The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
But this is too frivolous altogether for a statesman to be writing
to one whose mind is interested only in serious things! I can see
her steady, cold, stern eye of reproach. "And this to me," she
says, "And 'twere not for thy hoary beard, etc., etc."
I tell you frankly, tho' you may not believe it, that I am not
entirely in a sober mood. Yesterday I planted bulbs with a lady
who was not bulbous. The day before I shot pigeons for a lark. And
I am boastful! fair boastful, my Lady! My secretary and my
confidential clerk and my many dark-hued messengers are solemnly
impressed with my prowess with gun and spade. The truth shall not
be heard in the land. I am my own talebearer and my own censor. I
know more about agriculture than the Secretary of Agriculture, and
I know more of Labor than the Secretary of the same. And for this,
this glorious bursting into fruitfulness at so advanced an age--
you and your good man are responsible and to be credited in the
Golden Book in which is written, What the Plain People Do for Each
Other.
Thanking you for the Bread and Butter, believe me yours for Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
F. K L.
Washington, Saturday, [January 19, 1980]
I am clothed in sackcloth and sitting in ashes. My head is bowed
in humility and I am beating my breast in contrition. There is no
joy in my face and my eyes look downward. Truly I am full of
regret. Did she not write long, joyous, inquiring, curious,
inviting pages to me? and I have not answered! And now will she
ever make her face to shine upon me and give me peace?
I would fly to her--yes, fly to her in monoplane, biplane, or
triplane--but many things deter me. A wife, who is busy with the
Gods of the Elder Days; a daughter, who is busy with the God of
the present day--to wit, a young man named Philip, surnamed
Kauffmann, son of "The Star" six feet two in stockings or
otherwise, late of His Majesty's Navy, Princeton, Football, etc.,
etc. The marriage is to be tied in April, God willing, Nancy
ordering, Philip consenting, Father paying.
As if this were not enough to hinder, the desk must be cleared for
exit--the office desk; for the place that knew me through seven
long years of trouble, anxiety, insult, joy, humiliation,
satisfaction, achievement, companionship, hope, shall soon know me
no more, forever.
Verily, I say unto you, that if ever mortal man or mortal mind
needed rest, recreation, recuperation, and other alliterative
things, that same man is now writing to the Lady Elizabeth Ellis,
of Terraced Garden, in Camden, by the Wateree. And he is writing
without hope that he will see the Lady and her Lord and the
Princeling, for moons and moons. This is a sad, sad word for him
to write. But the whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and
altogether perverse. The President is broken in body, and
obstinate in spirit. Clemenceau is beaten for an office he did not
want. Einstein has declared the law of gravitation outgrown and
decadent. Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed World, is shut
off; and all goes merry as a dance in hell!
Oh God, I pray, give me peace and a quiet chop. I do not ask for
power, nor for fame, nor yet for wealth. Lift me on the magic
carpet of the Infinite Wish and lay me down on a grassy slope,
looking out on a quiet sunny sea, and make me to dream that men
are gentle and women reasonable. And forgive us our trespasses,
Amen!
And again I pray--Give me patience. Let me not ask for today what
may not come until tomorrow. Let mine eyes not be filled with
visions of things as they would be in a world wherein men were
Gods. Let mine ears be closed to Siren calls which lure to the
rocks. Stiffen my soul to make the climb. Keep from my heart
cynical despair. Make my mouth to speak slow words, and curb my
tongue that it may not outrun the Wisdom taught by the years. Give
surety to my steps, O Lord, and lead me by the hand for I know not
the way.
Your telegram lures as your letter did. But such pleasures are not
for us, because of our sins. "And those that are GOOD shall be
happy!"
Work. Work. Work. It is the order of the One Supreme. It keeps us
from being foolish, and doing as fools do. It is needed for the
mastery of a world that has its Destiny written, as surely as
we have ours. It is a chain and a pair of wings; it binds and it
releases. It is the master of the creature and the tool of the
Creator. It is hell, and it lifts us out of hell into heaven. It
was not known in Paradise, but there could be no Paradise without
it. A curse and a Savior! Our life-term sentence and the one plan
of salvation! Work for the weary, the wasted, and the worn. Work--
for the joyous, the hopeful, the serene. Work--for the benevolent
and the malevolent, the just and the cruel, the thoughtful and the
unheeding. Work--for things that life needs, for things that are
illusions, for dead-sea fruit, for ashes; and work for a look at
the stars, for the sense of things made happier for many men, for
the lifting of loads from tired backs, for the smile of a tender
girl, for the soft touch of a grateful mother, for the promise it
brings to the boy of one's hopes.
