JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON1 ... PARIS, December 4, 1872. Oddly enough when I got your letter about Tennyson's poem I had just finished reading a real Arthurian romance"Fergus" not one of the best, certainly, but having that merit of being a genuine blossom for which no triumph of artifice can compensate; having, in short, that woodsy hint and tantalization of perfume which is so infinitely better than anything more defined. Emerson had left me Tennyson's book; so last night I took it to bed with me and finished it at a gulp -reading like a naughty boy till half-past one. The contrast between his pomp and my old rhymer's simpleness was very curious and even instructive. One bit of the latter (which I cannot recollect elsewhere) amused me a good deal as a Yankee. When Fergus comes to Arthur's court and Sir Kay "sarses" him (which, you know, is de rigueur in the old poems), Sir Gawain saunters up whittling a stick as a medicine against ennui. So afterwards, when Arthur is dreadfully bored by hearing no news of Fergus, he reclines at table without any taste for his dinner, and whittles to purge his heart of melancholy. I suppose a modern poet would not dare to come so near Nature as this lest she should fling up her heels. But I am not yet "aff wi' the auld love," nor quite "on with the new." There are very fine childish things in Tennyson's poem and fine manly things, too, as it seems to me, but I conceive the theory to be wrong. I have the same feeling (I am not wholly sure of its justice) that I have when I see these modern mediæval pictures. I am defrauded; I do not see reality, but a masquerade. The costumes are all that is genuine, and the people inside them are shams-which, I take it, is just the reverse of what ought to be. One special criticism I should make on Tennyson's new Idyls, and that is that the similes are so often dragged in by the hair. They seem to be taken (à la Tom Moore) from note-books, and not suggested by the quickened sense of association in the glow of composition. From Letters of James Russell Lowell. Copyright, 1893, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission. Sometimes it almost seems as if the verses were made for the similes, instead of being the cresting of a wave that heightens as it rolls. This is analogous to the costume objection and springs perhaps from the same cause the making of poetry with malice prepense. However, I am not going to forget the lovely things that Tennyson has written, and I think they give him rather hard measure now. However, it is the natural recoil of a too rapid fame. Wordsworth had the true kind-an unpopularity that roused and stimulated while he was strong enough to despise it, and honor, obedience, troops of friends, when the grasshopper would have been a burthen to the drooping shoulders. Tennyson, to be sure, has been childishly petulant; but what have these whipper-snappers, who cry "Go up, baldhead," done that can be named with some things of his? He has been the greatest artist in words we have had since Gray and remember how Gray holds his own with little fuel, but real fire. He had the secret of the inconsumable oil, and so, I fancy, has Tennyson. I keep on picking up books here and there, but I shall be forced to stop, for I find I have got beyond my income. Still, I shall try gradually to make my Old French and Provençal collection tolerably complete, for the temptation is great where the field is definitely bounded ... R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY 1 MY DEAR HENLEY, BRÆMAR, August, 1881. Of course I am a rogue. Why, Lord, it's known, man; but you should remember I have had a horrid cold. Now I'm better, I think; and see here-nobody, not you, nor Lang, nor the devil, will hurry me with our crawlers. They are coming. Four of them are as good as done, and the rest will come when ripe; but I am now on another lay for the moment, purely owing to Lloyd, this one; but I believe there's more coin in it than in any amount of crawlers: now, see here, "The SeaCook, or Treasure Island: A Story for Boys." From Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. دو If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my days. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public-house on Devon coast, that it's all about a map, and a treasure, and a mutiny, and a derelict ship, and a current, and a fine old Squire Trelawney (the real Tre, purged of literature and sin to suit the infant mind), and a doctor, and another doctor, and a sea-song with the chorus, "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum (at the third Ho you heave at the capstan bars), which is a real buccaneer's song, only known to the crew of the late Captain Flint (died of rum at Key West, much regretted, friends will please accept this intimation); and lastly, would you be surprised to hear, in this connection, the name of Routledge? That's the kind of man I am, blast your eyes. Two chapters are written, and have been tried on Lloyd with great success; the trouble is to work it off without oaths. Buccaneers without oaths-bricks without straw. But youth and the fond parent have to be consulted. And now look here- this is next day-and three chapters are written and read. (Chapter