It is the unexpected in life, as has often been said, that happens. The
rejected stone throughout the centuries has always been the keystone in
the arch of fame, and genius and greatness always have and always will
come from the bosom of Mother Earth. The best legacy a boy can have is an
honest ancestry and a condition that forces him to work. And, therefore,
I am always sorry for the young man who “has a fine start in life.” He
has as many chances for failure as the “brilliant young lawyer” has for
mediocrity and a bar-room clientage. Success despises assistance and
fame hates caste and titles as the gods do salt water. Mediocrity, like
a faint hearted hound, may always be found running up and down the river
of his purpose, fearing to plunge and doubting the ford, while success
plunges in and crosses, or dies trying. Two generations of idleness will
breed crime, while two generations of shirt sleeves mean wealth. If the
world would stop working a year God would have to destroy it with fire
and brimstone.
* * * * *
Poetry should be brought back to the uses for which it was intended. The
metaphysical school that is trying now to control it, and whose object
seems to be to make it a science instead of a pleasure and beautiful way
of expressing our thoughts, should be driven from our standard as they
have always been from our hearts. We must go back to first and natural
principles again, and by demanding imagination, simplicity, beauty and
naturalness, make poetry a vehicle of the pure and the beautiful, and
so simple that ordinary minds can read it with pleasure and understand
what they read. The story age of Spencer, Shakespeare and Burns should
be received and much of Browning’s stuff flung to the dogs, where it
belongs. God has given us poetry to be enjoyed, to be understood, to
make us wiser and better, to take to our hearts and firesides. Its
principle is all but universal and there are few who do not, in some
shape, enjoy it. It was not intended to be an intellectual puzzle, a
metaphysical science to be gobbled up by a few abnormally developed
protoplasms and denied to the world of yearning hearts. Imagine Homer
reciting his glorious stories of Agamemnon and Ulysses, of “Ox-eyed Juno”
and Penelaus, “tamer of horses,” to the Greek philosophers; imagine
Shakespeare giving “Romeo and Juliet” in a barn to the learned of Europe.
Of Burns lying in the dew of the haystack watching the morning star
quiver like the soul of Highland Mary and then writing his deathless song
for the ears of those people who live in palaces and never saw a morning
star, nor felt the kiss of an honest love in their lives.
* * * * *
The world is wild for prose stories. The reason is obvious. The stories
have been shut out of poetry by the metaphysical school, and, being
unable to get them in the language of the heart, of the imagination,
the world which must have them is taking them in the language of the
commonplace. And thus is the true and the beautiful being destroyed to
give way to the double meaning and the sensational. The so-called poetry
of to-day is not new. The only reason a lot of metaphysical poetry has
not been handed down to us is because it did not live to get to us. Five
hundred years hence the people who will know Burns will have to hunt
around in a sheepskin encyclopoedia of biography to find out who Howells
and Henry James were. We must not forget that contemporary criticism
placed Ben Jonson ahead of Shakespeare, Pope above Milton, Scott above
Keats. And yet Pope and Scott did a world of harm to poetry. They helped
to drive it out by disgusting people with the sameness of its flow and
the smoothness of its rhythm. As if the wind roars ’round the house by
a foot and a meter measure as Whitmore expressed it, as if the mountain
looms up by a law of rising and falling, or the waves thunder like a
church organ.
But the grave of truth is never the theme of fraud but for one
generation—the next one finds truth on the monument and wrong in the
grave. Let us get back to truth; though dead, she is a sweeter mistress
than a living and bedecked and bespangled lie. As Romeo said over
Juliet’s body, so with poetry:
“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
* * * * *
Trotwood loves to throw a bouquet—he believes they are more easily
gathered in the sunshine around us and leave a more pleasant memory
than some other things which might be cast, such, for instance, as
bricks and stones. Especially does he love to throw them when they are
intended for a lovely woman. And we have known her long—Miss Minnie
McIntyre, editor of the new horse show paper, The Bit and Spur, of
Chicago, and so we know whereof we speak when we say that in her class
she is simply an “only,” and her monthly, The Bit and Spur, is a gem
of its kind, and an inspiration. It is beautifully illustrated, its
workmanship is the finest, and is the best edited magazine of its class
in the whole country. If you love the horse shows you cannot afford to
miss its monthly visits. This is written deliberately and with charity
aforethought, and while it may have the flavors of the village sanctum
sanctorum, yet when a woman gets into the strenuous fight around her
and with her bright mind and pen rises to the very top, there is always
growing in Trotwood’s garden a bouquet of sunflowers for her.
* * * * *
Concerning Southern magazines, it is the fact that none has ever been
able to live in the South. We appreciated that fact with all its force
when we launched Trotwood’s Monthly. But we think we have studied the
situations thoroughly enough to know the reason of this: First, they have
all been feeble imitations of Northern magazines—a field so well and ably
filled already. Every section of our country has its own character, its
own atmosphere, its own earmarks. People North and West, when they buy a
Southern magazine, want the South to be in it—its stories, traditions,
its sunshine, its fields, its very air. They want to hear of the land
which is harvesting and sowing, while they are in the far-off snow,
waiting to see the good, glad earth again; the land where the average
farmer does not spend all he makes in the summer keeping himself and
his stock warm in the winter; the land that is Southern—the great,
undeveloped country of the future. Trotwood’s Monthly is trying to do
this. In the second place, Southern people are not great readers. There
are too many chances to get out of doors—any time and all the time.
Like the petted children of indulgent parents, kind Nature does so much
for them—they do little for themselves. And a child will never leave
the joyous out-doors for the study, the schoolroom or the work shop.
