Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 515 But these comments are not meant to detract from the overall excellence of Kennedy's study as an intellectual portrait of Tracy set against the panoramic background of philosophy, social science, and politics in post-revolutionary France. ARAM VAR'rANIAN New York University Kenneth Marc Harris. Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Pp. 194. $1~.5o. As long ago as t88 3 Charles Eliot Norton published an edition of the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence, and critics of the stature of Henry James, Matthew Arnold, and Friedrich Nietzsche have commented on the relationship between the two men. Using a more recent edition of this correspondence, Kenneth Harris has written a book-length treatment of the Emerson-Carlyle connection. Its intent is to center on the epistolary friendship of the two men but also to take acount of their three personal meetings and the structural similarities in their writing. Harris is at his best when he focuses on the religious conflict both speculators felt. Emerson and Carlyle were living in an age when one sort of ideology--a peculiarly Calvinist sensibility--had lost the power to console for death. In their attempt to discover another, Harris argues, they symbolized tile struggle of the nineteenth-century "Transatlantic" educated 61ite. In their regard for the transcendance of death as "the acid test" of the success of future modes of belief, Emerson and Carlyle embodied the crucial problem of the intellectual culture of their era. The book is weakened, however, because Harris often neglects these larger issues for the less interesting task of Carlyle or Emerson criticism. For example, he often refers to aspects of their work and development and to criticism about them in ways that will be fully intelligible only to other experts on Carlyle and Emerson. Much of Carlyle and Emerson is a scrupulous contrast of their work on similar topics or their theories of a certain subject. The subtitle of the book gives the game away; for Harris is not so concerned with the gestation and flowering of the Carlyle-Emerson friendship as he is with "their long debate." And this debate is not so much a real debate as it is Harris's conscientious juxtaposition of the more significant writings of both authors. The problem is not that close textual exegesis is boring or without value. It is rather that Harris does not show that Emerson and Carlyle were deep enough thinkers to make detailed comparative analysis worth the effort; or he does not show that he has the key which makes their orphic sayings or vague reasoning compelling in their insights. Carlyle and Emerson is a narrow academic monograph and has the flaws of the genre. But it is nonetheless an intelligent and meticulous book that will be useful to scholars of nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature. BRUCE KUKLtCK University of Pensylvania ...