The influence of Emerson by Mead Edwin D. (Edwin Doak) 1849-1937

Author:Mead, Edwin D. (Edwin Doak), 1849-1937
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882, Parker, Theodore, 1810-1860, Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881
Publisher: Boston : American Unitarian Association
Published: 1903-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

178 The Influence of Emerson

begun. The first letter in this famous correspondence was written by Emerson, May 14, 1834; the last by Carlyle, April 2, 1872. Of this correspondence Whipple justly says: "In richness and fulness of matter, there is nothing superior, nothing, one is prompted to say, equal to it in literary annals." Nowhere else are the deep sympathies and sharp differences of the writers so strikingly revealed. Dr. Holmes estimates it well: " The hatred of unreality was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers, find their counter parts in every thinking community. Car lyle did not weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon ; a De Profundis answered by a Sursum Corda. ' The ground of my ex istence is black as death/ says Carlyle. c Come and live with me a year/ says Emerson, c and if you do not like New

England well enough to stay, one of these years (when the "History" has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you/ ' The criticisms of each other's style are most frank. In his first letter, Emerson remon strates with Carlyle upon his "defying dic tion "; and he writes in his diary, " O, Carlyle! the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen through." Carlyle finds that Emerson's sentences do not "cohere," do not "rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers; the para graphs not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful bag of duck shot held together by canvas." In his diary Emerson writes: " My affection for that man really incapa citates me from reading his book. The pages which to others look so rich and alluring to me have a frigid and marrowless air for the warm hand and heart I have an estate in, and the living eye of which I can almost discern across the sea some sparkles." In 1836 Emerson edited "Sartor Re-sartus," from the pages of Fraser, and had it published in Boston, himself writing a

180 The Influence of Emerson

preface for the book. He had lent the numbers of Fraser to Miss Jackson at Plymouth, and we have accounts of the excitement which they caused in her circle and in others. " The foreign dress and aspect of the work," Emerson said in his preface, "are quite superficial, and cover a genuine Saxon heart. We believe no book has been published for many years written in a more sincere style of idiomatic English, or which discovers an equal mastery over all the riches of language. The author makes ample amends for the occasional eccentricity of his genius, not only by frequent bursts of pure splendor, but by the wit and sense which never fail him.

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