In literature the great South is but a child. But last and chiefest,
no magazine has ever been launched in the South to supply a practical
demand, instead of creating a supply. Sentiment is a great thing, but
like blue litmus paper, it changes quickly if it meets an acid. And
sentiment meets an acid every little while. Trotwood’s Monthly is
supplying practical demand, not trying to create a supply, dependent on
local sentiment. It is weaving the Southern atmosphere around a practical
subject—a subject in demand all over the world, as our subscription
list, which now has reached a goodly number in every State in the Union,
in Canada, even to faraway Nova Scotia, in South Africa, Honolulu and
Australia. Around this practical subject for which there is a positive
demand, we will weave the Southern literature and life, and in that way
do we hope to live. Sentiment alone will carry no magazine beyond the
first year, and the story of the literature of every people—aye, of every
literary workman among the people—is that the practical staff must go
with the first efforts long before he who runs, learns how to read.
* * * * *
Trotwood’s Monthly is going slow, but with the staff of the practical for
support.
Trotwood’s Monthly wants good stories and poems. Write them, but let them
be life, for literature, if real, is but the true interpretation of life.
Write of the life around you, not of that in some other State or country.
* * * * *
If you fail to get your Monthly promptly, be sure to write and let us
know. The Monthly comes out on the 15th of each month. We always have
extra numbers for those which miscarry in the mails. Drop us a postal if
you fail to get yours promptly.
* * * * *
Mr. A. D. Shamel, physiologist in charge of Tobacco Breeding In the
Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture,
Washington, D. C., sends the following appreciative letter: “I appreciate
the high character of your Monthly, and know that it will be of great
service in promoting the best interests of the agricultural interests
which it represents. In the great agricultural awakening taking place in
the South and the development of her great resources, there is certainly
a great field of valuable work.” Prof. Schumel will favor us soon with a
valuable paper.
* * * * *
Men seem to be animals which would not only betray other men, but their
own children, if there was no higher power to prevent. One of the curses
of the South is child labor—another form of slavery and race suicide.
In the new era dawning in the South, this curse has come in with the
spindle and the money behind it has been so great that in some Southern
States, like South Carolina and Georgia, the friends of the child and of
humanity have been unable to pass child labor laws. The legislators are
bought by the money of the corporations. The South is making a strenuous
effort to correct this evil, but it is met by graft and bribery, evasion
and contempt of the law, and the shame goes on. Take from anyone’s life
its untrammeled childhood, and what is left? Not even the memory of a
sweetness. White child slavery in the cotton mills of the country to-day
is worse than negro slavery ever was. After many fruitless efforts,
Alabama, which has rapidly taken first rank among all the Southern
States, succeeded two years ago in passing a child labor law, the age
limit being twelve years. On the day this law went into effect, one
hundred and twenty-five children, all white, walked out of one mill
at Lannett, Ala. The most of the children, perhaps, had never been to
school in their lives and never would have had the opportunity. Not only
that, but half of them would never have lived to maturity, and these, at
twenty, would look like middle-aged, decrepit, ambitionless folks from
whom the life had been crushed. The use of child labor not only promotes
race suicide and all manner of narrow injustice, but encourages laziness
in the parents, as in nearly all cases the children support the parents
in idleness. The law is now rendered almost null by the fact that the
parents do not hesitate to swear falsely to the age of their children in
order to put them to work in the mills.
* * * * *
What is a thought—an idea? The most valuable asset in the brain of man.
Not common, ordinary thinking, but a new thought—a thought which no one
else ever originated. There is such a thought in the letter below, and I
am publishing it, taken from many other letters to Trotwood, because of
that particular thought and not on account of the nice things the author
is kind enough to say. I have underscored the thought I have selected.
Read it and tell me, are you doing your work because you must do
something, or are you doing it because it is the something you must do.
Think and find out, for on it depends whether your life will be a success
or failure:
Medicine Lodge, Kan., Oct. 30, 1905.
Dear Trotwood:
The first and second number of the Monthly have come and, to
tell you how much we have enjoyed them, I must use a big word
and say immensely. The farmer who will follow their counsel
will soon have to pull down his barns and build greater, while
he will have treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth
corrupt; it is the only magazine I know of giving advice about
this world and the next.
So old Solomon could not resist the Influence of beauty, his
namesake of old fell at the same place.
I think you have established the origin of the pacing horse.
Poor fellow, he has fought his way to fame, but like nature’s
gentleman,
“He may not have ancestral fame
His pathway to illume;
The sun that flings the brightest ray
May rise from mist and gloom.”
After all, it is the irrepressive in either man or horse that
makes him great.
When you see a man go to work because he must do something,
very likely you will never hear about him or the work; while
another goes at a work because it is something he must do, then
look for something great.
This will hold good in regard to the newspaper jingle you spoke
of, written by someone anxious to see his name in print. Burns
could not help writing about Mary, and so immortalized the name
a second time. I venture the assertion, Trotwood’s Monthly is
not written because he must do something, but rather because it
is something he must do.
And now, about the Dakota hunt. Well, for beauty of sentiment
and sublimity of style, it surpasses anything that has been
written on the like subject hitherto.
I have read it over and over again until I became spellbound by
the magic of the scene. It brought before my mind the memory
of other days when I, too, saw something similar, only in a
smaller way, on the fields of Kansas. I feel I have wearied you
with much talking and will ask the same forgiveness that Mr.
Stone granted you when you shot first.
Sincerely yours,