I took our friend M—— to see him [Carlyle], and he came away greatly distressed and désillusionné, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to anybody, and to profess, indeed, the utmost contempt for everybody who thought he had, and poor M—— being intent on giving him a plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.
And again in a letter to Emerson:
Carlyle nowadays is a palpable nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he will find no showman là-bas to match him.... Carlyle’s intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly imagine anything able to cope with it.
An earlier letter has this delicious bit about Hawthorne:
Hawthorne isn’t to me a prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an enjoying person.... But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn’t take my eyes off him all dinner, nor my rapt attention.... It was heavenly to see him persist in ignoring the spectral smiles—in eating his dinner and doing nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn’t remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a canary!
And in the postscript of the same:
What a world, what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and the new earth will swim into reality.
Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were—it was a tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of slavery, and still hoping for a new world.
I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but they must be read entire, with the author’s comments, to place them correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most magnificent things about the book, however,—if I may use a large word for a large concept—is the spirit running through it of filial and fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in the history of American letters.