commandante General of the Mexican army.

Thomas Carlyle wrote from Chelsea to Waldo Emerson, promising to send him his Daguerreotype as soon as the exposure had been made: “Furthermore, — yes, you shall have that Sun-shadow, a Daguerreotype likeness, as the sun shall please to paint it: there has often been talk of getting me to that establishment, but I never yet could go. If it be possible, we will have this also ready for the 3d of May. Provided you, as you promise, go and do likewise! A strange moment that, when I look upon your dead shadow again; instead of the living face, which remains unchanged within me, enveloped in beautiful clouds, and emerging now and then into strange clearness! Has your head grown greyish? On me are “grey hairs here and there,” — and I do “know it.” I have lived half a century in this world, fifty years complete on the 4th of December last: that is a solemn fact for me! Few and evil have been the days of the years of thy servant, — few for any good that was ever done in them. Ay de mi!”

April 18th The morning: must remind every one of his ideal life– Then if ever we can realize the life of the Greeks We see them Aurora. The morning brings back the heroic ages. AURORA I get up early and bathe in the pond –that is one of the best things I do –so far the day is well spent. In some unrecorded hours of solitude whether of morning or evening whose stillness was audible –when the atmosphere contained an arousal perfume the hum of a mosquito was a trumpet that recalled what I had read of most ancient history and heroic ages. There was somewhat that I fancy the Greeks meant by ambrosial about it –more than Sybilline or Delphic– It expressed the infinite fertility and fragrance and the everlastingness of the  It was  Only Homer could name it. The faintest is the most significant sound. I have never felt lonely or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude but once, and that was a few weeks after I came here to live when for an hour I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essentially to a healthy life– To be alone was something. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity –and seemed to foresee my recovery –in the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed– There suddenly seemed such sweet and beneficent society in nature –and the very pattering of the drops –& in evry sound & sight around my house –as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of my kindred, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild, that the nearest of blood to me & humanest was not a person nor a villager –that no place could be strange to me. Cheerful society is worthy employment. The morning which is the most memorable season of the day –is the awaking hour –then there is least somnolence in us –and for an hour at least some part of us seems to awake which slumbers all the rest of the day and night– After a partial cessation of our sensual life –the soul of man, or its organs –seem to be reinvigorated each day. And the Genius tries again what noble life it can make. I know of no more encouraging fact that the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life –by a conscious endeavor. All memorable events in my experience transpire in morning time –and a morning atmosphere– Their atmosphere is auroral– Greek poetry & art are auroral to me– And the evening & the morning are one. The wood thrush sings at morning & at evening –and to him who has kept pace with the sun there is no difference It is some thing to be able t paint a particular picture –or carve a statue –and so to make a few objects beautiful –but it is far sublimer to carve & paint the very atmosphere & medium through which we look –which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day that is highest of arts. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes & labors of men –morning is when I am awake & there is a dawn in me. Moral reform & improvement is the effort to throw off sleep & somnolency– How is it that men can give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering– They are not such poor calculators If they had not been over come with drowsiness they would have performed some-what. The millions are awake enough for physical labor & activity –but only one in the million is awake enough for mental exertion –only one in a hundred million –spiritually –(more than intellectually) awake. To be awake is to be alive. My thoughts which are either the memory or the expectation of my actions –are the causes which determine life & death. Every man is tasked to make his life even in its details worthy the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

After April 18: Events were shaping up along the banks of the rivers vaguely separating Mexico from Texas. The Mexican army had just been reinforced by the Mexico Light and 8th Line Cavalry Regiments, 4th Line Infantry, Mexico, Puebla & Morelia Activo Battalions and 6 guns, and acting on secret orders direct from President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces James Knox Polk, General Zachary Scott was about to send out a reconnaissance in force of about 70 US Dragoons commanded by Captain Seth Thornton with orders to scout an area 20 miles northwest of what later would become Brownsville, Texas and “determine whether the Mexican Army had crossed the Rio Grande for a possible attack on Fort Texas.” The actual purpose of these orders, of course, was to get these unsuspecting dragoons done to death by the Mexican army on land between the rivers that we could reasonably allege was “American soil,” so we would have plausible cause to declare “defensive” war — and launch our preplanned invasion of Mexico. WAR ON MEXICO

After April 18, 1846: {Two leaves missing} man could have consciously devised. Commerce is brave & serene –alert –adventurous –unwearied – It is very natural –much more than many fantastic enterprises –sentimental experiments and hence its success – I am refreshed and expanded when the freight-train rattles past me on the rail road –and I smell the stores which have been dispensing their odors from long-wharf last –which remind me of foreign parts of coral reefs & Indian oceans and tropical climes –& the extent of the globe– I feel more a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm leaf which will cover so many new England flaxen heads the next summer –the manilla cordage –& the cocoanut husks– The old Junk & scrap iron, and worn out sails –are full of history more legible & significant now these old sails than if they could be wrought into writing paper. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods which did not go out to sea in the last freshet –risen 4 dollars on the thousand by reason of what did go out or was split up –pine spruce cedar –1st 2nd –3d & 4th quality so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear & moose & caribou. LIME KILNS –next rolls of Thomaston lime a prime lot which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked– These rags in bales of all hues & qualities the last and lowest condition of dress –of patterns which are now no longer cried up those splendid articles –poplin & muslin de laines –& pongees –from all quarters both of fashion & of poverty –going to become paper of one color –or a few shades COD This closed car smells of salt fish the strong scent –the commercial scent –reminding me of the grand banks & the fisheries & fish flakes A hogshead of molasses or rum –directed John Brown –Cuttings-ville Vt. –some trader among the growers who imports from the farmers near his clearing and now perchance stands over his bulk head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast Is telling his customers perhaps –has told 20 this morning that he expects some by the next arrivals– It is advertised in the cuttingsville Times I know a woman who possess a restless & intelligent mind –interested in her own culture & that of the family and earnest to enjoy the highest possible advantages. I meet her with pleasure as a natural person who a little provokes me –& I suppose is stimulated in turn by myself– Yet our acquaintance plainly does not attain that degree of confidence & sentiment –which women –while all –covet – I am glad to help her, as I am helped by her, I like very well to know her with a sort of strangers privilege –and hesitate to visit her often like her other friends– My nature pauses here & I do not well know why. Perhaps she does not make the highest demand on me –not a religious demand. Some with whose prejudices or peculiar bias I have no faith –yet inspire me with confidence –and I trust they consider in me also as a religious heathen at least, –a good Greek– I too have principles as well founded as their own – If this person would conceive that without wilfulness I associate with her as far as our destinies are coincident –as far as our good geniuses permit –and still value such intercourse it would be a grateful assurance to me. I feel as if I appeared careless & indifferent & without principle –or requisition –to her –not expecting more & yet not content with less– If she could know that I make an infinite demand on myself, as well as all others – she would see that this true though incomplete intercourse was infinitely better than a more abandoned & unreserved though falsely grounded one –without the principle of growth in it. For a companion I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius– Such a one will always be rightly tolerant. It is suicide –it corrupts good manners to welcome any less than this. I value & trust HDT WHAT? INDEX

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those who love & praise my aspiration and tendency –not my performance – If you would not stop to look at me, –but look whither I am looking & further –then my education could not dispense with thy company. The struggle in me is between a love of contemplation and a love of action –the life of a philosopher & of a hero. The poetic and philosophic have my constant vote –the practic hinders & unfits me for the former. How many things that my neighbors do bunglingly could I do skillfully & effectually –but I fain would not have leisure– My tendency is, on the one hand to the poetic life –on the other to the practic –and the result is the indifference of both –or the philosophic. In the practic the poetic loses its intensity –and fineness but gains in health & assurance- The practical life is the poetic making for itself a basis –and in proportion to the breadth of the base will be the quantity of material at the apex– The angle of slope for various materials is determined by science. The fabric of life is pyramidal. The man of practice is laying the foundations of a poetic life The poet of great sensibility is rearing a superstructure without foundation. To make a perfect man –the Soul must be much like the body not to unearthly & the body like the soul. The one must not deny & oppress the other. The line of greatest breadth intersects the line of greatest length at the point of greatest depth or height A law so universal –and to be read in all material –in Ethics as well as mechanics –that it remains its own most final statement. –It is the heart in man– It is the sun in the system –it is the result of forces– In the case of the pond it is the law operating without friction. Draw lines through the length & breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets –and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. You only need to know how his shores trend & the character of the adjacent country to know his depth and concealed bottom. There is a bar too across the entrance of his every cove –every cove is his harbor for a season –and in each successively is he detained –land locked. There is no exclusively moral law –there is no exclusively physical law. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle is a brave and genuine man earnest & sincere A most talented writer of English –an art of which he is master If he is sometimes an extreme praiser he is never a fatal detractor A Detector of shams A practical bent. He inspires us to greater earnestness & effort –and useful activity I find I cannot fish without falling a little in my own respect. I have tried it again & again –and have skill at it –and a certain instinct for it which revives from time to time but always I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished I think I am not mistaken. It is perhaps a faint intimation– Yet so are the streaks of morning. It tempts me as one means of becomming acquainted with nature not only with fishes but with night & water and the scenery –which I should not see under the same aspects; –and occasionally though {Two leaves missing} boat I seem to hear a faint music from the horizon– When our senses are clear and purified we always may hear the notes of music in the air– This is the tradition under various forms of all nations –the statue of Memnon– The music of the spheres –of the sun flower in its circular motion –with the sun &c. &c. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyles place & importance in English Literature is not yet recognised – For the most part I know not how the hours go. Certainly I am not living the heroic life I had dreamed of– And yet all my veins are full of life –and nature whispers no reproach– The day advances as if to light some work of mine –and I defer in my thought as if there were some where busier men– It was morning & lo! it is now evening– And nothing memorable is accomplished– Yet my nature is almost content with this– It hears no reproach in nature. What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more –& be forever ready. Instead of singing as the birds I silently smile at my incessant good fortune but I dont know that I bear any flowers or fruits– Methinks if they try me by their standards I shall not be found wanting –but men try one another not so. The elements are working their will with me. As the fields sparrow has its trill sitting on the hickory before my door –so have I my chuckle as happy as he – which he may hear out of my nest. Man is like a plant and his satisfactions are like those of a vegetable –his rarest life is lest his own– One or two persons come to my house –there being proposed it may be to their vision the faint possibility of intercourse – HDT WHAT? INDEX

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& joyous communion. They are as full as they are silent and wait for your plectrum or your spirit to stir the strings of their lyre. If they could ever come to the length of a sentence or hear one –or that ground they are thinking of!! They speak faintly –they do not obtrude themselves They have heard some news which none, not even they themselves can impart. What come they out for to seek? If you will strike my chord? They come with somethings in their minds no particular fact or information –which yet is ready to take any form of expression on the proper impulse It is a wealth they bear about them which can be expended in various ways Laden with its honey the bee straightway flies to the hive to make its treasure common stock– The poet is impelled to communicate at every risk and at any sacrifice. I think I have this advantage in my present mode of life over those who are obliged to look abroad for amusement –to theatres & society –that my life itself is my amusement –and never ceases to be novel –the commencement of an experiment –or a drama which will never end.

April 30, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle forwarded to Waldo Emerson the unbearded Daguerreotype image he had had made of himself during the summer of 1845, as his work on his Oliver Cromwell ms had eased. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May: When the new group of the Tropical Emigration Society sailed from England, their intended destination, rather than Venezuela, was New Orleans.

Henry Thoreau would ascribe, in WALDEN, that early in this month in this year of 1846:

WALDEN: Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hill-sides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whippoorwill, the brown-thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood-thrush long before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern- like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises.

WHIPPOORWILL WOOD THRUSH CHEWINK Waldo Emerson was having his Daguerreotype made, in order to send it off to his white supremacist buddy Thomas Carlyle in England.

The Indians and the old monks chose their dwellingplace for beauty of scenery. The Indians have a right to exist in this world: they are (like Monadnoc & the Ocean) a part of it, & fit the other parts, as Monadnoc & the sea, which they understand and live with so well, as a rider his horse. The teamster, the farmer, are jocund and hearty, & stand on their legs: but the women are demure and subdued, as Shaker Women, &, if you see them out of doors, look, as H.T. said, “as if they were going for the Doctor.” Has our Christianity saddled & bridled us? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 3, Sunday: The Mexican army surrounded a fort in Texas.

Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott sauntered to Walden Pond and stood on the higher hill on the opposite side of the pond from Henry Thoreau’s shanty, at the site which Emerson had set aside for his writerly tower, their magisterial gaze thus encompassing not only that little home but also Mount Monadnock and Mount Wachusett.

Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq.

“HUCKLEBERRIES”: Botanists, on the look out for what they thought a respectable descent, have long been inclined to trace this family backward to Mount Ida. Tourneforte does not hesitate to give it the ancient name of Vine of Mount Ida. The common English Raspberry also is called Rubus Idaea or the Mount Ida bramble — from the old Greek name. The truth of it seems to be that blueberries and raspberries flourish best in cool and airy situations, on hills and mountains, and I can easily believe that something like these at least grows on Mount Ida. But Mount Monadnoc is as good as Mount Ida, and probably better for blueberries, though its name is said to mean Bad Rock. But the worst rocks are the best for poets’ uses. Let us then exchange that oriental uncertainty for this western certainty. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At this point Giles Waldo, in the Hawaiian Islands, was negotiating with the King of the Sandwich Islands for a land grant to be awarded to Bronson Alcott, which –if such a deal had gone down– would have radically altered the context in which we now peruse Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN and its many sequels.

Sunday May 3d, 1856: I heard the whippoorwill last night for the first time. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle’s books are not to be studied but ready with a swift satisfaction –rather– Their flavor & charm –their HDT WHAT? INDEX

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gust is like the froth of wine which can only be tasted once & that hastily. On a review I never can find the pages I had read– The book has done its work when once I have reached the conclusion, and will never inspire me again. They are calculated to make one strong and lively impression –and entertain us for the while more entirely than any –but that is the last we shall know of them They have not that stereotyped success & accomplishment which we name classic– It is an easy and inexpensive entertainment –and we are not pained by the author’s straining & impoverishing himself to feed his readers. It is plain that the reviewers and politicians do not know how to dispose of him– They take it too easily & must try again a loftier pitch– They speak of him within the passing hour as if he too were one other ephemeral man of letters about town who lives under Mr. Somebody’s administration. Who will not vex the world after burial– But he does not depend on the favor of reviewers –nor the honesty of booksellers –nor on popularity– He has more to impart than to receive from his generation He is a strong & finished journeyman in his craft –& reminds us oftener of Samuel Johnsson than of any other. So few writers are respectable –ever get out of their apprenticeship– As the man said that as for composition it killed him he did’nt know which thought to put down first –that his hand writing was not a very good one –& then there was spelling to be attended to– So if our able stock writer can take care of his periods & spelling –and keep within the limits of a few proprieties –he forgets that there is still originality & wisdom to be attended to, and these would kill him. There is always a more impressive and simpler statement possible than consists with any victorious comparisons. We prize the good faith & valor of soberness & gravity when we are to have dealings with a man If this is his playful mood we desire so much the more to be admitted to his serious mood.

May 5, Tuesday: Henryk Sienkiewicz, author (QUO VADIS, Nobel 1905), was born in Poland.

May 5th: Now I hear the whippoorwill every night –they are my clock –now two are singing one a stanza behind the other. Like Scotland’s burning, now together in exact time now one lags. The subject of sex is a most remarkable one –since though it occupies the thoughts of all so much, and our lives & characters are so affected by the consequences which spring from this source– Yet mankind as it were tacitly agrees to be silent about it –at least the sexes do one to another. Here is the most interesting of all human facts or relations still veiled, more completely than the Eleusinian mystery– Out of such secresy & awe one would think that some religion would spring. I am not sorry for the silence– It is a golden reserve which speech has not yet desecrated– I believe it is unusual for the most intimate friends to impart the pleasures –or the anxieties connected with this fact– This is wonderfully singular –& when from this soil our flowers grow and music has its root here. I love men with the same distinction that I love woman –as if my friend were of some third sex –some other or stranger and still my friend. I do not think the shakers exaggerate this fact –but all mankind exaggerate it much more by silence. In the true and noblest relations of the sexes there is somewhat akin to the secret of all beauty & art in the universe The imagination of the Greeks filled the heavens full of love & benignity in a thousand forms –flitting from this AURORA side to that– From Apollo in the sun to Aurora in the morning –still charming the world with this inexplicable variety– What sort of Dualism or difference there is who ever conceived? If there are Gods there are Goddesses Apollo & Venus –Neptune & Ceres– And the Hebrew’s God is Love too. What the difference is between man and woman –that they should be so attracted to one another I never saw VENUS adequately stated. Man and man are more nearly of the same sex. What an infinite and divine demand is made on us forever to sustain this relation worthily –It is easy to see that the education of mankind has not commenced –there is so little interaction– The life of the Greek would be forgotten in noble relations of the sexes to one another –and to themselves– What can the university do to develope the inert faculties of men –if they go not hence to the more catholic university of friendship –The end of love is not house keeping –but it consists as much or more with the letting go of the house. Men can help one another indeed but not by money or by kindness & just & upright & neghborly behavior much –but by being gods to oneanother –objects of adoration– The wisest philosopher that ever lived is not such HDT WHAT? INDEX

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an instructor as the illiterate love of any human-being – – The world is full of suspicion when it might be full of love– There is contempt where there might as well be respect & adoration. Instead of imprisoning or executing the criminal we might so easily apotheosize him or translate him by love and admiration for what is god-like in him– And it is not done. If men would steadily observe realities only and not allow themselves to be deluded –life would be like a fairy tale & the Arabian nights entertainments. When I am calm & wise and unhurried I perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent & absolute existence– That petty fears and petty pleasures – are but the shadows of the reality. By closing the eyes and slumbering and consenting to be deceived by shows –men establish their daily life of routine and habit everywhere –which however is built on imaginary foundations If men could discriminate always and were never deluded by appearances life would never be mean – nor unworthy. Children who play life discern its true law & relations more clearly than men who fail to live it worthily – but think they are wise by experience. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle was 50 years old on the 4th Dec. 1845. —— Caught pouts from the boat –in 20 ft water off Cove May 2nd – People had caught them from the shore four or five nights previous. —— Early in May or by the last of April the oaks hickory –maples & other trees –just putting out amidst the pine woods –give them the appearance in cloudy days especially of the sun just breaking through mists and shining on them– Their green bursting buds or expanding leaves scatter a slight sun-shine over the hillsides– It is moist bright & spring-like The first week in May I hear the Whippoorwill –the brown-thrasher –the veery –the wood pewee –the chewink The wood thrush long before The 3d or 4th of may I saw a loon? in the pond HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 14, Thursday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle about his “new plaything, the best I ever had — a woodlot” and described his plans for a writerly tower atop the hill overlooking Walden Pond: I, too, have a new plaything, the best I ever had — a wood-lot. Last Fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond.... In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 23, Thursday or 24, Friday: Henry Thoreau provoked Sheriff Sam Staples, who was under contract as the

Concord tax farmer, into taking him illegally to the Middlesex County Prison42and spent the night there, for having for several years (up to perhaps 9), following the example of Bronson Alcott, refused to pay certain taxes as useful for the perpetuation of domestic slavery and foreign wars.43

“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour — for the horse was soon tackled — was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen. This is the whole history of “My Prisons.” I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax- bill that I refuse to pay it.

42. The usual penalty for failure to pay the Massachusetts poll tax was property seizure and auction upon failure to display a stamped tax receipt, and was most certainly never imprisonment, but young Thoreau possessed few auctionable items and probably did not use a bank account. 43. During the one year 1845, in Massachusetts, the “poll tax” had been being reckoned as if it were a state tax, although in all other years it had been and would be reckoned as a municipality or county tax. As a town tax, and as a county tax, of course, it could hardly be considered to be in support of slavecatching or of foreign wars, since neither the Massachusetts towns nor the Massachusetts counties engaged in either slavecatching or the raising of armies. Also, even in the one year 1845, while this tax was being considered as a state tax, under the law no part of this revenue was to be used for the catching of fugitive slaves, and no foreign war was going on at the moment (the march upon Mexico had not yet fairly begun). Thoreau, therefore, in declining to pay voluntarily this tax bill, actually was not refusing to acknowledge slavery, as alleged, or a war effort, as alleged, but was refusing to recognize any political organization whatever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Walter Harding has tracked down what may well be the origin of the often-told but utterly spurious story, that Waldo Emerson came to visit Thoreau in his prison cell and expressed concern: he found a “Bringing Up Father” cartoon strip in the newspaper, in which Paddy was in jail for drunkenness, and when Jiggs asks him how come he was in jail Paddy retorts “How come you’re not?” Alcott has reported that Emerson’s reaction to the news of this was to find Thoreau’s stand to have been “mean and skulking, and in bad taste.” Therefore, is this not the point at which we can profitably ask, was Thoreau merely running away from his social responsibilities, as has been so often alleged, when he went out to live at Walden Pond? Let’s attach the humorous title “DECAMPING TO WALDEN POND: A GENDER 44 ANALYSIS BY MARTHA SAXTON” to the following quotation:

It seems, from exaggerated nineteenth-century sex definitions, that Victorians were afraid men and women might not be able to distinguish gender. So women were trussed, corseted, and bustled into immobility while men posed in musclebound attitudes of emotionless strength. this suppression of tenderness, warmth, and most expressions of feelings produced the male equivalent of the vapors. Louisa [May Alcott]’s teacher and secret love, Henry David Thoreau, decamped to Walden Pond rather than confront social demands that he be conventionally “male.”

Another member of the Thoreau family, we don’t know who, paid the tax for him, as the tax had previously been paid by Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar when Alcott had almost been jailed on January 17, 1843. Although Emerson was irritated no end by such unseemly conduct, on the part of an associate, as failure to pay one’s share of the general tax burden, to his credit he did continue to press for publication of Thoreau’s WEEK manuscript. However, at that time Thoreau was still preparing additions to the second draft.45

44. On page 226 of her LOUISA MAY: A MODERN BIOGRAPHY OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Saxton accused Thoreau of “unrelenting misogyny” as her way of elaborating on Bronson Alcott’s remark of November 5, 1858 that Thoreau was “better poised and more nearly self-sufficient than other men.” This caused me to look back to her title page and inspect the date of publication and say to myself, “Yeah, this thing was published back in 1977, the bad old days when we thought we had to combat male sexism by nurturing prejudice against anyone with a penis.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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45. Lawrence, Jerome (1915-2004) and Robert Edwin Lee (1918-1994), THE NIGHT THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL: A PLAY. NY: Hill and Wang, 1971, Spotlight Dramabook #1223, c1970, c1972 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I should make reference here to a snide remark that Albert J. von Frank has included at page 202 of his 1 AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. The sentence is as follows, in its entirety: “Henry Thoreau expressed his own anti-politics a month later by spending a night in jail for tax evasion, an act that drew Emerson’s quick disapproval, thought the principles behind the act, as Thoreau explained in ‘Civil Disobedience,’ had more in common with Emerson’s own position than he then suspected.” Now here are the things that I suppose to be quite wrongheaded about von Frank’s assertion, which would seem on its face simply to be praising Thoreau against Emerson: •“anti-politics” Thoreau’s act was not an act of anti-politics but an act of politics. To privilege assent over dissent in such a manner constitutes an unconscionable expression of mere partisanship. •“tax evasion” Thoreau’s act was not the act of a tax evader. A tax evader is a cheater, who is trying through secrecy or deception to get away with something. Thoreau’s act was the deliberate public act of a man who would rather be imprisoned than assist in ongoing killing, and thus is in an entirely separate category from such cheating. To conflate two such separate categories, one of self-service and the other of self-abnegation, into a single category, in such manner, is, again, an unconscionable expression of prejudicial politics. •“had more in common” The implication here is that Emerson’s attitudes constitute the baseline for evaluation of Thoreau’s attitudes, so that Thoreau may be condescendingly praised for imitating Emerson whenever the two thinkers can be made to seem in agreement, while preserving the option of condemning him as a resistor or worse whenever these contemporaries seem at loggerheads. –But this is unconscionable.

Albert J. von Frank. AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. NY: G.K. Hall & Co. and Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Emerson to his journal:

These rabble at Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold & manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, & they proceed from step to step & it seems they have calculated but too justly upon your Excellency, O Governor Briggs. Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax. The State is a poor good beast who means the best: it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you — do not grudge it its hay. It cannot eat bread as you can, let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield you milk from its teat. You who are a man walking cleanly on two feet will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful of clover & welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat.

