The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political Part 60

To Roland Cotton Smith

Rochester, Minnesota, [April] 30

And you know that I cannot even write Spoon River! Vain man!

Strutting c.o.c.k o' the walk! Knight of the Knickerbocker Club!

Gazer upon Fifth Avenue and the Foibles and Frivolities! Reveller in things of life and Enjoyer of Gaiety!

Look thou upon me. To Minnesota driven. In a hospital-hotel.

Punched and tapped by every stray Knight of the Golden Fleecers.

Awaiting a verdict from puzzled doctors. ... Bless you, I have been through years of watchful waiting but not of this kind, and a few weeks of this is enough. But I am a patient, long-suffering, Christian martyr upon whom the Pagans work their will.

And you, poor man. Tied to a woman's foot! Now that is what I call humiliating. Worse than being tied to her ap.r.o.n strings or to her chariot, (in the latter, they say, there is often much joy.) Why should people have feet anyway in these days of autos? A mere transportation convenience! Well, all our transportation facilities seem to be out of order these days. Fallen arches, in sooth! Reminds one of Rome. Very much more aristocratic than infected gall-bladder after all. And I do hope they can be restored, those arches, and the world once more put on its peripatetic way.

But you do not tell me of yourself. Can you chop wood or saw wood or play golf or do aught else that doth become a man of muscle, energy, life, vim, go, pep? Take a trip to the South Seas, a knock-about trip, casting off clerical garb and living in the open, mixing with the primitive peoples, seeing beauteous nature, climbing mountains, swimming in soft waters, not seeing newspaper or book. They tell me that in Burmah live a happy people who love beauty, are always smiling and follow the Golden Rule far nearer than those who live by trade and are blest by civilization. Ah, that I might see such a people! The nearest I ever came was at Honolulu, and there was the taint of the Christian, alack-a-day!

The White Man's Burden is the weight of the load of sin, disease, death, and misfortune he has dropped on the happy ones who never knew a Christian creed. We have given them bath tubs in exchange for cheerful living!

I am as much in the air as to the future as I was in the russet days of Bethel. But one of these days, let us hope we may gather over a bottle of something sound and mellow, and laugh together over our adventure into the land of the woebegone. I do not take to it, tho' they say some people live in it by choice, for they find something to talk of there, and feel saintly because they suffer. Well, we will have more knowledge in that happy future and more of sympathy. What a lot one must endure to gain a wee bit of wisdom. And then to have it die with us. Maybe it does not, eh?

Maybe it somehow, somewhere finds a corner into which it drops and carries someone over a hard place. I don't know what kind of theology this is that I am dripping from my pen, but I cannot yet be beaten to the point where I say it is all purposeless. And that is the faith that may not save a soul but does save souls, I guess.

I wish you the joy and elevation of spirit that you have many times given to my sick soul and to others. Did I tell you my boy is married--to a Catholic girl too, of much charm? They were married on the ancestral farm with the ancestor of ninety years present and in high spirits. A Dios, Padre mio,

F. K. L.

To John G. Gehring

Rochester, Minnesota, [April] 30, [1921]

Tomorrow will be May day--once, before the world became industrial, a day of gladness, now a day of dread, another result of mal-adjustment.

What ever would these doctors do if they had no cheeks in which to hold their tongues while telling sick folk what ails them, and the cure? You are learning, Sir, how much of wisdom some men lack who have certain knowledge. And wisdom is what we are after, we Knights of the Mystic Sign. Wisdom--the essence of lives lived; knocks, blows, pains, tortures reduced to fears, and these incorporated into a string or queue of people who have eyes, nerves, and powers of inference, and the initiative to experiment and the impulse to try, and try again. Result--a nugget no larger than a mustard seed of intellectual or spiritual radium, y-clept wisdom. It does not grow on ancestral trees or on college campuses, nor does it come out of laboratories or hospitals, tho'

it is sometimes found in all these places. A Carpenter is known to have possessed more of it than any other man; tho' most of us don't possess enough wisdom to know that He did possess so much of it. An Indian Prince is also celebrated for the richness of his supply. These men have been followed by others who sometimes carried mirrors, but some had tiny grains of the real thing also.

