1890/10/21: Ebenezer to Agnes
Being honest with each other, writing to a former professor in Scotland, Ebenezer moving into a formal career, a fever epidemic in Calgary
Calgary
21, October : 1890.
My Comrade,
Your letter came to me this morning, throbbing with yourself--your true self, as did that former letter from Vancouver, and I am content, I am content. At all times in this dark world of falsehood, irreverence, and unrest, let us have comfort in knowing that we may be sincere and at home in each other’s disinterested confidence, full of kindness, truth, and encouragement one with the other! In my absolute yielding of obedient devotion to you--that obedience which makes me expect from you not only the praise and the reward of all toil, but so far as any choice is open, the direction of the toil--I wrote this afternoon as you suggested, to Professor Masson1 of Edinburgh University. So that matter is settled to a certain Extent. For your sake I do trust that all may go well in this direction2; it was you who wrote that letter. Are the lehrjahre + wanderjahre3 really then over for me? It must be so, and at last I must away down to that dim confused battle-field. But yours is the lady’s hand that is buckling on my armour. Ah! as poor Ruskin4 said--the soul’s armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it; + it is only when she braces it loosely that the honour of mankind fails.
Poor Mr. Barter is dead--done with it all, and a higher Will and Intelligence than ours has decided against the trip to the Quorn Ranch that I dreamed of; it is better so, then, in every way. There is a serious Epidemic of fever5 here now; Dr. Lafferty reports tonight over twenty serious cases. Many of our brave-??6 young men are panic-stricken, afraid of the End--the unknown.
We have looked too long in that direction to give pale or shudder.
Your own true knight and Comrade--
E. Charlton Black.
David Mather Masson (1822–1907), Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University from 1865 to 1895, and a personal friend of Carlyle's. Best known for his six-volume Life of Milton. Because Ebenezer studied literature at Edinburgh, Masson was almost certainly among his professors and a likely source of the Carlylean influence that surfaces in these letters.
Given subsequent letters, it seems that Ebenezer is reaching out to his former professor at the University of Edinburgh to inquire about a possible recitation tour for Agnes.
Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre--German: literally "years of learning" and "years of wandering," the two traditional stages of a young man's formation, named for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) and its sequel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821–29). The pairing was popularized for English readers by Thomas Carlyle, who translated Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in 1824 and championed Goethe throughout his career. This is likely how Ebenezer, an admirer of Carlyle, came to the reference. In invoking it, he is asking Agnes whether his own period of learning and restless wandering is now behind him.
John Ruskin (1819–1900), English art and social critic; the line paraphrased here is from "Of Queens' Gardens," in Sesame and Lilies (1865), which argues that women exercise their influence not through public power but through the private moral guidance they give the men in their lives. Ebenezer's "poor Ruskin" reflects the man's real circumstances in 1890: after years of recurring breakdowns, Ruskin had withdrawn from public life in 1889 and would remain largely reclusive until his death in 1900, a decline well known to educated readers of the day.
The "serious epidemic of fever" here is almost certainly the 1889–90 "Russian" or "Asiatic" influenza pandemic, the first flu pandemic to spread globally via rail and steamship networks. It reached Canada's western towns, including newly rail-connected Calgary, in 1890.
You are invited to decipher this word!