With Trotwood
It is the unexpected in life, as has often been said, that happens. The rejected stone throughout the centuries has always been the keystone in the arch of fame, and genius and greatness always have and always will come from the bosom of Mother Earth. The best legacy a boy can have is an honest ancestry and a condition that forces him to work. And, therefore, I am always sorry for the young man who “has a fine start in life.” He has as many chances for failure as the “brilliant young lawyer” has for mediocrity and a bar-room clientage. Success despises assistance and fame hates caste and titles as the gods do salt water. Mediocrity, like a faint hearted hound, may always be found running up and down the river of his purpose, fearing to plunge and doubting the ford, while success plunges in and crosses, or dies trying. Two generations of idleness will breed crime, while two generations of shirt sleeves mean wealth. If the world would stop working a year God would have to destroy it with fire and brimstone.
Poetry should be brought back to the uses for which it was intended. The metaphysical school that is trying now to control it, and whose object seems to be to make it a science instead of a pleasure and beautiful way of expressing our thoughts, should be driven from our standard as they have always been from our hearts. We must go back to first and natural principles again, and by demanding imagination, simplicity, beauty and naturalness, make poetry a vehicle of the pure and the beautiful, and so simple that ordinary minds can read it with pleasure and understand what they read. The story age of Spencer, Shakespeare and Burns should be received and much of Browning’s stuff flung to the dogs, where it belongs. God has given us poetry to be enjoyed, to be understood, to make us wiser and better, to take to our hearts and firesides. Its principle is all but universal and there are few who do not, in some shape, enjoy it. It was not intended to be an intellectual puzzle, a metaphysical science to be gobbled up by a few abnormally developed protoplasms and denied to the world of yearning hearts. Imagine Homer reciting his glorious stories of Agamemnon and Ulysses, of “Ox-eyed Juno” and Penelaus, “tamer of horses,” to the Greek philosophers; imagine Shakespeare giving “Romeo and Juliet” in a barn to the learned of Europe. Of Burns lying in the dew of the haystack watching the morning star quiver like the soul of Highland Mary and then writing his deathless song for the ears of those people who live in palaces and never saw a morning star, nor felt the kiss of an honest love in their lives.
The world is wild for prose stories. The reason is obvious. The stories have been shut out of poetry by the metaphysical school, and, being unable to get them in the language of the heart, of the imagination, the world which must have them is taking them in the language of the commonplace. And thus is the trueand the beautiful being destroyed to give way to the double meaning and the sensational. The so-called poetry of to-day is not new. The only reason a lot of metaphysical poetry has not been handed down to us is because it did not live to get to us. Five hundred years hence the people who will know Burns will have to hunt around in a sheepskin encyclopoedia of biography to find out who Howells and Henry James were. We must not forget that contemporary criticism placed Ben Jonson ahead of Shakespeare, Pope above Milton, Scott above Keats. And yet Pope and Scott did a world of harm to poetry. They helped to drive it out by disgusting people with the sameness of its flow and the smoothness of its rhythm. As if the wind roars ’round the house by a foot and a meter measure as Whitmore expressed it, as if the mountain looms up by a law of rising and falling, or the waves thunder like a church organ.
But the grave of truth is never the theme of fraud but for one generation—the next one finds truth on the monument and wrong in the grave. Let us get back to truth; though dead, she is a sweeter mistress than a living and bedecked and bespangled lie. As Romeo said over Juliet’s body, so with poetry:
“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yetIs crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yetIs crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yetIs crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
Trotwood loves to throw a bouquet—he believes they are more easily gathered in the sunshine around us and leave a more pleasant memory than some other things which might be cast, such, for instance, as bricks and stones. Especially does he love to throw them when they are intended for a lovely woman. And we have known her long—Miss Minnie McIntyre, editor of the new horse show paper, The Bit and Spur, of Chicago, and so we know whereof we speak when we say that in her class she is simply an “only,” and her monthly, The Bit and Spur, is a gem of its kind, and an inspiration. It is beautifully illustrated, its workmanship is the finest, and is the best edited magazine of its class in the whole country. If you love the horse shows you cannot afford to miss its monthly visits. This is written deliberately and with charity aforethought, and while it may have the flavors of the village sanctum sanctorum, yet when a woman gets into the strenuous fight around her and with her bright mind and pen rises to the very top, there is always growing in Trotwood’s garden a bouquet of sunflowers for her.