And those are called Optimists and Transcendentalists and Idealists and Fools who think that more and more of these grains will come into the hearts and minds of men; while those are called sensible, and shrewd, and sane, who a.s.sert that the supply is uniform, stationary in quant.i.ty but moved about from time to time, producing nothing but the illusion that something is worth while.

But you and I say, "Suffer the Illusion to come into me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." Emerson says each man is an "inlet" of the Divine Spirit--just a bit on the side, out of the infinite ocean. Thus all of us are connected up, and thus there is hope that some day doctors will be wiser than today. ...

I should like to hold your hand for a time. It's the best service one man can give another. We are great hand-holders, we men, natural dependents, transfusers of sympathy and understanding and heartening stuff. They tell me here that your blood for purposes of transfusion is 1, 2, 3 or 4. The last is common denominator blood and will go into anyone safely, but is uncommon. All the other three will kill if not put into those of corresponding quality of blood. Well, you and I like each other because we have the same wave-length to our nerve current, perhaps, and we could hold hands without danger to the other fellow, and possibly with some benefit to the world,--for human sympathy makes good medicine.

Good fortune betide you! My brother, who is sitting by, wishes his affectionate regards to go with mine, and he hopes you will some day see him in that vale of Paradise where he lives.

F. K. L.

To Adolph C. Miller Federal Reserve Board

Rochester, Minnesota, May 1, [1921]

May Day, Glad Day, Day of Festival and Frolic,--once. Now Day of Portent, of Threats and the Evil Eye. Such is the miracle worked by Steam Engine, Mechanics, Quick Exchanges, Industry!

With this happy opening let me to your letter in which you love me a little, which I very much like, calling me baby,--child, anyway. And so I am. I laugh at myself. I cannot think of myself as Grandad or possible Grandad. In fact, I should not be Grandad or Dad, notwithstanding the beauty and n.o.blemindedness and capacity of my dear kids. But I have always been a priest, married to things undomestic, and without the time which every father should have to train and educe the mind of his offspring; especially to give sound and substantial bread and meat to their subconscious mind when they are young. Then, too, a father should have a religion, a sense of relation between himself and the Master, and be able to instill this by gentle and non-didactive method into his bairns, so that they may steer by the North Star and not by s.h.i.+ftier, flas.h.i.+er stars.

Yes, altho' I am now tottering, bruised, battered, down on the floor like a prostrate prize-fighter "taking the count" and hoping for strength enough to rise, altho' an "aged man" as I was once described in my hearing, I am the youngest thing inside that I know; in my curiosity and my trustfulness and my imagination, and my desire to help and my belief in goodness and justice. I want to strike right out now and see the world, and having found the good bring it back and distribute it. And I see every day things that should be done which make me long to live, even tho' I only tell others that they should be done. And one thing that bothers me right now is our money scheme. I know I am far off from your standpoint, but there is something wrong when there is so great a variation in the purchasing power of things produced. Why is not Irving Fisher on the right road? I should like to lay a quieting hand upon the feverish desire for things which so possesses our people. So few things will do, rich, beautiful, solid things, but not many; and then to live with them, proud of them, revelling in them, and making them to s.h.i.+ne like well-handled bronze--not glossily but deeply. The great luxury we will not allow ourselves is repose; that is because we are not essentially dignified. The soul is not respected sufficiently; it is not given that food on which it grows. Curious, the turn of my mind now, too. Having been thinking, and while I still am thinking, in large terms,--the city, the state, the nation, all peoples (I have grown through them all, never really thinking of the family unit)--I am now thinking of a nest, a roof of my own, a bit of garden, a tree of my planting--little things, indeed, on which the mind can rest, after casting an eye over the world and talking in terms of continents. (And I wonder if the gardens of the British--their week-ends at home with flowers and birds, may not bring them down to those little things which make for good sense, sanity, wisdom!) But I fear me I may never so indulge myself, and that is wrong-- that a man should live for fifty-seven years and never thrust his hand into his own bit of his country's soil--such condition makes against loyalties that are essential.

Now I have talked with you for a long time, but not long enough.

