I remember well how, when we were all young together, we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our little family was not in business....
Such had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance; the business in which the boy's father gloriously was stood forth inveterately as the very first note of our comrade's impressiveness. We had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly recover the effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was respectable--if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in business, just as I remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly, at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth about our credentials, that the author of his being was in the business of stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play--the word was fine and mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you are, don't you see?" could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal.
Very interesting are the occasional letters telling of Emerson and Carlyle. Especially so to me are the side lights on Carlyle, as chiming in somehow with the series of impressions I seem gradually to have accumulated about him as time goes on. Perhaps it really isn't fair, as a large amount of those impressions I feel sure I owe to Froude, but I can't help wondering what our times, with modern surgery and therapeutics, would have accomplished with Carlyle's indigestion, and what resultant difference there would assuredly have been in his philosophy. To quote from a letter of the elder Henry James:
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.