A Williams Anthology Part 12

David walked on mechanically, unmindful of any destination or definite purpose; a dumb bitterness wrung his heart, and, in comparison with that, all that was external and objective seemed unaccountable.

Involuntarily he thrust his hand into his coat and drew out a letter.

He had read it twice already.

"My dear David,--I hardly know how I am to tell you what I know I must tell you--and if not now, certainly before many more weeks pa.s.s. Let me admit then first of all that you were right in your antic.i.p.ation of what college life would do for me. It _has_ changed my ways of looking at things more than I can tell you, and things that once seemed very beautiful to me are so no longer. This was inevitable and we need not regret it, for I know that the aggregate enjoyment of life has been increased, at least potentially. You may know that your brother Loren spent part of his Christmas vacation here, and he has just been here again for a flying visit. Need I tell you the result, David? I think you foresaw it long ago, and I cannot of course feel sad that things have come about in this way, though I realize that for a time, at least, it may be hard for you to understand it. But there are many interests we have in common, he and I; I know that you will see sometime that we were made for each other and that you will be happy with us in our great happiness.

"I doubt whether this news will much surprise you, for I know, from the tenor of your latest letters, you have noticed a change and have been suspicious of the truth...."

Ah, yes, he had noticed it and had had suspicions; but to have it come to this, and so suddenly--it was more than he could bear. His throat ached and his hands were wet with perspiration. He looked up into the sky and saw nothing there to help him--nothing but a roofless expanse of drizzling gray fog. Not a bird chirped in the distance. The brook down below him ran on silently without an audible ripple. Everything was silent and motionless. If only a cow would low or a hen would cackle back in the barnyard, life would be a bit more tolerable. It was as if all the world had become soulless and dead.

How he had loved her! ... No other thought could find entrance in his mind ... and now, it was all over. She belonged to some one else and had left him without a thought, almost, of the pain it was going to bring him. "Hard to understand!" She was wrong: he had understood it from the first, and far better than she. Had he not told her so that afternoon when they sat together in the barn? But understanding it made it no more easy to bear. He wondered whether he could bear it. He seemed so cruelly alone with his sorrow. The silence seemed shouting at him.

Suddenly, without knowing why, he looked back to the barn. A little figure, wrapped in a plaid shawl, was coming towards him: it was his mother. A sharp thrill of tenderness ran through him. "Poor little mother," he said softly, "you are longing to help me," and, somewhat ashamed of the way in which he had left her recently, he turned and walked back to meet her.

"Come with me to the barn," she said, and together they returned, silently, each timid of the other. Entering the building they sat down on the hay, side by side. "Read that, mother," he said, and handed her the letter. She glanced it through, and then, taking his hand in hers, faltered gently, "My poor boy! I can guess what it must mean to you."

He put his head down in her lap and sobbed like a child, while she stroked his hair and face and spoke shy words of sympathy.

"David," she said, "it was for your father and me that you gave up college. Perhaps you think we don't appreciate it, because we never say much. I know what it has cost you and how n.o.bly you have stuck to your duty, and you know that in G.o.d's sight whatever may come of it you have done the kindest thing."

"Oh, but mother, that doesn't make it any easier to lose Janet. She was so much to me, and we were going to be so happy together."

"Hush, little boy, you mustn't take it so hard. Perhaps some day you'll see that it was for the best."

The afternoon light was fading and the rain was beginning to fall softly outside. In the dimming light the two continued sitting there together, hardly speaking a word, for what comfort could words bring?

And slowly a vague peacefulness began to fall upon his heart under the gentle touch of his mother, and rising, he kissed her silently and went out to his work.

_Literary Monthly_, 1902.

THE ENDITING OF LETTERS

STUART P. SHERMAN '03

"Now for enditing of Letters: alas, what need wee much adoe about a little matter?"

In a letter to Miss Sara Hennel, George Eliot writes that "there are but two kinds of _regular_ correspondence possible--one of simple affection, which gives a picture of all the details, painful and pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after ..., and one purely moral and intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification in which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects." These two cla.s.ses embrace, perhaps, the great bulk of letters, but George Eliot says there is a third cla.s.s to which her correspondence with Miss Hennel belongs--one of _impulse_.

