snow dirty, sky dark. How different from a place we know!
There are one hundred and fifty physicians and surgeons in the
clinic, and Heaven knows how many hundred employees. No hospitals
are owned and run by the Mayos; all these are private, outside
affairs. The side tracks are filled with private cars of the
wealthy. Scores of residences, large, small, fine, and shabby are
little hospitals. The town has grown 5,000 in five years, all on
account of the Mayos, these two sons of a great country doctor who
without a college education have gathered the world's talent to
them.
I am tomorrow to be medically examined further, to the revealing
of my terrible past, my perturbed present, and pacific future. The
result of which necromancy I shall duly report. I am afraid that
they will not find that an operation will do good, if so I shall
truly despair. And if they decide for the knife, I shall go to the
guillotine like the gayest Marquis of the ancient regime. Yes, I
should do better for I have my chance, and he, poor chap, had
none.
I received your Christmas present in the spirit that sent it. I
can't say "No! No!"--for I preach mixing pleasure with business.
Things are all wrong when we don't. I will never repay you. If I
could, or did, you would receive none of the blessings that come
from giving gifts. The truth is, we knew each other years ago,
perhaps centuries ago, and you have done a good turn to an old
friend for which the old friend is glad, because it makes the tie
more binding.
I told you I would send Wells' history to you, and to it I have
added one of the greatest of human documents, William James'
Letters. I hope you love the largeness of the man, to be large and
playful and useful, I say, man, can you beat that combination? I
believe I know another beside James who meets the specifications.
And strangely enough he, too, evolved from physician to
psychologist, to philosopher.
Well, here's hoping that he and his High-Souled Partner meet with
many joys and few sorrows in 1921.
F. K. L.
XIII
LETTERS TO ELIZABETH 1919-1920
To Mrs. Ralph Ellis
[Camden, North Carolina, March, 1919]
MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--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 attachees
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 them to find that they are hollow
wind-bag affairs, tho' 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.
You have no love for Czarism any more than you have for Kaiserism.
You do not care to make the world righteous by dictatorship,
because you know that it is not growth or the basis of growth, but
the foundation of hate. Now the very cornerstone of Bolshevism is
smartness--the get-even spirit. Because the Czars and the Dukes
have oppressed the poor, because when this land was divided among
the serfs the division was not what it pretended to be, and
because the German business managers of Russian industry made
wages and conditions that were brutal and brutalizing, the
peasants and workmen have said, "Let us have done with the whole
crew, and take all land and industry into our own hands, killing
those who were our masters under the old economic system. Let us
turn the whole world topsy-turvy in a night, and bring all down to
where we are. In our aspiration for Beauty, let us kill what has
been created. In our hunt for Justice, let us disregard fair
dealing. In our purpose to level down, let us do it with the knife
ruthlessly and logically," Thus disregarding the teachings of
time, that men are not the creatures of logic, of passionless or
passionate theses, but are the expression of an unfaltering
Spirit. Whenever men have been the victims of logicalness they
have been wrong. For instance, read the story of the Inquisition.
They saw what they wanted clearly, those old Fathers of the
Church. They knew their objective, which was to save men's souls.
And they thought they knew the way. Logic told them that those who
preached heresies were bringing men's eternal souls to everlasting
hell fire. And they set about to stop the preaching. Had I
believed as they did, I doubtless would have done as they did. But
to be infallibly right is to be hopelessly smart. Thus it is with
all who take a paper system and apply it to that strange thing
called Life.
This is the defect of the Intellectuals, the "parlor" Bolsheviks.
(Better by far be an outdoor Bolshevik, a Red Guard, if you
please, one who is in and of the fighting, who acts, who lives the
theory!) They do not think in terms of human nature, of natural
progress, of real facts. They say, "all men are born free and
equal," and at once conclude that the stable boy can step from the
stable door to the management of a factory or into the
legislature. Now experience teaches that this is a most dangerous
experiment, both for stable boy and society. The true philosophy
of Democracy teaches that the stable boy shall have, through
school and the step-ladder of free institutions, the chance to
rise to the management of industry or the leadership of the
Senate. That is why the foundation of Democracy is political. For
out of political freedom will come social and economic freedom.
That is why I favor woman suffrage, it gives women a chance to
grow, to think along new lines and grow into new capacities.