I. The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow. Chapter II. Black Dog appears and disappears. Chapter III. The Black Spot.) All now heard by Lloyd, F., and my father and mother, with high approval. It's quite silly and horrid fun, and what I want is the best book about the buccaneers that can be had the latter B's above all, Blackbeard and sich, and get Nutt or Bain to send it skimmingly by the fastest post. And now I know you'll write to me for "The Sea-Cook's" sake. Your "Admiral Guinea" is curiously near my line, but of course I'm fooling; and your Admiral sounds like a shublime gent. Stick to him like wax-he'll do. My Trelawney is, as I indicate, several thousand sea-miles off the lie of the original of your Admiral Guinea; and besides, I have no more about him yet but one mention of his name, and I think it likely he may turn yet farther from the model in the course of handling. A chapter a day I mean to do; they are short; and perhaps in a month "The Sea-Cook" may to Routledge go, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! My Trelawney has a strong dash of Landor, as I see him from here. No women in the story, Lloyd's orders; and who so blithe to obey? It's awful fun, boys' stories; you just indulge the pleasure of your heart, that's all; no trouble, no strain. The only stiff thing is to get it ended that I don't see, but I look to a volcano. O sweet, O generous, O human toils! You would like my blind beggar in Chapter III, I believe; no writing, just drive along as the words come and the pen will scratch! R. L. S., Author of Boys' Stories. FRANKLIN K. LANE TO MRS. RALPH ELLIS 1 MY DEAR ELIZABETH, [CAMDEN, North Carolina, March, 1919.] And so they call you a Bolshevik! a parlor Bolshevik! Well, I am not surprised for your talk gives justification for calling you almost anything except a dull person. When one is adventurous in mind and in speech-perfectly willing to pioneer into all sorts of mountains and morasses-the stay-at-homes always furnish them with purposes that they never had and throw them into all kinds of loose company. I have forgotten whether or no there was a Mrs. Columbus, but if the Old Man on his return spoke an admiring word of the Indian girls he saw on Santo Domingo you may be sure that he was at once regarded as having outdone that Biblical hero who exclaimed, "Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity!," after having run his personal attachées up into the thousand. Yes, the very solemn truth is that adventuring is dangerous business, and mental adventuring most dangerous of all. We forgive those who do things that are strange, really more readily than those who talk of doing them. People are really afraid of talk, and rightly so, I believe. The mind that goes reaching out and up and around and through is a disturber, it bumps into every kind of fixed notion and takes off a chip here and there, it probes into all sorts of mysteries and opens From The Letters of Franklin K. Lane. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Reprinted by permission. them to find that they are hollow wind-bag affairs, though always held as holy of holies heretofore. To think, to speculate, to wonder, to query-these imply imagination, and the Devil has just one function in this Universe-to destroy, to kill, or suppress or to divert or prevent the imagination. Imagination is the Divine Spark, and old Beelzebub has had his hands full ever since that spark was born. "As you were, " is his one military command. His diabolical energy is challenged to its utmost when he hears the words "Forward March!" There is not much-anything of beauty or nobility or achievement in the world that he has not fought, and all of it has been the fruit of imagination, the working of the creative mind. You see I come very near to believing in that old personal Devil which my Presbyterian father saw so vividly, and which our friend Wells has recently discovered. Satan is smart, and that is a very dreadful thing to be. I never like to hear the Yankee called smart, it is a term of reproach. I don't like to think of a Smart Set. And my refuge is in the knowledge that there is just one thing that destroys smartness and that is, to put it in a very high-sounding word, Nobility. There is the test we can all put to ourselves and it really is conscience and ethics and religion all in one is the idea smart or is it noble? I'd take my chances of going to Heaven on the conformity of conduct to that criterion. But all this seems a far way from Parlor Bolshevism-yet it is not so far. For it all comes down to this. The Lord he prompts us to think and to advance, and the Devil he urges us to be smart, to switch our thinkings, our very right thinkings, our progressive impulses, to side tracks that will serve his ends. And that is just what is happening to a lot of the finest minds. Men and women who see clearly that things are wrong, who have enough insight and knowledge to get a glimpse into the unnecessary suffering of the world and who mentally come down with a slap-bang declaration that this must stop, are allowing themselves to be called by a name that history will execrate, and to smooth over and palliate and defend things that are bad, out of which good will not come. |