I'm indebted to you for two letters--awfully good ones. In the last
you tell me that your health is better, and I can see for myself that
your spirits are. This you attribute to exercise, correctly, no doubt.
You need a lot of the open air--we all do. I can give myself
hypochondria in forty-eight hours by staying in-doors. The sedentary
life and abstracted contemplation of one's own navel are good for
Oriental gods only. We spirits of a purer fire need sunlight and the
hills. My own recent wanderings afoot and horseback in the mountains
did me more good than a sermon. And you have "the hills back of
Oakland"! God, what would I not give to help you range them, the dear
old things! Why, I know every square foot of them from Walnut Creek to
Niles Canyon. Of course they swarm with ghosts, as do all places out
there, even the streets of San Francisco; but I and my ghosts always
get on well together. With the female ones my relations are sometimes
a bit better than they were with the dear creatures when they lived.
I guess I did not acknowledge the splendidly bound "Shapes" that you
kindly sent, nor the Jack London books. Much thanks.
I'm pleased to know that Wood expects to sell the whole edition of my
book, but am myself not confident of that.
So we are to have your book soon. Good, but I don't like your
indifference to its outward and visible aspect. Some of my own books
have offended, and continue to offend, in that way. At best a book is
not too beautiful; at worst it is hideous. Be advised a bit by Scheff
in this matter; his taste seems to me admirable and I'm well pleased
by his work on the "Shapes"; even his covers, which I'm sorry to learn
do not please Wood, appear to me excellent. I approved the design
before he executed it--in fact chose it from several that he
submitted. Its only fault seems to me too much gold leaf, but that is
a fault "on the right side." In that and all the rest of the work
(except my own) experts here are delighted. I gave him an absolutely
free hand and am glad I did. I don't like the ragged leaves, but he
does not either, on second thought. The public--the reading public--I
fear does, just now.
I'll get at your new verses in a few days. It will be, as always it
is, a pleasure to go over them.
About "Prattle." I should think you might get help in that matter from
Oscar T. Schuck, 2916 Laguna St. He used to suffer from "Prattle" a
good deal, but is very friendly, and the obtaining it would be in the
line of his present business.
How did you happen to hit on Markham's greatest two lines--but I need
not ask that--from "The Wharf of Dreams"?
Well, I wish I could think that those lines of mine in "Geotheos" were
worthy to be mentioned with Keats' "magic casements" and Coleridge's
"woman wailing for her demon lover." But I don't think any lines of
anybody are. I laugh at myself to remember that Geotheos, never before
in print I believe, was written for E. L. G. Steele to read before a
"young ladies' seminary" somewhere in the cow counties! Like a man of
sense he didn't read it. I don't share your regret that I have not
devoted myself to serious poetry. I don't think of myself as a poet,
but as a satirist; so I'm entitled to credit for what little gold
there may be in the mud I throw. But if I professed gold-throwing, the
mud which I should surely mix with the missiles would count against
me. Besides, I've a preference for being the first man in a village,
rather than the second man in Rome. Poetry is a ladder on which there
is now no room at the top--unless you and Scheff throw down some of
the chaps occupying the upper rung. It looks as if you might, but I
could not. When old Homer, Shakspeare and that crowd--building
better than Ozymandias--say: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and
despair!" I, considering myself specially addressed, despair. The
challenge of the wits does not alarm me.
* * * * *
As to your problems in grammar.
If you say: "There is no hope _or_ fear" you say that _one_ of them
does not exist. In saying: "There is no hope _nor_ fear" you say that
_both_ do not exist--which is what you mean.
"Not to weary you, I shall say that I fetched the book from his
cabin." Whether that is preferable to "I will say" depends on just
what is meant; both are grammatical. The "shall" merely indicates an
intention to say; the "will" implies a certain shade of concession in
saying it.
It is no trouble to answer such questions, _nor_ to do anything else
to please you. I only hope I make it clear.
I don't know if all my "Journal" work gets into the "Examiner," for I
don't see all the issues of either paper. I'm not writing much anyhow.
They don't seem to want much from me, and their weekly check is about
all that I want from them.
* * * * *
No, I don't know any better poem of Kipling than "The Last Chanty."
Did you see what stuff of his Prof. Harry Thurston Peck, the Hearst
outfit's special literary censor, chose for a particular commendation
the other day? Yet Peck is a scholar, a professor of Latin and a
writer of merited distinction. Excepting the ability to write poetry,
the ability to understand it is, I think, the rarest of intellectual
gifts. Let us thank "whatever gods may be" that we have it, if we
haven't so very much else.
I've a lovely birch stick a-seasoning for you--cut it up in the
Alleghanies.
* * * * *
Sincerely yours,
AMBROSE BIERCE.
[Washington, D. C.,
October 29, 1903.]