Mr. Masefield, the poet, does not believe that war times nourish the arts. The human brain does its best work, he says, when men are happy. How perfectly true! Look at ancient Greece. She was continually at war, and what did the Grecians do for art? A few poets, a few philosophers and statesmen, a few sculptors, and the story is told. On the other hand, look at England in Shakespeare’s time. The English people were inordinately happy, for there were no wars to depress them, barring a few little tiffs with the French and the Spanish, and one or two domestic brawls. The human brain does its best work when men are happy, indeed. There was Dante, a cheery old party. But why multiply instances?
Having read a third of H. M. Tomlinson’s “The Sea and the Jungle,” we pause to offer the uncritical opinion that this chap gets as good seawater into his copy as Conrad, and that, in the item of English, he can write rings around Joseph.
Like others who have traversed delectable landscapes and recorded their impressions, in [p 224] />]memory or in notebooks, we have tried to communicate to other minds the “incommunicable thrill of things”: a pleasant if unsuccessful endeavor. When you are new at it, you ascribe your failure to want of skill, but you come to realize that skill will not help you very much. You will do well if you hold the reader’s interest in your narrative: you will not, except by accident, make him see the thing you have seen, or experience the emotion you experienced.
So vivid a word painter as Tomlinson acknowledges that the chance rewards which make travel worth while are seldom matters that a reader would care to hear about, for they have no substance. “They are no matter. They are untranslatable from the time and place. Such fair things cannot be taken from the magic moment. They are not provender for notebooks.”
He quotes what the Indian said to the missionary who had been talking to him of heaven. “Is it like the land of the musk-ox in summer, when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very often?” These lakes are not charted, and the Indian heard the loon’s call in his memory; but we could not better describe the delectable lands through which we have roamed. “When the mist is on the lakes and the loon cries very often.” What traveler can better that?
[p 225]
]Old Bill Taft pulled a good definition of a gentleman t’other day. A gentleman, said he, is a man who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.
Mr. Generous is the claim agent for the New Haven railroad at New Britain, Conn., but a farmer whose cow wandered upon the rails tells us that he lost money by the settlement.
William Benzine, who lives near Rio, Wis., was filling his flivver tank by the light of a lantern when— But need we continue?
Our notion of a person of wide tastes is one who likes almost everything that isn’t popular.
Speaking of the Naval Station, you may have forgotten the stirring ballad which we wrote about it during the war. If so—