With Trotwood

When I wake up in the mornin’, in the laughin’, smilin’ mornin’,With my soul keyed like a fiddle an’ my heart keyed like a lute,An’ memory-maids come trippin’, an’ a-slidin’ an’ a-slippin’,An’ floodin’ all my heart house with the faint notes of their flute—Then my lips jus’ longs to utter little songs that kind o’ flutter’Round the earthly cage that coops them, an’ would fly up in the light,An’ to my soul a-yearnin’, little firefly thoughts come burnin’An’ bringin’ spirit-lanterns that would lead it out of night—When I wake up in the mornin’.When I wake up in the mornin’, in that solemn, silent mornin’,After long, long years of slumber, an’ long, long years of sleep,When my spirit’s bird has rested in the heavenly air it breastedAn’ its golden pinions tested for their flight across the Deep—Lord, I know my soul will flutter up to heaven, an’ will utterIn a clearer note the songs it only tried to sing below;An’ these fitful, fiery flashes from the pale hope of my ashesWill be altars of star incense in the glory of Thy glow—When I wake up in the mornin’.John Trotwood Moore.

When I wake up in the mornin’, in the laughin’, smilin’ mornin’,

With my soul keyed like a fiddle an’ my heart keyed like a lute,

An’ memory-maids come trippin’, an’ a-slidin’ an’ a-slippin’,

An’ floodin’ all my heart house with the faint notes of their flute—

Then my lips jus’ longs to utter little songs that kind o’ flutter

’Round the earthly cage that coops them, an’ would fly up in the light,

An’ to my soul a-yearnin’, little firefly thoughts come burnin’

An’ bringin’ spirit-lanterns that would lead it out of night—

When I wake up in the mornin’.

When I wake up in the mornin’, in that solemn, silent mornin’,After long, long years of slumber, an’ long, long years of sleep,When my spirit’s bird has rested in the heavenly air it breastedAn’ its golden pinions tested for their flight across the Deep—Lord, I know my soul will flutter up to heaven, an’ will utterIn a clearer note the songs it only tried to sing below;An’ these fitful, fiery flashes from the pale hope of my ashesWill be altars of star incense in the glory of Thy glow—When I wake up in the mornin’.

When I wake up in the mornin’, in that solemn, silent mornin’,

After long, long years of slumber, an’ long, long years of sleep,

When my spirit’s bird has rested in the heavenly air it breasted

An’ its golden pinions tested for their flight across the Deep—

Lord, I know my soul will flutter up to heaven, an’ will utter

In a clearer note the songs it only tried to sing below;

An’ these fitful, fiery flashes from the pale hope of my ashes

Will be altars of star incense in the glory of Thy glow—

When I wake up in the mornin’.

John Trotwood Moore.

I read two novels by two women not long ago. I believe I should say what my critical deductions were:

Too many novels are a dangerous thing and two a year are pabulum enough for a man. For men must fight the life around them. Women may dream, thank God, and right beautifully do they dream.

These novels were “The Awakening of Helena Richie,” by our country-woman, Mrs. Margaret Deland, and “Fenwick’s Career,” by Mrs. Humphry Ward, an Englishwoman. There are two kinds of writers: one is retrospective and gets his food from without—absorbs from what is seen, heard, copied; what others say and do; creates, but the creation is imitative; there is lacking the great, broad highway of initiatory genius. It may be clever but it is never genius—versatile, but never great.

The other is introspective—grows from within. The best definition of it, is, I love to think,God-given; and its genius is limited only to what God has put there in the beginning. It copies from no man—it is Master. Its flow is limitless, like the great tides of the greater ocean, and, like them, it grows as it goes. It does nothing twice the same way—every book is different, every poem, every mood.

For books and poems are merely the moods of Genius.

There is no place in literature for the practical, the poised, the balanced, the consistent, the saving, the so-called sound men and women of the world. To these God gave the all-sufficient talent of taking care of themselves. To Genius he gave the greater gift of caring for all humanity.

“Helena Richie” is introspective. “Fenwick’s Career” is retrospective, and between them is a gulf boundless.

Woman, by nature, writes the spiritual novel. Men write the novels whichdo.

Neither of the novels above, in the man-sense,do. Because they were not written by men.