Concerning Southern magazines, it is the fact that none has ever been able to live in the South. We appreciated that fact with all its force when we launched Trotwood’s Monthly. But we think we have studied the situations thoroughly enough to know the reason of this: First, they have all been feeble imitations of Northern magazines—a field so well and ably filled already. Every section of our country has its own character, its own atmosphere, its own earmarks. People North and West, when they buy a Southern magazine, want the South to be in it—its stories, traditions, its sunshine, its fields, its very air. They want to hear of the land which is harvesting and sowing, while they are in the far-off snow, waiting to see the good, glad earth again; the land where the average farmer does not spend all he makes in the summer keeping himself and his stock warm in the winter; the land that is Southern—the great, undeveloped country of the future. Trotwood’s Monthly is trying to do this. In the second place, Southern people are not great readers. There are too many chances to get out of doors—any time and all the time. Like the petted children of indulgent parents, kind Nature does so much for them—they do little for themselves. And a child will never leave the joyous out-doors for the study, the schoolroom or the work shop. In literature the great South is but a child. But last and chiefest, no magazinehas ever been launched in the South to supply a practical demand, instead of creating a supply. Sentiment is a great thing, but like blue litmus paper, it changes quickly if it meets an acid. And sentiment meets an acid every little while. Trotwood’s Monthly is supplying practical demand, not trying to create a supply, dependent on local sentiment. It is weaving the Southern atmosphere around a practical subject—a subject in demand all over the world, as our subscription list, which now has reached a goodly number in every State in the Union, in Canada, even to faraway Nova Scotia, in South Africa, Honolulu and Australia. Around this practical subject for which there is a positive demand, we will weave the Southern literature and life, and in that way do we hope to live. Sentiment alone will carry no magazine beyond the first year, and the story of the literature of every people—aye, of every literary workman among the people—is that the practical staff must go with the first efforts long before he who runs, learns how to read.
Trotwood’s Monthly is going slow, but with the staff of the practical for support.
Trotwood’s Monthly wants good stories and poems. Write them, but let them be life, for literature, if real, is but the true interpretation of life. Write of the life around you, not of that in some other State or country.
If you fail to get your Monthly promptly, be sure to write and let us know. The Monthly comes out on the 15th of each month. We always have extra numbers for those which miscarry in the mails. Drop us a postal if you fail to get yours promptly.
Mr. A. D. Shamel, physiologist in charge of Tobacco Breeding In the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., sends the following appreciative letter: “I appreciate the high character of your Monthly, and know that it will be of great service in promoting the best interests of the agricultural interests which it represents. In the great agricultural awakening taking place in the South and the development of her great resources, there is certainly a great field of valuable work.” Prof. Schumel will favor us soon with a valuable paper.
Men seem to be animals which would not only betray other men, but their own children, if there was no higher power to prevent. One of the curses of the South is child labor—another form of slavery and race suicide. In the new era dawning in the South, this curse has come in with the spindle and the money behind it has been so great that in some Southern States, like South Carolina and Georgia, the friends of the child and of humanity have been unable to pass child labor laws. The legislators are bought by the money of the corporations. The South is making a strenuous effort to correct this evil, but it is met by graft and bribery, evasion and contempt of the law, and the shame goes on. Take from anyone’s life its untrammeled childhood, and what is left? Not even the memory of a sweetness. White child slavery in the cotton mills of the country to-day is worse than negro slavery ever was. After many fruitless efforts, Alabama, which has rapidly taken first rank among all the Southern States, succeeded two years ago in passing a child labor law, the age limit being twelve years. On the day this law went into effect, one hundred and twenty-five children, all white, walked out of one mill at Lannett, Ala. The most of the children, perhaps, had never been to school in their lives and never would have had the opportunity. Not only that, but half of them would never have lived to maturity, and these, at twenty, would look like middle-aged, decrepit, ambitionless folks from whom the life had been crushed. The use of child labor not only promotes race suicide and all manner of narrow injustice, but encourages laziness in the parents, as in nearly all cases the children support the parents in idleness. The law is now rendered almost null by the fact that the parents do not hesitate to swearfalsely to the age of their children in order to put them to work in the mills.