DANIEL WEBSTER We now understand that Sheriff Sam was considerably twisting the law under which he confined Thoreau for nonpayment of that $5 or $6 arrears of poll tax, and for his own convenience. For what the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts required him to do in regard to such a tax resistor, prior to debt imprisonment, was to attempt to seize and sell some of Thoreau’s assets, such as the books he had in storage in his parents’ boardinghouse in Concord. Sheriff Staples hadn’t been inclined to do this and at this point didn’t have time because he was leaving office — and the sad fact of the matter is that, since he was merely under contract as a “tax farmer,” had he vacated his position without collecting this money from the Thoreau family, Massachusetts would simply have deducted the sum from his final paycheck (bottom line, The Man always takes his cut). For here is that law, and it simply offers no support whatever for what Sheriff Staples did to put pressure on Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Section 7. If any person shall refuse or neglect to pay his [poll] tax, the collector shall levy the same by distress and sale of his goods, excepting the good following, namely: • The tools or implements necessary for his trade or occupation; • beasts of the plow necessary for the cultivation of his improved lands; • military arms, utensils for house keeping necessary for upholding life, and bedding and apparel necessary for himself and family. Section 8. The collector shall keep the goods distrained, at the expense of the owner, for the space of four days, at the least, and shall, within seven days after the seizure, sell the same by public auction, for the payment of the tax and the charges of keeping and of the sale, having given notice of such sale, by posting up a notification thereof, in some public place in the town, forty eight hours at least before the sale. Section 11. If the collector cannot find sufficient goods, upon which it may be levied, he may take the body of such person and commit him to prison, there to remain, until he shall pay the tax and charges of commitment and imprisonment, or shall be discharged by order of law.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

After July 24: In my short experience of human life I have found that the outward obstacles which stood in my way were not living men –but dead institutions It has been unspeakably grateful & refreshing to make my way through the crowd of this latest generation honest & dishonest virtuous & vicious as through the dewy grass –men are as innocent as the morning to the early riser –and unsuspicious pilgrim and many an early traveller which he met on his way v poetry –but the institutions as church –state –the school property &c are grim and ghostly phantoms like Moloch & Juggernaut because of the blind reverence paid to them. When I have indulged a poets dream of a terrestrial paradise I have not foreseen that any cossack or Chipeway –would disturb it –but some monster institution would swallow it– The only highway man I ever met was the state itself– When I have refused to pay the tax which it demanded for that protection I did not want itself has robbed me– When I have asserted the freedom it declared it has imprisoned me. I love mankind I hate the institutions of their forefathers– What are the sermons of the church but the Dudleian lectures –against long extinct perhaps always imaginary evils, which he dead generations have willed and so the bell still tolls to call us to the funeral service which a generation can rightly demand but once. It is singular that not the Devil himself –has been in my way but these cobwebs –which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct the fiend. If I will not fight –if I will not pray –if I will not be taxed –if I will not bury the unsettled prairie –my neighbor will still tolerate me nd sometimes even sustains me –but not the state. And should our piety derive its origin still from that exploit of pius Aenaeus who bore his father Anchises on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy Not thieves & highwaymen but Constables & judges –not sinners but priests –not the ignorant but pedants & pedagogues –not foreign foes but standing armies –not pirates but men of war. Not free malevolence –but organized benevolence. For instance the jailer or constable as a mere man and neighbor –with life in him intended for this particular 3 score years & ten –may be a right worthy man with a thought in the brain of him –but as the officer & tool of the state he has no more understanding or heart than his prison key or his staff– This is what is saddest that men HDT WHAT? INDEX

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should voluntarily assume the character & office of brute nature.– Certainly there are modes enough by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion & neighbor. There are stones enough in the path of the traveller with out a man’s adding his own body to the number. There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war –to take a single instance– And yet I have not yet learned the name or residence and probably never should of the reckless vilain who should father them– all concerned –from the political contriver to the latest recruit possess an average share of virtue & of vice the vilainy is in the readiness with which men, doing outrage to their proper natures –lend themselves to perform the office of inferior & brutal ones. The stern command is –move or ye shall be moved –be the master of your own action –or you shall unawares become the tool of the meanest slave. Any can command him who doth not command himself. Let men be men & stones be stones and we shall see if majorities do rule. Countless reforms are called for because society is not animated or instinct enough with life, but like snakes I have seen in early spring –with alternate portions torpid & flexible –so that they could wriggle neither way. All men more or less are buried partially in the grave of custom, and of some we see only a few hairs upon the crown above ground. Better are the physically dead for they more lively rot. Those who have stolen estate to be defended slaves to be kept in service –who would pause with the last inspiration & perpetuate it –require the aid of institutions –the stereotyped and petrified will of the past But they who are something to defend –who are not to be enslaved themselves – –who are up with their time – ask no such hinderance THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle’s is not the most lasting words nor the loftiest wisdom –but for his genius it was reserved at last to furnish expression for the thoughts that were throbbing in a million breasts– It has plucked the ripest fruit in the public garden– But this fruit now least concerned the tree that bore it –which was rather perfecting the bud at the foot of the leaf stalk. Carlyle is wonderfully true to the impressions on his own mind, but not to the simple facts themselves. He portrays the former so freshly and vividly –that his words reawaken and appeal to our whole Experience But when reinforced by this terrible critic we return to his page his words are found not to be coincident with the thing and inadequate and there is no host worthy to entertain the guest he has invited. On this remote shore we adventurously landed unknown to any of the human inhabitants to this day – But we still remember well the gnarled and hospitable oaks, which were not strangers to us, the lone horse in his pasture and the patient ruminating herd whose path to the river so judiciously chosen to overcome the difficulty of the ascent we followed and disturbed their repose in the shade. And the cool free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to the wayfarers though still green and crude. The hard round glossy fruit which if not ripe –still is not poison but New English –brought hither its ancestor by our ancestors once. And up the rocky channel of a brook we scrambled which had long served nature for the sluice in these parts leaping from rock –through tangled woods at the bottom of a ravine, darker and darker it grew and more hoarse, the murmur of the stream –until we reached the ruins of a mill where now the ivy grew and the trout glanced through the raceway and the flume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

And the dreams and speculations of some early settler was our theme

But now “no war nor battle’s sound” Invades this peaceful battle ground but waves of Concord murmuring by With sweetly fluent harmony. But since we sailed, some things have failed And many a dream gone down the stream Here then a venerable shepherd dwellt ...... The Reverend Ezra Ripley Who to his flock his substance dealt And ruled them with a vigorous crook By precept of the sacred Book. But he the pierless bridge passed o’er And now the solitary shore Knoweth his trembling steps no more. Anon a youthful pastor came ...... Nathaniel Hawthorne Whose crook was not unknown to fame His lambs he viewed with gentle glance Dispersed o’er a wide expanse, And fed with “mosses from the Manse” We view the rocky shore where late With soothed and patient ear we sat Under our Hawthorne in the dale And listened to his Twice told Tale. It comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains –through dark primitive woods – whose juices it receives and where the bear still drinks it– Where the cabins of settlers are still fresh and far between, and there are few that cross its stream. Enjoying still its cascades unknown to fame perhaps unseen as yet by man –alone by itself –by the long ranges of the mountains of Sandwich and of Squam with sometimes MT. KEARSARGE the peak of Moose hillock the Haystack & Kearsarge reflected in its waters. Where the maple and the raspberry that lover of the mountains flourish amid temperate dews. Flowing as long and mysterious and untranslateable as its name Pemigewasset. By many a pastured Pielion and Ossa where unnamed muses haunt, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Helicon Not all these hills does it lave but I have experienced that to see the sun set behind them avails as much as to have travelled to them. From where the old Man of the Mountain overlooks one of its head waters –in the Franconia Notch, taking the basin and the Flume in its way –washing the sites of future villages –not impatient. For every mountain stream is more than Helicon, tended by oreads dryads Naiads, and such a pure and fresh inspirit draught gift of the gods as it will take a newer than this New England to know the flavor of.

Such water do the gods distill And pour down hill For their new England men. A draught of this wild water bring And I will never taste the spring Of Helicon again. But yesterday in dew it fell This morn its streams began to swell And with the sun it downward flowed So fresh it hardly knew its road. Falling all the way, not discouraged by the lowest fall –for it intends to rise again. There are earth air fire & water –very well, this is water. down it comes that is the way with it. It was already water of Squam and Newfound lake and Winnipiseogee, and White mountain snow dissolved on which we were floating –and Smith’s and Bakers and Mad rivers and Nashua and Souhegan and Piscataquoag –and Suncook & Soucook & Contoocook –mingled in incalculable proportions –still fluid yellowish restless all with an inclination seaward but boyant. Here then we will leave them to saw and grind and spin for a season, and I fear there will be no vacation at low water for they are said to have Squam and Newfound lake and Winipiseogee for their mill ponds. By the law of its birth never to become stagnant for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood through beaver dams broke loose not splitting but splicing and mending itself until it found a breatheing plaace in this lowland– No danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

before it reach the sea for it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom again with every eve We wandered on by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains –& through notches which the stream had made –looking down one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabitants –like crusaders strolled out from the camp in Palestine–46 And looking in to learning’s little tenement by the way –where some literate swain earns his ten dollars by the month –after the harvest –with rows of slates and well cut benches round –as well cut as farther south –not noticing the herd of swine which had poured in at the open door, and made a congregation– So we went on over hill and dale through the stumpy rocky –woody –bepastured country –until we crossed a rude wooden bridge over the Amonnoosuck and breathed the free air of the Unappropriated Land. Now we were in a country where inns begin– And we too now began to have our ins and outs– Some sweet retired house whose sign only availed to creak but bore no Phoenix nor golden eagle but such as the sun and rain had painted there – –a demi public demi private house –where each apartment seems too private for your use –too public for your hosts. One I remember where Landlord and lady hung painted as if retired from active life –upon the wall –remarkable one might almost say –if he knew not the allowed degrees of consanguinity for a family likeness –a singular deflexion of the nose turned each to each –so that the total variation could not have been better represented than in the picture. –But here at any rate the cream rose thick upon the milk –and there was refreshment One “Tilton’s Inn” tooo sheltered us which it were well worth remembering, in Thornton it was where towns begin to serve as gores only to hold the world together –reached late in the evening and left before the sun rose. But the remembrance of an entertainment still remains and among publicans Tiltons name still stands conspicuous in our diary. But where we took our ease was not Canterbury street, no Four corners nor Five points –no trivial place where 3 roads meet but hardly one road held together– A dank forest path –more like an otter’s or a marten’s trail or where a beaver had dragged his trap than where the wheels of travel ever raised a dust. The pigeon sat secure above our heads high on the dead limbs of the pine reduced to robins size– The very yard of our hostelries was inclined upon the skirts of mountains and as we passed we looked up at angle at the stems of maples waving in the clouds –and late at evening we heard the drear bleating of innumerable flocks upon the mountains sides seeming to hold unequal parley with the bears Shuddered through the Franconia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agiocochook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun– And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march– Went on our way silent & humble through the Notch –heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains late at night –looked back on Conway peak –threaded the woods of Norway pine –and saw the Great Spirit smile in Winnipiseogee47 Varro advises to plant in Quincunx order in order not to “obstruct the beneficial effects of the sun and moon and air,” and adds “nuts, when they are whole, which you might comprize in one modius, because nature confines the kernels in their proper places, when they are broken, can hardly be held in a measure of a modius and a half.” Vines thus planted produce more fruit “more must and oil, and of greater value”. I read in Varro that “Caesar Vopiscus AEdilicius, when he pleaded before the Censors, said that the grounds of Rosea were the gardens [(sedes)] of Italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage.” This soil was not remarkably fertile yet I was so well contented with myself it may be & with my entertainment –that I was really remind of this anecdote. In speaking of “the dignity of the herd” Varro suggests that the object of the Argonautic expedition was a ram’s fleece the gold apples of the Hesperides were by the ambiguity of language [] goats and sheep which 46. We wandered on (by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains — & through notches which the stream had with awe made — looking down ^one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabi- where every house seemd to us a holy sepulchre tants — like crusaders strolled out from Richards as if we were the camp in Palestine — (T 74) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Hercules imported –the stars and signs bear their names the AEgean sea has its name from the goat and mountains and straits have hence their names –sic. The Bosphorus Piso makes Italy to be from Vitulis– The Romans were shepherds “Does not the fine [mulcta, a mulgendo] that was by ancient custom paid in kind refer to this?” The oldest coins bore the figures of cattle and the Roman names Porcius –Ovinus Caprilius & the surnames Equitius, Taurus, Capra Vitulus. Vide Cato “Of purchasing an Estate –” “How an estate is to be planted –” &c in Lat & Eng.

I will insert here some commentary on this early draft of material that would wind up in the “Monday” chapter of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

A WEEK: If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.

The following is, if I recall correctly and can trust my notes, from William Bronk’s THE BROTHER IN ELYSIUM: IDEAS OF FRIENDSHIP AND SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES (1980), pages 104-106: The crux of the matter is that Thoreau believed that all evil did come in through the opening formed when any man might so betray his own nature as to lend himself to perform an inhuman office. While it might be contended that good and evil are something to be done at will and according to will, without reference to our own constitutions, — that we are of indifferent 47. our way Shuddered ^through that Fran- conia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agioco- chook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun — And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march — Went on our way ^silent & humble through the Notch ^— heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains holding unequal parley with the wolves & bears late at night — ^looked back on Conway peak — threaded the woods of Norway pine — and saw the Great Spirit smile ^in Winnipiseogee (T 76-77) HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

or irrelevant moral quality ourselves, and are able to choose between a good act and an evil one and so determine by the excess of one kind of action over the other our own moral quality and the moral quality of the world, yet it was Thoreau’s contention that the process by which good and evil came into being was more exacting and natural, less arbitrary than this. He believed that it was always necessary to make the choice between good and evil whenever such a choice was presented, but he also believed that in most cases, the choice was not presented, and that evil resulted in some mysterious way without anyone’s willing it, or being aware of it, and even to everyone’s surprise and chagrin. Thoreau accounted for this phenomenon by saying that being is more important and more effective than doing. Anything therefore might happen to us which was consistent with the nature we took for ourselves, even though the process by which the happening came about was so subtle or so complicated that we missed the apprehension of it, even after its end. If. as Thoreau said, we do outrage to our proper nature, — if we take our identity from the state, then we become liable to the evils of the state, and have no defense against war and slavery, since it has none. It is only by refusing to do the office of inferior and brutal natures that we can hope to escape, on our own part, treatment which in its brutality is suited to inferior natures. We must be treated according to the nature which we determine shall be ours. We can win or lose, or act in any other way, only in accordance with terms we set for ourselves. The identity which Thoreau wished us to find, which left no opening for the evil we claimed to deplore, was most certainly not to be found in the state; and neither was it to be found in any other external form, for its essence was personal. It was to be found only through that steady communion with one’s deepest desires and insights, which was called silence. He found no evil and little that was ambiguous in silence. It is easier to see now, of course, why Thoreau rejected philanthropy and reform, since to find one’s identity, to become personal, was truly to ennoble one’s being; it was to enjoy those moments of serene and self-confident life which were better than whole campaigns of daring; it was to combat evil directly by leaving no opening by which it could enter. Philanthropy’s method was less direct. It offered the goodness of actions as an excuse and substitute for being. Reform was an attempt to avoid a change in true form by changing the surface only. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Early October: With the potato harvesting season underway in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant Lord Bessborough confessed to the Prime Minister of England

“I verily believe that by Christmas there will not be a sound potato in the country.”

Margaret Fuller was visiting Thomas Carlyle. During her stay in London she commented, evidently not at all anent the potatoes of Ireland, “I accept the universe.” Carlyle made light of the comment, clearly not at all anent the potatoes of Ireland of the scarcity of which he would emphatically have approved — for it was considered bad form in the 19th Century for a mere woman to accept the universe, it was as distressing as the idea of a cheerleader taking on the football team since it was the masculine role to embrace, the feminine to HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

48 FEMINISM renounce. IRISH POTATO FAMINE

Fuller would come away from her encounter with this illuminated one with an understandable reaction: “the worst of hearing Carlyle is that you cannot interrupt him.” During her visit, the harangue which she had attempted to interrupt had been one in which Carlyle was carrying on about his pet idea that “if people would not behave well,” we ought simply to “put collars round their necks. Find a hero, and let them be his slaves.”49

Public Works Enrollment

October 1846 114,000

January 1847 570,000

March 1847 750,000

November 16, Monday: On her 2d visit to Thomas Carlyle’s home, Margaret Fuller had met an Italian revolutionary in exile, Giuseppe Mazzini.

48. Carlyle seems to have overlooked, however, that Fuller was merely negating the thesis of Ivan in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, “I do not accept the world.” Of course, it was unmanly for Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski to have announced this through a male character, as unmanly as it would have been for him to have failed to have embraced a lady in distress, since it was the 19th Century gentleman’s role to seize every opportunity. We may also note that when, in Philadelphia PA in 1852 at the first Women’s Rights Convention, Sarah Moore Grimké proposed Fuller’s “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion” as the motto of the movement, she was proposing a motto very similar to this “I accept the universe” sentiment. Those who have incautiously repeated Carlyle’s defensive mutter seem to have neglected to notice that it is a very serious matter, in Christendom, for us to criticize an attitude of acceptance. And in particular we who are influenced by the life of Thoreau should be wary of criticizing an amor fati. 49. Compare this with the beloved “conservative” radio commentator Paul Harvey’s pet idea in our own time in our own nation, that what we ought to do with our criminals is get them off their asses and out of our prison systems by simply chaining them behind our garbage trucks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Winter: Prior to 1845 the average daily intake of an Irish adult during a winter had consisted of ten to twelve pounds of potatoes, with buttermilk. This winter it consisted of one pound of Indian meal or one bowl of soup with one slice of bread — and to prove oneself worthy to receive such sustenance one needed to be performing daily hard labor. IRISH POTATO FAMINE

Fall-Winter 1846/1847: … The works of Landor –Coleridge –Wordsworth –contain quotable sentences THOMAS CARLYLE –gems –in the midst of much that is dull and comparatively of little value– In Carlyle there is as little to quote as in the conversation of a vivacious and eloquent speaker– What you would quote is his vivacity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1847

January: This month’s issue of the Literary World indicated that an “elaborate” paper on Thomas Carlyle and his works, in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, had been “attracting considerable attention,” and that its author Henry David Thoreau “has also completed a new work of which reports speak highly” which “will probably be soon given to the public.” The article concluded: “Truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap. To have our sunlight without paying for it, without any duty levied, —to have our poet there in England, to furnish us entertainment, and what is better, provocation, from year to year, all our lives long, to make the world seem richer for us, the age more respectable, and live better worth the living, — all without expense of acknowledgment even, but silently accepted out of the east, like morning light as a matter of course.” Waldo Emerson owed $450.00 to the Concord Bank but agreed to pay $500.00 for three acres adjoining his property on the east side, payment to be made by April 1.

From this month through March, Emerson would be lecturing a total of seventeen times but netting only $12.00 per lecture. Fortunately, his brother William was able to repay almost $1,000.00 of the money he had borrowed, before Waldo was forced into default on his promises. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

February 5, Friday: A letter to Henry Thoreau from Horace Greeley in New-York indicated that “Carlyle and His Works” was being presented in Graham’s Magazine as its lead article:

Feb. 5th, 1847. New York, Jan My dear Thoreau:

Although your letter only came to hand to-day, I attended to its subject yesterday, when I was in Philadelphia on my way home from Washington. Your article is this moment in type, and will appear about the 20th inst. as the leading article in Graham’s Mag. for next month. Now don’t object to this, nor be unreasonably sensitive at the delay. It is immensely more important to you that the article should appear thus (that is, if you have any literary aspirations,) than it is that you should make a few dollars by issuing it in some other [way]. As to lecturing, you have been at perfect liberty to deliver it as a lecture a hundred times if you had chosen — the more the better. It is really a good thing, and I will see that Graham pays you fairly for it. But its appearance there is worth far more to you than money. I know there has been too much delay, and have done my best to obviate it. But I could not. A Magazine that pays, and which it is desirable to be known as a contributor to, is always crowded with articles, and has to postpone some for others of even less merit. I do this myself with good things that I am not required to pay for. Thoreau, do not think of hard of Graham. Do not try to stop the publication of your article. It is best as it is. But just set down and write a like article about Emerson, which I will give you $25 for if you cannot do better with it; then one about Hawthorne at your leisure, &c. &c. I will pay you the money for each of these articles on delivery, publish them when and how I please, leaving to you the copyright expressly. In a year or two, if you take care not to write faster than you think, you will have the material of a volume worth publishing, and then we will see what can be done. There is a text somewhere in St. Paul — my Scriptural reading is getting rusty which says “Look not back to the things which are behind, but rather to [those] which are before,” &c. Commending this to your thoughtful appreciation, I am,

Yours, &c.

Horace Greeley.

Regards to Mr. and Mrs. Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Postmark: U.S. EXPRESS MAIL N. YORK FEB 5 N.Y. Postage: 5 Address: Henry D. Thoreau, Esq. care of R. W. Emerson, Esq. Concord, Massachusetts

February 10, Wednesday: Brigham Young “got married with” Jane Terry.

Lecture 1050

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 3, Wednesday, 1847 Concord (?) February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II)

50. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Narrative of Event: As discussed in the entry on lecture 8 above, at least some of Henry Thoreau’s neighbors on the evening of 4 February 1846 were more interested in hearing about his life at Walden Pond than about Thomas Carlyle’s graces as a writer. Thus, in a preliminary journal draft of this 10 February 1847 lecture, he remarked, “When I lectured here before [last] winter I heard that some of my towns men had expected of me some account of my life at the pond — this I will endeavor to give tonight” (JOURNAL 1, 1837-1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. [1981], page 142). The Concord Lyceum’s record of the event is typically brief: “Concord Feb 10 1847 A lecture was delivered by H. D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject — HISTORY OF HIMSELF. A. G. Fay Sec[retary].”51 His lecture was the eleventh of sixteen at the Concord Lyceum that season (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 162).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

51.Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 162. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: Professor Walter Roy Harding says that this lecture “was received so well that, quite out of keeping with the regular practice of the lyceum, he was asked to repeat it a week later for those who had missed it” (THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, page 187). Indeed, Miss Prudence Ward reported in a letter later that month,

“Henry repeated his lecture to a very full audience …. It was an uncommonly excellent lecture — tho, of course few would adopt his notions — I mean as they are shown forth in his life. Yet it was a very useful lecture, and much needed” (quoted in THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, pages 187-88). Thoreau did, in fact, give a lecture on the same topic one week later, on 17 February 1847. Whether it was a repetition of the first lecture or a continuation of the topic in a different lecture is not clear. Although Ward’s remark would appear to support the notion that the first early WALDEN lecture was simply repeated, Thoreau almost certainly had in hand by this date the second of what was already or what was soon to become his three-lecture “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” course. If he did not deliver that second lecture on 17 February 1847, he did not deliver it to his fellow townspeople at all. Yet he refers directly to “we inhabitants of Concord” in the surviving manuscript of the second lecture.52 We conjecture, therefore, that Harding’s remark about Thoreau being asked to repeat the first lecture was extrapolated solely from Ward’s remark but that Ward misspoke and actually meant that Thoreau delivered a lecture on the same topic as he had the previous week: his life in the woods. In any event, it appears that both lectures were well received. Description of Topic: See entry to lecture 9 above.

February 27, Saturday: Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle and mentioned that Henry Thoreau had put an essay about him in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine. He indicated that Thoreau was intending to post a copy to England as soon as the second part of the essay had appeared in the next issue of that magazine.53 He mentioned also that Thoreau had written “a good American book”54 and that he was saying that it was shortly to be printed.

52.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION, page 155. Also, see the quotation cited in note 4 of lecture 11 below. 53. Issues #3, pages 145-52 and #4, pages 238-245. 54. Titled at that point AN EXCURSION ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK RIVERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

March-April: After much exchange of correspondence and much intercession by Horace Greeley, “Thomas Carlyle and his Works,” which had been submitted for paid publication before August 16, 1846,55 appeared as the leading article in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine 30, Issue #3, pages 145-52 and was completed in Issue #4, pages 238-245.56

In the course of this essay Thoreau makes a critical remark about Sir Archibald Alison’s MODERN HISTORY OF EUROPE FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE FALL OF NAPOLEON: One improvement we could suggest in this last, as indeed in most epics — that he should let in the sun oftener upon his picture. It does not often enough appear, but it is all revolution, the old way of human life turned simply bottom upward, so that when at length we are inadvertently reminded of the “Brest Shipping,” a St. Domingo colony, and that anybody thinks of owning plantations, and simply turning up the soil there, and that now at length, after some years of this revolution, there is a falling off in the importation of sugar, we feel a queer surprise. Had they not sweetened their water with revolution then? It would be well if there were several chapters headed “Work for the Month,” — Revolution-work inclusive, of course — “Altitude of the Sun,” “State of the Crops and Markets,” “Meteorological Observations,” “Attractive Industry,” “Day Labor,” etc., just to remind the reader that the French peasantry did something beside go without breeches, burn châteaus, get ready knotted cords, and embrace and throttle one another by turns. These things are sometimes hinted at, but they deserve a notice more in proportion to their importance. We want not only a background to the picture, but a ground under the feet also. We remark, too, occasionally, an unphilosophical habit, common enough elsewhere, in Alison’s History of Modern Europe, for instance, of saying, undoubtedly with effect, that if a straw had not fallen this way or that, why then — but, of course, it is as easy in philosophy to make kingdoms rise and fall as straws. READ THE FULL TEXT

“a ground under the feet also”: This, like the previous knotted cords (garotte) and the previous throttling of one another by turns, is an obvious reference to hanging, since the important life support of which a hanging person has been deprived would be the ground underfoot.

55. See early draft of this reference by Thoreau to hanging, written during Winter 1845-1846 before February 22d. Thoreau would undertake much more correspondence before finally receiving payment from that magazine. In fact Thomas Carlyle would obtain a copy, in England, and would peruse it “with due entertainment and recognition,” before Thoreau would receive $50.00 on May 17, 1848. 56. For the manner in which this gallows humor which had originated in the journal during the winter before February 22, 1846 would be inserted into the essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works,” see:

GALLOWS HUMOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

March 12, Friday: While Waldo Emerson was offering the manuscript of Henry Thoreau’s AN EXCURSION ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK RIVERS to Evert Augustus Duyckinck of Wiley & Putnam for publication as part of

their Library of American Books, but only as “a very slender thread for such big beads & ingots as are strung on it,” pointing out that its author had an article on Thomas Carlyle running in the current issues of Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, Thoreau was continuing to polish his ms throughout the spring while busily adding yet another big bead, the captivity narrative of Hannah Duston.57 More of the “California B’hoys” of Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson, aboard the Susan Drew, arrived at the Golden Gate.