Compare “The Awakening of Helena Richie” with “The Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne’s woman and her preacherdid things—people did things all through his masterpiece. And they reaped all the infamy and anguish of it—the illegitimate child, the pillory—death. And yet Hester Prynne and her preacher-lover had more excuse for their real wrong-doing than the business love-pair who set up their convenient and quasi establishment in the village of Dr. Lavendar. For the Puritan people had the excuse of youth—of passion—and the greater man-excuse of nature and by them callednature-given. But they forget that since the beginning God has been improving on nature. Helena and her lover merely played with passion; the others were passion. In Mrs. Deland’s people the fires were out—it was a weak, sordid, dissatisfied, half revengeful spoiled child determination to be naughty for naughty’s sake. They were a materialistic pair of polite adulterers, doing no harm to society, for they left no scarlet track, and none to themselves, for they were incapable of being hurt. No man writer would care to have picked up their miserable and naughty little affair; and instead of ending as it did, they might as well have been permitted to go on into the society of some city near them among those of their kind and claimed they had been married.

And not a gossiper of their set, had she found it out, would have gone two blocks to tell it to another.

Mrs. Deland is not Hawthorne, it is true, but she is great—her novel is great. It is introspective, virile, uplifting, beautiful. Some of its characterization is superb and one of its characters, that of the old man whoknew things, who spotted character when he smelt it as a setter dog the unseen quail, is the best drawn of any book of the year. The idiosyncratic mood of the author—the only mood by which genius may be known—for it alone makes clear the line between man and men—that cosmic idiosyncratic insolence which stamps individual authorship—if it be real authorship—in this, no woman writer of the year has approached her.

In the glow of the warmth of this house of her soul genius, “The House of Mirth” is a brilliant ice-castle in the Klondike, and “A Fighting Chance,” that mongrel thing brought to life by the union of “Lady Rose’s Daughter” and “The House of Mirth”—a thing so clearly marked in its genealogy that one can easily trace each separate lineament of its doughy countenance to either parent who is responsible for its existence—this thing of cigarette-smoking, russet-legged quail-hunting, burning women, and drunken, lewd-doped society adulterers with not a real man or woman in its pages, is the Dakota sod-hut of novel houses.

But if “Helena Richie” suffers in comparison with its great prototype, Mrs. Ward’s book is wiped off the map. In her book nobody does anything and the years of marvelous anguish they go through doing it should give the sweet-sixteen readers who glory in it enough sniffle-nose sufferings to last them till next vacation.

This author glories in heroines a little off-color in their moral make-up with an over-weening desire to do something naughty but never game enough to score down to it. We would love every silly one of them more had they sinned and been sorry. For the sack-clothed sins of real men and women add most to their growth and bigness.

Our sins make us.

Mrs. Ward’s books are all alike, with a little variation in plot and people. She cannot get away from the illegitimate cross in her moral pedigree. Her people are oftener paste-boards,her characters the half-harmonized personalities of incongruous vaporings and she has made her literary fame and money on the sad but decadent frailty of that large, honest, well-meaning, but common lot of us who “do dearly love a lord.”

And these are my deductions: Between Mrs. Deland’s and Mrs. Ward’s novels have we not greater geniuses at home? And between the unspeakable Castellane and Marlborough—haven’t we—honest now, ladies! better husbands here?

John Trotwood Moore.

Trotwood loves to take as well as to give and the following letter is too rich to go into any waste basket. I do not know the writer, but it has been sent by an esteemed friend, a colonel of an Ohio regiment who was on the firing line at Shiloh, the letter having been written to him by a comrade now living in California. Of him our correspondent writes:

“He spent four years in the Civil War, and when he came home to Ohio at the termination of the war he was not yet old enough to vote.” But here is his letter:

“My dear Colonel: I am enjoying every inch of the text work inTrotwood’s—and especially that part that deals with the blue and gray paladins that wrestled for a time on the flanges of hell—in order to become betteracquainted.

