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George Ripley and Thomas Carlyle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph Slater
Joseph Slater*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N. J.
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Extract

In the spring of 1835, George Ripley, a young Unitarian minister of Boston, remembered an old debt. For some years he had been a leader in that transplantation of German literature and philosophy which was now flowering into Transcendentalism. He could read Kant in the original tongue, and he owned a redoubtable library of German biblical criticism and idealist philosophy. Three years before, in the Christian Examiner (xi, 375) he had explained the differences between Kant and Coleridge and asserted the superiority of Kant; this very spring he had written for the same journal (xviii, 167-221) a biography of Herder and a closely critical review of Marsh's translation of Herder's Spirit of German Poetry. But he was still young enough in erudition to remember the names of those who had first turned his eyes to Germany: the Herder article began with a statement of his indebtedness to “sound and liberal scholars, like Carlyle.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , June 1952, pp. 341 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

1 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston, 1882), p. 46. Unless otherwise indicated, biographical details in this article are taken from Frothingham.

2 The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1883), i, 59-60. Subsequent references to this correspondence will appear in the text.

3 MS. in the Pierpont Morgan Library, published by permission of the Trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library.

4 “State of German Literature,” Edinburgh Rev., xlvi (Oct. 1827), 304-351.

5 “Burns,” Edinburgh Rev., xlviii (Dec. 1828), 267-312.

6 Carlyle's Life of Friedrich Schiller was published in London in 1825, in Boston in 1833. His article “Schiller,” Fraser's Mag., iii (March 1831), 127-152, was in large part a review of the book. Both works were originally anonymous.

7 In his letter to Emerson of 12 Aug. 1834 Carlyle had written: “Nothing was ever more ungenial than the soil this poor Teufelsdröckhish seed-corn has been thrown on here” (Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i, 20).

8 The OED gives Carlyle as the first to use “environment” in its present concrete sense. Emerson also, in his first letter to Carlyle, called attention to the neologism (i, 12).

9 Probably his Christian Examiner article on Herder.

10 An allusion to Carlyle's 12 Aug. 1834 letter to Emerson: Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i, 23.

11 Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1826-1836, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London, 1889), p. 543.

12 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York, 1939), i, 432, n.

13 MS. in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

14 A. H. Everett in the North Amer. Rev., xli (Oct. 1835), 454-482, demonstrated, mock-seriously, that Sartor was fictitious. Carlyle could not decide whether this reviewer was a dullard or a “thrice-plied quiz” (Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i, 94, 112).

15 N. L. Frothingham, Christian Examiner, xxi (Sept. 1836), 74-84. This review, Carlyle thought, “had more true perception and appreciation than all the other critiques, laudations and vituperations I had seen of myself” : New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London, 1904), i, 65.

16 The second American edition of Sartor, published in 1837, consisted of 500 copies: I. W. Dyer, A Bibiography of Thomas Carlyle's Writings and Ana (Portland, Me., 1928), p. 222.

17 The Rev. W. H. Charming and his wife.

18 Ripley perhaps knew the 1830 German edition of Carlyle's Schiller, in which was printed a letter from Carlyle to Goethe that mentioned “zwei leichte Pferde.” See the Centenary Edition, xxv, 322, 338.

19 John Lowell (1799-1836). The institution which was established from his bequest was the Lowell Institute of Boston.

20 In the Boston Daily Advertiser Norton denounced a Christian Examiner article of Ripley's as a step toward infidelity; Ripley replied in the same newspaper. O. B. Frothingham (see n. 1), p. 96.

21 Letters to Andrews Norton on “The Latest Form of Infidelity” (Boston, 1840).

22 Philosophical Miscellanies, trans. and ed. by George Ripley (Boston, 1838), i, 41-42.