What is a thought—an idea? The most valuable asset in the brain of man. Not common, ordinary thinking, but a new thought—a thought which no one else ever originated. There is such a thought in the letter below, and I am publishing it, taken from many other letters to Trotwood, because of that particular thought and not on account of the nice things the author is kind enough to say. I have underscored the thought I have selected. Read it and tell me, are you doing your work because you must do something, or are you doing it because it is the something you must do. Think and find out, for on it depends whether your life will be a success or failure:
Medicine Lodge, Kan., Oct. 30, 1905.Dear Trotwood:The first and second number of the Monthly have come and, to tell you how much we have enjoyed them, I must use a big word and say immensely. The farmer who will follow their counsel will soon have to pull down his barns and build greater, while he will have treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it is the only magazine I know of giving advice about this world and the next.So old Solomon could not resist the Influence of beauty, his namesake of old fell at the same place.I think you have established the origin of the pacing horse. Poor fellow, he has fought his way to fame, but like nature’s gentleman,“He may not have ancestral fameHis pathway to illume;The sun that flings the brightest rayMay rise from mist and gloom.”After all, it is the irrepressive in either man or horse that makes him great.When you see a man go to work because he must do something, very likely you will never hear about him or the work; while another goes at a work because it is something he must do, then look for something great.This will hold good in regard to the newspaper jingle you spoke of, written by someone anxious to see his name in print. Burns could not help writing about Mary, and so immortalized the name a second time. I venture the assertion, Trotwood’s Monthly is not written because he must do something, but rather because it is something he must do.And now, about the Dakota hunt. Well, for beauty of sentiment and sublimity of style, it surpasses anything that has been written on the like subject hitherto.I have read it over and over again until I became spellbound by the magic of the scene. It brought before my mind the memory of other days when I, too, saw something similar, only in a smaller way, on the fields of Kansas. I feel I have wearied you with much talking and will ask the same forgiveness that Mr. Stone granted you when you shot first.Sincerely yours,ROBT. HAMILTON.
Medicine Lodge, Kan., Oct. 30, 1905.
Dear Trotwood:
The first and second number of the Monthly have come and, to tell you how much we have enjoyed them, I must use a big word and say immensely. The farmer who will follow their counsel will soon have to pull down his barns and build greater, while he will have treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it is the only magazine I know of giving advice about this world and the next.
So old Solomon could not resist the Influence of beauty, his namesake of old fell at the same place.
I think you have established the origin of the pacing horse. Poor fellow, he has fought his way to fame, but like nature’s gentleman,
“He may not have ancestral fameHis pathway to illume;The sun that flings the brightest rayMay rise from mist and gloom.”
“He may not have ancestral fameHis pathway to illume;The sun that flings the brightest rayMay rise from mist and gloom.”
“He may not have ancestral fameHis pathway to illume;The sun that flings the brightest rayMay rise from mist and gloom.”
“He may not have ancestral fame
His pathway to illume;
The sun that flings the brightest ray
May rise from mist and gloom.”
After all, it is the irrepressive in either man or horse that makes him great.
When you see a man go to work because he must do something, very likely you will never hear about him or the work; while another goes at a work because it is something he must do, then look for something great.
This will hold good in regard to the newspaper jingle you spoke of, written by someone anxious to see his name in print. Burns could not help writing about Mary, and so immortalized the name a second time. I venture the assertion, Trotwood’s Monthly is not written because he must do something, but rather because it is something he must do.
And now, about the Dakota hunt. Well, for beauty of sentiment and sublimity of style, it surpasses anything that has been written on the like subject hitherto.
I have read it over and over again until I became spellbound by the magic of the scene. It brought before my mind the memory of other days when I, too, saw something similar, only in a smaller way, on the fields of Kansas. I feel I have wearied you with much talking and will ask the same forgiveness that Mr. Stone granted you when you shot first.
Sincerely yours,
ROBT. HAMILTON.
The publisher of a disreputable sheet in New York, which makes its living by holding up society and dishing out scandal about men and women, has sued that splendid and fearless paper, Collier’s Weekly, for libel, the occasion of the exposure by Collier’s was a venomous attack by the sheet aforesaid upon the President’s daughter. Collier’s, with its characteristic ability, laid the sheet open to its knife, showing how it held up people for hush money and lived in the gutters of things bad. For all of which it was sued for $100,000 by the aforesaid sheet. In a recent editorial on the subject, Norman Hapgood, the able editor of Collier’s, says: “Men submit to blackmail to protect their wives and sisters from such sheets as this, for in the North the pocketbook has replaced the pistol.”