May 18, Tuesday: Elijah Dunbar died in Keene, New Hampshire. He was survived by two of his six children. DUNBAR FAMILY

In England on this day Thomas Carlyle was writing to Waldo Emerson, saying that about a week before he had received a visit from one of his correspondent’s Concord neighbors, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, who was “a solid, sensible, effectual-looking man.”

57. As his source for the Hannah Emerson Duston material discussed in “Thursday” of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, Henry Thoreau perhaps utilized Thomas Hutchinson’s HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY, which drew upon William Hubbard’s GENERAL HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND, the Reverend Cotton Mather’s Article XXV “A Notable Exploit; Dux Faemina Facti” in MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW- ENGLAND, and Daniel Neal’s HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND, and perhaps utilized Benjamin L. Mirick’s HISTORY OF HAVERHILL, MASSACHUSETTS. I do not know that he referred to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of “The Duston Family” that now appears in SKETCHES AND ESSAYS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

October (on some Monday late in the month): Waldo Emerson arrived at 5 Great Cheyne Row in Chelsea, London, the home of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Carlyle. I found at Liverpool, after a couple of days, a letter which had been seeking me, from Carlyle, addressed to “R.W.E. — on the instant when he lands in England,” conveying the heartiest welcome & urgent invitation to house & hearth. And finding that I should not be wanted for a week in the Lecture- rooms I came down to London, on Monday, &, at 10 at night, the door was opened to me by Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the hall. They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in August) when I left them at Craigenputtock. “Well,” said Carlyle, “here we are shovelled together again!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

During this month, upon hearing of the death of Governor Silas Wright of New York on August 27, 1847 in Canton, New York at the age of 53, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier wrote:

THE LOST STATESMAN. AS they who, tossing midst the storm at night, While turning shoreward, where a beacon shone, Meet the walled blackness of the heaven alone, So, on the turbulent waves of party tossed, In gloom and tempest, men have seen thy light Quenched in the darkness. At thy hour of noon, While life was pleasant to thy undimmed sight, And, day by day, within thy spirit grew A holier hope than young Ambition knew, As through thy rural quiet, not in vain, Pierced the sharp thrill of Freedom’s cry of pain, Man of the millions, thou art lost too soon! Portents at which the bravest stand aghast, — The birth-throes of a Future, strange and vast, Alarm the land; yet thou, so wise and strong, Suddenly summoned to the burial bed, Lapped in its slumbers deep and ever long, Hear’st not the tumult surging overhead. Who now shall rally Freedom’s scattering host? Who wear the mantle of the leader lost? Who stay the march of slavery? He whose voice Hath called thee from thy task-field shall not lack Yet bolder champions, to beat bravely back The wrong which, through his poor ones, reaches Him: Yet firmer hands shall Freedom’s torchlights trim, And wave them high across the abysmal black, Till bound, dumb millions there shall see them and rejoice. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

November: Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson having met personally once more after some 15 years of close correspondence, Carlyle confided to his journal “Good of him I could get none.” He would after further reflection on this elaborate, that the second time he had found his ol’ American buddy “somewhat moonshiny.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1848

Waldo Emerson returned to London in the company of Joseph Neuberg, a Jewish businessman of Nottingham who desired to be introduced to Thomas Carlyle.58 While in London this time Emerson would be introduced to Professor Sir Charles Lyell (he having just been knighted), and to Charles Babbage, and to Thomas

Babington Macaulay. While visiting the Royal College of Surgeons he would attempt to interest these British physicians in the claims then being made by his chemist brother-in-law Dr. Charles T. Jackson of the Boston Society of Natural History, to having himself been the uncredited discoverer of the anesthetic use of sulfuric ether — only to be informed that these surgeons had moved on from sulfuric ether to chloroform and were uninterested in these elaborate opposing historic allegations in regard to this obsoleted anesthetic substance,

58. Later, Neuberg would assist Thomas Carlyle with FREDERICK. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

which the visiting American literary layman needed to tell them so much about. DENTISTRY

WALDEN: The village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company’s on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain, –otherwise it would often be painful to hear,– without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, which I rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors.

March 7, Tuesday: At Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion Waldo Emerson attended a Chartist meeting. He was suitably unimpressed.

In Hawaii, the Great Mahele (division of lands) was signed.

March 31, Friday: It being a full year since his article on Thomas Carlyle had begun its run in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, Henry Thoreau pointed out while writing to Horace Greeley that he had not yet seen any money for this. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Spring: According to page 40 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and others got up a petition asking Waldo Emerson to deliver a course of six lectures before the Literary and Scientific Institution at Portman Square in London and he began work on what would be entitled “Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century”: Both the complexity of his subject and its vital importance contributed to his struggle to treat it. The first three lectures, which he grouped under the heading “Natural History of the Intellect,” were his new ones on metaphysics, and he entitled them “Powers and Laws of Thought,” “Relation of Intellect to Natural Science,” and “Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought.” The second three were updated versions of “Politics and Socialism,” “Poetry and Eloquence,” and “Natural Aristocracy.” The entire six-lecture course, delivered before the Literary and Scientific Institution at Portman Square in London, 6-17 June, drew upon contemporary revolutionary events but used them to argue that the scholar should remain aloof from the times. “I write ‘Mind & Manners in the XIX Century,’” Emerson declared in his journal, “and my rede is to make the student independent of the century, to show him that his class offer one immutable front in all times & countries, cannot hear the drums of Paris, cannot read the London journals, they are the Wandering Jew or the Eternal Angel that survives all, & stands in the same fraternal relation to all.” ...He reworked the lectures for a course he gave at Harvard in 1870-1871, but his mental powers by then were failing, and the papers published posthumously in NATURAL HISTORY OF THE INTELLECT (1893) are but fragments. Because Emerson excelled as a poetic perceiver of truth but not as maker of philosophical systems, his failure to write his great work on metaphysics is understandable. The task did not suit him.... The six London lectures constituted Emerson’s personal “Charter,” which he had urged himself to produce and make others feel its “infinite superiority today, even today.” Whether he succeeded or not, whether any in his audience were awakened to the overwhelming importance of the inspired mind aloof from the times remains an open question.... Carlyle himself, whose respect for Emerson was waning, attended all six lectures but dismissed them in a letter to his sister as “pleasant moonshiny discourses, delivered to a rather vapid miscellany of persons (friends of humanity, chiefly),” and added that he “was not much grieved at the ending of them.”

At one point in the lecture series Emerson suggested to his audience that there might be some reason why the Chartists and other 1848 revolutionaries were so upset: some members of the aristocracy were attempting to live without duties but none were scorning to live by the labour of their inferiors. Upon objection from his audience, he removed this remark. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

April 10, Monday: In Poland, Prussian troops attacked insurgents near Tremeszna.

In Sweden, Gustaf Sparre replaced Arvid Posse as Prime Minister for Justice, and Gustaf Nils Algernon Stierneld replaced Albrecht Ihre as Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal opened between Chicago and LaSalle, connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River (this was an enormous improvement, as henceforward any freshwater species that had become a pest in the Great Lakes could also plague the Mississippi River basin and any freshwater species that had become a pest in the Mississippi River basin could also plague the Great Lakes).59

Joseph Pulitzer, journalist and philanthropist, was born.

At Kennington Common an unarmed crowd of some 30,000 Chartist assembled for a march upon Westminster and the houses of the British Parliament. They were to be led by one Feargus O’Connor, who intended to use the occasion to make an impressive delivery of a petition bearing 5.7 million signatures to the House of Commons.

Facing this threat were a rabble of 170,000 “special constables” hastily deputized by representatives of the government and dispatched into the thoroughfares for the occasion. But, also, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington had caused seven full regiments of the British regular army to be dispositioned at various hidden

59. Fast forward to the opening of the Suez Canal, whereby any saltwater species in the Red Sea could flow downstream to disrupt the saltwater biota of the Mediterranean. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

locations in London, all government offices had been secured for the day, the Bank of England had been sandbagged, and the General Post Office had been barricaded and its employees supplied with weapons. Lord

Palmerston had sealed off the entrances to the Foreign Office with bound copies of the Times of London, – which would surely prove as effective in stopping bullets as in stopping thought– and was handing around among his clerks a variety of cutlasses and antique muskets.60 When Mr O’Connor arrived in Kennington Common, he immediately concurred with the Chief of Police that the affair was hopeless, and, rather than lead his marchers toward the forces assembled against them, began a rambling speech in which he very gradually revealed to that assembly of citizens that no such threatening movement was going to be authorized. Finally the determination of the Chartists was dissolved in a fortuitously steady, heavy London rain, enough to send even the diehards into the available pubs for a nip.61

MY CHILDREN, HAVE NOW FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY BEEN MIXED UP WITH THE DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT — IN IRELAND SINCE 1822, AND IN ENGLAND FROM THE 60. At long last Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), “Lord Pumice-Stone,” had found a situation entirely to his liking. 61. According to Waldo Emerson at the time, this made the man a “swindling leader” all set to “betray them in public and cheat them in private,” although it would seem to me at this distance that the way Mr O’Connor handled the situation probably saved some lives. Interestingly, there’s a very interestingly similar scenario depicted in the Martin Scorcese movie “The Last Temptation of Christ,” with Jesus Christ playing the role of Feagus O’Connor — check out this movie and see if you don’t agree. Carlyle, who had attended in order to witness some shedding of blood, was disappointed at Mr O’Connor’s restraint.

THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

YEAR 1833. I HAVE ALWAYS, IN AND OUT OF PARLIAMENT, CONTENDED FOR YOUR RIGHTS, AND I HAVE RECEIVED MORE THAN 100 LETTERS, TELLING ME NOT TO COME HERE TODAY, OR MY LIFE WOULD BE SACRIFICED. MY ANSWER WAS, THAT I WOULD RATHER BE STABBED IN THE HEART THAN ABSTAIN FROM BEING IN MY PLACE. AND MY CHILDREN, FOR YOU ARE MY CHILDREN, AND I AM ONLY YOUR FATHER AND BAILIFF; BUT I AM YOUR FOND FATHER AND YOUR UNPAID BAILIFF. MY BREATH IS NEARLY GONE, AND I WILL ONLY SAY, WHEN I DESERT YOU MAY DESERT ME. YOU HAVE BY YOUR CONDUCT TODAY MORE THAN REPAID ME FOR ALL I HAVE DONE FOR YOU, AND I WILL GO ON CONQUERING UNTIL YOU HAVE THE LAND AND THE P EOPLE’S CHARTER BECOMES THE LAW OF THE LAND. This manufactured event had been in planning for some time. It was in Spring 1848 that O’Connor had decided on this new strategy as a combination of several tactics: a large public meeting, a procession, and the presentation of a petition to the House of Commons. He alerted the prime minister, Lord John Russell, to the fact that after the speeches he intended to lead the large crowd to Parliament to present a petition. This put the Lord in an awkward position because he had all his political life been campaigning for freedom of speech and for the universalization of suffrage. However, since becoming prime minister in 1846, he had been unable to persuade the majority of MPs in the House of Commons to indulge in parliamentary reform. Afraid that the meeting would result in a riot, Russell decided to make sure that there would be 8,000 soldiers and 150,000 special constables on duty in London that day. Russell asked O’Connor to guarantee that he would not attempt to move the crowd to the vicinity of the Parliament building. The meeting did take place without violence. O’Connor would claim that over 300,000 people had shown up, but others described this as a vast exaggeration. (The government alleged that the crowd had amounted to but 15,000 and the Times reporter estimated it at 20,000. Even a sympathetic paper would not go so far as to agree to 50,000. O’Connor also told the assembly that their petition contained 5,706,000 signatures, but, when examined at the Parliament it counted out at 1,975,496 and many of these were clear forgeries.) O’Connor’s many enemies in the parliamentary reform movement would accuse him of having destroyed their credibility as Chartists. His affair at Kennington Common would turn out not to have at all helped the reform movement and Chartism in general would go into rapid decline.

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

cocoanut husks– The old Junk & scrap iron, and worn out sails –are full of history more legible & significant now these old sails than if they could be wrought into writing paper. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods which did not go out to sea in the last freshet –risen 4 dollars on the thousand by reason of what did go out or was split up –pine spruce cedar –1st 2nd –3d & 4th quality so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear & moose & caribou. LIME KILNS –next rolls of Thomaston lime a prime lot which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked– These rags in bales of all hues & qualities the last and lowest condition of dress –of patterns which are now no longer cried up those splendid articles –poplin & muslin de laines –& pongees –from all quarters both of fashion & of poverty –going to become paper of one color –or a few shades COD This closed car smells of salt fish the strong scent –the commercial scent –reminding me of the grand banks & the fisheries & fish flakes A hogshead of molasses or rum –directed John Brown –Cuttings-ville Vt. –some trader among the growers who imports from the farmers near his clearing and now perchance stands over his bulk head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast Is telling his customers perhaps –has told 20 this morning that he expects some by the next arrivals– It is advertised in the cuttingsville Times I know a woman who possess a restless & intelligent mind –interested in her own culture & that of the family and earnest to enjoy the highest possible advantages. I meet her with pleasure as a natural person who a little provokes me –& I suppose is stimulated in turn by myself– Yet our acquaintance plainly does not attain that degree of confidence & sentiment –which women –while all –covet – I am glad to help her, as I am helped by her, I like very well to know her with a sort of strangers privilege –and hesitate to visit her often like her other friends– My nature pauses here & I do not well know why. Perhaps she does not make the highest demand on me –not a religious demand. Some with whose prejudices or peculiar bias I have no faith –yet inspire me with confidence –and I trust they consider in me also as a religious heathen at least, –a good Greek– I too have principles as well founded as their own – If this person would conceive that without wilfulness I associate with her as far as our destinies are coincident –as far as our good geniuses permit –and still value such intercourse it would be a grateful assurance to me. I feel as if I appeared careless & indifferent & without principle –or requisition –to her –not expecting more & yet not content with less– If she could know that I make an infinite demand on myself, as well as all others – she would see that this true though incomplete intercourse was infinitely better than a more abandoned & unreserved though falsely grounded one –without the principle of growth in it. For a companion I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius– Such a one will always be rightly tolerant. It is suicide –it corrupts good manners to welcome any less than this. I value & trust those who love & praise my aspiration and tendency –not my performance – If you would not stop to look at me, –but look whither I am looking & further –then my education could not dispense with thy company. The struggle in me is between a love of contemplation and a love of action –the life of a philosopher & of a hero. The poetic and philosophic have my constant vote –the practic hinders & unfits me for the former. How many things that my neighbors do bunglingly could I do skillfully & effectually –but I fain would not have leisure– My tendency is, on the one hand to the poetic life –on the other to the practic –and the result is the indifference of both –or the philosophic. In the practic the poetic loses its intensity –and fineness but gains in health & assurance- The practical life is the poetic making for itself a basis –and in proportion to the breadth of the base will be the quantity of material at the apex– The angle of slope for various materials is determined by science. The fabric of life is pyramidal. The man of practice is laying the foundations of a poetic life The poet of great sensibility is rearing a superstructure without foundation. To make a perfect man –the Soul must be much like the body not to unearthly & the body like the soul. The one must not deny & oppress the other. The line of greatest breadth intersects the line of greatest length at the point of greatest depth or height A law so universal –and to be read in all material –in Ethics as well as mechanics –that it remains its own most final statement. –It is the heart in man– It is the sun in the system –it is the result of forces– In the case of the pond it is the law operating without friction. Draw lines through the length & breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets –and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. You only need to know how his shores trend & the character of the adjacent country to know his depth and HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

concealed bottom. There is a bar too across the entrance of his every cove –every cove is his harbor for a season –and in each successively is he detained –land locked. There is no exclusively moral law –there is no exclusively physical law. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle is a brave and genuine man earnest & sincere A most talented writer of English –an art of which he is master If he is sometimes an extreme praiser he is never a fatal detractor A Detector of shams A practical bent. He inspires us to greater earnestness & effort –and useful activity I find I cannot fish without falling a little in my own respect. I have tried it again & again –and have skill at it –and a certain instinct for it which revives from time to time but always I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished I think I am not mistaken. It is perhaps a faint intimation– Yet so are the streaks of morning. It tempts me as one means of becomming acquainted with nature not only with fishes but with night & water and the scenery –which I should not see under the same aspects; –and occasionally though {Two leaves missing} boat I seem to hear a faint music from the horizon– When our senses are clear and purified we always may hear the notes of music in the air– This is the tradition under various forms of all nations –the statue of Memnon– The music of the spheres –of the sun flower in its circular motion –with the sun &c. &c. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyles place & importance in English Literature is not yet recognised – For the most part I know not how the hours go. Certainly I am not living the heroic life I had dreamed of– And yet all my veins are full of life –and nature whispers no reproach– The day advances as if to light some work of mine –and I defer in my thought as if there were some where busier men– It was morning & lo! it is now evening– And nothing memorable is accomplished– Yet my nature is almost content with this– It hears no reproach in nature. What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more –& be forever ready. Instead of singing as the birds I silently smile at my incessant good fortune but I dont know that I bear any flowers or fruits– Methinks if they try me by their standards I shall not be found wanting –but men try one another not so. The elements are working their will with me. As the fields sparrow has its trill sitting on the hickory before my door –so have I my chuckle as happy as he – which he may hear out of my nest. Man is like a plant and his satisfactions are like those of a vegetable –his rarest life is lest his own– One or two persons come to my house –there being proposed it may be to their vision the faint possibility of intercourse – & joyous communion. They are as full as they are silent and wait for your plectrum or your spirit to stir the strings of their lyre. If they could ever come to the length of a sentence or hear one –or that ground they are thinking of!! They speak faintly –they do not obtrude themselves They have heard some news which none, not even they themselves can impart. What come they out for to seek? If you will strike my chord? They come with somethings in their minds no particular fact or information –which yet is ready to take any form of expression on the proper impulse It is a wealth they bear about them which can be expended in various ways Laden with its honey the bee straightway flies to the hive to make its treasure common stock– The poet is impelled to communicate at every risk and at any sacrifice. I think I have this advantage in my present mode of life over those who are obliged to look abroad for amusement –to theatres & society –that my life itself is my amusement –and never ceases to be novel –the commencement of an experiment –or a drama which will never end. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

April 25, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson dined with John Forster (editor of The Examiner) at Forster’s rooms in Lincoln’s Inn, and there encountered Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, who joined them for a chat.

Dined with John Forster, Esq. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, & found Carlyle, & Dickens, & young Pringle. Forster, who has an obstreperous cordiality, received Carlyle with loud salutation, “My Prophet!” Forster called Carlyle’s passion, Musket-worship.

(We note that tall Mr. Emerson, meeting Dickens this time in person at the height of his fame rather than merely glimpsing him reading at the lectern in Boston, refrained from repeating his comment of 1842 about the author’s extreme shortness.) ATTITUDES ON DICKENS

June 6, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson began to deliver the 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution at 17 Edwards Street on Portman Square in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle as part of his audience. The first lecture was entitled “Powers and Laws of Thought” and was his entirely unsatisfactory attempt at systematic epistemology and metaphysics.

June 8, Thursday: Waldo Emerson delivered the 2d of his 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle in the audience. The lecture was on the “Relation of Intellect to Natural Science.” THE LIST OF LECTURES

June 10, Saturday: Waldo Emerson delivered the 3d of his 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle still stuck sitting in the audience out of sheer politeness. This one was on the “Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought.”

June 13, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson delivered the 4th of his 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle still stuck in the audience. This one was on “Politics and Socialism” (he came out against politics and against socialism).

June 15, Thursday: Waldo Emerson delivered the 5th of his 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle still stuck in the audience. This one was on “Poetry and Eloquence” (he was in favor of both poetry and eloquence) and, as it was merely a reworked earlier lecture rather than containing new materials, it wasn’t too bad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

June 17, Saturday: Waldo Emerson delivered the last of his 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution at Portman Square in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle still stuck in the audience.

This one was on “Natural Aristocracy” and the American thinker tried to wind up his series with a zinger at the British upper crust. Finding at the close of the series that he had cleared only 80 pounds, he contracted to deliver also “The Superlative in Manners and Literature.” He also contracted to deliver three of the lectures for a middle-class audience at Exeter Hall for a flat fee of 30 guineas.

In England, every man is a castle. When I get into our first class cars on the Fitchburg Road, & see sweltering men in their shirt sleeves take their seats with some well drest men & women, & see really the very little difference of level that is between them all, and then imagine the astonishment that would strike the polished inmates of English first class carriages, if such masters should enter & sit beside them, I see that it is not fit to tell Englishmen that America is like England. No, this is the Paradise of the third class; here every thing is cheap; here every thing is for the poor. England is the Paradise of the first class; it is essentially aristocratic, and the humbler classes have made up their minds to this, & do contentedly enter into the system. In England, every man you meet is some man’s son; in America, he may be some man’s father. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

July 7, Friday-8, Saturday: Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle visited Stonehenge.62

July 13, Thursday: Waldo Emerson and George Eliot met at Foleshill. “I have seen Emerson — the first man I have ever met.” When Mary Anne Evans informed Waldo that it had been Rousseau’s CONFESSIONS which had introduced her to profound thought, the American responded that although Carlyle had told him the same thing, he had indicated that he had had to disdain the temptations offered for education and for the life of the emotions, and to fight his way through the text.

July 15, Saturday: Waldo Emerson sailed for Boston about the steamer Europa. “As they [Waldo Emerson and Arthur Hugh Clough] stood on the deck, waiting for the signal for visitors to leave and the steamer to start down the Mersey, Clough said sorrowfully: ‘You leave all of us young Englishmen without a leader. Thomas Carlyle has led us into the desert, and he has left us there.’ Emerson replied: ‘That is what all young men in England have said to me.’ Placing his hand on Clough’s head, he said with mock solemnity: ‘I ordain you Bishop of England, to go up and down among all the young men, and lead them into the promised land’.” (Gay Wilson Allen’s biography of Waldo Emerson, page 518)

November: Thomas Carlyle began work on his LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.

62. It was so windy Carlyle had trouble lighting his cigars, they were riding around by dogcart, and the local tea was just horrid. On this trip they came close to quarreling. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1849

Spring: Waldo Emerson had recommended Indian cornmeal to Thomas Carlyle as a substitute for the scarce and low- quality potato of this period, and had provided the Carlyles with an American recipe that removed some of the bitterness of this mash, which many farmers were refusing to feed even to their livestock.63

THOMAS CARLYLE

Carlyle was so impressed by the idea that a servant might be fed for as little as a penny per day that he wrote a short piece on this intending to put it in the Times of London. As it would turn out, he wouldn’t be able to get it published there — but would be able to get such ruminations published in Fraser’s Magazine. IRISH POTATO FAMINE

June 15, Friday: Prussian troops captured Mannheim.

The Liberator reviewed A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, indicating that the lovers of Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle would appreciate this book for its author Henry Thoreau “writes in their vein.”

63. Emerson and Carlyle were mistaken. A diet of Indian maize produces scurvy as this grain is not only deficient in the essential amino protein known as lysine but also deficient in Vitamin C. The ultimate effects of such a regimen are that one’s gums bleed and teeth fall out, while one’s limbs are covered with black sores. A death from scurvy is often hastened by gangrene — and this would be inevitable even were one able to force down enough cooked cracked corn mush to prevent any loss of weight! Had these gents themselves been obliged to subsist for any length of time upon the sort of cheapo regimen they supposed good enough for servants, they would of course have been obliged to become considerably more thoughtful. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: Thomas Carlyle began writing a tract “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” which would eventually find publication in Fraser’s Magazine.

THOMAS CARLYLE

(The title the magazine would use, “The Negro Question,” would be less outrageous, but the idea itself was outrageous from the get-go: Blacks, who are inherently inferior, are to be forced to labor and must be prepared accept whatever recompense their white and comely overlords see fit to provide.)

Betsey, Frederick Douglass’s grandmother, died.

Henry Thoreau surveyed a farm on Lexington Road belonging to Isaac Watts.64 The farm stretched from Lexington Road across the field to Cambridge Turnpike and then to the Mill Brook and Thoreau divided the woods on the hill behind and northeast of the house into 52 woodlots. Marcia Moss believed this was the first survey Thoreau recorded in his Field Notes book. It shows the location of land belonging to Sexton, George Heywood, C.B. Davis, Cyrus Warren, Shannon, Richard Messer, John B. Moore, and the surroundings. Thoreau’s journal for October 4, 1857 indicates that he seriously injured himself one day while building a woodshed on this land.

“I think that it was the woods back of the old Kettell place on Lexington Road. It was divided into 52 lots and cut in 1849-50.”

64. This was not the Isaac Watts who authored hymns. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

December 1, Saturday: A less-than-lifesize statue of Aristides the Sophist, the author of HEROI LOGI, was unveiled in Louisburg Square on top of Boston’s Beacon Hill. (What was this, some parlor ornament that some Boston richie was trying to find a decent way to dispose of?)

