should have omitted some personal observations which are all fair in a private letter; as about Tennyson being of a ‘gloomy’ turn (which you know is not so), Thackeray’s ‘enormous appetite’ ditto; and such mention of Richard Milnes as a ‘Robin Redbreast,’ etc.; which may be less untrue, though not more proper to be published of a clever, useful, and amiable man, now living.
To C. E. Norton.
Woodbridge. May 12/83.
My dear Norton,
Your Emerson-Carlyle of course interested me very much, as I believe a large public also. I had most to learn of Emerson, and that all good: but Carlyle came out in somewhat of a new light to me also. Now we have him in his Jane’s letters, as we had seen something of him before in the Reminiscences: but a yet more tragic Story; so tragic that I know not if it ought not to have been withheld from the Public: assuredly, it seems to me, ought to have been but half of the whole that now is. But I do not the less recognize Carlyle for more admirable than before—if for no other reason than his thus furnishing the world with weapons against himself which the World in general is glad to turn against him. . . .
And, by way of finishing what I have to say on
Carlyle for the present, I will tell you that I had to go up to our huge, hideous, London a week ago, on disagreeable business; which Business, however, I got over in time for me to run to Chelsea before I returned home at Evening. I wanted to see the Statue on the Chelsea Embankment which I had not yet seen: and the old No. 5 of Cheyne Row, which I had not seen for five and twenty years. The Statue I thought very good, though looking somewhat small and ill set-off by its dingy surroundings. And No. 5 (now 24), which had cost her so much of her Life, one may say, to make habitable for him, now all neglected, unswept, ungarnished, uninhabited
‘TO LET’
I cannot get it out of my head, the tarnished Scene of the Tragedy (one must call it) there enacted.
Well, I was glad to get away from it, and the London of which it was a small part, and get down here to my own dull home, and by no means sorry not to be a Genius at such a Cost. ‘Parlons d’autres choses.’