'He Loved His Books and Loved Nature Better'

“The first time I was ever confronted by myself in print was one Sunday morning (please don't append an editorial note here, stating just how many years ago it was) when I opened the Sunday Journal and saw, stretching out through a column or two, an essay on ‘SomePersonal Characteristics of Thomas Carlyle’ which Professor Hunt had given you to publish, quite without my knowledge.” 

It’s easy to be fashionably blasé about seeing one’s name in print. After the first two- thousand times it’s a bore, don’t you know. Above, Willa Cather’s fifty-three-year-old self is writing about her first bylined publication, at age seventeen. She was enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the essay was submitted by her teacher of rhetoric and oratory, Ebenezer W. Hunt, without her knowledge. She was still twenty-one years away from publishing her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912).

 

Her March 22, 1927 letter quoted above was written to Will Owen Jones, who was then associate editor of the Nebraska State Journal. The reader suspects she already identified with Carlyle, a difficult Scot:

 

“He was a recluse, not that he had any aversion for men, but that he loved his books and loved Nature better. He saw little of society; yet, though he never bent his knee to it, he never trampled upon its laws. He was merely indifferent to it, for he was one of the few men who can live utterly independent of it, while those who condemn it most severely, cling to it as the only thing which can give them zest or ambition enough to live.”

 

Cather ranks among the most independent and confident of American writers. One admires her unruffled poise, in life and in prose. I first encountered Carlyle not in the classroom but in Herman Melville, who likewise admired him. The prose texture of Moby-Dick owes something to the author of Sartor Resartus. As to the renowned Thomas vs. Jane Carlyle donnybrook, which rivals Leo and Sophia Tolstoy’s marriage for sheer animosity and misery, Cather sides with Thomas and makes no friends among latter-day feminists:

 

“It is well known that Carlyle’s married life was not strictly a happy one, and the Mrs. Carlyle sometimes complained bitterly of his indifference to her. The wife of an artist, if he continues to be an artist, must always be a secondary consideration with him; she should realize that from the outset. Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so even than Jehovah. He says only, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Art, science, and letters cry, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods at all.’ They accept only human sacrifices.”

 

In writing about Carlyle, one senses Cather is composing a personal apologia:

 

“This reverential seriousness of disposition was characteristic of him in literature, as in everything else. He never strove to please a pampered public. His genius was not the tool of his ambition, but his religion, his god. Nothing has so degraded modern literature as the desperate efforts of modern writers to captivate the public, their watching the variation of public taste, as a speculator watches the markets.”