CHAPTER XXII. CANAL BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST. 1842. 1842. Character letters. IT would not be possible that a more vivid or exact AMERICA: impression, than that which is derivable from these letters, could be given of either the genius or the character of in the the writer. The whole man is here in the supreme hour of his life, and in all the enjoyment of its highest sensations. Inexpressibly sad to me has been the task of going over them, but the surprise has equalled the sadness. I had forgotten what was in them. That they contained, in their first vividness, all the most prominent descriptions of his published book, I knew. But the reproduction of any part of these was not permissible here; and believing that the substance of them had been thus almost wholly embodied in the American Notes, when they were lent to assist in its composition, I turned to them with very small expectation of finding anything available for present use. Yet the difficulty has been, not to find but to reject; and the rejection when most unavoidable has not been most easy. Even where the subjects recur that are in the printed volume, there is a freshness of first impressions in the letters that renders it no small trial to act strictly on The Notes less satis factory. 1842. A charm in letters excluded AMERICA: the rule adhered to in these extracts from them. In the Notes there is of course very much, masterly in observation and description, of which there is elsewhere no trace; but the passages amplified from the letters have not been improved, and the manly force and directness of some of their views and reflections, conveyed by touches of a picturesque completeness that no elaboration could give, have here and there not been strengthened by rhetorical additions in the printed work. There is also a charm in the letters which the plan adopted in the book necessarily excluded from from Notes. it. It will always of course have value as a deliberate expression of the results gathered from the American experiences, but the personal narrative of this famous visit to America is in the letters alone. In what way his experiences arose, the desire at the outset to see nothing that was not favourable, the slowness with which adverse impressions were formed, and the eager recognition of every truthful and noble quality that arose and remained above the fault-finding, are discoverable only in the letters. Personal narrative in them. The copyright diffe rences. Already it is manifest from them that the before-named disappointments, as well of the guest in his entertainers as of the entertainers in their guest, had their beginning in the copyright differences; but it is not less plain that the social dissatisfactions on his side were of even earlier date, and with the country itself had certainly nothing to do. It was objected to him, I well remember, that in making such unfavourable remarks as his published book did on many points, he was assailing the democratic institutions that had formed the character of the nation: but 1842. Social dis satisfac the answer is obvious, that, democratic institutions being AMERICA: universal in America, they were as fairly entitled to share in the good as in the bad; and in what he praised, of which there is here abundant testimony, he must be held tions. to have exalted those institutions as much, as in what he blamed he could be held to depreciate them. He never sets himself up in judgment on the entire people. As Fairness of judgment. we see, from the way the letters show us that the opinions he afterwards published were formed, he does not draw conclusions while his observation is only half-concluded; and he refrains throughout from the example too strongly set him, even in the very terms of his welcome by the writers of America,* of flinging one nation in the other's face. He leaves each upon its own ground. His great business in his publication, as in the first impressions recorded here, is to exhibit social influences at work as he saw them himself; and it would surely have been of all bad compliments the worst, when resolving, in the tone and with the purpose of a friend, to make public what he had observed in America, if he had supposed that such a country would take truth amiss. There is however one thing to be especially remembered, as well in reading the letters as in judging of the book which was founded on them. It is a point to which I believe Mr. Emerson directed the attention of his countrymen. Everything of an objectionable kind, whether the author would have it so or not, stands out more prominently and distinctly than matter of the opposite description. The social sin is a more tangible thing than the · See ante, p. 282-8. The real compliment to America. A fact to be remem bered. 1842. AMERICA: Social virtue. Pertinaciously to insist upon the charities and graces of life, is to outrage their quiet and unobtrusive character; but we incur the danger of extending the vulgarities and indecencies, if we seem to countenance by omitting to expose them. And if this is only kept in view in reading what is here given, the proportion of censure will be found not to overbalance the just admiration and unexaggerated praise. Literary merits of How written. Apart from such considerations, it is to be also said, the letters. the letters, from which I am now printing exactly as they were written, have claims, as mere literature, of an unusual kind. Unrivalled quickness of observation, the rare faculty of seizing out of a multitude of things the thing only that is essential, the irresistible play of humour, such pathos as only humourists of this high order possess, and the unwearied unforced vivacity of ever fresh, buoyant, bounding animal spirits, never found more natural, variously easy, or picturesque expression. Written amid such distraction, fatigue, and weariness as they describe, amid the jarring noises of hotels and streets, aboard steamers, on canal boats, and in log huts, there is not an erasure in them. Not external objects only, but feelings, reflections, and thoughts, are photographed into visible forms with the same unexampled ease. They borrow no help from the matters of which they treat. They would have given, to the subjects described, old acquaintance and engrossing interest if they had been about a people in the moon. Of the personal character at pourtrayed. the same time self-pourtrayed, others, whose emotions it less vividly awakens, will judge more calmly and clearly than Personal character myself. Yet to myself only can it be known how small were the services of friendship that sufficed to rouse all the sensibilities of this beautiful and noble nature. Throughout our life-long intercourse it was the same. His keenness of discrimination failed him never excepting here, when it was lost in the limitless extent of his appreciation of all kindly things; and never did he receive what was meant for a benefit that he was not eager to return it a hundredfold. No man more truly generous ever lived. CANAL BOAT FOR PITTS BURGH: 1842. passages His next letter was begun from 'on board the canal On board. 'boat. Going to Pittsburgh. Monday, March twenty' eighth, 1842;' and the difficulties of rejection, to which reference has just been made, have been nowhere felt by me so much. Several of the descriptive masterpieces of the book are in it, with such touches of original freshness as might fairly have justified a reproduction of them in their first form. Among these are the Harris- Choicest burgh coach on its way through the Susquehanah valley; of Notes the railroad across the mountain; the brown-forester of the Mississippi, the interrogative man in pepper-and-salt, and the affecting scene of the emigrants put ashore as the steamer passes up the Ohio. But all that I may here give, bearing any resemblance to what is given in the Notes, are, the opening sketch of the small creature on the top of the queer stage coach, to which the printed version íails to do adequate justice; and an experience to which the interest belongs of having suggested the settlement of Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit..... 'We left Baltimore 'last Thursday the twenty-fourth at half-past eight in the |