Friday, January tenth.
One hour ago it was as beautiful a moonlit night as one ever beheld. The softest veils of cloud passed the moon and cast over the earth endlessly varied, luminous shadows. The mountain tops, trees, rocks, and all, are covered with new snow; the valleys and the lower levels are black where rain has cleared the trees. It is so beautiful here at times that it seems hard to bear. And now at this moment the rain falls as if it had fallen for all time and never would cease. Oh Olson, Olson! Is it anything to you in your old age to be so madly wanted? Here it truly is conceivable that any condition of bad weather could visit us for months without relief. There seems no rhyme or reason to it until you see it as the reverse of marvelously fair weather; a blue sky is here as wrong as rain in a rainless desert land.
Nothing has happened. I am making good drawings and have made two small woodcuts. Billy to-day again tackled the door of Olson’s shed. My fixing of the lock proved too good. That held—while he burst the door to pieces. I caught him at the finish of it; I become a maniac at such a time. I pursued the beast with a club in a mad chase through the heavy snow, catching him often enough to get some satisfaction at least in the beating I gave him. He fears me now and that’s something gained. But it’s a bad matter both for Billy and for me.
It is now after midnight and I’ve just finished a drawing. Rockwell is concerned about these late hours and when I told him that I could work so very well alone at night he seriously suggested that I send him out in the daytime to stay all day without dinner so that I could work better. I’m reading about King Arthur and the round table to him; that’s good for both of us. He has made himself a lance and a sword and to-morrow I expect to confer some sort of knighthood upon him. Apropos of the book of King Arthur, Rockwell said to-day, “I don’t think the pictures in the book are half nice enough. I think of a wonderful picture when you read the story and then when I see the one in the book I’m disappointed.” And these King Arthur pictures are rarely good in execution. It just shows that one need not attempt to palm off unimaginative stuff, much less trash, on children. The greatest artists are none too good to make the drawings for children’s books. Imagination and romance in pictures and stories a child asks for above all, and those qualities in illustration are the rarest.
WELTSCHMERZ