In front of Harvard Medical College, the medical school of Harvard College, a surly mob of people had assembled who well knew that the students therein had been paying graverobbers (termed humorously “resurrectionists” at the time) to keep them supplied them with the fresh corpses of their relatives, for use in dissection. DIGGING UP THE DEAD

Inside, the scorched torso and one of the thighs of Doctor George Parkman were being discovered at the bottom of an old tea chest packed full of chemical equipment. None of these downtown denizens gave a damn for Doctor Parkman the slumlord — but what an excellent opportunity this was to agitate to prevent the medical students and faculty from stealing and defiling any more bodies of poor people!

Since his obtaining enough money to retire from business in 1841, Ebenezer Elliott had been living quietly at Great Houghton, near Barnsley. On this day after long illness and depression, he died at the age of 68. The body would be placed in Darfield churchyard.

John Greenleaf Whittier would write a poem about him: Elliott Hands off! thou tithe-fat plunderer! play No trick of priestcraft here! Back, puny lordling! darest thou lay A hand on Elliott’s bier? Alive, your rank and pomp, as dust, Beneath his feet he trod: He knew the locust swarm that cursed The harvest-fields of God. On these pale lips, the smothered thought HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Which England’s millions feel, A fierce and fearful splendour caught, As from his forge the steel. Strong-armed as Thor, — and a shower of fire His smitten anvil flung; God’s curse, Earth’s wrong, dumb Hunger’s ire, He gave them all a tongue! Then let the poor man’s horny hands Bear up the mighty dead, And labour’s swart and stalwart bands, Behind as mourners tread. Leave cant and craft their baptized bounds, Leave rank its minister floor; Give England’s green and daisied grounds The poet of the poor! Lay down upon his Sheaf’s green verge That brave old heart of oak, With fitting dirge from sounding forge, And pall of furnace smoke! Where whirls the stone its dizzy rounds, And axe and sledge are swung, And, timing to their stormy sounds, His stormy lays are sung.

There let the peasant’s step be heard, The grinder chant his rhyme; Nor patron’s praise nor dainty word Befits the man or time. No soft lament nor dreamer’s sigh For him whose words were bread, — The Runic rhyme and spell whereby The foodless poor were fed! Pile up thy tombs of rank and pride, O England, as thou wilt! With pomp to nameless worth denied, Emblazon titled guilt! No part or lot in these we claim; But, o’er the sounding wave, A common right to Elliott’s name, A freehold in his grave!

Thomas Carlyle’s OCCASIONAL DISCOURSE ON THE NEGRO QUESTION (the essay which would in 1853 be reissued under the title initially planned, OCCASIONAL DISCOURSE ON THE NIGGER QUESTION) appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. The author would be outraged at the outrage expressed by his readers.

Even more of a “Teutomaniac” than the history professor Thomas Arnold, Carlyle asserted that “if the Black gentleman is born to be a servant, and, in fact, is useful in God’s creation only as a servant, then let him hire not by the month, but by a very much longer term.”65

65. You know, actually, what this sort of “humor” reminds me of? I once sighted a photograph of a Southern lynching, in which the dead man’s black feet are protruding into the frame of the photograph from above, while all the white guys and their wives and children are clustering around to have their group portrait made. And from the big toe of the hanged man is hanging a piece of this Thomas Carlylish humor in the form of one of those funny little hotel room signs that you put on your outside doorknob, proclaiming something on the order of “Please do not disturb my slumbers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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According to Simon Heffer’s MORAL DESPERADO: A LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), pages 276-7: It is the form and tone, rather than the actual message, that did most of the damage. Carlyle constructs a brilliant parody of an Exeter Hall meeting, with an unnamed speaker spelling out unpalatable truths to an audience driven deeper and deeper into shock. Philanthropy in general he parodies as “the Universal Abolition of Pain Association,” which is at risk of turning into a “Sluggard and Scoundrel Protection Society.” Carlyle did not feel he was attacking the blacks; his targets were the liberals who were destroying them. This was not, though, how his audience saw it. He was so open to interpretation because of the callous, heartless and brutally sarcastic language he used. He talks of the emancipated blacks being like the Irish, with a land of plenty they are refusing to exploit, because no one is there to guide them to the greater happiness that exists beyond eating pumpkins. The essay is also an attack on the “dismal science” of economics; the blacks were not more constructively employed because it was in no one’s economic interest to do so, just as it was not in Ireland.... He cannot envision the black man being born for any other purpose than to serve; and while he may abhor slavery, he wonders whether being bound for life to a master in other circumstances is not the most humane and appropriate way to deal with the “emancipated,” and ease them into civilization. To apply the principles of laissez-faire to them was, he argued, cruel, as they had no means to survive on their own. Again (and the allegorical is never far away), all this was true of Ireland, as he saw it. His strictures about what actually constitutes slavery cannot be easily dismissed, and reflect directly his Irish experiences. “You cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament,” he claims, “but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little!”

I encounter these materials myself with mixed feelings, since it is my suspicion that Carlyle may well have been correct in his assertion that a society cannot eliminate a scourge such as human chattel bondage that has grown from the bottom up, by any techniques which proceed merely from the top down. In fact here in the USA, when we would enact the XIIIth Amendment to our federal Constitution in 1865 in the indicated top- down manner, we would not abolish slavery so much as abolish the name of it, exactly as specified here by Carlyle.

THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2 For in fact the amendment initially ratified by /3ds of our state legislatures, including by now ratification even by the sovereign state of Mississippi, does not define precisely what might constitute a “slave,” or “slavery,” or “enslavement,” nor does it proscribe whatever these entities might in some manner eventually be decided to be, but instead it merely extends to the federal congress the authority to enact legislation defining and proscribing these undefined entities, and criminalizing and punishing a certain range of abusive conduct, thus effectively forbidding the other two arms of our federal government, the executive arm and the judicial arm, forever from proscribing or punishing these undefined entities — and indeed, subsequent to this amendment, much as we hate to contemplate this, our federal government has never ever enacted any such proscription, and there has never been any such punishment. In fact in our nation slavery is as unassailable during this Year of Our Lord 2010 as it had been, say, in the year 1810. What a field day of sarcasm a 20th-Century Carlyle would have with us!

Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E.Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31 Cong. 1 sess. III. pt. 1, No. 5, pt. 1, pp. 427-8. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1850

Thomas Carlyle’s LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. He visited Walter Savage Landor and wrote “He was really stirring company: a proud irascible, trenchant, yet generous, veracious, and very dignified old man.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

January: John Stuart Mill responded to the “The Negro Question” piece that Thomas Carlyle had written for the December 1st issue of Fraser’s Magazine (which Carlyle would retitle in 1852 in its pamphlet form in reaction to Mill, precisely in order to exacerbate its outrage, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question”) by averring that although blacks were clearly inferior, they were yet capable, by being allowed to share in the benefits of civilization, of being improved.66

THOMAS CARLYLE

Mill did deliver himself here of some remarkably Thoreauvian and wide-marginish sentiments: “In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour.”

In London, H.G. Bohn published E.C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn’s translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s ANSICHEN DER NATUR book of essays as VIEWS OF NATURE, OR CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE SUBLIME PHENOMENA OF CREATION, WITH SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS.

Edward Damon, son of the mill owner Calvin Carver Damon, was working in the cotton room of his father’s factory in Concord, “tending drawing” — that is, he was a child card-tender. If he were nominally being paid the same wage as poorer children of necessity consigned by their families to such activities, he was receiving $2.50 the week. However, it is unlikely that his father would have insisted that he be at work the usual 6 days a week, for that would have kept his heir Edward like the other child labor away from school. Edward’s

66. Gee, thanks, Mr Mill, that’s mighty white of you. With kind and thoughtful people like you for friends, a person of color truly doesn’t have need any enemies such as Mr Carlyle! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1 testimony was that a normal workday for such a working child in 1850 amounted to 11 /2 hours of tending the demanding, constantly spinning machinery: It is very clean work for the factory. I go to work at seven and work half an hour, then half an hour for breakfast, then work again from eight o’clock and work until half-past twelve. Commence again at one o’clock and work until half-past seven. I like it very well.

This “very clean work for the factory,” you will understand, is what we now know produces the lifelong debilitating illness termed “cotton lung.” At the age of 17 young Edward would take over the managership of the factory from his father Calvin, and in May 1859 it would be he who would hire local surveyor Thoreau to check the boundaries and the placement of the buildings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

September: Giuseppe Garibaldi came to Manhattan Island for the funeral of his friend Avezzana’s wife.

According to pages 114-16 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), Herman Melville would base his characterization of Captain Ahab largely upon Thomas Carlyle’s and Waldo Emerson’s analyses of Napoleon Bonaparte:

Nevertheless, for many of the details of Ahab’s character, especially those that distinguish him from traditional tragic heroes and make him a modern (that is, a nineteenth-century) protagonist, Herman Melville I think drew upon a particular account of Napoleon, that of Waldo Emerson in “REPRESENTATIVE MAN,” a book Melville probably read in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s small sitting room during a September morning in 1850. Emerson, fascinated in spite of himself by Napoleon, describes him as a representative of the “class of industry and skill,” someone able to “carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers,” because “the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.” Unlike the effete kings he defeated, Napoleon was, according to Emerson, “a worker in brass, in iron, in wood.... He knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that each should do after its kind.” He “would not hear of materialism,” however, and fondly indulged in abstract speculation, especially concerning religion and justice. Although Emerson attributes to Napoleon Bonaparte a deadly “absorbing egotism” and admits he has no scruples, he nevertheless defends him from the charge of cruelty, claiming he must not “be set down as cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, — but woe to what thing or person stood in his way!... He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way.” ...Some of [the characterization of the shaggy old whale hunter] resulted from another book Melville turned to in the summer of 1850, Thomas Carlyle’s HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP, which contained a treatment of Napoleon and the French Revolution that supplemented Emerson’s chapter and showed Melville an intriguing way of perceiving and presenting political revolt as ontological heroics.

The 3rd edition of THE SCARLET LETTER, printed from stereotype plates which did not correct the errors of the 2nd edition (again Nathaniel Hawthorne had not bothered himself to read proof, and yet further errors had been introduced). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1851

Thomas Carlyle, in his LIFE OF JOHN STERLING, referred not only to “ecclesiastical chimeras” but also to vacant philosophical “air-castles.” (How common, in that period, was this expression, which would make an appearance in Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN?)

WALDEN: I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

CASTLES IN THE AIR

Carlyle chose, as his next project, a biography of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

June 25, Wednesday: Thomas Carlyle sent his mother Margaret A. Carlyle in Chelsea a nigger joke, to the effect that the glass of the Crystal Palace had gotten to be so dusty and dim that its architect Sir Henry Cole was being referred to as “‘Koh-i-Nigger’ or the mountain of darkness!”

The word “secular” had been in use for some time, and so a nonce term “secularism” was introduced in The Reasoner, and was explained as confining itself to issues “which can be tested in this life” (this word would begin to come into currency in 1864 to describe an ongoing discernible process of the influence of religion being radically resisted in the spheres of politics and economics, etc.). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

Thomas Carlyle reissued his “The Negro Question” article of 1849 as a pamphlet. In reaction to John Stuart Mill’s reaction,67 and precisely in order to exacerbate its outrage, he retitled it “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.”68

THOMAS CARLYLE

67. While granting the obvious fact that blacks were inferior to whites, Mill had offended Carlyle by suggesting that if allowed to share in the benefits of civilization, blacks would be improved. 68. Here’s a question for the entire class. Had Carlyle’s article been originally entitled “The Woman Question,” and had Carlyle’s former friend Mill responded to the effect that while women were obviously inferior to men, if allowed to share in the benefits of civilization they would be improved — what new title might Carlyle have assigned to his article in this year of feminism in republishing it as a pamphlet? HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

During her visit to Thomas Carlyle in 1846 Margaret Fuller had commented “I accept the universe” and Carlyle seems to have overlooked the fact that Fuller was merely negating the thesis of Ivan in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, “I do not accept the world.”

Gad! She’d better!

When, in this year in Philadelphia at the first Women’s Rights Convention, Angelina Emily Grimké Weld’s Quaker sister Sarah Moore Grimké proposed Fuller’s “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion” as the motto of the movement, she was proposing a motto very similar to this “I accept the universe” sentiment. (Both Angelina and Sarah also contributed letters to be read at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse NY in September 1852. Susan B. Anthony was in attendance at this convention. Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s nomination as the convention’s president was rejected when she offended other ladies by displaying herself in a dress which exposed her neck and her arms.)

During the same year, Susan B. Anthony was incorporating women’s rights into three other reform movements: temperance, labor, and education. She was helping to organize the “Whole World’s Temperance Convention” in New-York. (The “World’s Temperance Convention,” held in the same city, had refused to recognize women delegates -— or “half” the world, as these women said.) That year, she also was helping a group of Rochester, New York seamstresses draft a code outlining fair wages for working women in the city.

“The needle is the chain of woman, and has fettered her more than the laws of the country.” — Professor Maria Mitchell HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

And, at a New York State Teacher’s Association meeting, also in Rochester, she was demanding that women be allowed to participate in discussions formerly opened only to men. FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

Even more of a “Teutomaniac” than the history professor Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle in this year reissued his 1849 essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” under the deliberately provocative new title “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.” Allowing the blacks of Jamaica to work in freedom in the expectation of material rewards was proving to be a relatively more expensive and therefore inefficient substitute for working them for free under threat of corporal punishment. The history of the island of Jamaica subsequent to the granting of freedom to the slaves amply demonstrated, to Carlyle, that the African could be induced to work without adequate reward only under compulsion. Carlyle was evidently not the only bloke around with that sort of “One simply cannot get good servants anymore” moan. In New-York, for instance, Dr. John H. Van Evrie was publishing the 1st edition of his extremely popular work on race differences, NEGROES AND NEGRO “SLAVERY”: THE FIRST AN INFERIOR RACE: THE LATTER ITS NORMAL CONDITION, a tome which suggested that Confucius, and many other wise and honorable ancient Chinese, must have been Caucasians — certainly those ancient Eastern philosopher guys were far too intelligent to have been mere Mongoloids.

Late Spring: Thomas Carlyle started to draft his THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT.

Mid-September: Thomas Carlyle had become exasperated at the Irish workmen he had hired to soundproof the room on his upper floor, they having fallen through the ceiling five times. He moved to separate lodgings for the duration of the renovations.69

December: The newly installed soundproofing wasn’t protecting Thomas Carlyle adequately from the noise of the fowls next door. He had to move to separate lodgings again to get some work done.70

69. What a time a modern safety engineer would have with an employer who provides such inherently dangerous tasks and work conditions, that his workmen fall through a ceiling not once but repeatedly! 70. Poor author, he should have had the iron nerves of a Henry Thoreau who could do his work of literary creation in a boardinghouse! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1854

October 9, Monday: Thomas Carlyle shaved for the last time. (From this point forward he would save himself half an hour each day by affecting the appearance of the sage.)

Joshua Stoddard of Worcester, Massachusetts received a patent for the first calliope. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1856

June 22, Sunday: Friend Daniel Ricketson spent the forenoon in Henry Thoreau’s room copying titles of books, etc. The Reverend Convers Francis was preaching in Concord that morning, and his prooftext was Colossians 1:27

and his topic “Christ in Us the Hope of Glory.” The thermometer reaching 95 at 3PM. At 4PM Ricketson and Thoreau went over to the Emerson home for tea by prior invitation, stopping by on the way to call on Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks. Then he, Thoreau, and Emerson went with the Emerson children to Walden Pond.

Thoreau walked back from the pond with Ellen Emerson and Edith Emerson while Ricketson, Waldo Emerson, and 12-year-old Edward Waldo Emerson “bathed” and discussed the birds and flowers that they had met on the way. Upon return to the Emersons, Ricketson had a chance to meet Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley with Miss Ripley, Mrs. Marsten Goodwin, and the Reverend Francis. They visited until 9, and Ricketson was in bed back at the Thoreaus’ at 10. He had found the day very satisfactory and mused to his journal about Concord’s opportunity of becoming the famous-author tourist trap it is today: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

My ideas of Mr. Emerson, with whom I had my second interview last night, are that he is a kind, gentle-natured man, even loving, but not what is usually termed warm-hearted. His mind does not strike me as being so great and strong as good in quality; it appears to me also limited as to its power. I should think he could rarely surprise one with any outburst of inspiration — his genius, for what he undoubtedly has, is sui generis. He is thoughtful, original, and only Emerson, and the founder of his race. It does not appear to me that he is even indebted to Carlyle, although the latter has recognized him as a kindred spirit. Emerson’s strength appears to me to lie in his honesty with himself; by his honesty he has produced a genuine article in the way of thought. He is an intelligent philosopher, a recipient of the divine cordial in doses rather homœopathic, but effectual specifics for those seeking a purer and better draught than what the schools afford. He is a blessing to the age. I am much interested in Concord, and should prefer it for a residence to almost any other place. The scenery is very picturesque in and about the village, and all appears quiet and peaceful, none of the stir and bustle of New Bedford. The Concord, or Musketaquid or grass-grown river, as my friend H.D.T. has learned its meaning from the Indians, runs along the edge of the village, which is chiefly on one street, although there are several others. It is a fine stream, and remarkable for its gentle current. With Thoreau I rowed up the river several miles, and had many pleasant views from different points. Walden Pond, by the shore where Thoreau built him a little house and there lived two years, is a small but delightful little lake, surrounded by woods. It is very deep and clear, a kind of well of nature. Concord has been for a long time the home or place of temporary abode for many of our most intellectual men and women, — commencing, so far as I am informed, with Dr. Ripley, then Emerson, Margaret Fuller for a short time as a visitor, Hawthorne, G.W. Curtis, H.D. Thoreau, the true Concord aborigine, William E. Channing, 2d, poet, Hon. Samuel Hoar, and his son, ex-Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. It is also the home of Mrs. Brooks, a true and stirring abolitionist. Concord has a large number of fine old houses, and the old parsonage, once the home of Dr. Ripley and near the battle-ground, is one of the finest old homes in this county. WALDO EMERSON NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS ELLERY CHANNING SAMUEL HOAR EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR EZRA RIPLEY MARGARET FULLER THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Mid-September: Thomas Carlyle was staying with the Ashburtons in Rossshire, being bored to tears by their grouse- shooting crowd and reading about himself in the pages of Waldo Emerson’s ENGLISH TRAITS.

A poem by James Ballantine, “Castles in the Air,” set to the tune “Bonnie Jean o’ Aberdeen,” would become his favorite song. The bonnie, bonnie bairn, wha sits poking in the ase, Glow’ring in the fire wi’ his wee round face; Laughing at the fuffin’ lowe, what sees he there? Ha! the young dreamer’s biggin’ castles in the air. His wee chubby face, and his touzie curly pow, Are laughing and nodding to the dancing lowe. He’ll brown his rosey cheeks, and singe his sunny hair, Glow’ring at the imps wi’ their castles in the air. He sees muckle castles towering to the moon! He sees little sodgers pu’ing them a’ doun! Worlds whombling up and doun, bleezing wi’a flare, — See how he loups! as they glimmer in the air. For a’ sae sage he looks, what can the laddie ken? He’s thinking upon naething, like mony mighty men; A wee thing mak’s us think, a sma’ thing mak’s us stare. — There are mair folk than him biggin’ castles in the air. Sic a night in winter may weel mak’ him cauld: His chin upon his buffy hand will soon mak’ him auld; His brow is brent sae braid, O pray that daddy Care, Would let the wean alane wi’ his castles in the air! He’ll glowre at the fire! and he’ll keek at the light! But many sparkling stars are swallow’d up by night; Aulder een than his are glamour’d by a glare, Hearts are broken, heads are turn’d wi’ castles in the air. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

“CASTLES IN THE AIR”

Thomas Carlyle was beginning to receive proofs, at a point late in this year, for his initial two volumes of THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT, and would be spending the entirety of 1857 in correction and revision of these proof pages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1857

The Reverend George Gilfillan’s CHRISTIANITY AND OUR ERA (Edinburgh: James Hogg). By this point his attitude toward Thomas Carlyle in England had darkened as considerably as had his attitude toward Waldo Emerson in America, and so he wrote about Carlyle on pages 160-161 that “discontent has darkened into something fiercer than misanthropy — into universal hatred. … His aversion to Christianity … has of late assumed a deeper shade. … His system, always a flower-dressed corpse, is fast becoming putrid.”

Thomas Carlyle spent this entire year correcting and revising proof pages for the initial two volumes of his THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT (the balance of the project would not be complete until 1865). Robert Tait painted the Carlyles in their front room, with its dark wainscotting, its piano and oval table and details very much as preserved today, titling his picture “A Chelsea Interior”:71

As you can see from the above carefully representational painting, photography had not yet at this point achieved the level of penetration at which it could begin its utter replacement of such representational effort. That sort of acceptance would come later; however, during this year a photograph was made by the light of an electric carbon-arc lamp using power from a mammoth low-voltage battery (a means of running an electric carbon-arc lamp with low current by stepping the voltage way up would not be devised until 1879).

71. National Trust Photographic Library / Michael Boys. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1858

Publication of the various volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT would proceed between this year and 1865.72 BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES has preserved for us the following snippet from Montesquieu’s APHORISMS, from out of this series of serious tomes:

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books. — Life of FREDERICK THE GREAT. Book XVI, Chapter I.

September: The immediate proceeds from the first two volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT were turning out to amount to some £2,800, a princely sum.

72. During the earlier period of his career, Thomas Carlyle had been popular in New England but not in the American South. It was only this later Carlyle, of CROMWELL and of FREDERICK THE GREAT, the Carlyle who proclaimed “the natural propensity of men to grovel or to rule” (a phrase by Van Wyck Brooks), who had become immensely popular in our South. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1859

Thomas Carlyle read John Stuart Mill’s essay ON LIBERTY and confided that “I never read a serious, ingenious, clear, logical Essay with more perfect and profound dissent from the basis it rests upon, and most of the conclusions it arrives at.” What did Carlyle’s objections amount to? “As if it were a sin to control, or coerce into better methods, human swine in any way; — as if the greater and more universal the ‘liberty’ of human creatures of the Swine genus, the more fatal all-destructive and intolerable were not the ‘slavery’ the few human creatures of the Man genus are thereby thrown into, and kept groaning powerless under.”

May 1, Sunday: A revolution against Austrian rule began in Parma.

In the Ungers Casino of Vienna, Nachtigall-Polka op.222 by Johann Strauss was performed for the initial time.

New York State began directly letting its contracts on canal work, no longer allowing that function to be performed by the supervisor of the Contracting Board.

At this point the Unitarian congregation of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, in Cincinnati, Ohio was at a low of a couple hundred, since the BIBLE believers of his congregation had recently separated themselves to constitute a “Church of the Redeemer,” and so he delivered his “East and West” sermon in which he described the Redeemer concept of Jesus Christ as “an idea out of the dark ages.” The Reverend Conway confessed he was no “believer in what the churches call Christianity” as it would be a “pious insult to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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holiest relations of life” to suppose Jesus to have lacked a human biological father.73

74 Waldo Emerson lectured on ““WEALTH”,” a topic appropriate for downtown Boston, to the Parker Fraternity in the 1,500 comfortable seats of the Boston Music Hall, and wrote to Thomas Carlyle on the American race

73. Moncure Daniel Conway. EAST AND WEST: AN INAUGURAL DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CINCINNATI, O., MAY 1, 1859, BY M.D. CONWAY, MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. Pamphlet. Cincinnati: Truman & Spofford, 1859. READ THE FULL TEXT

74. The megachurch “28th Congregational Society” established by the Reverend Theodore Parker, who had gone to live in Italy in an attempt to recover his health. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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problem:

I flatter myself I see some emerging of our people from the poison of their politics the insolvency of slavery begins to show, & we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black Vomit extirpating by mere diking & planting. Another ground of contentment is the mending of the race here.

My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term “Africanism” not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term “Africanism,” nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.

This “putrid Black Vomit” of which the Sage of Concord here speaks is of course the yellow fever, an infection which needs to be extirpated. The disease was called Yellow Fever because it damages the liver in such manner as to cause jaundicing of skin and eyes, and was called black vomit because a classic manifestations of severe HDT WHAT? INDEX

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infection was hemorrhage into the mucous membranes, with frightful vomiting of dark blood.

However, putrid Black vomit also was, of course, in the opinion of the Sage of Concord, the words that were coming out of the mouths of Americans of color, whose infectious thoughts and presumptions were as delusion-provoking in the white man as the fevers of this plague. What we would regard as two separate topics, the prevention of the tropical disease and the prevention of the tropical human, were quite conflated for a 19th- Century white man of Emerson’s mentality. The dark man and the dark vomit were predicting the same thing: the blackness of death. Preventing the one was preventing the other.

(Is it any wonder that this Emerson had blacklisted Frederick Douglass a decade earlier for membership in the Town and Country Club? His dark words would have been a “disabling virus” within polite literary discourse. Society, meaning white society, was not ready for that.)