“Sometime, when you meet our friend Trotwood, tell him you once knew a trembling country boy, with calliper legs, who enlisted in the earliest earlies, and really thought for a time that he was a quarter section of Mars, until he hit Shiloh—and he has never fully recovered confidence in himself since. Even to this day, that boy needs no map of the ‘high places’ between Shiloh Church and the river bluffs. If there was asunken road, it was so far below the level of the chain of pinnacles that youngster made use of in ‘promoting’ distance betweensectionlines, that he only knows of it by hearsay and tradition, and that vortex called the ‘Hornet’s Nest’ was omnipresent in that lad’s ears until the following June. So far as that youth remembers, the “Purdy Road” only hadone endleading in a bee-line to the steamboat landing, and he well remembers that large stocks of cannon balls were bursting in job lots as he crossed that open furnace known as the ‘Jones Field.’ For a number of days after the carnage at Shiloh this stripling of the tented field had no appetite for the ordinary rations, and it is doubtful if the best vaudeville extant could have made him sit up and take notice. He was much like Artemus Ward’s baby bear that straddled a buzz saw—willing to quit. Printer’s ink has been ladled out by the pailful to show that Shiloh was not a surprise; but the young truthful James of this sketch says that it was a ‘23’ for him—a powder and ball—before-breakfast surprise, accompanied by demoniacal yells that frayed the atmosphere and loosened the tent-pins of Sherman’s entire lines. If the loss of tents, luggage, arms, munitions, keepsakes, love letters, confidence, pride and self-respect was not enough to constitute evidences of a full-grown surprise, there was certainly nothing additional to throw inunless it might be the epiglottis and the back teeth. The youthful scion of this preachment says he has no doubt but the worthy men who wore the gray have had many a hearty laugh at the Herculean efforts of the North to show that Shiloh was not a surprise. Apropos of this, we are reminded of Len Wardlow, who was hurled from a sixth-story apartment during the San Francisco earthquake and lit in fifteen feet of water in an open cistern; Len says he was not one whit surprised, but for a very few minutes he was d—d badly startled.

“About the best definition of a ‘surprise’ is that it’s the unexpected; now,if, to drop into the language of Old Wash, our hosts, Grant and Sherman wuz expectin’ Deacons Johnsing and Booragard to come over real airly on dat Sunday mornin’ bringin’ dar Hornet’s Nests and bloody anglers erlong wid em, why in de name ob common eruptions didn’t dey fix for em? Put de house in order, have de different parts layin’ on de music rack and put all de perrotecknix whar de performers could stick er match to ’em? Stid ob dat, we all was a-actin’ as if no visitors was gwine to call on us dat Sunday mornin’ sure enough! Kase Grant was trimmin’ his korns way down at Savannah and Sharmin had put on no biled shirt to welcome de visitors. Ebber since dat Shiloh reception de rank and file, de real workers, hab all s’posed dat dey was sartinly not fixed for de influx ob callers—and ’specially not so tarnal airly. But de leaders, dem as was not dar to hear de knockin’ on de front door, and usher in Brer Johnsing, hab all erlong said dat de kyards had been out and de punch hole a simmerin’ for jist sech a quiltin’ and we are willin’ to ’serverate de leaders ought to know.”

Dear Trotwood: Knowing your fondness for satirizing women who drive horses, I am sending you this little true bill.

I was riding along the other week near a small city when a hard shower came up suddenly. Just before me I noticed two ladies driving a very spirited horse to a buggy. They were evidently just from the town. Instead of putting up the buggy top or drawing out the rain cloth when the shower came up, they each gave a little feminine shriek and both grabbed at once an umbrella, paying no attention whatever to the lines, and bent way over holding it over the rear end of the horse, the rain pouring down on them all the time. I followed them, looking on in amazement—there they were bending over the dashboard catching a hard rain on their graceful backs and well-fitting, new gowns and holding an umbrella half way over the southern half of a horse who was going along well enough and perfectly indifferent to the weather. For a mile they drove thus, and I followed, wondering. Finally, as I rode up to them, my curiosity was so great that I asked:

“Ladies, pardon me, but will you tell me why you are holding that umbrella over your horse and not protecting yourselves?”

“Why—yes,” one of them faltered, “we are scared nearly to death. You see, it is a hired horse, and we don’t know much about him, and when we hired him the liveryman told us to be very careful not to let him get the rain under his tail or he would kick us out and run away!”

C. R.

Dar now, Banjo!—t’ek yo’ sign in,—Let Miss Fiddle sing her song.O my h’art—I’m jes’ a pinin’—Come, Miss Fiddle, come along—Wid yo’ gleam of sun in show’rs,Nights so sweet an’ days so ca’mful—Wid yo’ birds an’ bees an’ flowers,Fetchin’ music by de armful!John Trotwood Moore.

Dar now, Banjo!—t’ek yo’ sign in,—

Let Miss Fiddle sing her song.

O my h’art—I’m jes’ a pinin’—

Come, Miss Fiddle, come along—

Wid yo’ gleam of sun in show’rs,

Nights so sweet an’ days so ca’mful—

Wid yo’ birds an’ bees an’ flowers,

Fetchin’ music by de armful!

John Trotwood Moore.

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