We do not play intellectual games here, thank heaven, and there is
no idol on a pedestal, nor one person who is more the fashion than
another. We are frivolous usually, although I have occasionally heard
some solid and instructive conversation, and we all read a good deal.
Every house has several shelves of books, and the best literature of
all countries except the Great Republic is well represented. Although
I no longer take much interest in the subject--and indeed had observed
long ago that the Americans of this class cared little for their own
bookmakers--I asked Mrs. Van Worden the other day the cause of it. She
often answers in sentences so short they sound like epigrams; however,
brevity is the soul as well as the substance of most epigrams, as far
as I am able to distinguish between the short sentences of the witty
novelists and the paragraphs of those who think. For some reason the
staccato movement supplies a meaning of which the words reck not.
Mrs. Van W. shrugged her flexible little shoulders when I called her
attention to the fact that she had only three American novels in her
bookcase.
“Why should I waste my little time on the obvious? I read what I do not
know. I want knowledge. Not of a new dialect and pin point on a map,
but of life, of the eternal mysteries. I want the wisdom of those who
are not afraid to live and tell of what they have felt, thought, done.
I am not satiated, not blasée. I am still full of hopes and dreams, and
often I am quite happy; but _I_ have lived. Therefore I want to read
books by people who have lived more. How could the surface--painted in
water-colours by a cautious hand--interest _me_. And the love scenes!
Rotten. Conducted through a telephone. I want books written out of a
brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a
big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don’t care a hang for the
‘verbal felicities.’ They’ll do for the fringe, but I want the garment
to warm me first. Good God! how little true poetry there is in our
time; and I often feel the want of it so terribly. I know the old boys
by heart. Oh, for a new Voice! What is the matter with the men, anyway?
Women make asses of themselves when they try to be passionate and rhyme
at the same time, but I can see no reason why a man should become so
offensively ladylike the moment he becomes a poet.”
“These are busy times,” I suggested. “Perhaps the virile brains have
found something better to do. A poet always has seemed to me a pretty
poor apology for a man. Byron was masculine but he was the great
exception. And his genius of personality was far greater than his
poetical gift, great, creatively, as that was. I could stand a man
being a poet incidentally, if he had the power to make me forget he was
a poet, but not otherwise.”
And then we all went out on the lake in the dusk and Mr. Nugent quoted
Byron to me for an hour. Not to my back. He was rowing this time.