May 1: Hear the ruby-crowned wren. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We accuse savages of worshipping only the bad spirit, or devil, though they may distinguish both a good and a bad; but they regard only that one which they fear and worship the devil only. We too are savages in this, doing precisely the same thing. This occurred to me yesterday as I sat in the woods admiring the beauty of the blue butterfly. We are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the earth and cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they eat more grubs than they do cherries, and the only account of the insects which the State encourages is of the “Insects Injurious to Vegetation.” We too admit both a good and a bad spirit, but we worship chiefly the bad spirit, whom we fear. We do not think first of the good but of the harm things will do us. The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects–butterflies, etc.– which God has made and set before us which the State ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are injurious to vegetation! This is the way we glorify God and enjoy him forever. Come out here and behold a thousand painted butterflies and other beautiful insects which people the air, then go to the libraries and see what kind of prayer and glorification of God is there recorded. Massachusetts has published her report on “Insects Injurious to Vegetation,” and our neighbor the “Noxious Insects of New York.” We have attended to the evil and said nothing about the good. This is looking a gift horse in the mouth with a vengeance. Children are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. The parents remind me of the devil, but the children of God. Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, “Is it not poisonous?” Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. So described, they are as monstrous as if they should be magnified a thousand diameters. Suppose I should see and describe men and houses and trees and birds as if they were a thousand times larger than they are! With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature. P. M.–To Second Division. Very warm. Looking from Clamshell over Hosmer’s meadow, about half covered with water, see hundreds of turtles, chiefly picta, now first lying out in numbers on the brown pieces of meadow which rise above the water. You see their black backs shine on these hummocks left by the ice, fifty to eighty rods off. They would rapidly tumble off if you went much nearer. This heat and stillness draws them up. It is remarkable how surely they are advertised of the first warm and still days, and in an hour or two are sure to spread themselves over the hummocks. There is to-day a general resurrection of them, and there they bask in the sun. It is their sabbath. At this distance, if you are on the lookout, especially with a glass, you can discover what numbers of them there are, but they are shy and will drop into the water on a near approach. All up and down our river meadows their backs are shining in the sun to-day. It is a turtle day. As we sat on the steep hillside south of Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, we noticed a remarkable whirlwind on a small scale, which carried up the oak leaves from that Island copse in the meadow. The oak leaves now hang thinly and are very dry and light, and these small whirlwinds, which seem to be occasioned by the sudden hot and calm weather (like whirlpools or dimples in a smooth stream), wrench them off, and up they go, somewhat spirally, in countless flocks like birds, with a rustling sound; and higher and higher into the clear blue deeps they rise above our heads, till they are fairly lost to sight, looking, when last seen, mere light specks against the blue, like stars by day, in fact. I could distinguish some, I have no doubt, five or six hundred feet high at least, but if I looked aside a moment they were lost. The largest oak leaves looked not bigger than a five-cent-piece. These were drifting eastward,–to descend where? Methought that, instead of decaying on the earth or being consumed by fire, these were being translated and would soon be taken in at the windows of heaven. I had never observed this phenomenon so remarkable. The flight of the leaves. This was quite local, and it was comparatively still where we sat a few rods on one side. Thousands went up together in a rustling flock. Many of the last oak leaves hang thus ready to go up. I noticed two or more similar whirlwinds in the woods elsewhere this afternoon. One took up small twigs and clusters of leaves from the ground, matted together. I could easily see where it ran along with its nose (or point of its tunnel) close to the ground, stirring up the leaves as it travelled, like the snout of some hunting or rooting animal. See and hear chewink. See a little snake on the dry twigs and chips in the sun, near the arbutus, uniformly brown (or reddish-brown) above except a yellowish ring on the occiput, the head also lighter than the body; beneath vermilion, with apparently a row of light dots along each side. It is apparently Coluber amaenus (?), except that it has the yellowish ring. Luzula campestris. Also the Oryzopsis Canadensis by the Major Heywood path-side, say a day, or April 30th, six inches high or more, with fine bristle-like leaves. See a thrasher. What is that rush at Second Division? It now forms a dense and very conspicuous mass some four rods long and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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one foot high. The top for three inches is red, and the impression at a little distance is like that made by sorrel. Certainly no plant of this character exhibits such a growth now, i. e. in the mass. It surprises you to see it, carries your thoughts on to June. The climbing fern is persistent, i. e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

June 15, Friday: According to urban legend, this was the day of the founding of the 1st town in the Idaho Territory, Franklin. The settlers were 13 families of Mormons who were presuming themselves to be within the territory of a Greater Utah, who named their place “Franklin” in honor of one of the current dozen leaders of their Church, Apostle Franklin D. Richards. Actually, Lemhi, Idaho, site of Fort Lemhi, had been the 1st Mormon settlement in the Idaho Territory and had been in existence since 1855, while Lewiston (named overtly in memory of early passer-by Merriwether Lewis but covertly in honor of the Maine town of Lewiston, origin of one of the settlers), was also already in existence and would become the state capital. In actuality nothing in particular of record happened in this tiny settlement during this day (Brigham Young had visited on June 10th, in between wives, to consecrate Preston Thomas as Bishop over the community, which had been arriving in wagon trains during that spring). So, why do we now have this urban legend, sponsored on the internet, that on this day the 1st town in the Idaho Territory was created, and named Franklin? –Because on March 7, 1911 the Idaho Legislature would belatedly set June 15th apart as “Pioneer Day” and said Legislature would HDT WHAT? INDEX

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belatedly decree this to constitute its explanation. –And who are you to say nay to your elected representatives who have determined it to be in the public interest to pin this tale on this Franklin donkey, may I enquire?

Anyway, present-day Franklin, although close, is not exactly on the site of this 1860 Franklin.

Joseph Emerson Worcester having issued his A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, George P. Marsh

compared this with the latest dictionary issued by the Webster empire, for the New-York WORLD, finding Noah Webster to be by contrast “unscholarly and unsound.” Worcester eventually would come to have the support of Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, Sr., Daniel Webster, and The Atlantic Monthly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

January 27, Sunday: Thomas Carlyle dined with John Ruskin.

[NO THOREAU JOURNAL ENTRY FOR 27 JANUARY]

January 29, Tuesday: The state of Georgia’s declaration of secession.

Kansas was admitted to the Union.

Thomas Carlyle acknowledged receipt of Waldo Emerson’s CONDUCT OF LIFE.

[NO THOREAU JOURNAL ENTRY FOR 29 JANUARY]

Fall: Thomas Carlyle determined that he would stand with the cause of the cultured white gentleman of the American South. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

May: The 3d volume of Thomas Carlyle’s THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT came off the presses. The understanding that Carlyle was espousing the doctrine of “might makes right” was becoming unavoidable. A reviewer commented that “It seems a sorrowful waste that such powers should be devoted to whitewashing despot kings, advocating human bondage, and worshipping physical force.”

John Strong Newberry offered a presentation in Boston that would induce the American Association of Science to embrace the theory that it had been solid ice sheets rather than debris-laden icebergs that had brought layers of rock fragments to cover much of the northern portions of America, and this not merely once but several times. During the years 1862-1870 he and Charles Whittlesey would be persuading their discipline that it had been massive glaciers that had formed the Great Lakes: BSNH PROCEEDINGS

Notes on the Surface Geology of the Basin of the Great Lakes. By Dr. J. S. Newberry. PALEONTOLOGY OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION

The changes which have taken place in the physical geography of the country surrounding the great Lakes, geologically speaking, within a recent period, have been very great; how great, and dependent upon what causes, we cannot as yet definitely state, as much more study than has hitherto been given to the subject will be necessary before all its difficulties and obscurities shall be removed. These changes to which I have referred apparently include (a) great alterations in the level of the water-surface in the lake basin, and (b) in the elevation of this portion of the continent as compared with the sea-level, with (c) corresponding alternations of temperature, all followed by their natural sequences. The facts which lead to these conclusions are briefly as follows:—

(1) The surfaces of the rocks underlying all portions of the basin of the great lakes, except where affected by recent atmospheric action, are planed down, polished, scratched, and furrowed, precisely as those are which have been observed beneath heavy sheets and masses of moving ice. The effect of this action is strikingly exhibited in the hard trap ledges of the shores of Lake Superior; by the roches HDT WHAT? INDEX

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moutonnés of the granitic islands in the St. Mary’s River and Lake Huron; by all the hard, rocky margins of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan; by the Devonian limestones underlying the surface deposits of the peninsulas of Canada West and Michigan; by the planed and grooved surfaces of the Coniferous limestone beneath the west end of Lake Erie, and composing the group of islands off Sandusky; by nearly all the surface rocks, when hard enough to retain glacial furrows, of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, &c.

(2) Upon these grooved and polished surfaces we find resting, First, A series of blue laminated clays in horizontal beds, containing few shells, as far as yet observed, but, in abundance, water-worn trunks of coniferous trees with leaves of fir and cedar, and cones of a pine (apparently Abies balsamea, Juniperus Virginiana, and Pinus strobus). Second, Yellow clays, sands, gravel, and boulders. Among the latter are granite, trap, azoic slates, silurian fossiliferous limestone, masses of native copper, &c., all of northern origin, and generally traceable to points several hundred miles distant from where they are found.

(3) Millions of these granite boulders and masses of fossiliferous limestone, often many tons in weight, are now scattered over the surface of the slopes of the highlands of Ohio; and, in some places, collections of them are seen occupying areas of several acres, and numbering many thousands, all apparently having been brought here together and from one locality.

(4) At various points are found remarkable pits, conical depressions in the superficial deposits, which have been attributed to icebergs stranding and melting, dropping their loads of gravel and stone around their resting-places.

(5) The beds of clay and other transported materials mentioned above are several hundred feet in thickness, extending from at least one hundred feet below the present water-level in the lakes to points five hundred feet or more above that level.

(6) During the “glacial period” to which I have referred, the whole country must have been relatively higher than at present, and the drainage much more free; for, during this epoch, the valleys of the streams were excavated to a far greater depth than they are at present. This is proven by the explorations which have been made in all the country bordering Lake Erie in search of rock oil. The borings made upon the Upper Ohio and its tributaries, as well as along the rivers emptying into Lake Erie, show that all these streams flow above their ancient beds, — the Mahoning and Shenango, at their junction, one hundred and fifty feet, the Cuyahoga at its mouth over one hundred feet above the bottom of their rocky troughs. The valley of the Mississippi HDT WHAT? INDEX

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at St. Louis and Dubuque, and the Missouri at and above Council Bluffs, exhibit precisely similar phenomena, — deep troughs excavated in the rock by the ancient representations of the present streams, subsequently submerged and filled up with drift clay, gravel, or loess; these troughs having been but partially cleared of these accumulations by the action of the rivers during what we call the present epoch.

(7) Along the margins of the great lakes are distinct lines of ancient beaches, which show that in comparatively recent times the water-level in these lakes was full one hundred feet higher than at present. The facts enumerated above seem to justify us in the following inferences in regard to the former history of this portion of our continent.

(A) At a period corresponding with, if not in time, at least in the chain of events, the glacial epoch of the Old World, the lake region, in common with all the northern portion of the American continent, was raised several thousand feet above the level of the sea. In this period the fiords of the Atlantic (and probably Pacific) coasts were excavated, as also the deep channels of drainage which, far above their bottoms, are traversed by the Mississippi and its branches, and indeed most of the streams of the lake country. During this period Lake Erie did not exist as a lake, but as a valley, traversed by a river to which the Cuyahoga, Vermillion, Chagrin, &c., were tributaries. In this “glacial epoch” all the lake country was covered with ice, by which the rocky surface was planed down and furrowed, and left precisely in the condition of that beneath the modern moving glaciers in mountain valleys. Could we examine the surfaces upon which rest the enormous sheets of ice which cover so much of the extreme arctic lands, we should doubtless find them exhibiting the same appearance.

(B) At the close of the glacial epoch all the basin of the great lakes was submerged beneath fresh water, which formed a vast inland sea. From the waters of this sea were precipitated the laminated clays, the oldest of our drift deposits, containing trunks and branches of coniferous trees, a few fresh-water and land shells, but no oceanic fossils. Parallel beds on the St. Lawrence, as shown by Pro£ Dawson, generally contain marine remains. It would seem, then, that this was a period of general subsidence throughout the northern portion of our continent, and that the Atlantic then covered a large part of New England and Canada East.

(c) Subsequent to the deposit of the blue clays, an immense quantity of gravel and boulders was transported from the region north of the great lakes, and scattered over a wide area south HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of them. That these materials were never carried by currents of water is certain, as their gravity, especially that of the copper, would bid defiance to the transporting power of any current which could be driven across the lake basin; indeed, that such was not the method by which they were carried is conclusively proved by the fact, that, between their places of origin and where they are now found, the blue clay beds previously deposited now lie continuous and undisturbed. By any agent, ice or water, moving over the rocky bottom of the lake basin, carrying with it gravel and boulders, these clay beds would have been entirely broken up and removed. The conclusion is, therefore, inevitable, that these immense masses of Northern drill; were floated to their resting-places. All the facts which have come under my observation seem to me to indicate that, during countless years and centuries, icebergs freighted with stones and gravel were floating from the northern margin of this inland sea, melting and scattering their cargoes on or near its southern shores. Subsequently, as its waters were gradually withdrawn, these transplanted materials, rolled, comminuted, and rearranged by the slowly retreating shore-waves, were left as we now find them, heaps and imperfectly stratified beds of sand and gravel.

(D) In the lake ridges (ancient beaches), which have been so fully described by Col. Whittlesey and others, we have evidence that the water of the lakes remained for considerable intervals much higher than at present. By careful study of these ridges we may hereafter be able to map the outlines of the great inland sea, of which our lakes are now the miniature representatives, and to determine by what causes, whether by local subsidence of some portion of its shores, or the cutting down of channels of drainage, this great depression of the water-level was effected. If, with the topography of the basin of the lakes remaining precisely what it now is, the water-level were raised one hundred feet, to the ancient beach which runs through the city of Cleveland, the whole of the chain of lakes would be thrown together and form a great inland sea. By this sea, a large portion of the State of New York would be submerged, much of Canada lying in the basin of the St. Lawrence, most of the peninsula of Canada West, the greater part of Michigan, and a wide area south and west of the lakes in the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, &c. Indeed, raised to this level, the water of the lakes would submerge deeply the summit between Lake Ontario and the Mohawk, and escape at once through the Hudson to the ocean, as well as by the outlet of the St. Lawrence. At the west a similar state of things would exist; the Kankakee summit, the divide between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, now scarcely more than twenty feet above the lake level, would be deeply buried, and the whole valley of the Mississippi flooded. We apparently have proof that the lake waters did once flow over this summit, as it is said HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that lake shells are found beneath the soil over nearly all parts of it. While it is entirely possible that the low points in the rim of this great basin have been worn down to the present inconsiderable altitude by the action of the water flowing from it, and that the former inland sea was drained by the simple process of the wearing down of its outlets, we may well hesitate to accept such an explanation of the phenomena until conclusive evidence of its truth shall be obtained. Geological history affords us so many examples of the instability of our terra firma, that we can readily imagine that local changes of level in the land have not only greatly affected the breadth of water surface in the lake basin, but have perhaps in some instances produced what we have supposed to be proofs of great and general elevations of the water-level, which are, in fact, only indications of a local rise of the land. Nothing short of years of patient observation and study will enable us to ·write anything like a complete history of the great changes which have.taken place in the physical geography of the basin of the great lakes, within a comparatively recent period. Yet we may hope, and fairly expect, that by carefully tracing the lake ridges, measuring their elevation above the present water-level at various points, examining minutely the present and former outlets through which the surplus water of the lakes escapes or has escaped, that much more than we now know will be learned of this interesting subject. To stimulate inquiry in this direction, is the main purpose for which these brief notes are now written.

Winter Lecture Season of ’62/63, at the Odeon in Boston:

The Lowell Institute 22d Season of the Lowell Institute x xx lectures x xx lectures x xx lectures x xx lectures

Winter: Thomas Carlyle would spend this season correcting the proofs for the 4th volume of THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT while hard at work on the 5th volume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

August: Thomas Carlyle sadly blundered by allowing the following short parody to be published over his initials in Macmillan’s Magazine: Peter of the North (to Paul of the South). — “Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do! You are going straight to Hell, you ———!” Paul. — “Good words, Peter! The risk is my own; I am willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my own method.” Peter. — “No, I won’t. I will beat your brains out first!” (And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet manage it.) — The piece went over poorly in a Brit culture that had been imbibing deeply of the doctrine of John Stuart Mill’s ON LIBERTY, and which had just been alerted from the issuance of his volumes on the German prince to the existence of a serious defect in Carlyle’s style of thinking. In this situation The Spectator expressed a polite doubt that Carlyle was “altogether serious” and followed this with a polite hope that “no Englishman will be [slavery’s] last defender.” In the northern states of the USA, Carlyle’s THE NIGGER QUESTION was being used to demonstrate that this deep thinker was in bed with the enemy.

The period in which the Transcendentalists of New England had been fascinated by this British curmudgeon was a period that was safely in the forgotten past. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1864

March: The 4th volume of Thomas Carlyle’s 6-volume THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT came off the presses. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

January 15, Sunday: In Concord, Moses Prichard died.

Thomas Carlyle took the last ms leaves of his THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT to the post-office. He would comment that his labors on this history had nearly killed him:75 Evening still vivid to me. I was not joyful of mood; sad rather, mournfully thankful, but indeed half-killed, and utterly wearing out and sinking into stupefied collapse after my “comatose” efforts to continue the long fight of thirteen years to finis. On her [Jane’s] face, too, when I went out, there was a silent, faint, and pathetic smile, which I well felt at the moment, and better now!

October: The Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, put down a rising at Morant Bay by the black population of the island in which 18 whites had been killed and 31 wounded, by the imposition of a very severe martial law. Over the course of the conflict 439 of the blacks were killed, 354 of these being hangings subsequent to courts martial. In addition there was of course a great deal of flogging, and the torching of various black settlements. Back home in England, as news of this began to filter in, there was outrage, and a judicial inquiry into the conduct of the governor was being contemplated. John Stuart Mill, John Bright, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Leslie Stephen would form a committee to seek the governor’s prosecution for malfeasance. Thomas Carlyle and Jane Carlyle would come down 100% on Governor Eyre’s side — and Mill would condemn sympathizers such as these as “the same kind of people who have so long upheld negro slavery.” As a result of this unrest Jamaica would be made a Crown Colony under full British rule.

75. William Allingham would characterize this work as “the reductio ad absurdum of Carlyleism.” Simon Heffer would say: The book is shot through with Carlyle’s fundamental prejudices. It is a pursuit of a hero, one made all the more special by his self-reclamation from a degenerate, effete youth. It is a celebration of Germanism, more particularly Prussianism, and the resolute process of Germanisation. Above all, it is the text adduced, quite fairly, by Carlyle’s critics to prove his belief in the “might is right” thesis. Carlyle paints Frederick as a man of peace who, in his desire for peace, had frequently to go to war, because of the provocations of his rivals. “He is a very demon for fighting,” says his biographer. He is also “the stoutest King walking the Earth just now, may well be a universal one. A man better not to be meddled with, if he will be at peace, as he professes to wish being.” ...The need to fight to maintain peace was an excuse used by Adolf Hitler for his conquests, with less cause than in the case of Frederick. But the real example for Hitler was in Frederick’s power of recovery when all seemed lost, in the penultimate winter of the Seven Years’ War. That was why Goebbels read the book to his Führer in the bunker, to cheer him up; and it is the philosophical smell of the book, as much as its style and structure, that alienates modern readers.... Carlyle never quite gives a naked message of “might is right”; but endorses might being right when might is backed by veracity. One then has to argue with Carlyle’s judgment of what constitutes veracity, a quality often concomitant with inhumanity. PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1866

Thomas Carlyle returned to Scotland to deliver his inaugural address as lord rector of Edinburgh University.

April 21, Saturday: Prussia and Austria agreed to stand down their armies on their common border.

Jane Carlyle died. Thomas Carlyle grieved, and from this point forward would lack the impetus a great deal (he would however open and edit her diary). Dr. John Aitken Carlyle would suggest that henceforth he and his bereaved brother might live together (the kind offer would be reluctantly declined).

August 29: The first meeting of the committee to defend Governor Eyre’s strong-man conduct in suppression of the black revolt on the island of Jamaica against charges of excessive brutality. The members included Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, John Tyndall, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1867

October: Bankrupt, Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Hyde Reid relocated from England to a furnished rental in Newport, Rhode Island. In New-York, the author would found Onward Magazine.

By this point Thomas Carlyle’s “Shooting Niagara” had sold 7,000 copies: One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments, — with a turn for Nigger Melodies, and the like: — he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant. Under penalty of Heaven’s curse, neither party to this pre-appointment shall neglect or misdo his duties therein; — and it is certain (though as yet widely unknown), Servantship on the nomadic principle, at the rate of so many shillings per day, cannot be other than misdone. The whole world rises in shrieks against you, on hearing of such a thing.

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1869

March 4, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle visited the Queen of England in her castle home. At one point this confirmed explainer became so intense in informing her about the beauties of his Galloway that he pinned her dress to the floor with the leg of his chair.76

Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as President of the United States of America. INAUGURAL ADDRESS

76. Talk about captivating one’s audience! We were not amused. To her journal, Victoria would describe this man as “a strange- looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1870

Thomas Carlyle lost the use of his right hand. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1871

Thomas Carlyle commented “I often think of Immanuel Kant’s notion –no real Time or Space, these are only appearances– and think it is true.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1872

May: Thomas Carlyle was introduced to the Empress of Germany upon her visit to London. She informed him to his face that he himself was the sort of “hero” which he had described in his writings.77

Fall: Sojourner Truth had sponsored the reelection of President Ulysses S. Grant but, when she attempted to cast a ballot in Battle Creek, Michigan, she of course was turned aside.

While his home “Bush” in Concord was being rebuilt after the fire, Waldo Emerson visited Thomas Carlyle in London. He would stay through the entire winter season, not leaving until spring had arrived. His host would not, however, be as involved with him as during earlier visits. On his way home, during May 1873, he would visit Egypt.

(On the following screen Emerson poses with a grandchild.)

77. This may have been a noble courtesy but we can be certain this commoner did his very best to credit her. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1873

December 6, Saturday: Thomas Carlyle was fully 78 years old and made his last legible entry in his journal. He remarked upon the worthlessness of his spirit now that his body had become so old and weak and ill.78

78. And by this point all this wasn’t just his hypochondria any longer! HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1874

Thomas Carlyle accepted a Prussian Order of Merit proffered by Otto von Bismarck while rejecting an English baronetcy or G.C.B. proffered by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

August 22, Saturday: Although he was nearly twice her age, William Allingham got married with Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson, the water-colorist. The newlyweds would take a residence in Trafalgar Square, Chelsea in order to be close to William’s famously irascible elder friend, Thomas Carlyle. Here is the bridegroom, in his dressing gown, his reading loupe having fallen out of his eye, fast asleep over a book and able therefore to sit very still as his young wife sketches: HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1875

Sir Edgar Boehm sculpted the likeness of Thomas Carlyle that now sits on the Chelsea embankment at the end of Cheyne Row.79

79. Sir Edgar did a gold medallion as well. Fortunately Edgar was male, and so his efforts as a sculptor could be received and regarded and rewarded. In this same year, in America, a model of a colossal seated bronze of Senator Charles Sumner (yes, the one that now sits on an island in the middle of Peabody Street in Harvard Square in Cambridge MA) was being entered into a competition, anonymously. This model would be announced as the winner of the competition but then the judges would be forced to re-award this honor obtained through fraud when they belatedly were made aware that the impressive model had been prepared by a mere female, someone named Ann Whitney. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

Summer: Thomas Carlyle inquired of Charles Darwin, whether humans might again become apes.

November: William Allingham and Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson Allingham’s first son was named Gerald Carlyle Allingham in honor of their neighbor Thomas Carlyle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

Winter: Harvard University granted an honorary doctorate to Thomas Carlyle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

1878

Edith Emerson Forbes wrote to Thomas Carlyle that “Father is very well and very happy. Mother often says that he is the happiest person she ever knew — he is so uniformly in good spirits, and waking each morning in a joyful mood.” WALDO EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

1881

February 5, Saturday: Thomas Carlyle died at Chelsea. The body would be buried near his family in Ecclefechan churchyard. Soon, at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Waldo Emerson would read a paper on the significance of his life.

