TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
[LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,]
INSTEAD OF PREFACE.
Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and don gratuit to printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page; on these we are now printing.
My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures, but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.
Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third, finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of alternating between the other two.
This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.
The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external, as the madman in a worse sense does; every fixed idea, such as rules every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long, fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![[33]]
This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State, and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors, Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons, what way of becoming happy here can I possibly point out?
My second merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent Fixlein's Life into the Messrs. Lübeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same Life--therefore in this Preface it is less needful--I may show to the whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals; in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at home.