To feel acutely that things are badly ordered, and to feel that
you know what opportunities men and women and boys and girls
should have, is not a program of salvation, it is only the impulse
toward finding one. Why then, because we do feel so, should we
harness ourselves to a word that implies methods that we would not
countenance, and give character to a movement that is at absolute
defiance with America's spirit and purpose? There is danger, grave
danger, in doing this. For we can upset our own apple-cart very
easily these days. I have no more of this world's goods than the
humblest workingman. No man is poorer than I am, measured by bank
account standards. The education that I have, I fought for.
Therefore I do not speak for a class. To defend the methods by
which some men have made their money is not at all to my fancy. I
see as clearly, I think, as one can, the necessity for the strong
arm of society asserting itself, thrusting itself in where it has
not been supposed to have any business. Yet I know that a
Bolshevik movement, a capturing of what others have gained under
the system which has obtained, and the brutal satisfaction of
"getting even with the wage-masters" and making them feel to the
depths of their souls and in the pain of their flesh every
humiliation and torture, will permanently set nothing right.
America is fair play. Is it a failure? Have you tried it long
enough to know that it will not serve the world, as you think the
world should be served? Is there any experiment that we cannot
make? Are our hands tied? True, our feet may lag, our eyes may not
see far ahead, but who should say that for this reason man should
throw aside all the firmness and strength and solidity of order,
forget all that he has passed through, and start afresh from the
bottom rung of the ladder--from the muck of the primitive brute?
There are things that we would not hold, that we think unworthy of
our philosophy, that must be changed or else our sympathies and
abiding hopes will be forever offended. And this would be to live
right on under the pointing finger of shame. So we know it cannot
last, this thing that offends, the badness and brutality of
injustice, of unfairness to the weak, their inability to get a
squarer chance.
Yet this does not compel us to forsake the hopeful thing we have,
for which all men have striven, these centuries through. Must we
confess that revolution is still necessary? Are we no further
ahead for all that Pym and Hampden and Sam Adams and Washington
and all the rest of the glorified ones have done? This land is
truly a land of promise because it may be a land of fulfilment. It
shows the way by which without murder and robbery and class hatred
and the burning up of what has been, men may go right on making
experiments, and failing, making others and failing, and learning
something all the time.
So, I'm for America, because, if nationalization of land and
industry are wise experiments to make, no one can stop us from
making them, if partial nationalization of either, or both,
appeals to us as something that will right manifest wrongs, we can
try that solution. And to cry quits on the best that civilization
has done, because all that is wished for may not be realized or
realizable today, is to lose perspective and balance, and jump out
the window because the stairs go round and round.
There is really no use, and therefore no sanity, in being too gay
or too grave over this old world of ours. That smart Devil, who is
for the static life, is just now particularly active in his
favorite old line of propaganda. He knows that the fruit of the
tree will bring the millennium. Eat it and you will be happy. He
knows the short cuts to freedom and justice. He knows that the
curses that are promised for the breaking of the laws of the hunt
will be turned into songs. So he is urging and urging, telling
you, with your imagination and sensitiveness, that all is so bad
that it is best to take the great risk, telling the poor sightless
ones that their very primitive feelings and powers are the only
safe guides, their last ultimate reliance and hope. And out of
despair comes the bitter fruit we find in Russia, where they have
wrought what they call an economic revolution, but have in fact
produced nothing, for chaos is nothing. The wise Tinker who wrote
of the Pilgrim's Progress was too true a Christian Scientist, a
Christian and a Scientist, if you please, to picture his hero
reaching the gate of gold by adopting Despair as his guide.
Progress means the discovery of the capable. They are our natural
masters. They lead because they have the right. And everything
done to keep them from rising is a blow to what we call
civilization. Bolshevism is the supremacy of the least capable who
have the most power, most physical power. The thing Democracy will
do is to breed capacity, give capacity its "show." The premiums,
the distinctions, must go to capacity to promote it, to bring it
forth, to make it grow, to be its sunshine. A chance at the
sunshine, that's the motto. Sincerely yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
Washington, 20 [March, 1919]
You said, you will remember, that you did not mind such
unconventional things as penciled letters--so here goes, Mrs.
Radium.
This is to be a conventional letter, too, one of the bread and
butter variety, the quail and dove, pigeon pie, creamed macaroni
variety, for all of which much thanks, likewise for much
stimulating talk, your help in planting my garden, many motor
flights through brown woods, and some most charming company,
including a man named Ellis and his celebrated son, the pigeon
shooter.