The South, to people who do not know her, has many faults. One of these is the quickness and certainty with which her men have always meted out tragic justice to the brute, black or white, who tears down the barrier between his own vile passions, whether of malice or murder, and a woman’s purity. Nor has any court or any jury ever convicted the man who used his pistol to protect the name of his women. In such cases, the law considers the man to be temporarily insane, at the sudden destruction of his home and happiness, and though it also recognizes what is called “cooling time” for such frenzy, an old Georgia judge years ago expressed the sentiment of the entire South on this subject when he declared in such a case that “cooling time with this court means ninety-nine years.”
Many sheets of the kind mentionedhave tried to build their foul nest in the South, forgetting that here the pocketbook is not the god it is where people live only for money. Its end is invariably the same and the curtain drops to the rapid fire of pistol shots, “and the rest is silence.”
This has come from the old South which taught that money was not all of life, that a man’s word was his bond and a woman’s good character her crown. And words being bonds, men were careful of them, for the man who has to redeem his words with his pistol instead of his pocketbook is more careful how he uses them. We wish Collier’s a speedy vindication. Indeed, we predict the trial will prove something of the same kind of a farce as that of the windy Prof. Trigg, of the Chicago University, who taught the classes that Rockefeller was greater than Shakespeare, that our hymns were all doggerel and much else that was false. He was unwise enough to bring suit for libel against a New York daily which held him up to ridicule. On trial he proved by his own testimony that he was even more ignorant and ridiculous than the defendant had supposed.
And we appreciate greatly the letter below from so distinguished a source as Mr. Spillman, in the Bureau of Plant Industry, Washington, D. C.:
Mr. John Trotwood Moore, care Trotwood Publishing Co., Nashville, Tenn.My Dear Sir: Your favor of October 19 has remained unanswered thus long on account of my absence from the office.I have read the copy of Trotwood’s Monthly with a great deal of interest, and wish to congratulate you on its high character. You are certainly striking out in a new line compared with our present agricultural literature. None of our farm papers have heretofore attempted the literary excellence of Trotwood’s Monthly, confining themselves more particularly to the instructional side of farming. I am much interested in your venture and hope that it may meet with the highest success. Our farmers have been a little too much inclined to look at the financial side of their business and they need something that will help in other directions. This you seem to be able to give.While reading your magazine I was struck by the fact that my own work has nearly all been directed toward the financial side of farming, but you have given me a new idea and one which I hope will have its effect upon my future work. I shall take pleasure in sending you once in a while anything I may be able to write which I think will be of interest to your readers.Wishing you the highest success, I amYours very truly,W. J. SPILLMAN,Agriculturist.
Mr. John Trotwood Moore, care Trotwood Publishing Co., Nashville, Tenn.
My Dear Sir: Your favor of October 19 has remained unanswered thus long on account of my absence from the office.
I have read the copy of Trotwood’s Monthly with a great deal of interest, and wish to congratulate you on its high character. You are certainly striking out in a new line compared with our present agricultural literature. None of our farm papers have heretofore attempted the literary excellence of Trotwood’s Monthly, confining themselves more particularly to the instructional side of farming. I am much interested in your venture and hope that it may meet with the highest success. Our farmers have been a little too much inclined to look at the financial side of their business and they need something that will help in other directions. This you seem to be able to give.
While reading your magazine I was struck by the fact that my own work has nearly all been directed toward the financial side of farming, but you have given me a new idea and one which I hope will have its effect upon my future work. I shall take pleasure in sending you once in a while anything I may be able to write which I think will be of interest to your readers.
Wishing you the highest success, I am
Yours very truly,
W. J. SPILLMAN,Agriculturist.
A man named Fessler, who ran an apiary in the North, conceived the idea of making honey the year round. In the fall he loaded his hives upon a flatboat and floated to the land of perpetual sun. But the bees, finding it always summer, ceased to lay up honey at all and Fessler had his expense for his experience.
Lessons are easily drawn from a thing like this. Since the world was made, the experience of life is the nearer the sun the less the work. But the real lesson is deeper. Cannot the farmer who works the soil year in and year out, with no chance for a rest and no returns to the soil see it?
We want a good live agent in every town in the United States for “Trotwood’s Monthly.” Write for terms to agents. Address Trotwood Publishing Company, Nashville, Tenn.
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