After his death William and Helen Allingham would have no further reason to remain in this pricey neighborhood in London, and so they would soon be relocating to the sleepy hamlet of Sandhills, near Witley in Surrey. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

February 10: A report from Walt Whitman in regard to the death of Thomas Carlyle: “Specimen Days”

Death Of Carlyle And so the flame of the lamp, after long wasting and flickering, has gone out entirely. As a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling parturition periods, than Carlyle. He belongs to our own branch of the stock too; neither Latin nor Greek, but altogether Gothic. Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he was himself more a French revolution than any of his volumes. In some respects, [Page 887] so far in the Nineteenth century, the best equipt, keenest mind, even from the college point of view, of all Britain; only he had an ailing body. Dyspepsia is to be traced in every page, and now and then fills the page. One may include among the lessons of his life — even though that life stretch’d to amazing length — how behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a sort of casting vote. Two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the man, sometimes pulling him different ways like wild horses. He was a cautious, conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of modern radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded reform, demanded change — often terribly at odds with his scornful brain. No author ever put so much wailing and despair into his books, sometimes palpable, oftener latent. He reminds me of that passage in Young’s poems where as death presses closer and closer for his prey, the soul rushes hither and thither, appealing, shrieking, berating, to escape the general doom. Of short-comings, even positive blur-spots, from an American point of view, he had serious share. Not for his merely literary merit, (though that was great) — not as “maker of books,” but as launching into the self-complacent atmosphere of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock, is Carlyle’s final value. It is time the English-speaking peoples had some true idea about the verteber of genius, namely power. As if they must always have it cut and bias’d to the fashion, like a lady’s cloak! What a needed service he performs! How he shakes our comfortable reading circles with a touch of the old Hebraic anger and prophecy — and indeed it is just the same. Not Isaiah himself more scornful, more threatening: “The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet: And the glorious beauty which is on the head of the fat valley shall be a fading flower.” (The word prophecy is much misused; it seems narrow’d to prediction merely. That is not the main sense of the Hebrew word translated “prophet;” it means one whose mind bubbles up and pours forth as a fountain, from inner, divine spontaneities revealing God. Prediction is a very minor part of prophecy. The great matter is to reveal and [Page 888] outpour the God-like suggestions pressing for birth in the soul. This is briefly the doctrine of the Friends or Quakers.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

DEATH OF Thomas Carlyle [continued] Then the simplicity and amid ostensible frailty the towering strength of this man — a hardy oak knot, you could never wear out — an old farmer dress’d in brown clothes, and not handsome — his very foibles fascinating. Who cares that he wrote about Dr. Francia, and “Shooting Niagara” — and “the Nigger Question,” — and didn’t at all admire our United States? (I doubt if he ever thought or said half as bad words about us as we deserve.) How he splashes like leviathan in the seas of modern literature and politics! Doubtless, respecting the latter, one needs first to realize, from actual observation, the squalor, vice and doggedness ingrain’d in the bulk-population of the British Islands, with the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkeyism everywhere, to understand the last meaning in his pages. Accordingly, though he was no chartist or radical, I consider Carlyle’s by far the most indignant comment or protest anent the fruits of feudalism to-day in Great Britain — the increasing poverty and degradation of the homeless, landless twenty millions, while a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, possess the entire soil, the money, and the fat berths. Trade and shipping, and clubs and culture, and prestige, and guns, and a fine select class of gentry and aristocracy, with every modern improvement, cannot begin to salve or defend such stupendous hoggishness. The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider, or try to consider, for a moment, the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery. The show were still a gay and rich one — Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more — horsemen and rapid infantry, and banners flying — but the last heavy roar so dear to the ear of the train’d soldier, and that settles fate and victory, would be lacking. For the last three years we in America have had transmitted glimpses of a thin- bodied, lonesome, wifeless, childless, very old man, lying on a sofa, kept out of bed by indomitable will, but, of late, never well enough to take the open air. I have noted this news from time to time in brief descriptions in the papers. A week ago I read such an item just before I started [Page 889] out for my customary evening stroll between eight and nine. In the fine cold night, unusually clear, (Feb. 5, ’81,) as I walk’d some open grounds adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, and his approaching — perhaps even then actual — death, filled me with thoughts eluding statement, and curiously blending with the scene. The planet Venus, an hour high in the west, with all her volume and lustre recover’d, (she has been shorn and languid for nearly a year,) including an additional sentiment I never noticed before — not merely voluptuous, Paphian, steeping, fascinating — now with calm commanding seriousness and hauteur — the Milo Venus now. Upward to the zenith, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon past her quarter, trailing in procession, with the Pleiades following, and the constellation Taurus, and red Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion strode through the southeast, with his glittering belt — and a trifle below hung the sun of the night, Sirius. Every star dilated, more vitreous, nearer than usual. Not as in some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible, and just as nigh. Berenice’s hair showing every gem, and new ones. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

DEATH OF Thomas Carlyle [concluded] To the northeast and north the Sickle, the Goat and kids, Cassiopea, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying. (To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight.) And now that he has gone hence, can it be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an identity still? In ways perhaps eluding all the statements, lore and speculations of ten thousand years — eluding all possible statements to mortal sense — does he yet exist, a definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual — perhaps now wafted in space among those stellar systems, which, suggestive and limitless as they are, merely edge more limitless, far more suggestive systems? I have no doubt of it. In silence, of a fine night, such questions are answer’d to the soul, the best answers that can be given. With me, too, when depress’d by some specially sad event, or tearing problem, I wait till I go out under the stars for the last voiceless satisfaction. [Page 890]

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW Later Thoughts and Jottings. There is surely at present an inexplicable rapport (all the more piquant from its contradictoriness) between that deceas’d author and our United States of America — no matter whether it lasts or not.1 As we Westerners assume definite shape, and result in formations and fruitage unknown before, it is curious with what a new sense our eyes turn to representative outgrowths of crises and personages in the Old World. Beyond question, since Carlyle’s death, and the publication of Froude’s memoirs, not only the interest in his books, but every personal bit regarding the famous Scotchman — his dyspepsia, his buffetings, his parentage, his paragon of a wife, his career in Edinburgh, in the lonesome nest on Craigenputtock moor, and then so many years in London — is probably wider and livelier to-day in this country than in his own land. Whether I succeed or no, I, too, reaching across the Atlantic and taking the man’s dark fortune-telling of humanity and politics, would offset it all, (such is the fancy that comes to me,) by a far more profound horoscope- casting of those themes — G.W.F. Hegel’s.2 [Page 891]

1.It will be difficult for the future — judging by his books, personal dissympathies, &c., — to account for the deep hold this author has taken on the present age, and the way he has color’d its method and thought. I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as affecting myself. But there could be no view, or even partial picture, of the middle and latter part of our Nineteenth century, that did not markedly include Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many others, literary productions, works of art, personal identities, events,) there has been an impalpable something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to — those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy — even from the most erudite and sincere mind of Europe. 2.Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during their lives consider’d the United States worthy of serious mention, all the principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: “Speculations for the use of North America, and Democracy there, with the relations of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the New.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] First, about a chance, a never-fulfill’d vacuity of this pale cast of thought — this British Hamlet from Cheyne row, more puzzling than the Danish one, with his contrivances for settling the broken and spavin’d joints of the world’s government, especially its democratic dislocation. Carlyle’s grim fate was cast to live and dwell in, and largely embody, the parturition agony and qualms of the old order, amid crowded accumulations of ghastly morbidity, giving birth to the new. But conceive of him (or his parents before him) coming to America, recuperated by the cheering realities and activity of our people and country — growing up and delving face-to-face resolutely among us here, especially at the West — inhaling and exhaling our limitless air and eligibilities — devoting his mind to the theories and developments of this Republic amid its practical facts as exemplified in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana. I say facts, and face-to-face confrontings — so different from books, and all those quiddities and mere reports in the libraries, upon which the man (it was wittily said of him at the age of thirty, that there was no one in Scotland who had glean’d so much and seen so little,) almost wholly fed, and which even his sturdy and vital mind but reflected at best. Something of the sort narrowly escaped happening. In 1835, after more than a dozen years of trial and non-success, the author of SARTOR RESARTUS removing to London, very poor, a confirmed hypochondriac, “Sartor” universally scoffed at, no literary prospects ahead, deliberately settled on one last casting-throw of the literary dice — resolv’d to compose and launch forth a book on the subject of the French Revolution — and if that won no higher guerdon or prize than hitherto, to sternly abandon the trade of author forever, and emigrate for good to America. But the venture turn’d out a lucky one, and there was no emigration. Carlyle’s work in the sphere of literature as he commenced and carried it out, is the same in one or two leading respects that Immanuel Kant’s was in speculative philosophy. But the Scotchman had none of the stomachic phlegm and never-perturb’d placidity of the Konigsberg sage, and did not, like the latter, understand his own limits, and stop when he got to the end of them. He clears away jungle and poison- vines and [Page 892] underbrush — at any rate hacks valiantly at them, smiting hip and thigh. Kant did the like in his sphere, and it was all he profess’d to do; his labors have left the ground fully prepared ever since — and greater service was probably never perform’d by mortal man. But the pang and hiatus of Carlyle seem to me to consist in the evidence everywhere that amid a whirl of fog and fury and cross-purposes, he firmly believ’d he had a clue to the medication of the world’s ills, and that his bounden mission was to exploit it.1

1.I hope I shall not myself fall into the error I charge upon him, of prescribing a specific for indispensable evils. My utmost pretension is probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims, and general movement and result, of ideas. Something of the latter kind seems to me the distinctive theory of America, of democracy, and of the modern — or rather, I should say, it is democracy, and is the modern. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] There were two anchors, or sheet-anchors, for steadying, as a last resort, the Carlylean ship. One will be specified presently. The other, perhaps the main, was only to be found in some mark’d form of personal force, an extreme degree of competent urge and will, a man or men “born to command.” Probably there ran through every vein and current of the Scotchman’s blood something that warm’d up to this kind of trait and character above aught else in the world, and which makes him in my opinion the chief celebrater and promulger of it in literature — more than Plutarch, more than Shakspere. The great masses of humanity stand for nothing — at least nothing but nebulous raw material; only the big planets and shining suns for him. To ideas almost invariably languid or cold, a number-one forceful personality was sure to rouse his eulogistic passion and savage joy. In such case, even the standard of duty hereinafter rais’d, was to be instantly lower’d and vail’d. All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were distasteful to him from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and contemptible. For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as his, the bearings he persistently ignored were marvellous. For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so much of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the only effectual method for surely, however slowly, training [Page 893] people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the ultimate aim of political and all other development) — to gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs and their doings to the telescopes and microscopes of committees and parties — and greatest of all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient content, which went well enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have henceforth palpably burst forever their old bounds — seem never to have enter’d Carlyle’s thought. It was splendid how he refus’d any compromise to the last. He was curiously antique. In that harsh, picturesque, most potent voice and figure, one seems to be carried back from the present of the British islands more than two thousand years, to the range between Jerusalem and Tarsus. His fullest best biographer justly says of him: “He was a teacher and a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfill’d. Carlyle, like them, believ’d that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherish’d ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seem’d to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teachings are false. He has offer’d himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, [Page 894] and no matter how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpass’d conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect. The second main point of Carlyle’s utterance was the idea of duty being done. (It is simply a new codicil — if it be particularly new, which is by no means certain — on the time-honor’d bequest of dynasticism, the mould-eaten rules of legitimacy and kings.) He seems to have been impatient sometimes to madness when reminded by persons who thought at least as deeply as himself, that this formula, though precious, is rather a vague one, and that there are many other considerations to a philosophical estimate of each and every department either in general history or individual affairs. Altogether, I don’t know anything more amazing than these persistent strides and throbbings so far through our Nineteenth century of perhaps its biggest, sharpest, and most erudite brain, in defiance and discontent with everything; contemptuously ignoring, (either from constitutional inaptitude, ignorance itself, or more likely because he demanded a definite cure-all here and now,) the only solace and solvent to be had. There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, (in its moral completeness, considered as ensemble, not for that moral alone, but for the whole being, including physique,) a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education, (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name) — an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness — this revel of fools, and incredible make- believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hand of the hunter. Such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind — mere optimism explains only [Page 895] the surface or fringe of it — Carlyle was mostly, perhaps entirely without. He seems instead to have been haunted in the play of his mental action by a spectre, never entirely laid from first to last, (Greek scholars, I believe, find the same mocking and fantastic apparition attending Aristophanes, his comedies,) — the spectre of world-destruction. How largest triumph or failure in human life, in war or peace, may depend on some little hidden centrality, hardly more than a drop of blood, a pulse-beat, or a breath of air! It is certain that all these weighty matters, democracy in America, Carlyleism, and the temperament for deepest political or literary exploration, turn on a simple point in speculative philosophy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man — the problem on whose solution science, art, the bases and pursuits of nations, and everything else, including intelligent human happiness, (here to-day, 1882, New York, Texas, California, the same as all times, all lands,) subtly and finally resting, depends for competent outset and argument, is doubtless involved in the query: What is the fusing explanation and tie — what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side, of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space, on the other side? Immanuel Kant, though he explain’d, or partially explain’d, as may be said, the laws of the human understanding, left this question an open one. Friedrich von Schelling’s answer, or suggestion of answer, is (and very valuable and important, as far as it goes,) that the same general and particular intelligence, passion, even the standards of right and wrong, which exist in a conscious and formulated state in man, exist in an unconscious state, or in perceptible analogies, throughout the entire universe of external Nature, in all its objects large or small, and all its movements and processes — thus making the impalpable human mind, and concrete Nature, notwithstanding their duality and separation, convertible, and in centrality and essence one. But G. F. Hegel’s fuller statement of the matter probably remains the last best word that has been said upon it, up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, [Page 896] he so carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with certain serious gaps now for the first time fill’d, that it becomes a coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there can be any answer) to the foregoing question — a system which, while I distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in its entirety, illuminating the thought of the universe, and satisfying the mystery thereof to the human mind, with a more consoling scientific assurance than any yet. According to Hegel the whole earth, (an old nucleus-thought, as in the Vedas, and no doubt before, but never hitherto brought so absolutely to the front, fully surcharged with modern scientism and facts, and made the sole entrance to each and all,) with its infinite variety, the past, the surroundings of to-day, or what may happen in the future, the contrarieties of material with spiritual, and of natural with artificial, are all, to the eye of the ensemblist, but necessary sides and unfoldings, different steps or links, in the endless process of Creative thought, which, amid numberless apparent failures and contradictions, is held together by central and never-broken unity — not contradictions or failures at all, but radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose; the whole mass of everything steadily, unerringly tending and flowing toward the permanent utile and morale, as rivers to oceans. As life is the whole law and incessant effort of the visible universe, and death only the other or invisible side of the same, so the utile, so truth, so health, are the continuous-immutable laws of the moral universe, and vice and disease, with all their perturbations, are but transient, even if ever so prevalent expressions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE JANE CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] To politics throughout, Hegel applies the like catholic standard and faith. Not any one party, or any one form of government, is absolutely and exclusively true. Truth consists in the just relations of objects to each other. A majority or democracy may rule as outrageously and do as great harm as an oligarchy or despotism — though far less likely to do so. But the great evil is either a violation of the relations just referr’d to, or of the moral law. The specious, the unjust, the cruel, and what is called the unnatural, though not only permitted [Page 897] but in a certain sense, (like shade to light,) inevitable in the divine scheme, are by the whole constitution of that scheme, partial, inconsistent, temporary, and though having ever so great an ostensible majority, are certainly destin’d to failure, after causing great suffering. Theology, Hegel translates into science.1 All apparent contradictions in the statement of the Deific nature by different ages, nations, churches, points of view, are but fractional and imperfect expressions of one essential unity, from which they all proceed — crude endeavors or distorted parts, to be regarded both as distinct and united. In short (to put it in our own form, or summing up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable combination of train’d wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, and all life and time, present and future, is both the truest cosmical devotee or religioso, and the profoundest philosopher. While he who, by the spell of himself and his circumstances, sees darkness and despair in the sum of the workings of God’s providence, and who, in that, denies or prevaricates, is, no matter how much piety plays on his lips, the most radical sinner and infidel. I am the more assured in recounting Hegel a little freely here,2 not only for offsetting the Carlylean letter and spirit — cutting it out all and several from the very roots, and below the roots — but to counterpoise, since the late death and deserv’d apotheosis of Darwin, the tenets of the evolutionists. Unspeakably precious as those are to biology, and henceforth indispensable to a right aim and estimate in study, they neither comprise or explain everything — and the last word or [Page 898] whisper still remains to be breathed, after the utmost of those claims, floating high and forever above them all, and above technical metaphysics. While the contributions which German Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel have bequeath’d to humanity — and which English Darwin has also in his field — are indispensable to the erudition of America’s future, I should say that in all of them, and the best of them, when compared with the lightning flashes and flights

1.I am much indebted to J. Gostick’s abstract. 2.I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle’s ever-lurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most thoroughly American points of view I know. In my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Germany, or in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I should say, is quite the legitimate European product to be expected. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JANE CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [concluded] of the old prophets and exalt[??]s, the spiritual poets and poetry of all lands, (as in the Hebrew Bible,) there seems to be, nay certainly is, something lacking — something cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest emotions of the soul — a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which the old exalt[??]s and poets supply, and which the keenest modern philosophers so far do not. Upon the whole, and for our purposes, this man’s name certainly belongs on the list with the just-specified, first-class moral physicians of our current era — and with Waldo Emerson and two or three others — though his prescription is drastic, and perhaps destructive, while theirs is assimilating, normal and tonic. Feudal at the core, and mental offspring and radiation of feudalism as are his books, they afford ever-valuable lessons and affinities to democratic America. Nations or individuals, we surely learn deepest from unlikeness, from a sincere opponent, from the light thrown even scornfully on dangerous spots and liabilities. (Michel Angelo invoked heaven’s special protection against his friends and affectionate flatterers; palpable foes he could manage for himself.) In many particulars Carlyle was indeed, as Froude terms him, one of those far-off Hebraic utterers, a new Micah or Habbakuk. His words at times bubble forth with abysmic inspiration. Always precious, such men; as precious now as any time. His rude, rasping, taunting, contradictory tones — what ones are more wanted amid the supple, polish’d, money-worshipping, Jesus- and-Judas-equalizing, suffrage-sovereignty echoes of current America? He has lit up our Nineteenth century with the light of a powerful, penetrating, and perfectly honest intellect of the first-class, turn’d on British and European politics, social life, literature, and representative personages — thoroughly dissatisfied with all, and mercilessly exposing the illness of all. [Page 899] But while he announces the malady, and scolds and raves about it, he himself, born and bred in the same atmosphere, is a mark’d illustration of it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

The following comment appeared in this year in the North American Review: Thomas Carlyle says that when any great change in human society is to be wrought, God raises up men to whom that change is made to appear as the one thing needful and absolutely indispensable. Scholars, orators, poets ... play their part, but the crisis comes at last through someone who is stigmatized as a fanatic by his contemporaries, and whom the supporters of the systems he assails crucifies between thieves or gibbet as a felon. The man who is not afraid to die for an idea is its most potential and convincing advocate.

About this martyrdom mindset, Eyal J. Naveh has offered in his CROWN OF THORNS: POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (NY: New York UP, 1990, pages 46-7) that it had to do more with our spiritual whistling-in-the-dark than with any of the easy legitimations which we have been offering to one another: As we have seen, American culture in the nineteenth century was receptive in general to the idea of martyrdom. People took religious symbolism seriously and believed in the cosmic structure of fall, sin, sacrifice, and redemption. Rhetoric that described sacrifice for the sin of slavery in order to purify America and to promote the kingdom of God made sense to many Americans. A description of John Brown as the ultimate altruist who sacrificed his life for such a purpose appealed to people who basically believed in the morality of the universe and the inevitability of linear progress. Such a worldview denied suffering by interpreting its temporal existence as having ultimately positive consequences. “The best portion of the people,” wrote E.P. Stearns in an epilog to Herman von Holst’s biography of Brown, “were pervaded and thrilled by the conviction that a martyr had laid down his life as an offering for the sins of the nation.... This seed sown in blood ... must bring forth a mighty harvest.” This is an example of the genteel tradition, which, in fact, refused to accept suffering in a moral world and used the concept of martyrdom as a rationale for its apparent existence. The ultimate success of the cause for which the martyr had suffered not only uplifted him as an individual but also helped others to believe in the morality of their universe. Glorification of a martyr figure through the use of binary contrasts served to deny the existence of suffering in a moral universe created by a benevolent God. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year, Thomas Hovenden prepared a painting depicting the famous falsehood, what supposedly had

taken place at the door of the Charlestown jail while John Brown was being led to his execution: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At least this Thomas Hovenden got the backdrop for his sentimental picture reasonably accurate, for this was the Charlestown jail as it would appear in the year 1900: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April: Richard Henry Horne’s GOOD SAMARITAN: A MORALITY PLAY appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

At this point a 12th and final British edition of the scandalous 1844 scientific summary and popularization VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION was seen to be appropriate. There was something inordinately attractive about this anonymous author’s scientific theorizing. For an example, consider that in speaking of the assumption “that the human race is one,” the author was offering after a general analysis that: The Negro alone is here unaccounted for; and of that race it may fairly be said, that it is the one most likely to have an independent origin, seeing that it is a type so peculiar in an inveterate black colour, and so mean in development. But it is not necessary to presume such an origin for it, as much good argument might be employed to shew that it is only a deteriorated offshoot of the general stock. Please bear in mind that the above racist sentiment is not the reason why the book needed to be an entirely anonymous one! The above racist sentiment is not the reason why all communications with the publisher needed to be conducted by the use of a prearranged code, with prior agreement that all business communications would be immediately burned! The above racist sentiment was not the reason why all manuscripts needed to be copied into a hand other than the author’s hand, to ensure total anonymity, before conveyal to the publisher for typesetting! No, not at all. The above racist sentiment was considered at the time to be entirely innocuous. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The reason for all this intense secrecy through eleven editions had been that the book had been sensitive for other — for religious reasons. But now there was no further need for secrecy as the author, Robert Chambers had deceased. Therefore, in the introduction to this 12th and final edition of Vestiges, the publisher, Alexander Ireland, an admirer of the individualistic philosophies of Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson, finally confirmed to the public the identity of its author.

A 74-gun ship-of-the-line that had been launched in 1820, the USS Ohio, was being scrapped in Greenport Harbor at #13 on the map below, when a storm wrenched it loose from its mooring. This hulk would need to be burned to its waterline in order to reduce obstruction to shipping but below the sand and silt that has accumulated, the bottom of the hull of the vessel remains to this day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1885

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher issued a volume on two topics about which he knew less than nothing, entitled EVOLUTION AND RELIGION.

Dr. Sigmund Freud, after seeing what had been done in a biography of Thomas Carlyle, destroyed his stores of unpublished notes and letters and manuscripts and scientific extracts, sparing only family letters. He would continue this practice throughout his long life: Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments and even to dissembling his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had.

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Brazil freed all slaves over the age of 60.

In the period after the US Civil War there was much reappraisal of that notion which had been so persuasive prior to the upheaval, that some heroic figures among humankind were animated by a “divine light” which released them from the constraints which ordinary mortals of limited vision were wise to operate in accordance with. Although citizens continued to think of rebellion as justified under the most oppressive regimes, the attempts to compare John Brown to Spartacus80 or Frederick Douglass to Toussaint Louverture had come to

80. To attempt to compare Brown with Spartacus would be to attempt to compare a person who desired to eliminate the evil of slavery with a person whose desire it was to become himself the slavemaster — which would be, wouldn’t you say, the mother of all Hollywoodish-inane category mistakes?

“...the slave, dreaming of the death of slavery...” — Kirk Douglas, preparing himself to play the title role in the 1961 Hollywood movie “Spartacus” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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be regarded as the most abjectly erroneous of readings.81 In THE DIAL for this period we find assertions that

the “great man” theory of history as found in the Secret “Six” conspiracy before the US Civil War was incompatible with the American belief in general progress: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn wrote within Thomas Carlyle’s theory of Great men namely that the world runs down ... through the deficiencies of merely common men, and would go to the bad entirely only it is so arranged that just in the nick of time the Lord sends down a Hero ... so ... that we can then get along for ... a generation or two.

The story of Brown’s last stand as a martyr was under heavy attack. A certification written by Brown’s jailor, Captain John Avis, appeared as eyewitness testimony to counter the story that Brown had kissed a black child, to refute the story had grown up to the effect that Brown had exhibited cheerfulness as he walked toward his place of execution, and to refute the account that had him giving thanks to God for the opportunity to die in such a cause.

The family of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway returned to the United States, settling in New-York. 81. Refer to Brown, David, “Sanborn’s Life of John Brown,” Dial 6 (1885-1886):139-40, to an editorial entitled “John Brown,” New England and Yale Review 45 (1886):289-302, and to Jenks, Leland H. “The John Brown Myth,” American Mercury (1924):268. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1892

Thomas Carlyle’s lecture series from the spring of 1840, all but one of which as it turned out had been taken down in shorthand by a barrister in the audience, achieved publication in this year, subsequent to the deaths both of the lecturer and of this witness Thomas Anstey, as

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS preserves for us the following snippets: • The true University of these days is a Collection of Books. — The Hero as a Man of Letters • In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. — Ibid • One life, — a little gleam of time between two Eternities. — Ibid • Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity. — Ibid • The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. — The Hero as a Prophet [His only fault is that he has none. —Pliny the Younger, Book ix, Letter xxvi] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1895

The Carlyle’s House Memorial trust began the process of maintaining the Carlyles’ home at 5 Great Cheyne Row ( now 24 Cheyne Row) in the Chelsea district of London near the Thames River.

The London School of Economics and Political Science was founded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1897

A new edition of Thomas Carlyle’s ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY, edited, with notes and introduction, by Mrs. Annie Russell Marble, A.M. (NY: Macmillan).

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1901

Now that WALDEN has become federally mandated reading for all High Schoolers during their junior year, it is interesting for us to recollect that our high estimation of Thoreau as an author is of very recent origin. For about one half century subsequent to his death Thoreau had actually been infra dig, of lesser worth.

A good example of this is to be found in a set of tomes published during the period 1901-1905, dealing with the literary reputations of an entire potfull of English and American authors: Charles Wells Moulton’s THE LIBRARY OF LITERARY CRITICISM OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN AUTHORS (Buffalo NY: The Moulton Publishing Company). Since each one of the eight tomes in this set is about 800 pages in length, we are dealing with 800x8 or a rough total of 6,400 pages of literary appreciation. In those thousands upon thousands of fine- print pages dealing with the remainders of hundreds upon hundreds of English and American authors, we ought to be able carefully to compare and contrast the attention given to Thoreau with the attention given to others. Shakespeare of course deserved a lengthy section, and Hawthorne, and Quarles, and Carlyle, and Dickens, and De Quincey — and even Thoreau’s friend Alcott received a surprising amount of space.

