The Reader Critic
Will Levington Comfort, Kingsville, Ontario:
I have just had the January number.
I feel as if I had found my companions. You who rejoiced in Caroline Branson and Margaret Swawite will know what one means by finding his companions.
And when I came to the line of George Soule’s—“I am the greatest anarchist of you all—” the fact is I had settled for a nap by the fire, and here I am by the machine instead.
I am proud of you and glad to be in the world with you all. I am sure you must feel the same about each other—for you must have been very lonely in a world that has lost the art of playing—you who play so well.
I have looked long for the new voices; of late I have put every faith in the conviction that they were just behind. You will have everything in ten years. No voice from Germany, England, or France—all must come from you. The only thing that can possibly hurt you is Beauduin and his kind. They are poison and vision is not with them. I think you must belong to that generation now of the twenties—that I have felt behind me so long and so wonderfully. Again and again I have written about this new race of Americans—there is a touch of it in the January Craftsman which I wish you would read.
You are singing it. You are of it. You ask nothing—you sing, you play. There are moments in which I caught you (you of the little book) in that wondrous naivete which is the loss of the love of self—that cosmic simplicity of the workmen of to-morrow.
How dreadful is the old—
“And then O night, deliberate, unlovely—”
But the new which you voice, and must always voice—
“In the inspired improvisation of love—”
I have read your January poems to all who come to the study. I have looked with even more delight at old Walt—who opened the door for (y)our generation—the dear old pioneer. He helped to make possible, too, our acceptance of the Zarathustra man—the pillar of fire of our transition, but Walt is the pillar of cloud by day.
I’m sure you’ll see my zeal for you. I have plugged through fifteen years in which every ideal of workmanship has sunk visibly in America until it can sink no lower. The great crowd is forgetting even how to read. It has lost the cohering line of expression—a series of broken pictures is enough to hold its eye. But the end is reached with the war—and the new generation which will witness the tragedy of greater human waste perhaps than the one before it, also contains the superb individuals—the few—such individuals as we never dreamed of in our twenties. I want some time to do for you a bit on this generation of mine (the bleakest in the world). The age of advertising.... Imagine a race that can only point to Herrick and London and Atherton and Dreiser and Watts—weakened solutions of Zola and Thackeray—except London who was great and open-souled—but lost his way. So I laugh and think of myself as born out of due time, and though just past midstream, I want to belong to the twenties again. I believe that you can become the heart of our new age of letters—if you are true; and I know you will not encounter the bleakness and the killing terror that we met, for the way is preparing momentarily. The glory of it all will come from your being yourselves—as you are so splendidly now. But the prison-house will close on some, and others will hear the call of the markets and others the decadence of Europe’s withered loins—and that is why I venture to ask you to hold fast to the dream—not to listen to anyone—for you have emerged truly.... Remember there are no others but you in the world—you alone have touched the new harmony—and it had to come from America. The New Republic is not doing it, nor The Masses, nor The Unpopular. Though they are great—they are of the old. Just to be true to your vision is all Heaven asks, and believe me one with you. I am just beginning, too. I want to belong—although I have ten years start. Great good to you—all.
P. S. We have all loved the little milliner’s hat, and some of us have wept over it.