How I should like to sit in the big re-upholstered chair beside the lamp, beyond the fire, and throw a match into your brain stuff that would start it blazing. Yes, and I would like to gather around that fire a few whom I love. You and Aleck and Sid. and Pfeiffer and Jack Hallo well and John Burns and Brydon Lamb and Lathrop Brown and Cotton Smith and John Finley and Dr. Gehring and John Wigmore--the real world is very small, isn't it?

It just may be that the verdict here will be one of exile to California, to my brother George's farm; ah, yes he should be with the few great, and I say 'exile' for I wonder if I should ever see any of you then? My doctor in Pasadena said that I should live as a country gentleman, and I answered, "But that takes money." Yet I would not know where the farm should be, for climate is not all.

So long, old man.

F.K.

Many months later, writing to Mrs. Lane this friend of many years says, "I want also to recall the remark Frank made when you and Mary, and he and I, were rain-bound in the little chalet at St.

Mary's in Glacier Park, nine years ago. That was an outstanding experience in my long friends.h.i.+p with Frank. We had many hours to discuss things, and no matter on what road we started, we always came back to a discussion of life; what it was all for, and what it was about, and what principle a chivalrous man should take in adjusting himself usefully to the going world. I remember late one night we sat in the dimly lighted room after a long discussion, he arose, and turning to me said: 'Doesn't it, after all, just come to this,--To spend and to be spent--isn't that what life is?'

Every subsequent experience with Frank confirmed me in the belief that that was his personal philosophy. That is why he lived greatly while he lived, and died n.o.bly when his life was spent."

To Robert Lansing

Rochester, Minnesota, May 2, [1921]

MY DEAR LANSING,--I am to be operated on on Friday and so send you this line that you may know that I have yours of April sixteenth, and have rejoiced very much at its good news, that you were better, and that you were not bitter because of the come-back campaign.

Really, I think Harding is doing well, or rather that the whole administration is being supported well by the country. Oh, these Republicans have the art of governing, and we do so much better at talking! No one knows just what his foreign policy is, but something will work through that will satisfy a very tired people.

There seem to be comparatively few out of work now. We are not out of the woods yet. But the Lord will take care of them. He may even keep Johnson from bolting Harding. They will temporize through; that's my guess.

Good English the people don't know. Ideality they have had enough of for a time. They just want to get down to bra.s.s tacks and make some money, so that the Mrs. can have more new dresses. I do earnestly wish them luck. G.o.d gave us the great day, and you and I, anyway, are not ashamed of the parts we played. In fact, the party loomed pretty large those days--the whole country breathed lung-fuls and felt heroic. We shall not look upon such another time nor act for a people so n.o.bly inspired.

Please give to Mrs. Lansing my very best regards--fine spirit, that she is--and to you, as always, dear Lansing, my affection and esteem.

LANE

To James D. Pkelan

Rochester, Minnesota, May 2, 1921

MY DEAR JIM,--Glad to hear from you and to get so cheerful a word, for surely you are justified in looking upon the world as very much of a friend of yours. You have a rare home, in which to gather your many friends, and you have had honors in abundance, and now may rest and write and speak and adjust yourself to things--terrestrial and celestial--and other service will call you. There must be some Democrats appointed to adjust European or other difficulties, even by a Republican, and you will be the prominent one. So I can look across the mountains to Montalvo and find you ripening into a fine old mellow age, conscious of usefulness, in health and in happiness. May it be so!

Just as soon as my boy gets here, I shall be operated on. ... Ned is now on his honeymoon with his darling little bride, a Catholic Irish girl named Catherine McCahill, whose grey-whiskered grandfather of ninety quite took the s.h.i.+ne off the bride at the wedding. He is a Democrat (State Senator for thirty years) a Sinn Feiner of the most robust sort, and a fanner of many acres.

Poor Anne, she is in for a bad time, with Nancy sick, but she has a good stout heart and a most adequate and comfortable religious faith, which throws things that are personal into a very minor place. The theory of relativity has more than one expression indeed, and things are small when looked at from a height. And it is good to find one who can be both religious and large.

The country seems to be liking Harding and his cabinet more and more. They do have a faculty for getting things done, those Republicans, and they are subjected to so little criticism. It is really good to see them do their work and get away with things so neatly. ... As always,

FRANKLIN K. LANE