We left you in the best possible hands, a lion and lioness
[Footnote: Mr. and Mrs. John Galsworthy.] who through long years
of civilized captivity came tamely to your bars to be tickled and
patted, and, no doubt, when properly fed, purred back. If I were
you, I would loot their typewriter. Therein are the secrets of the
British government, copies of all unknown treaties, plans for the
extermination of Bolsheviki generally and the female kind in
particular; likewise, therein you will find, narrated with
particularity, the details of all loose conversations had with
hotel clerks, commercial travelers, teachers, chauffeurs, and
others of the illuminati, in which "impressions" are given to
foreign authors hunting for "copy." Mr. George Creel has these
aforesaid gents of the illuminati staked out, so to speak, for
this very purpose. Your dear friend Vera, the political Vamp, is
no doubt conducting these sweet Innocents abroad, tho' not in
person of course, being much too crafty and cunning for that. She
has directed them by the wireless magic of her mind to Horsebranch
on the Hill, there to discover a radiating and luminous Lady,
hidden in the pine woods, who will reveal among other things the
following: (1) The nature of Woodrow Wilson's personal character;
(2) The full reasons for his conduct; (3) His occult international
designs; (4) How he purposes to free Ireland; (5) The value of
being House-broken; (6) The real name of the Man in the Iron Mask.
And much, much more--for she is a well, a fountain, a geyser, a
Niagara, reversed, of information, misinformation, knowledge,
ignorance, modesty, audacity, in captivating breeches or in modest
demure caps or in flowing evening robe. Wise Vera, wise Creel--
they know their business! The English snooper, with typewriter in
hand, will have a generous swig of the Scotch whiskey of the
vintage of '56, and his tied tongue will loosen, a confiding and
tender and sympathetic hand will softly clasp his, and the Dark
Flower will open to the world--rather mixed that figure! eh, what?
Now, of course, this is not what I took my pen in hand to write,
not at all. I had intended after the formalities had been duly
observed to tell you a few words about my wife. Excellent woman,
that! But very jealous! very! No sense of her own place! Unwilling
to subordinate herself. Since she "came into my life" she has
walked around in it and otherwise behaved familiarly and at home.
Never, never I beg of you, permit anyone to come into your life.
It decidedly makes for clutter and disturbance. However, as I was
saying, she is an excellent woman and has been to the Doctor who
says that she has suffered much. (Charge for same $10.) As he
wishes to make the same charge for many days the excellent wife
will not go to Charleston but remain here, that the charge may
lawfully be imposed. (This is where the Christian Scientists are
more Scientific for they could make the charge in absentia.)
However and notwithstanding, the Peace Conference still lives. By
wireless I have the news that Lloyd George is still doing
politics, that Orlando is Fiuming (give that one to the
Englisher), that Colonel House has not told all he knows to
Lansing, and that Henry White dined last night with a Duchess who
held his hand four minutes while telling him terrible things.
But this is too frivolous altogether for a statesman to be writing
to one whose mind is interested only in serious things! I can see
her steady, cold, stern eye of reproach. "And this to me," she
says, "And 'twere not for thy hoary beard, etc., etc."
I tell you frankly, tho' you may not believe it, that I am not
entirely in a sober mood. Yesterday I planted bulbs with a lady
who was not bulbous. The day before I shot pigeons for a lark. And
I am boastful! fair boastful, my Lady! My secretary and my
confidential clerk and my many dark-hued messengers are solemnly
impressed with my prowess with gun and spade. The truth shall not
be heard in the land. I am my own talebearer and my own censor. I
know more about agriculture than the Secretary of Agriculture, and
I know more of Labor than the Secretary of the same. And for this,
this glorious bursting into fruitfulness at so advanced an age--
you and your good man are responsible and to be credited in the
Golden Book in which is written, What the Plain People Do for Each
Other.
Thanking you for the Bread and Butter, believe me yours for Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
F. K L.
Washington, Saturday, [January 19, 1980]
I am clothed in sackcloth and sitting in ashes. My head is bowed
in humility and I am beating my breast in contrition. There is no
joy in my face and my eyes look downward. Truly I am full of
regret. Did she not write long, joyous, inquiring, curious,
inviting pages to me? and I have not answered! And now will she
ever make her face to shine upon me and give me peace?
I would fly to her--yes, fly to her in monoplane, biplane, or
triplane--but many things deter me. A wife, who is busy with the
Gods of the Elder Days; a daughter, who is busy with the God of
the present day--to wit, a young man named Philip, surnamed
Kauffmann, son of "The Star" six feet two in stockings or
otherwise, late of His Majesty's Navy, Princeton, Football, etc.,
etc. The marriage is to be tied in April, God willing, Nancy
ordering, Philip consenting, Father paying.