Strictly speaking, all of the letters which really belong as such to literature come under this last head. The result of a perfect fusion of the two other styles, they exhibit a sparkle, a pungency, and lightness of touch, which take the curse from mere gossip, supple the joints of intellectual disquisition, and mark unmistakably the epistolary artist. The letter-writer, no less than the poet, is born, not made, and his art, though for the most part unconscious, is no less an art. The expression of every sentiment, the choice of every word, however random it may seem, is determined for the born enditer of epistles by a sense of fitness so exquisite that its niceties of distinction escape a.n.a.lysis and only its more general principles can be enunciated.

The most vital of these principles is pretty generally observed.

Thackeray perceives it when at the close of a delightful letter to Mrs. Brookfield he exclaims, "Why, this is almost as good as talk!" He was right: it was written talk. If read aloud with pauses for the correspondent's reply, the perfect letter would make perfect conversation. It should call up the voice, gesture, and bearing of the writer. Though it may be more studied than oral speech, it must appear no less impromptu. This, indeed, is its essential charm, that it contains the mind's first fruits with the bloom on, that it exhale carelessly the mixed fragrance of the spirit like a handful of wild flowers not sorted for the parlor table but, as gathered among the fields, haphazard, with here a violet, there a spice of mint, a strawberry blossom from the hillside, and a sprig of bittersweet. This is the opportunity for the clergyman to show that he is not all theologian, but part naturalist; the farmer that he is not all ploughman, but part philosopher. This is the place for little buds of sentiment, short flights of poetry, wise sermons all in three lines, odd conceits, small jests rubbing noses with deacon-browed moralities; in short, for every fine extravagance in which the mind at play delights. Sickness and sorrow, too, and death, if spoken of reverently and bravely, must not be denied a place. So we shall have a letter now all grave, now all gay, but generally, if it be a good letter, part grave, part gay, just as the mingled threads are clipped from the webs of life.

That such a letter cannot be written with white gloves goes without saying. The first requisite is freedom from stiffness. The realm of good letters is a republic in which no man need lift his hat to another. It is hail-fellow well met, or not met at all. So when the humble address their superiors, or when children write to austere grandfathers, they suffer from an awkwardness of mental att.i.tude which is the paralysis of all spontaneity. Before the indispensable ease can exist, certain relations of equality must be established. But there are some whose fountains of speech, in letters as in conversation, lie forever above the line of perpetual snow. They never thaw out. Bound by a sort of viscosity of spirits, that peculiar stamp of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, they are incapable of getting their thoughts and emotions under way; with the best will in the world, genuine warmth of feeling, minds stocked with information on all subjects, they are never fluent. The man with no ear must not hope to be a musician, nor the man with no fluency a letter-writer. Yet this is not all. You will find some at perfect ease in conversation who, touching pen to paper, exhibit the affected primness commonly ascribed to the maiden aunt. They have not learned that this is a place where words must speak for themselves without comment of inflection, gesture of the hand, or interpreting smile. Here to be unaffected one must take thought. As on the stage a natural hue must be obtained by unnatural means, so in the writing of letters one must a trifle overdo in order to do but ordinarily. A word which rings on the lips with frank cordiality will stare coldly from the written page and must be heightened to avoid offense. This is a license requiring the exercise of moderation and the utmost tact. Not all expressions suitable for conversation need reinforcement in black and white. In speaking one frequently raps out a phrase whose literalness one's eyes warn the listener to question. These must be toned down or glossed. An example of the toned down variety, which ill.u.s.trates as well men's fondness for a.s.sailing their friends with opprobrious epithet, is offered by Darwin when he writes, "I cannot conclude without telling you that of all blackguards you are the greatest and best." If Darwin had been talking face to face with Fox, he would doubtless have called him a blooming blackguard outright.

A writer in a journal of psychology points out the strong psychic link existing between a certain short expletive of condemnation and a refractory collar-b.u.t.ton. These words seem to come at times charged with the very marrow of the mind, and, if the letters of a man who occasionally indulges in them be wholly purged of them, the letters lose one of their most distinctive characteristics. The point to be made is, that the personal word is all-important, that till the fact is related to the writer, it is dead. If we want news, we can consult the dailies; but in letters facts are little, ideas about facts everything. That is to say, all events, especially the more trifling, should be shown through the colored gla.s.s of the writer's personality.

What concerns you is not what happened, but what relations the happening bears to you and your correspondent.

