Courtney Dowe Rising
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January 30, 1893Now wrapped in stone and silence, his seeming part in life and nature played, in other form and different, he still acts on unseen. There is the body and there is the spirit: they seem temporal; they are eternal; for matter is indestructible and the soul is immortal. The former is deathless on the earth and in the universe; the latter is deathless in time and eternity, and together they form the one. Many are the influences, evident and subtile, that emanate from man, many and enduring and his value is inestimable.
March 30, 1893What a pity it is that we have no great man at the head of our magazines. He would so lift them up and lift up the literature of the land. One may easily be unjust, in this way of saying, to some serious efforts done from an artistic or deeper conviction; but generally speaking the periodicals seem to give forth naught save cold photographic chronicles of the times, devoid of soul; seem to be untimely newspapers in pamphlet form, and hence superfluous. There is little in them of peculiar and distinctive style to distinguish them from the better class of newspapers. With all the affected realism, there is little from my point of view that is truly real and sincere. Indeed, it would be greatly in the interest of economy and simplicity for them to consolidate or combine with the latter, to the end that we may have papers more accurate and thorough going, appealing to the higher as well as the lower instincts, recording the news and current life as well as reflecting thought, style, advance, and the things of the spirit. Let us have simply newspapers and books, and let the books be something other than magazine books! How I long for warmth and inspiration and soul in what I read! But the aim, alas, is now for money, not literature, and while the one is gained, the other, and by natural sequence, is lost. I know there are certain cynics and practical people who may deem this top-lofty and boyish. Yet I am sincere and afraid that I must continue to remain in the respect a true boy - a character not so unenviable and stigmatic after all; for I, who conceive true letters to be the very coinage of the soul, can not bring myself to think that it be well traded for baser metal; I, who conceive letters to be the best religion of the soul, can not deem it a holy transaction to sell the same to Mephistopheles! The very idea of commercialism taints and debases the product of a writer. Again, once more, it must be acknowledged that the worldling is wrong and the thinker is right. Give a man his bread and butter to live on, but do not pay him to write; if you do, he will only report, return you the husks, the shells, not the grain, the oyster, or the essence pure. I speak shortly here, without detailing all the bearings and considerations, but the more one thinks of it, the more he appreciates the position of Spinoza, who, resorting to the handicraft of grinding lenses for a livelihood, refused to write for money!November 16, 1896 You have heard of boarding-school poets: not a few of our American poets are boarding-school poets. But maybe you didn’t know that our magazines for the most part were boarding-school magazines. Their respectable conventional writing bears in mind always readers of tender years and generally fits their case. This is not the way to get or encourage great letters. This smooth undistinguished writing obtains a certain vogue and present reputation, but in the long run the ages will have none of it, will measure by more strenuous standards; they will seek and hold whatever they find of distinctive genius, the perfect, the whole if possible, but, rather than the tomes of mass, even fragments and broken pieces chiseled or rough-hewn, that speak out, that speak sincerely. Have you considered that two of the most interesting and pregnant writers this side of Shakespere are Rousseau and Walt Whitman? The magazines fight shy of their like or those congenerous.
December 31, 1900
Break, in the barren places, lines of literature, show the initiative and peculiar way. Start the procession of Spirits!
Nineteenth Century
Good-bye, old Nineteenth Century, a parting hand; you have not done badly; you look up well out of the ruck* and some sordidness; you had some predecessors, there were Pericles and Augustine and Elizabeth; they had their fine points and a few salient, superlative; You made too much of the indifferent and not enough of the really great; but then you hold to the spirit of democracy and, with all it's faults, that is best, best for the general welfare; you had that startling cometary man Napoleon, who broke your path, though his temperament was not yours, no more was Goethe's long spent in the Eighteenth cycle. Yet he rests nobly with you; you had Darwin, an elemental poet, lacking in form, - would that he had written like Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura!- and Keats, Poe, Shelley, Tennyson, soul's of beauty and exquisite style; your most natural and puissant poet was Byron, but he frayed his edges in life and blunted his scimitar; Hugo represents your imagination, though it flashed in a deal of rhetoric; and there was Carducci ((. Y))ou had in Webster an orator, a man in Lincoln and a statesman in Bismarck; if I must select from the clutter of romancers and novelists, I should name Scott Balzac. Hawthorne, Dickens and Hardy - and Tolstoy, and you had a warm fellowship temperament in Whitman, as encircling as nature, and in Ibsen a realistic and symbolic dramatist of penetrating and revealing power; you had Grant, the silent conqueror in the century's greatest war, and Rockefeller, the most salient representative of it's industrial and commercial life, and a splendid line of inventors, chiefly American; musicians and artists, not a few; and there were certain men apart - Wordsworth, Carlyle, Emerson, Wagner, Browning - great amorphous souls, with elemental fires and dark, mixed communings of the spirit, yet initial lacking in crucial expression, voicing only in eruptions of shreds and patches the deep internal music, the voidance of the soul in complete sustained utterance, and yet your peers in note; they charactered your age: you have made the mass, the complex, a wonderful comfortableness, a great average and material advance; you had ((sane clear rising)), and have made yourself agreeable and helpful to the many, though they grumbled - their privilege and consolation; good-bye; old boy - a friendly good-bye; you will not be forgot!
*rubbish