As if this were not enough to hinder, the desk must be cleared for
exit--the office desk; for the place that knew me through seven
long years of trouble, anxiety, insult, joy, humiliation,
satisfaction, achievement, companionship, hope, shall soon know me
no more, forever.
Verily, I say unto you, that if ever mortal man or mortal mind
needed rest, recreation, recuperation, and other alliterative
things, that same man is now writing to the Lady Elizabeth Ellis,
of Terraced Garden, in Camden, by the Wateree. And he is writing
without hope that he will see the Lady and her Lord and the
Princeling, for moons and moons. This is a sad, sad word for him
to write. But the whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and
altogether perverse. The President is broken in body, and
obstinate in spirit. Clemenceau is beaten for an office he did not
want. Einstein has declared the law of gravitation outgrown and
decadent. Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed World, is shut
off; and all goes merry as a dance in hell!
Oh God, I pray, give me peace and a quiet chop. I do not ask for
power, nor for fame, nor yet for wealth. Lift me on the magic
carpet of the Infinite Wish and lay me down on a grassy slope,
looking out on a quiet sunny sea, and make me to dream that men
are gentle and women reasonable. And forgive us our trespasses,
Amen!
And again I pray--Give me patience. Let me not ask for today what
may not come until tomorrow. Let mine eyes not be filled with
visions of things as they would be in a world wherein men were
Gods. Let mine ears be closed to Siren calls which lure to the
rocks. Stiffen my soul to make the climb. Keep from my heart
cynical despair. Make my mouth to speak slow words, and curb my
tongue that it may not outrun the Wisdom taught by the years. Give
surety to my steps, O Lord, and lead me by the hand for I know not
the way.
Your telegram lures as your letter did. But such pleasures are not
for us, because of our sins. "And those that are GOOD shall be
happy!"
Work. Work. Work. It is the order of the One Supreme. It keeps us
from being foolish, and doing as fools do. It is needed for the
mastery of a world that has its Destiny written, as surely as
we have ours. It is a chain and a pair of wings; it binds and it
releases. It is the master of the creature and the tool of the
Creator. It is hell, and it lifts us out of hell into heaven. It
was not known in Paradise, but there could be no Paradise without
it. A curse and a Savior! Our life-term sentence and the one plan
of salvation! Work for the weary, the wasted, and the worn. Work--
for the joyous, the hopeful, the serene. Work--for the benevolent
and the malevolent, the just and the cruel, the thoughtful and the
unheeding. Work--for things that life needs, for things that are
illusions, for dead-sea fruit, for ashes; and work for a look at
the stars, for the sense of things made happier for many men, for
the lifting of loads from tired backs, for the smile of a tender
girl, for the soft touch of a grateful mother, for the promise it
brings to the boy of one's hopes.
Work! Why work? It is the order of the One Supreme.
So saying, at one o'clock of Sunday morning, he lifted up his hand
and waved three times to the Southward--once for the Lady of the
Troubled Heart, who flirts with the Angel of Destruction, thinking
he may turn out to be a God, and once for the Lord of the Lady,
serenely fatalistic, and the third, and this a very big one, for
the Princeling who is making a manly battle, cheerfully,
confidently. The Friend of the Three.
F. K L.
Washington, [February 5, 1920]
And so, again the Boy has been attacked by a strange enemy, and
you are fighting. That is what you have been doing for years,
fighting for that bit of life you love more than your own self.
You did not think you could do it when you were a girl, did you?
You have wondered at yourself many, many times. And wondered at
the Fate which brought this long challenge to you. But it has been
a splendid fight, hasn't it? A glorious fight against odds. There
has been no justice in it. No justice, and our souls do so want
justice, an even chance, something in front of us that we can see
and know and fight. God knows why such tortures come to some,
while others sail on such smooth seas. Can it be that there is no
soul excepting the one we make for ourselves by fighting? Are
those really blest who have such challenges given to their
spirits? Or is this all by way of excusing God, or Nature, for the
unexplainable?
There is no way to make the fight excepting to believe that the
fight is the thing--the one, only, greatest thing. (To deny this
is to leave all in a welter, and drift into purposeless cynicism,
--blackness.) To determine that this is the way, the truth, and the
life, is to get serenity. Then the winds may howl and the seas
roll, but there can be no wreck.