If the sun shone only upon the righteous, he would not need to get up so early in the morning.
I have my livelihood to earn, and consequently I am an optimist.
There is something intellectually lacking in all converts to brand new dogmas and creeds. A deep sense of wickedness is but a phase of immaturity of mind.
A woman who is not at heart a tyrant in her dreams of love is a perversion of nature.
So far as can be learned at this distance, there is only one industry in the new South which is really in a flourishing condition, and that is the unlimited production of abominable trashy “literature.”
If some half baked people would consent to go to night school instead of covering endless reams with horrible aberrations, the progress of aesthetics would be more rapid in America. Some people cannot realize that mere mellifluous meanderings in verse or plain prose are simply indications of an affection of the gray matter, akin to a cold in the head, and are of no more significance to the outside world than the week’s washing.
The instability of all industrial and business life in America is one of the horrors of existence here, and it is one of the factors that make culture impossible here. A nation on the jump runs to “smartness” but not to intellect. There is only one class in our society that enjoys stability, and that is the Police. Whether we may expect any aesthetic appreciation from this quarter remains to be seen.
“To amuse respectable people,” said Moliere, “what a strange task.” And God was good enough to allow Moliere to live and write for the Court of Louis XIV. It is a great privilege for a writer to know precisely the follies and moods of his audience. Moliere himself showed how much appreciation of wit and sanity can be cultivated in a court of folly. But how can the most assiduous student of human nature gauge the vagaries of taste in a democracy? The amusing of respectable, and other people, is the wreck of imagination and authorship in this happy land of Educational Eclipse. Here, all are what is called “educated.” But how few care for or know anything of that self education which constitutes culture?
The poor alone trust in Providence. The rich own Providence.
To Amaryllis: As you did not enclose postage for the return of your manuscript, I address you through this medium. Your verses are good enough from one point of view; but unfortunately this is a Bibelot of Literature, and these are picture-book verses. They are in the right key, though, for we have tried them on the office cat with gratifying results. The cat was seized with a fit of melancholy, and has not been out for two nights. It will be a sin if you do not send these potent poems to the editor of the Century magazine.