But here in its entirety is the rather briefer citation awarded to our guy: ATTITUDES ON THOREAU

(In these 6,400 pages the name of Thoreau also makes five other, minor appearances — because he had happened to make five incidental comments upon five English or American authors whose works were considered of cultural significance, to wit he had made recordable references to: Alcott, Carlyle, Hawthorne, Quarles, Shakespeare.) This, for the authors of this set of eight 1901-1905 volumes of literary appreciation, had been the valuable portion of Thoreau’s commentary on other authors: A SNIPPET ON ALCOTT A SNIPPET ON CARLYLE A SNIPPET ON HAWTHORNE A SNIPPET ON QUARLES A SNIPPET ON SHAKESPEARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Peruse it all if you dare! TOME NUMBER ONE TOME NUMBER TWO TOME NUMBER THREE TOME NUMBER FOUR TOME NUMBER FIVE TOME NUMBER SIX TOME NUMBER SEVEN TOME NUMBER EIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1902

Professor William James’s THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES ON NATURAL RELIGION DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH IN 1901-1902. “I accept the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: “Gad! she’d better!” At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission, — as Carlyle would have us — “Gad! we’d better!” — or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1912

Here is one of the chapters from a book published in this year by Hodder and Stoughton of London, New York, and Toronto, entitled AMONG FAMOUS BOOKS, by John Kelman, D.D.: SARTOR RESARTUS We now begin the study of the last of the three stages in the battle between paganism and idealism. Having seen something of its primitive and classical forms, we took a cross section of it in the seventeenth century, and now we shall review one or two of its phases in our own time. The leap from the seventeenth century to the twentieth necessarily omits much that is vital and interesting. The eighteenth century, in its stately and complacent fashion, produced some of the most deliberate and finished types of paganism which the world has seen, and these were opposed by memorable antagonists. We cannot linger there, however, but must pass on to that great book which sounded the loudest bugle-note which the nineteenth century heard calling men to arms in this warfare. Nothing could be more violent than the sudden transition from Samuel Pepys, that inveterate tumbler in the masque of life, whose absurdities and antics we have been looking at but now, to this solemn and tremendous book. Great in its own right, it is still greater when we remember that it stands at the beginning of the modern conflict between the material and spiritual development of England. Every student of the fourteenth century is familiar with two great figures, typical of the two contrasted features of its life. On the one hand stands Chaucer, with his infinite human interest, his good-humour, and his inexhaustible delight in man’s life upon the earth. On the other hand, dark in shadows as Chaucer is bright with sunshine, stands Langland, colossal in his sadness, perplexed as he faces the facts of public life which are still our problems, earnest as death. There is no one figure which corresponds to Chaucer in the modern age, but Thomas Carlyle is certainly the counterpart of Langland. Standing in the shadow, he sends forth his great voice to his times, now breaking into sobs of pity, and anon into shrieks of hoarse laughter, terrible to hear. He, too, is bewildered, and he comes among his fellows “determined to pluck out the heart of the mystery” — the mystery alike of his own times and of general human life and destiny. The book is in a great measure autobiographical, and is drawn from deep wells of experience, thought, and feeling. Inasmuch as its writer was a very typical Scotsman, it also was in a sense a manifesto of the national convictions which had made much of the noblest part of Scottish history, and which have served to stiffen the new races with which Scottish emigrants have blended, and to put iron into their blood. It is a book of incalculable importance, and if it be the case that it finds HDT WHAT? INDEX

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fewer readers in the rising generation than it did among their fathers, it is time that we returned to it. It is for want of such strong meat as this that the spirit of an age tends to grow feeble. The object of the present lecture is neither to explain SARTOR RESARTUS nor to summarise it. It certainly requires explanation, and it is no wonder that it puzzled the publishers. Before it was finally accepted by Fraser, its author had “carried it about for some two years from one terrified owl to another.” When it appeared, the criticisms passed on it were amusing enough. Among those mentioned by Professor Nichol are, “A heap of clotted nonsense,” and “When is that stupid series of articles by the crazy tailor going to end?” A book which could call forth such abuse, even from the dullest of minds, is certainly in need of elucidation. Yet here, more perhaps than in any other volume one could name, the interpretation must come from within. The truth which it has to declare will appeal to each reader in the light of his own experience of life. And the endeavour of the present lecture will simply be to give a clue to its main purpose. Every reader, following up that clue for himself, may find the growing interest and the irresistible fascination which the Victorians found in it. And when we add that without some knowledge of Sartor it is impossible to understand any serious book that has been written since it appeared, we do not exaggerate so much as might be supposed on the first hearing of so extraordinary a statement. The first and chief difficulty with most readers is a very obvious and elementary one. What is it all about? As you read, you can entertain no doubt about the eloquence, the violent and unrestrained earnestness of purpose, the unmistakable reserves of power behind the detonating words and unforgettable phrases. But, after all, what is it that the man is trying to say? This is certainly an unpromising beginning. Other great prophets have prophesied in the vernacular; but “he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men but unto God; for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” Yet there are some things which cannot convey their full meaning in the vernacular, thoughts which must coin a language for themselves; and although at first there may be much bewilderment and even irritation, yet in the end we shall confess that the prophecy has found its proper language. Let us go back to the time in which the book was written. In the late twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century a quite exceptional group of men and women were writing books. It was one of those galaxies that now and then over-crowd the literary heavens with stars. To mention only a few of the famous names, there were Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, and the Brownings. It fills one with envy to think of days when any morning might bring a new volume from any one of these. Emerson was very much alive then, and was already corresponding with Carlyle. Goethe died in 1832, but not before he had found in Carlyle one who “is almost more, at home in our literature HDT WHAT? INDEX

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than ourselves,” and who had penetrated to the innermost core of the German writings of his day. At that time, too, momentous changes were coming upon the industrial and political life of England. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened, and in 1832 the Reform Bill was passed. Men were standing in the backwash of the French Revolution. The shouts of acclamation with which the promise of that dawn was hailed, had been silenced long ago by the bloody spectacle of Paris and the career of Napoleon Buonaparte. The day of Byronism was over, and polite England was already settling down to the conventionalities of the Early Victorian period. The romantic school was passing away, and the new generation was turning from it to seek reality in physical science. But deep below the conventionality and the utilitarianism alike there remained from the Revolution its legacy of lawlessness, and many were more intent on adventure than on obedience. It was in the midst of this confused mêlée of opinions and impulses that Thomas Carlyle strode into the lists with his strange book. On the one hand it is a Titanic defence of the universe against the stage Titanism of Byron’s Cain. On the other hand it is a revolt of reality against the empire of proprieties and appearances and shams. In a generation divided between the red cap of France and the coal-scuttle bonnet of England Carlyle stands bareheaded under the stars. Along with him stand Benjamin Disraeli, combining a genuine sympathy for the poor with a most grotesque delight in the aristocracy; and John Henry Newman, fierce against the Liberals, and yet the author of “Lead, kindly Light.” The book was handicapped more heavily by its own style than perhaps any book that ever fought its way from neglect and vituperation to idolatrous popularity. There is in it an immense amount of gag and patter, much of which is brilliant, but so wayward and fantastic as to give a sense of restlessness and perpetual noise. The very title is provoking, and not less so is the explanation of it—the pretended discovery of a German volume upon “Clothes, their origin and influence,” published by Stillschweigen and Co., of Weissnichtwo, and written by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. The puffs from the local newspaper, and the correspondence with Hofrath “Grasshopper,” in no wise lessen the odds against such a work being taken seriously. Again, as might be expected of a Professor of “Things in General,” the book is discursive to the point of bewilderment. The whole progeny of “aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial devils” breaks loose upon us just as we are about to begin such a list of human apparel as never yet was published save in the catalogue of a museum collected by a madman. A dog with a tin kettle at his tail rushes mad and jingling across the street, leaving behind him a new view of the wild tyranny of Ambition. A great personage loses much sawdust through a rent in his unfortunate nether garments. Sirius and the Pleiades look down from above. The book is everywhere, and everywhere at once. The asides seem HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to occupy more space than the main thesis, whatever that may be. Just when you think you have found the meaning of the author at last, another display of these fireworks distracts your attention. It is not dark enough to see their full splendour, yet they confuse such daylight as you have. Yet the main thesis cannot long remain in doubt. Through whatever amazement and distraction, it becomes clear enough at last. Clothes, which at once reveal and hide the man who wears them, are an allegory of the infinitely varied aspects and appearances of the world, beneath which lurk ultimate realities. But essential man is a naked animal, not a clothed one, and truth can only be arrived at by the most drastic stripping off of unreal appearances that cover it. The Professor will not linger upon the consideration of the lord’s star or the clown’s button, which are all that most men care to see: he will get down to the essential lord and the essential clown. And this will be more than an interesting literary occupation to him, or it will not long be that. Truth and God are one, and the devil is the prince of lies. This philosophy of clothes, then, is religion and not belles lettres. The reason for our sojourn on earth, and the only ground of any hope for a further sojourn elsewhere, is that in God’s name we do battle with the devil. The quest of reality must obviously be wide as the universe, but if we are to engage in it to any purpose we must definitely begin it somewhere. A treatise on reality may easily be the most unreal of things—a mere battle in the air. So long as it is a discussion of theories it has this danger, and the first necessity is to bring the search down to the region of experience and rigorously insist on its remaining there. For this end the device of biography is adopted, and we see the meaning of all that apparent byplay of the six paper bags, and of the Weissnichtwo allusions which drop as puzzling fragments into Book I. The second book is wholly biographical. It is in human life and experience that we must fight our way through delusive appearances to reality; and Carlyle constructs a typical and immortal biography. To the childless old people, Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, leading their sweet orchard life, there comes, in the dusk of evening, a stranger of reverend aspect—comes, and leaves with them the “invaluable Loan” of the baby Teufelsdröckh. Thenceforward, beside the little Kuhbach stream, we watch the opening out of a human life, from infancy to boyhood, and from boyhood to manhood. The story has been told a million times, but never quite in this fashion before. For rough delicacy, for exquisitely tender sternness, the biography is unique. From the sleep of mere infancy the child is awakened to the consciousness of creatorship by the gift of tools with which to make things. Tales open up for him the long vistas of history; and the stage-coach with its slow rolling blaze of lights teaches him geography, and the far-flung imaginative suggestiveness of the road; while the annual cattle-fair actually gathers the ends of the earth about his wondering eyes, and gives him his first impression of the variety of human life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Childhood brings with it much that is sweet and gentle, flowing on like the little Kuhbach; and yet suggests far thoughts of Time and Eternity, concerning which we are evidently to hear more before the end. The formal education he receives—that “wood and leather education”— calls forth only protest. But the development of his spirit proceeds in spite of it. So far as the passive side of character goes, he does excellently. On the active side things go not so well. Already he begins to chafe at the restraints of obedience, and the youthful spirit is beating against its bars. The stupidities of an education which only appeals to the one faculty of memory, and to that mainly by means of birch-rods, increase the rebellion, and the sense of restraint is brought to a climax when at last old Andreas dies. Then “the dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him; the inexorable word never! now first showed its meaning.” The youth is now ready to enter, as such a one inevitably must, upon the long and losing battle of faith and doubt. He is at the theorising stage as yet, not having learned to make anything, but only to discuss things. And yet the time is not wasted if the mind have been taught to think. For “truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have.” The immediate consequence and employment of this unripe time of half-awakened manhood is, however, unsatisfactory enough. There is much reminiscence of early Edinburgh days, with their law studies, and tutoring, and translating, in Teufelsdröckh’s desultory period. The climax of it is in those scornful sentences about Aesthetic Teas, to which the hungry lion was invited, that he might feed on chickweed—well for all concerned if it did not end in his feeding on the chickens instead! It is an unwholesome time with the lad—a time of sullen contempt alternating with loud rebellion, of mingled vanity and self- indulgence, and of much sheer devilishness of temper. Upon this exaggerated and most disagreeable period, lit by “red streaks of unspeakable grandeur, yet also in the blackness of darkness,” there comes suddenly the master passion of romantic love. Had this adventure proved successful, we should have simply had the old story, which ends in “so they lived happily ever after.” What the net result of all the former strivings after truth and freedom would have been, we need not inquire. For this is another story, equally old and to the end of time ever newly repeated. There is much of Werther in it, and still more of Jean Paul Richter. Its finest English counterpart is Longfellow’s Hyperion—the most beautiful piece of our literature, surely, that has ever been forgotten—in which Richter’s story lives again. But never has the tale been more exquisitely told than in SARTOR RESARTUS. For one sweet hour of life the youth has been taken out of himself and pale doubt flees far away. Life, that has been but a blasted heath, blooms suddenly with unheard-of blossoms of hope and of delight. Then comes the end. “Their lips were joined, their two souls, like HDT WHAT? INDEX

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two dewdrops, rushed into one, — for the first time, and for the last! Thus was Teufelsdröckh made immortal by a Kiss. And then? Why, then—thick curtains of Night rushed over his soul, as rose the immeasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shivered Universe was he falling, falling, towards the Abyss.” The sorrows of Teufelsdröckh are but too well known. Flung back upon his former dishevelment of mind from so great and calm a height, the crash must necessarily be terrible. Yet he will not take up his life where he left it to follow Blumine. Such an hour inevitably changes a man, for better or for worse. There is at least a dignity about him now, even while the “nameless Unrest” urges him forward through his darkened world. The scenes of his childhood in the little Entepfuhl bring no consolation. Nature, even in his wanderings among her mountains, is equally futile, for the wanderer can never escape from his own shadow among her solitudes. Yet is his nature not dissolved, but only “compressed closer,” as it were, and we watch the next stage of this development with a sense that some mysteriously great and splendid experience is on the eve of being born. Thus we come to those three central chapters—chapters so fundamental and so true to human life, that it is safe to prophesy that they will be familiar so long as books are read upon the earth—”The Everlasting No,” “Centre of Indifference” and “The Everlasting Yea.” In “The Everlasting No” we watch the work of negation upon the soul of man. His life has capitulated to the Spirit that denies, and the unbelief is as bitter as it is hopeless. “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief; shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.” “Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the word Duty no meaning?” “Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo.” Faith, indeed, lies dormant but alive beneath the doubt. But in the meantime the man’s own weakness paralyses action; and, while this paralysis lasts, all faith appears to have departed. He has ceased to believe in himself, and to believe in his friends. “The very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind men limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!” He is saved from suicide simply by the after-shine of Christianity. The religion of his fathers lingers, no longer as a creed, but as a powerful set of associations and emotions. It is a small thing to cling to amid the wrack of a man’s universe; yet it holds until the appearance of a new phase in which he is to find escape from the prison-house. He has begun to realise that fear—a nameless fear of he knows not what—has taken hold HDT WHAT? INDEX

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upon him. “I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous.” Fear affects men in widely different ways. We have seen how this same vague “sense of enemies” obsessed the youthful spirit of Marius the Epicurean, until it cleared itself eventually into the conscience of a Christian man. But Teufelsdröckh is prouder and more violent of spirit than the sedate and patrician Roman, and he leaps at the throat of fear in a wild defiance. “What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death: and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a Heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!” This is no permanent or stable resting-place, but it is the beginning of much. It is the assertion of self in indignation and wild defiance, instead of the former misery of a man merely haunted by himself. This is that “Baphometic Fire-baptism” or new-birth of spiritual awakening, which is the beginning of true manhood. The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s); to which my whole Me now made answer: I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” The immediate result of this awakening is told in “Centre of Indifference” — i.e., indifference to oneself, one’s own feelings, and even to fate. It is the transition from subjective to objective interests, from eating one’s own heart out to a sense of the wide and living world by which one is surrounded. It is the same process which, just about this time, Robert Browning was describing in Paracelsus and Sordello. Once more Teufelsdröckh travels, but this time how differently! Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of himself, he sees the world full of vital interests—cities of men, tilled fields, books, battlefields. The great questions of the world—the true meanings alike of peace and war—claim his interest. The great men, whether Goethe or Napoleon, do their work before his astonished eyes. “Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows, over the many- coloured world, and pertinently enough note what is passing there.” He has reached—strangely enough through self-assertion— the centre of indifference to self, and of interest in other people and things. And the supreme lesson of it all is the value of efficiency. Napoleon “was a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached, through the cannon’s throat, that great doctrine, La carrière ouverte aux talens (the tools to him that can handle them).” This bracing doctrine carries us at once into The Everlasting Yea. It is not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self- centered mood to an interest in the outward world that surrounds him. That might transform him simply into a curious but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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heartless dilettante, a mere tourist of the spirit, whose sole desire is to see and to take notes. But that could never satisfy Carlyle; for that is but self-indulgence in its more refined form of the lust of the eyes. It was not for this that the Everlasting No had set Teufelsdröckh wailing, nor for this that he had risen up in wrath and bidden defiance to fear. From his temptation in the wilderness the Son of Man must come forth, not to wander open-mouthed about the plain, but to work his way “into the higher sunlit slopes of that Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only.” In other words, a great compassion for his fellow-men has come upon him. “With other eyes, too, could I now look upon my fellow- man: with an infinite Love, an infinite Pity. Poor, wandering, wayward man! Art thou not tried, and beaten with stripes, even as I am? Ever, whether thou bear the royal mantle or the beggar’s gabardine, art thou not so weary, so heavy-laden; and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O my Brother, my Brother, why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe away all tears from thy eyes!” The words remind us of the famous passage, occurring early in the book, which describes the Professor’s Watchtower. It was suggested by the close-packed streets of Edinburgh’s poorer quarter, as seen from the slopes of the hills which stand close on her eastern side. Probably no passage ever written has so vividly and suggestively massed together the various and contradictory aspects of the human tragedy. One more question, however, has yet to be answered before we have solved our problem. What about happiness? We all cry aloud for it, and make its presence or absence the criterion for judging the worth of days. Teufelsdröckh goes to the heart of the matter with his usual directness. It is this search for happiness which is the explanation of all the unwholesomeness that culminated in the Everlasting No. “Because the thou (sweet gentleman) is not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft- bedded, and lovingly cared-for? Foolish soul! What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” In effect, happiness is a relative term, which we can alter as we please by altering the amount which we demand from life. “Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.” Such teaching is neither sympathetic enough nor positive enough to be of much use to poor mortals wrestling with their deepest problems. Yet in the very negation of happiness he discovers a positive religion—the religion of the Cross, the Worship of Sorrow. Expressed crudely, this seems to endorse the ascetic fallacy of the value of self-denial for its own sake. But from HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that it is saved by the divine element in sorrow which Christ has brought— “Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.” This still leaves us perilously near to morbidness. The Worship of Sorrow might well be but a natural and not less morbid reaction from the former morbidness, the worship of self and happiness. From that, however, it is saved by the word “works,” which is spoken with emphasis in this connection. So we pass to the last phase of the Everlasting Yea, in which we return to the thesis upon which we began, viz., that “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action.” “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.... Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.... Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.” Thus the goal of human destiny is not any theory, however true; not any happiness, however alluring. It is for practical purposes that the universe is built, and he who would be “in tune with the universe” must first and last be practical. In various forms this doctrine has reappeared and shown itself potent. Ritschl based his system on practical values in religion, and Professor William James has proclaimed the same doctrine in a still wider application in his PRAGMATISM. The essential element in both systems is that they lay the direct stress of life, not upon abstract theory but upon experience and vital energy. This transference from theorising and emotionalism to the prompt and vigorous exercise of will upon the immediate circumstance, is Carlyle’s understanding of the word Conversion. When it comes to the particular question of what work the Professor is to do, the answer is that he has within him the Word Omnipotent, waiting for a man to speak it forth. And here in this volume upon Clothes, this SARTOR RESARTUS, is his deliberate response to the great demand. At first he seems here to relapse from the high seriousness of the chapters we have just been reading, and to come with too great suddenness to earth again. Yet that is not the case; for, as we shall see, the rest of the volume is the attempt to reconstruct the universe on the principles he has discovered within his own experience. The story to which we have been listening is Teufelsdröckh’s way of discovering reality; now we are to have the statement of it on the wider planes of social and other philosophy. This we shall briefly review, but the gist of the book is in what we have already found. To most readers the quotations must have been old and well-remembered friends. Yet they will pardon the reappearance of them here, for they have been amongst the most HDT WHAT? INDEX

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powerful of all wingéd words spoken in England for centuries. The reason for the popularity of the book is that these biographical chapters are the record of normal and typical human experience. This, or something like this, will repeat itself so long as human nature lasts; and men, grown discouraged with the mystery and bewilderment of life, will find heart from these chapters to start “once more on their adventure, brave and new.” This, then, is Teufelsdröckh’s reconstruction of the world; and the world of each one of us requires some such reconstruction. For life is full of deceptive outward appearances, from which it is the task of every man to come back in his own way to the realities within. The shining example of such reconstruction is that of George Fox, who sewed himself a suit of leather and went out to the woods with it— “Every stitch of his needle pricking into the heart of slavery, and world-worship, and the Mammon god.” The leather suit is an allegory of the whole. The appearances of men and things are but the fantastic clothes with which they cover their nakedness. They take these clothes of theirs to be themselves, and the first duty and only hope of a man is to divest himself of all such coverings, and discover what manner of man he really is. This process of divesting, however, may yield either of two results. A man may take, for the reality of himself, either the low view of human nature, in which man is but “a forked straddling animal with bandy legs,” or the high view, in which he is a spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries. It is the latter view which Thomas Carlyle champions, through this and many other volumes, against the materialistic thought of his time. The chapter on Dandies is a most extraordinary attack on the keeping up of appearances. The Dandy is he who not only keeps up appearances but actually worships them. He is their advocate and special pleader. His very office and function is to wear clothes. Here we have the illusion stripped from much that we have taken for reality. Sectarianism is a prominent example of it, the reading of fashionable novels is another. In the former two are seen the robes of eternity flung over one very vulgar form of self-worship, and in the latter the robe of fashionable society is flung over another. The reality of man’s intercourse with Eternity and with his fellow-men has died within these vestures, but the eyes of the public are satisfied, and never guess the corpse within. Sectarianism and Vanity Fair are but common forms of self-worship, in which every one is keeping up appearances, and is so intent upon that exercise that all thought of reality has vanished. A shallower philosopher would have been content with exposing these and other shams; and consequently his philosophy would have led nowhere. Carlyle is a greater thinker, and one who takes a wider view. He is no enemy of clothes, although fools have put them to wrong uses and made them the instruments of deception. His choice is not between worshipping and abandoning the world and its appearances. He will frankly confess the value of it and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of its vesture, and so we have the chapter on Adamitism, in defence of clothes, which acknowledges in great and ingenious detail the many uses of the existing order of institutions. But still, through all such acknowledgment, we are reminded constantly of the main truth. All appearance is for the sake of reality, and all tools for expressing the worker. When the appearance becomes a substitute for the reality, and the tools absorb the attention that should be devoted to the work for whose accomplishment they exist, then we have relapsed into the fundamental human error. The object of the book is to plunge back from appearance to reality, from clothes to him who wears them. “Who am I? What is this me?... some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind.” This swift retreat upon reality occurs at intervals throughout the whole book, and in connection with every conceivable department of human life and interest. In many parts there is little attempt at sequence or order. The author has made voluminous notes on men and things, and the whole fantastic structure of SARTOR RESARTUS is a device for introducing these disjointedly. In the remainder of this lecture we shall select and displace freely, in order to present the main teachings of the book in manageable groups. 1. Language and Thought.—Language is the natural garment of thoughts, and while sometimes it performs its function of revealing them, it often conceals them. Many people’s whole intellectual life is spent in dealing with words, and they never penetrate to the thoughts at all. Still more commonly, people get lost among words, especially words which have come to be used metaphorically, and again fail to penetrate to the thought. Thus the Name is the first garment wrapped around the essential me; and all speech, whether of science, poetry, or politics, is simply an attempt at right naming. The names by which we call things are apt to become labelled pigeon-holes in which we bury them. Having catalogued and indexed our facts, we lose sight of them thenceforward, and think and speak in terms of the catalogue. If you are a Liberal, it is possible that all you may know or care to know about Conservatism is the name. Nay, having catalogued yourself a Liberal, you may seldom even find it necessary to inquire what the significance of Liberalism really is. If you happen to be a Conservative, the corresponding risks will certainly not be less. The dangers of these word-garments, and the habit of losing all contact with reality in our constant habit of living among mere words, naturally suggest to Carlyle his favourite theme—a plea for silence. We all talk too much, and the first lesson we have to learn on our way to reality is to be oftener silent. This duty of silence, as has been wittily remarked, Carlyle preaches in thirty-seven volumes of eloquent English speech. “Silence and secrecy! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.... Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow how much clearer are thy purposes and duties.” Andreas, in his old camp-sentinel days, once challenged the emperor himself with the demand for the password. “Schweig, Hund!” replied Frederich; and Andreas, telling the tale in after years would add, “There is what I call a King.” Yet silence may be as devoid of reality as words, and most minds require something external to quicken thought and fill up the emptiness of their silences. So we have symbols, whose doctrine is here most eloquently expounded. Man is not ruled by logic but by imagination, and a thousand thoughts will rise at the call of some well-chosen symbol. In itself it may be the poorest of things, with no intrinsic value at all—a clouted shoe, an iron crown, a flag whose market value may be almost nothing. Yet such a thing may so work upon men’s silences as to fill them with the glimmer of a divine idea. Other symbols there are which have intrinsic value—works of art, lives of heroes, death itself, in all of which we may see Eternity working through Time, and become aware of Reality amid the passing shows. Religious symbols are the highest of all, and highest among these stands Jesus of Nazareth. “Higher has the human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew enquired into, and anew made manifest.” In other words, Jesus stands for all that is permanently noble and permanently real in human life. Such symbols as have intrinsic value are indeed perennial. Time at length effaces the others; they lose their associations, and become but meaningless lumber. But these significant works and personalities can never grow effete. They tell their own story to the succeeding generations, blessing them with visions of reality and preserving them from the Babel of meaningless words. 2. Body and Spirit.—Souls are “rendered visible in bodies that took shape and will lose it, melting into air.” Thus bodies, and not spirits, are the true apparitions, the souls being the realities which they both reveal and hide. In fact, body is literally a garment of flesh—a garment which the soul has for a time put on, but which it will lay aside again. One of the greatest of all the idolatries of appearance is our constant habit of judging one another by the attractiveness of the bodily vesture. Many of the judgments which we pass upon our fellows would be reversed if we trained ourselves to look through the vestures of flesh to the men themselves—the souls that are hidden within. The natural expansion of this is in the general doctrine of matter and spirit. Purely material science—science which has lost the faculty of wonder and of spiritual perception—is no true science at all. It is but a pair of spectacles without an eye. For all material things are but emblems of spiritual things—shadows or images of things in the heavens—and apart from these they have no reality at all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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3. Society and Social Problems.—It follows naturally that a change must come upon our ways of regarding the relations of man to man. If every man is indeed a temple of the divine, and therefore to be revered, then much of our accepted estimates and standards of social judgment will have to be abandoned. Society, as it exists, is founded on class distinctions which largely consist in the exaltation of idleness and wealth. Against this we have much eloquent protest. “Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living man like.” How far away we are from all this with our mammon-worship and our fantastic social unrealities, every student of our times must know, or at least must have often heard. He would not have heard it so often, however, had not Thomas Carlyle cried it out with that harsh voice of his, in this and many others of his books. It was his gunpowder, more than any other explosive of the nineteenth century, that broke up the immense complacency into which half England always tends to relapse. He is not hopeless of the future of society. Society is the true Phoenix, ever repeating the miracle of its resurrection from the ashes of the former fire. There are indestructible elements in the race of man—”organic filaments” he calls them—which bind society together, and which ensure a future for the race after any past, however lamentable. Those “organic filaments” are Carlyle’s idea of Social Reality—the real things which survive all revolution. There are four such realities which ensure the future for society even when it seems extinct. First, there is the fact of man’s brotherhood to man—a fact quite independent of man’s willingness to acknowledge that brotherhood. Second, there is the common bond of tradition, and all our debt to the past, which is a fact equally independent of our willingness to acknowledge it. Third, there is the natural and inevitable fact of man’s necessity for reverencing some one above him. Obedience and reverence are forthcoming, whenever man is in the presence of what he ought to reverence, and so hero-worship is secure. These three bonds of social reality are inseparable from one another. The first, the brotherhood of man, has often been used as the watchword of a false independence. It is only possible on the condition of reverence and obedience for that which is higher than oneself, either in the past or the present. “Suspicion of ‘Servility,’ of reverence for Superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your Superiors worthy to govern, and you worthy to obey, reverence for them were even your only possible freedom.” These three, then, are the social realities, and all other social distinctions and conventionalities are but clothes, to be replaced or thrown away at need. But there is a fourth bond of social reality—the greatest and most powerful of all. That reality is Religion. Here, too, we HDT WHAT? INDEX

