THE WHITE HOUSE,
_December 5, 1905_.
“THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT”
[Included in this volume because, although not an address or a state
paper, it was written by Mr. Roosevelt while President. It was
published in a recent number of “The Outlook”]
The “twilight of the poets” has been especially gray in America; for
poetry is of course one of those arts in which the smallest amount of
work of the very highest class is worth an infinity of good work that
is not of the highest class. The touch of the purple makes a poem out
of verse, and if it is not there, there is no substitute. It is hard
to account for the failure to produce in America of recent years a
poet who in the world of letters will rank as high as certain American
sculptors and painters rank in the world of art.
But true poems do appear from time to time, by Madison Cawein, by
Clinton Scollard, by Maurice Egan, and others; such are the poems in
Bliss Carman’s “Ballads of Lost Haven”; and such are the poems in
Edward Arlington Robinson’s “The Children of the Night.”
It is rather curious that Mr. Robinson’s volume should not have
attracted more attention. There is an undoubted touch of genius in
the poems collected in this volume, and a curious simplicity and good
faith, all of which qualities differentiate them sharply from ordinary
collections of the kind. There is in them just a little of the light
that never was on land or sea, and in such light the objects described
often have nebulous outlines; but it is not always necessary in order
to enjoy a poem that one should be able to translate it into terms
of mathematical accuracy. Indeed, those who admire the coloring of
Turner, those who like to read how—and to wonder why—Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower came, do not wish always to have the ideas presented to
them with cold, hard, definite outlines; and to a man with the poetic
temperament it is inevitable that life should often appear clothed with
a certain sad mysticism. In the present volume I am not sure that I
understand “Luke Havergal”; but I am entirely sure that I like it.
Whoever has lived in country America knows the gray, empty houses from
which life has gone. It is of one of these that “The House on the Hill”
was written.
“They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
“Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
“Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
“Why is it then we stray
Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
“And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
“There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.”
The next poem, “Richard Cory,” illustrates a very ancient but very
profound philosophy of life with a curiously local touch which points
its keen insight. Those who feel poetry in their marrow and fibre are
the spiritual heirs of the ages; and so it is natural that this man
from Maine, many of whose poems could have been written only by one to
whom the most real of lives is the life of the American small town,
should write his “Ballade of Broken Flutes”—where “A lonely surge
of ancient spray told of an unforgetful sea”;—should write the poem
beginning
“Since Persia fell at Marathon,
The yellow years have gathered fast:
Long centuries have come and gone”;
and the very original sonnet on Amaryllis, the last three lines of
which are:
“But though the trumpets of the world were glad,
It made me lonely and it made me sad
To think that Amaryllis had grown old.”
Some of his images stay fixed in one’s mind, as in “The Pity of the
Leaves,” the lines running:
“The brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside
Skipped with a freezing whisper.”
Sometimes he writes, as in “The Tavern,” of what most of us feel we
have seen; and then again of what we have seen only with the soul’s
eyes.
I shall close by quoting entire his poem on “The Wilderness,” which
could have been written only by a man into whose heart there had
entered deep the very spirit of the vast and melancholy Northern
forests:
“Come away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes,
And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;
There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.
There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn
Put off the summer’s languor with a touch that made us glad
For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we can not follow,
To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.
“Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,
Calling to us to come to them, and roam no more.
Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,
There’s an old song calling us to come!
“Come away! come away! for the scenes we leave behind us
Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that’s young forever;
And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,
That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.
The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,
And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;
But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us
In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman’s eyes.
“Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us—
Nothing now to comfort us, but love’s road home:—
Over there beyond the darkness there’s a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm heart waits for us within.
“Come away! come away!—or the roving-fiend will hold us,
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
So we’ll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know:—
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we can not fly from is the doom we do not see.
“Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us—
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long full wind on the lake.”
Mr. Robinson has written in this little volume not verse but poetry.
Whether he has the power of sustained flight remains to be seen.
TO THE CENTRAL JUVENILE REFORMATORY COMMITTEE, AT THE WHITE HOUSE,
DECEMBER 15, 1905
_Gentlemen_:
About all I can say to you is to express my very hearty sympathy with
and belief in your purpose. The time of my life when I was brought into
closest touch with conditions similar to those which you are trying to
remedy was while I was Police Commissioner in New York City. At that
time my closest friend and associate in all of my work was Mr. Jacob
Riis, with whose books and writings you are all more or less familiar.
I was even more impressed than I have been all along, ever since I have
grown up, with the fact that if you are going to do anything permanent
for the average man you have got to begin before he is a man. The older
man is almost impossible to reform. Of course there are exceptional
individuals, men who have been completely changed, not only after they
have reached years of manhood, but after very advanced periods of life.
But speaking generally, the chance of success lies in working with the
boy and not with the man. That applies peculiarly to those boys who
tend to drift off into courses which mean that unless they are checked
they will be formidable additions to the criminal population when
they grow older. It is eminently worth while to try to prevent those
boys becoming criminals, to try to prevent their being menaces to and
expenses and sores in society, while there is a chance of reforming
them.
A year ago I was approached by the people interested in Colorado in
their juvenile court, and they set an example which I wish could be
followed all over the country, and particularly here in the District of
Columbia. To the people of Colorado I expressed, as I express to you,
my very earnest belief in their work, and told them that “of course
so far as my very limited powers here go those powers will be at your
disposal.”
I think people rather often completely misapprehend what are really
the important questions. The question of the tariff, the currency, or
even the regulation of railroad rates, are all subordinate to the great
basic moral movements which mean the preservation of the individual in
his or her relations to the home; because if the homes are all straight
the State will take care of itself.
TO THE BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AND OTHERS, AT
THE WHITE HOUSE, DECEMBER 18, 1905
_Mr. Macfarland; Ladies and Gentlemen_:
It is a peculiar pleasure to greet this body here to-day. As Mr.
Macfarland has well said, the public-school system of our country is
the most characteristically democratic and American feature of our
national life. It has been my good fortune that all of my children have
received, or are receiving, a portion of their education in the public
schools of this District, in this city; and I feel that the advantage
to them is incalculable. I certainly do not underrate the importance
of the higher education. It would be the greatest misfortune if we
ever permitted such a warped and twisted view of democracy to obtain
as would be implied in a denial of the advantage that comes to the
whole Nation from the high education of the few who are able to take
advantage of the opportunity to acquire it. But while fully admitting
this, it remains true that most important of all is the education of
the common school. The public schools are not merely the educational
centres for the mass of our people, but they are the factories of
American citizenship. Incidentally to its other work the public school
does more than any other institution of any kind, sort, or description
to Americanize the child of foreign-born parents who comes here when
young, or is born here. Nothing else counts for as much in welding
together into one compact mass of citizenship the different race stocks
which here are being fused into a new nationality.