Complete Prose Works

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THE INHABITANTS--GOOD LIVING

Grim and rocky and black-water'd as the demesne hereabout is, however,
you must not think genial humanity, and comfort, and good-living are
not to be met. Before I began this memorandum I made a first-rate
breakfast of sea-trout, finishing off with wild raspberries. I find
smiles and courtesy everywhere--physiognomies in general curiously
like those in the United States--(I was astonish'd to find the same
resemblance all through the province of Quebec.) In general the
inhabitants of this rugged country (Charlevoix, Chicoutimi and
Tadousac counties, and lake St. John region) a simple, hardy
population, lumbering, trapping furs, boating, fishing, berry-picking
and a little farming. I was watching a group of young boatmen eating
their early dinner--nothing but an immense loaf of bread, had
apparently been the size of a bushel measure, from which they cut
chunks with a jack-knife. Must be a tremendous winter country this,
when the solid frost and ice fully set in.

CEDAR-PLUMS LIKE-NAMES (_Back again in Camden and down in Jersey_)

One time I thought of naming this collection "Cedar-Plums Like" (which
I still fancy wouldn't have been a bad name nor inappropriate.) A
melange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling--a little
thinking thrown in for salt, but very little--not only summer but all
seasons--not only days but nights--some literary meditations--books,
authors examined, Carlyle, Poe, Emerson tried, (always under my
cedar-tree, in the open air, and never in the library)--mostly the
scenes everybody sees, but some of my own caprices, meditations,
egotism--truly an open air and mainly summer formation--singly, or
in clusters--wild and free and somewhat acrid--indeed more like
cedar-plums than you might guess at first glance.

But do you know what they are? (To city man, or some sweet parlor
lady, I now talk.) As you go along roads, or barrens, or across
country, anywhere through these States, middle, eastern, western, or
southern, you will see, certain seasons of the year, the thick woolly
tufts of the cedar mottled with bunches of china-blue berries, about
as big as fox-grapes. But first a special word for the tree itself:
everybody knows that the cedar is a healthy, cheap, democratic wood,
streak'd red and white--an evergreen--that it is not a _cultivated_
tree--that it keeps away moths--that it grows inland or seaboard, all
climates, hot or cold, any soil--in fact rather prefers sand and
bleak side spots--content if the plough, the fertilizer and the
trimming-axe, will but keep away and let it alone. After a long rain,
when everything looks bright, often have I stopt in my wood-saunters,
south or north, or far west, to take in its dusky green, wash'd clean
and sweet, and speck'd copiously with its fruit of clear, hardy blue.
The wood of the cedar is of use--but what profit on earth are those
sprigs of acrid plums? A question impossible to answer satisfactorily.
True, some of the herb doctors give them for stomachic affections, but
the remedy is as bad as the disease. Then in my rambles down in Camden
county I once found an old crazy woman gathering the clusters
with zeal and joy. She show'd, as I was told afterward, a sort of
infatuation for them, and every year placed and kept profuse bunches
high and low about her room. They had a strange charm on her uneasy
head, and effected docility and peace. (She was harmless, and lived
near by with her well-off married daughter.) Whether there is any
connection between those bunches, and being out of one's wits, I
cannot say, but I myself entertain a weakness for them. Indeed, I love
the cedar, anyhow--its naked ruggedness, its just palpable odor,
(so different from the perfumer's best,) its silence, its equable
acceptance of winter's cold and summer's heat, of rain or drouth--its
shelter to me from those, at times--its associations--(well, I never
could explain _why_ I love anybody, or anything.) The service I now
specially owe to the cedar is, while I cast around for a name for my
proposed collection, hesitating, puzzled--after rejecting a long, long
string, I lift my eyes, and lo! the very term I want. At any rate, I
go no further--I tire in the search. I take what some invisible kind
spirit has put before me. Besides, who shall say there is not affinity
enough between (at least the bundle of sticks that produced) many
of these pieces, or granulations, and those blue berries? their
uselessness growing wild--a certain aroma of Nature I would so like
to have in my pages--the thin soil whence they come--their content
in being let alone--their stolid and deaf repugnance to answering
questions, (this latter the nearest, dearest trait affinity of all.)

Then reader dear, in conclusion, as to the point of the name for the
present collection, let us be satisfied to _have_ a name--something to
identify and bind it together, to concrete all its vegetable, mineral,
personal memoranda, abrupt raids of criticism, crude gossip of
philosophy, varied sands and clumps--without bothering ourselves
because certain pages do not present themselves to you or me as coming
under their own name with entire fitness or amiability. (It is a
profound, vexatious never-explicable matter--this of names. I have
been exercised deeply about it my whole life.[11])

After all of which the name "Cedar-Plums Like" got its nose put out
of joint; but I cannot afford to throw away what I pencill'd down the
lane there, under the shelter of my old friend, one warm October noon.
Besides, it wouldn't be civil to the cedar tree.

Note:

[11] In the pocket of my receptacle-book I find a list of suggested
and rejected names for this volume, or parts of it--such as the
following:

_As the wild bee hums in May,
& August mulleins grow,
& Winter snow-flakes fall,
& stars in the sky roll round._

_Away from Books--away from Art,
Now for the Day and Night--the lessons done,
Now for the Sun and Stars._

_Notes of a Half-Paralytic, As Voices in the Dusk, from
Week in and Week out, Speakers far or hid,
Embers of Ending Days, Autochthons....Embryons,
Ducks and Drakes, Wing-and-Wing,
Flood Tide and Ebb, Notes and Recalles.
Gossip at Early Candle-light, Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees,
Echoes and Escapades, Pond-Babble....Tete-a-Tetes,
Such as I....Evening Dews, Echoes of a Life in the 19th
Notes and Writing a Book, Century in the New World,
Far and Near at 63, Flanges of Fifty Years,
Drifts and Cumulus, Abandons....Hurry Notes,
Maize-Tassels....Kindlings, A Life-Mosaic....Native Moments,
Fore and Aft....Vestibules, Types and Semi-Tones,
Scintilla at 60 and after, Oddments....Sand-Drifts,
Sands on the Shores of 64, Again and Again._

DEATH OF THOMAS CARLYLE

_Feb. 10, '81_.--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, 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 outpour the
God-like suggestions pressing for birth in the soul. This is briefly
the doctrine of the Friends or Quakers.)

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 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. To the northeast and north the Sickle, the Goat and kids,
Cassiopeia, 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.

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[13]
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. F. Hegel's.[14]

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
poisonvines and 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.[15]

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 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 sign 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.

To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, 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.

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 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.