When once the personal vein is struck, nothing is so easy as to find a theme for a letter. The materials are only too plentiful if the eyes and heart are open to receive them. Stevenson wrote that he scarcely pulled a weed in his garden without pondering some fit phrase to report the fact to his friend Colvin, and we may be sure that the weed was not allowed to wither, but when it was transplanted, flourished again and reached its destination in a veritable Pot of Basil. No great events are necessary; the plainest incident, the morning's shopping, is as good as a Pan-American exposition for ideas to crystallize about, since exactly in proportion as an event is embedded in opinion, comment, and feeling, must its value as an epistolary item be rated. While the born letter-writer is driving a nail or polis.h.i.+ng a shoe, a thought apropos of his occupation or of stars, perhaps, drops complete and perfect like ripe fruit in an orchard. It matters little; seen through the eyes of a friend, all homely things are invested with an extrinsic interest and a new glory not their own.

... By the very nature of the composition a mean man cannot possibly write a good letter. When we cast about for a perfect exemplar of the epistolary style, we must of necessity look among the high-souled men--Cowper, Lamb, FitzGerald, Hearn--for where else shall we find one to stand the test of self-revelation? Happily, one of the blithest, manliest, completest spirits of our times was a matchless writer of letters--Stevenson. Aching for absolute honesty of style and making clearness almost synonomous with good morals, he has given us in the Vailima collection and in the two larger volumes of his correspondence an almost unexampled self-revelation. The man Stevenson is _in_ them, "his essence and his sting." The grip of his hand and the look of his eye lose none of their force in the transparent medium through which they are constrained to pa.s.s. Knowing that a man who constantly gives his best finds his best constantly growing better, he never h.o.a.rded his ideas for publication, but poured his intellectual riches into a note to a friend as freely as if each line were coining him gold. It results that the lover of Stevenson would almost prefer to give up all the romances rather than the letters. For they feel that in this correspondence, besides finding the qualities which distinguish the other works, they have met face to face and known personally the romancer, the essayist, the poet, and above all the man who, ridden by an incubus of disease, spoke always of the joy of living, the man who knew hours of bitterness but none of flinching, the man who grappled with his destiny undaunted, and, when death hunted him down in a South Sea island, fell gallantly and gazing unabashed into "the bright eyes of danger."

Stevenson approached close to the beau ideal of epistolary art. When we and our friends have achieved it, distance will be annihilated and there will be no such thing as separation. We shall draw from our little box a small white packet, and, though Nostradamus may offer us every secret of magician or alchemist in exchange for it, we shall refuse offhand. How shall he lure us with a shadow, a ghostly visitant, savoring of the pit and summoned only by the most marrow-freezing incantations? Here in our hand is a mysterious, more potent charm, bringing us the warm, human personality of the man. We are not spiritualists, yet here sealed in the white packet is an incorporal presence. Given but a mastery of the twenty-six signs and their combinations, and lo, the heart of our friend served up in Boston bond! Then, as for enditing of letters, we shall rise up and call them blessed who have made "much ado about a little matter."

_Literary Monthly, 1901._

GREYLOCK

MAX EASTMAN '05

This whole, far-reaching host of ancient hills That all thy kingdom's rugged boundary fills, Yields thee unrivalled thy supremacy.

'Tis not by chance that they thus kneel to thee; Those scars, that but increase thy grandeur, tell Of battles thou hast fought--and hast fought well, For, conquered at thy feet, two giants lie Who once did dare their sovereign to defy.

When earth with sea, and earth with earth, and sea With sea, all mingled, fought for mastery, Then didst thou meet thy foes, and by thy might Didst win, and since hath kept, thy regal right.

_Literary Monthly_, 1901.

TO SIDNEY LANIER

MAX EASTMAN '05

Thy name is not the highest in thy art, Though music sweet thou singest in thy songs That unto thee alone of all belongs, Uplifting Love in every burdened heart;

Thou hast not left us perfect poetry; But thou hast left by far a greater thing, A poem such as man did never sing-- Thine own brave life, a lifelong victory.

_Literary Monthly_, 1902.

THE LIFTING OF THE CLOUDS

SHEPARD ASHMAN MORGAN '06

All day long a reeking mist had been rolling across the valley, at times all but obscuring the Peak where it rose between its pair of flanking hills. Sifting clouds had surged and seethed in the Cleft, as those who dwelt in its vicinity called the interval between the two hills and the loftier and more distant Peak, and rose now and then barely enough to reveal the greater mountain, but never yet had quite cleared the summit. The mist had slimed the whole world with a coating of wet, and when the wind chanced to set the bare limbs of the trees to swaying, the drops would spatter on the ground and scarcely be absorbed, so waterlogged was the earth.