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must distinguish clothes from that which they cover—forms of religion from religion itself. Church-clothes, indeed, are as necessary as any other clothes, and they will harm no one who remembers that they are but clothes, and distinguishes between faith and form. The old forms are already being discarded, yet Religion is so vital that it will always find new forms for itself, suited to the new age. For religion, in one form or in another, is absolutely essential to society; and, being a grand reality, will continue to keep society from collapse. 4. From this we pass naturally to the great and final doctrine in which the philosophy of clothes is expounded. That doctrine, condensed into a single sentence, is that “the whole Universe is the Garment of God.” This brings us back to the song of the Erdgeist in Goethe’s Faust:— “In Being’s floods, in Action’s storm, I walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless motion! Birth and Death, An infinite ocean; A seizing and giving The fire of Living: ’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.” This is, of course, no novelty invented by Goethe. We find it in Marius the Epicurean, and he found it in ancient wells of Greek philosophy. Carlyle’s use of it has often been taken for Pantheism. In so mystic a region it is impossible to expect precise theological definition, and yet it is right to remember that Carlyle does not identify the garment with its Wearer. The whole argument of the book is to distinguish appearance from reality in every instance, and this is no exception. “What is Nature? Ha! why do I not name thee God? Art thou not the ‘living garment of God’? O Heavens, is it in very deed He, then, that ever speaks through thee? that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?... The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres: but godlike and my Father’s.” “This fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” Such is some very broken sketch of this great book. It will at least serve to recall to the memory of some readers thoughts and words which long ago stirred their blood in youth. No volume could so fitly be chosen as a background against which to view the modern surge of the age-long battle. But the charm of SARTOR RESARTUS is, after all, personal. We go back to the life-story of Teufelsdröckh, out of which such varied and such lofty teachings sprang, and we read it over and over again because we find in it so much that is our own story too. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1915

The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded — this year likewise there wasn’t anyone to hand it to.

Professor Bliss Perry’s THOMAS CARLYLE. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)

A revised version of the manifesto of the Vorticist movement, Blast.

Harry S Truman was appointed postmaster in Grandview, Missouri. He suffered losses in an investment in a zinc-mining venture. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1924

March 10, Monday: Robert Frost wrote to Louis Untermeyer, characterizing Thoreau’s writing as “conceited”: Dear Old Louis, Since last I saw you I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder. Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. Some fair to good writers have no style and so leave us ignorant of how they take themselves. But that is the one important thing to know: because on it depends our likes and dislikes. A novelist seems to be the only kind of writer who can make a name without a style: which is only one more reason for not bothering with the novel. I am not satisfied to let it go with the aphorism that the style is the man. The man’s ideas would be some element then of his style. So would his deeds. But I would narrow the definition. His deeds are his deeds; his ideas are his ideas. His style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds. Mind you if he is down-spirited it will be all he can do to have the ideas without the carriage. The style is out of his superfluity. It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward. Emerson had one of the noblest least egotistical of styles. By comparison with it Thoreau’s was conceited, Whitman’s bumptious. Thomas Carlyle’s way of taking himself simply infuriates me. Longfellow took himself with the gentlest twinkle- ... Whittier, when he shows any style at all, is probably a greater person than Longfellow as he is lifted priestlike above consideration of the scornful.82 In Winter 1960 I met Robert Frost as a very old man, at a reading of his poetry at Mem Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Interestingly, my present memory of this encounter is, that the Frost I observed was full of conceit and arrogance. (I was, however, ready to grant the man a free pass, at least on account of his age and perhaps also on account of the excellence of his poetry.) Since I do not myself find Thoreau at all conceited, the question I would need to ask would be, where exactly was the conceit that Frost observed to be present in Thoreau, that I myself cannot observe in Thoreau? Is it at all possible, that the conceit Frost supposed he was seeing in Thoreau’s eyes was Frost’s own conceit — being refracted straight back to him?

82. SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST, edited by Lawrance Thompson (Henry Holt and Company, 1964); Frost, Robert. THE LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER (NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1936

The National Trust took over from the Carlyles’ House Memorial trust the preservation of Thomas Carlyle home at 5 Great Cheyne Row (now 24 Cheyne Row) in the Chelsea district of London near the Thames River. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1945

April 30, Monday: Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz proclaimed himself head of the German state.

United States naval vessels damaged in operations against Japanese forces: • Destroyer Jenkins (DD-447), by mine, off Tarakan, Borneo, 3 degrees 12 minutes North, 117 degrees 37 minutes East • Destroyer Bennion (DD-662), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 27 degrees 26 minutes North, 127 degrees 51 minutes East • Minelayer Terror (CM-5), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 10 minutes North, 127 degrees 18 minutes East

German submarines sunk: • U-548, by destroyer escorts Thomas (DE-102), Bostwick (DE-103), Coffman (DE-191), and frigate Natchez (PF-2), off Virginia, 36 degrees 34 minutes North, 74 degrees 0 minute West • U-1055, by naval land-based aircraft (VPB-63), west of France, 48 degrees 0 minute North, 6 degrees 30 minutes West

German submarines sunk sometime in April by United States Army and British aircraft: • U-677 U-906, U-982, U-3525, Baltic area. • U-1131, U-1227, U-2516, Kiel, Germany. • U-2532, U-2537, Hamburg, Germany HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In the bunker under the Reich Chancellery gardens in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were wed83 and then offed themselves with cyanide capsule and pistol. Adolf had lately been reading in Thomas Carlyle’s FREDERICK THE GREAT, but we don’t know the point he had reached or the conclusions he was drawing from this review — maybe he had just been killing time. Then their corpses were mostly burned in the courtyard, using precious gasoline. (What remained after the gasoline fire would be buried in secret. The remains would then be exhumed and reburied in secret in another location. The remains would then be re-exhumed and cremated. The Russians would recover some pieces of Hitler’s corpse — enough to resolve lingering doubts by proving the guy was actually dead without even needing to have a stake driven through his heart. The Russians still possess a piece of this guy’s skull, for all the good it will ever do them.) WORLD WAR II

To the US military authorities in Pisa, Ezra Pound was characterizing Hitler as a martyr, and paralleling him with Joan of Arc. While sleeping on the concrete floor of a 10- foot-square by 7-foot-high steel cage, the poet would produce the PISAN CANTOS (LXVIV-LXXXIV), in which the influence of Benito Mussolini is

83. Would she have a tombstone that reads “Wife of the Führer for one Day”? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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particularly apparent. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Kenneth Walter Cameron’s THOREAU’S LITERARY NOTEBOOK IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Facsimile text. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

COMPANION TO THOREAU’S CORRESPONDENCE; WITH ANNOTATIONS, NEW LETTERS, AND AN INDEX OF PRINCIPAL WORDS, PHRASES, AND TOPICS (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

EMERSON’S WORKSHOP; AN ANALYSIS OF HIS READING IN PERIODICALS THROUGH 1836, WITH THE PRINCIPAL THEMATIC KEY TO HIS ESSAYS, POEMS, AND LECTURES; ALSO, MEMORABILIA OF HARVARD AND CONCORD. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Joseph Slater edited THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE (NY: Columbia UP): “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Contains all known letters of Carlyle and Emerson between the years of 1834 and 1872, as well as an extensive introduction with critical commentary on the “art” of the correspondences. The letters themselves are highly literary and the two men are, for the most part, absorbed in discussions of this book or that author. Although we do get letter by letter accounts of the health of each man’s spouse, neither writer appears terribly concerned with relaying much biographical information. However, the letters do serve as interesting ways of looking at each man’s personality as the friendship progresses through the years. Particularly interesting to note are Carlyle’s incessant whining over the poor sales of his books in England and Emerson’s assurances that the slow sales were due not to any fault of the author, but surely were because of the simple minded readership of the time. ( Stephen R. Webb, February 20, 1986) Looking for comments by Emerson (especially) on race: 1854 “the question is properly, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished” in connection with Kansas/Nebraska (page 499). May 1, 1859 “I flatter myself I see some emerging of our people from the poison of their politics the insolvency of slavery begins to show, & we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black Vomit extirpating by mere diking & planting. Another ground of contentment is the mending of the race [sic] here. Dec 8, 1862 “our President Lincoln will not even emancipate slaves, until on the heels of a victory, or the semblance of such.” “One lesson they {soldiers] all learn — to hate slavery, — tererrima causa. But the issues does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. Tis of no account what England or France may do. But even the war is better than the degrading & descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, & our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes to pease at the cost of replacing the South in the status ante bellum, we can… leave the problem to another score of years.” (page 536) Sept 26, 1864, pages 541-2. In talking about the Democratic party: “Take from it the wild Irish element, imported in the last twenty five years into this country, & led by Romish priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism, & you would bereave it of all its numerical strength…. This war has been conducted over the heads of all the actors in it: the foolish terrors — ’what shall we do with the negro?’ ‘the entire black population is coming north to be fed,’ &c. have strangely ended in the fact, that the black refuses to leave his climate; gets his living and all the living of his employers there, as he has always done; is the natural ally & soldier of the Republic, in that climate; now takes the place of 200 000 soldiers; & will be, as this conquest of the country proceeds, its garrison, till peace, without slavery, returns. Slaveholders in London have filled English ears with their wishes & perhaps beliefs…” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Meyer Howard Abrams described Romanticism in accordance with a phrase from SARTOR RESARTUS as “Natural Supernaturalism,” and embraced T.E. Hulme’s 1936 definition of it as mere “spilt religion”: After Kant and Schiller it became a standard procedure for the major German philosophers to show that the secular history and destiny of mankind is congruent with the Biblical story of the loss and future recovery of paradise; to interpret that story as a mythical representation of man’s departure from the happiness of ignorance and self-unity into the multiple self-divisions and conflicts attendant upon the emergence of self-consciousness, free decision, and the analytic intellect; to equate the fall, so interpreted, with the beginning of speculative philosophy itself; and to evaluate the fall as a fortunate self-division, because it was the necessary first step upon the educational journey by which thinking and striving man wins his way back toward his lost integrity, along a road which looks like a reversion but is in fact a progression.

According to Abrams’s NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM: TRADITION AND REVOLUTION IN ROMANTIC LITERATURE (NY: W.W. Norton, 1971), “romanticism” may be defined as “the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking.” It was a bunch of people posturing in the available understood roles of “philosopher-seer” and “poet-prophet,” who were intending “in various yet recognizably parallel ways, to reconstitute the grounds of hope and to announce the certainty, or at best the possibility, of a rebirth in which a renewed mankind will inhabit a renovated earth where he will find himself thoroughly at home.” They were undertaking “to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind of consciousness and its transactions with nature.” Abrams’s thesis is found on his page 334, that “faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been replaced by faith in an apocalypse by revolution, and this now gave way to faith in an apocalypse by imagination or cognition. In the ruling two-term frame of Romantic thought, the mind of man confronts the old heaven and earth and possesses within itself the power, if it will but recognize and avail itself of the power, to transform them into a new heaven and new earth, by means of a total revolution of consciousness. This, as we know, is the high Romantic argument, and it is no accident that it took shape during the age of revolutions.” “Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.... Spending time with these people, whose curiosity is focused on regimented on-the-shelf topics, feels stifling.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, THE BLACK SWAN: THE IMPACT OF THE HIGHLY IMPROBABLE (NY: Random House, 2007, pages 289-90) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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George P. Landow. ELEGANT JEREMIAHS: THE SAGE FROM CARLYLE TO MAILER. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP.

This is a book written by a professor with nothing to communicate, in mockery of anyone who has something to communicate. The professor of rhetoric mocks authors such as Henry Thoreau, with their big heads about themselves. Such people are trying to present themselves “as the one in charge, as the single source of knowledge and wisdom” (pages 132-3). This can only be a fraud, it is offered, since Professor Landow himself has nothing to offer: therefore for someone to try to offer something is for that person to suppose that he or she as a human being is superior to him, George P. Landow –which is of course impossible– and hence supererogatory. “Thoreau the sage” (page 126) takes center stage to produce only “aggressive acts of definition,” such as Thoreau’s redefinition of ordinary words such as “governor” and “slavery.” In such “aggressive” speech acts, supposedly, “the sage’s self-presentation [is] as master of experience” (page 133). Thoreau’s platform attitude was that “He alone knows what things mean” (page 126), but in fact this George P. Landow is astute enough to have discovered that “Thoreau’s entire strategy here seems to derive from Thomas Carlyle’s FRENCH REVOLUTION” — yet another nail in the coffin of the merely derivative, the person whose entire meaning and strategy can be nailed to the wall by such an expert in Influence Studies as George P. Landow. Any person who would set himself or herself up as a “sage” by use of the rhetorical device described by Aristotle as  (RHETORIC 1356a) obviously does not deserve, but merely is merely pretending to deserve, the attention and credence of his or her betters! Any writer who would descend to quoting the BIBLE, cases in point “Carlyle, Thoreau, Ruskin, and Arnold,” could be doing nothing more than salting their works with “complex, often witty, allusions” which “conveniently authenticated the sage’s claims to high seriousness” and “created a sense of community between the sage and his audience, even when he no longer held to any orthodox Christian belief” (page 34). –Presumably, Thoreau was an atheist trying to trick and defraud honest Christians into being opposed to the institution of human slavery? This “sage” puts out the instruction that, no matter how bizarre his or her ideas or interpretations might at first appear to be, George P. Landow is to be trusting of him or her. The “sage” claims to deserve an attention which Professor George P. Landow is loathe to provide, and a respect which Professor George P. Landow evidently feels should be reserved for people more like unto himself. Ultimately, the people who regard themselves as “sages” are demanding this professor of rhetoric’s reluctant allegiance on the grounds that they are in the right, which means of course that Landow himself must agree to be in the wrong. Their subtext, which is all too legible to Professor George P. Landow, is that he stands accused of having failed to comprehend what is necessary to his own well-being:

[T]he writings of the sage are unique in that their central or basic rhetorical effect is the implicit statement to the audience: “I deserve your attention and credence, for I can be trusted, and no matter how bizarre my ideas or my interpretations may at first seem, they deserve your respect, your attention, and ultimately your allegiance because they are correct and they are necessary to your well-being.” (page 155)

How absurd, to suggest that Professor George P. Landow would ever omit to comprehend what is necessary to his own well-being!

On page 23, comparing and contrasting the traditional statements of “wisdom” –found in such works as the BOOK OF PROVERBS which was created by and large by the upper classes of Judaic society, living in the capital city of Jerusalem– with the writings of the “sages” –found in such works as the BOOK OF JEREMIAH– Landow notes that although the two genres generally coincide, “[t]hey differ at one crucial point, crucial because it motivates the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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entire genre we are considering”:

Whereas the pronouncements of traditional wisdom literature always take as their point of departure the assumption that they embody the accepted, received wisdom of an entire society, the pronouncements of the biblical prophet and Victorian sage begin with the assumption that, however traditional their messages may once have been, they are now forgotten or actively opposed by society. In other words, the style, tone, and general presentation of the wisdom speaker derive from the fact that his often anonymous voice resides at a societal and cultural center; it purports to be the voice of society speaking its essential beliefs and assumptions. In contrast, the style, tone, and general presentation of the sage derive from the fact that his voice resides at the periphery; it is, to use a Ruskinian etymological reminder, an eccentric voice, one off center. We might hold that wisdom literature consists of the statements of orthodoxy and the sage’s writings of criticisms of that orthodoxy, except for the fact that the sage’s attacks upon established political, moral, and spiritual powers often charge that they have abandoned orthodox wisdom or reduced it to an empty husk. When a people can no longer follow its own wisdom literature, then it needs the writings of the sage. When a people ignores the wisdom that lies at the heart of its society and institutions, then the sage recalls that people to it.

Now, I have quoted this at length because I feel it to be pernicious, and tainted. The key distinction between the writings known as wisdom literature and the writings of the sage is seen by Landow to consist in a veneer of technique (“we are right” per the wisdom literature versus “you are wrong” per the writings of the sage) and in whether people agree with the said writings (“we recognize this as at the core of our belief system” per the wisdom literature versus “this is eccentric and idiosyncratic’ per the writings of the sage).

My suggestion is that a better distinction is available, and is similar to a distinction I have myself proffered for our two words “knowledge” and “wisdom”: Knowledge, I offered, was what was easy to remember because it “made one’s life work,” whereas Wisdom, I offered, is something that is bitter, and bitterly learned, and is virtually impossible to retain unless one continues to be driven by pain and the memory of pain, because its function in one’s life is precisely the opposite. And that distinction might be said to be illustratable, by comparing and contrasting the collected works of the professor of rhetoric George P. Landow with these collected works of the 19th-Century rhetorician Henry D. Thoreau — which the 20th-Century rhetorician in this book holds up for our considered contempt.

(Well, you can of course read this for yourself, and determine whether I am here too extreme in my criticisms.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1965

G.B. Tennyson. SARTOR CALLED RESARTUS: THE GENESIS, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE OF THOMAS CARLYLE’S FIRST MAJOR WORK (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1965).

Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS seems to have had a great impact on the presentation and upon the argumentation mode of Waldo Emerson’s famous essay NATURE, and upon Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS.

From pages 286-7 of this G.B. Tennyson study: Yet a further purpose of the painstaking identification of clothing with the practices of society is to strip the clothes off. Carlyle fashions the clothes metaphor less to apparel society than to denude it. [Jonathan] Swift creates his clothes metaphor in A TALE OF THE TUB to comment on a particular set of beliefs, Christianity, and to show that one set of beliefs is superior to its rivals, that one suit of clothes fits man better than any other. Carlyle’s metaphor is both more intensive and more extensive. All of society’s old clothes are ill-fitting and must be removed. SARTOR R ESARTUS abounds in allusions to nakedness, stripping away, disrobing — all designed to make us look at the fundamental object, man, so that we too see that he and his society are wearing tatters in this “Ragsfair of a World.” The time has come, Carlyle argues, to divest society of its clouts and deposit them where they belong — in the Monmouth Street Old Clothes market. There is no specific record that Carlyle was familiar with the fact that tearing off one’s clothes is a “ritual gesture of revulsion against blasphemy,” but the correspondence between the ancient Hebrew gesture and what Teufelsdröckh does for society is astonishingly close. The blasphemy, of course, resides in the decay into which divine institutions have been let fall and the hypocritical lip service those institutions continue to receive while the meaning they once symbolized is no longer operative. Let us, cries Teufelsdröckh, have new finite embodiments of the eternal truths that are ever there underneath the “adventitious wrappings,” in the very nature of the organism that is the human being. “The insight that man is an organism applies with equal force to society. If we can but peer beneath the outer coverings, the “hulls,” “husks,” and “garnitures,” and other pejorative terms Carlyle employs to make these externals appear contemptible, we will see that a living unity lies revealed. The perception of organic life in man and society is one of the most important, although not the most original, of Carlyle’s insights. The clothes metaphor dovetails with this insight at the most crucial point because clothes, in themselves lifeless, nevertheless presuppose a body. Machines are not clothed; society is, and man is. Even nature becomes the “living garment of God.” Once the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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clothes metaphor in its widest expression is firmly planted in the reader’s mind, Carlyle is able to play on the contrast between outer and inner, material and spiritual, real and ideal, dead and living, as on an instrument of which he is the designer and sole performer.

From page 313, referring to Voegelin, Eric, WISSENSCHAFT, POLITIK, UND GNOSIS (München 1959): There can be no doubt that historically Carlyle belongs to that phase of modern thought that leads ultimately to what Eric Voegelin has stigmatized as modern Gnosticism.

From page 319:

Book One [of SARTOR RESARTUS] poses the question, What is man that God is mindful of him? Book Two provides an answer in a specific, yet typical, instance. Book Three generalizes the whole to apply to society. Carlyle’s answer to the question is deceptively simple. It is the Open Secret, the Divine Idea. But lest we do Carlyle a disservice we must emphasize in as un-Carlylean terms as possible what this answer is; for the way we perceive Carlyle’s answer ultimately determines what the whole of SARTOR RESARTUS adds up to, and what we say to such seemingly distant issues as Carlyle’s alleged proto-Fascism.

From page 328, the last paragraph of this study, with a quote from the end, page 278, of Carlyle’s TWO NOTE BOOKS: Carlyle ... believed in life. In the final entry in his notebooks (dating from May 1832, or about the time of the completion of SARTOR RESARTUS), Carlyle wrote: “Joy and sorrow; irreparable losses; toils fruitless or fruitful: a share of all lies noted in this little tome. Onwards are we going, ever onwards: Eternity alone can give back what Time daily takes away.... Improve, cherish, laudably work with whatever Time gives and leaves. Gedenke zu leben. Farewell ye loved ones! I have still zu luben.”

The general question I would pose would be, does such a “belief in life” amount to mysticism — or to its opposite? This email exchange continued: > ...the attraction of Carlyle for the Anglican modernists I am studying. > These modernists were critical of the church and while I have not come > across a clothing metaphor the idea of the church as a husk or a hull, a > dry lifeless shell, is typically modernist. This rejection of the hull > of the church was frequently paired with the discovery and celebration > of a mystical religious experience. It was modernists like Evelyn > Underhill and W.R.Inge whose work has shaped the modern understanding of > mysticism, so the link to Carlyle is a significant one. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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My response was to the effect that I am myself studying Henry David Thoreau, who called himself a mystic. In fact, I pointed out, that is why I was a member of this list on mysticism, it was part of my struggle to discover what Thoreau might have intended by such a self-identification. I was reading Carlyle because Thoreau read him, and wrote an essay on him. It is very typical not only of your Anglican modernists but also of Thoreau, to consider organized, institutionalized “religiosity” as a husk or a hill, a dry lifeless shell. Typically, for instance, the Unitarian Universalists identify Thoreau as a Unitarian Universalist, despite two facts:

1.) he refused to worship with them, and

2.) he worshiped with Quakers.

In fact, I pointed out, the local Unitarian group in Irvine, California was referring to itself as the “Thoreau Society” and when I visited them their leader looked up from his guitar strumming and attempted to declare Thoreau to me as having been a 19th-Century Unitarian minister (historical facts seem to mean nothing to these believe-what-we-wanna hegemonists).

The email exchange continued: > It seems to me that Austin’s question at the end of this —whether > Carlyle’s celebration of life leads to mysticism or its opposite— is > one that might be applied to the modern interpretations of mysticism. > (The modernists are usually accused by religious historians of leading > us out of the church and into a barren secularism.) Comments??

In summation, it seems to me that the “celebration of life” thingie is interestingly ambiguous. To some it may mean “acceptance of whatever experience is given to one” while to others it may mean “struggle for survival.” I would hope for a formula which more clearly differentiated between these alternative interpretations.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Carlyle HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 23, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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