Work! Why work? It is the order of the One Supreme.
So saying, at one o'clock of Sunday morning, he lifted up his hand
and waved three times to the Southward--once for the Lady of the
Troubled Heart, who flirts with the Angel of Destruction, thinking
he may turn out to be a God, and once for the Lord of the Lady,
serenely fatalistic, and the third, and this a very big one, for
the Princeling who is making a manly battle, cheerfully,
confidently. The Friend of the Three.
F. K L.
Washington, [February 5, 1920]
And so, again the Boy has been attacked by a strange enemy, and
you are fighting. That is what you have been doing for years,
fighting for that bit of life you love more than your own self.
You did not think you could do it when you were a girl, did you?
You have wondered at yourself many, many times. And wondered at
the Fate which brought this long challenge to you. But it has been
a splendid fight, hasn't it? A glorious fight against odds. There
has been no justice in it. No justice, and our souls do so want
justice, an even chance, something in front of us that we can see
and know and fight. God knows why such tortures come to some,
while others sail on such smooth seas. Can it be that there is no
soul excepting the one we make for ourselves by fighting? Are
those really blest who have such challenges given to their
spirits? Or is this all by way of excusing God, or Nature, for the
unexplainable?
There is no way to make the fight excepting to believe that the
fight is the thing--the one, only, greatest thing. (To deny this
is to leave all in a welter, and drift into purposeless cynicism,
--blackness.) To determine that this is the way, the truth, and the
life, is to get serenity. Then the winds may howl and the seas
roll, but there can be no wreck.
I know you don't like to be coddled. You are not of the cotton-
batting school. You can take and give. But "may I not" say a word
of appreciation and perhaps of stimulation--give you a good
masculine thump on the shoulder by way of saying that for one who
lives in a mist you have lots of gimp. To love something better
than oneself is the first step, I guess, toward making that soul.
Please read the note, in special envelop, to Ralphie, when he will
be interested. By Jove, how fortunate that we could not leave. All
my force is sick. Three of my assistants are laid up. Six hundred
and eighty people in my Department are in bed. And I am struggling
to get out and leave my job up to date. Good fortune!
F. K. L.
[Katonah, August, 1920]
... You know that I love you--yes, just as much as Ralph Ellis,
who is a tough sailor man, and Anne Lane, who is a citizen of two
worlds, will let me. But I would love you more, much more, if you
did not have to be induced by my wife to write to me. Your love
letter was all right, but it was procured. Do you get that word--
procured--and my wife was the procuress. This may be de rigueur
and comme il faut and umslopogass on Long Island, but it does not
go in Katonah--peaceful, pure Katonah!
Here, in this sweet centre, if a lady wishes "for to make eyes" at
a man, by way of a letter, she does it without being told to do it
by the said man's wife. And then to open, "Dear Mr. Lane,"--Gosh
Lizzie! isn't that pretty warm!
My anger is so great that I am now sitting up in bed at the weary
hour of two to relieve myself--for otherwise I cannot sleep.
Your remarks upon the distraught condition of the public mind, the
unfortunate fix into which the Polacks have fixed themselves, the
heart-breaking cry that you send out for men to get together and
be sensible, before they are sadder,--these things have no
lodgement in my soul-center. For I am loved by a lady who speaks
much of free speech and courage and candor and other virtues of
prehistoric existence, but who talks of herself all through her
letter and never of me at all. How can the fire be kept burning
with a cold back-log like that? Talk about me! That's the first
principle of all conversation--even not amorous. Well, you are a
good woman, Mrs. Ellis, and I hope Mr. Ellis is well, and that you
are not having trouble with the help. Goodbye, Mrs. Ellis!
Come, sweet Elizabeth, let us join hands and go for a gay climb
over the piney hills--you can sing your minor note of sad
distress--your miserere, if you can, in the face of the puffy
clouds, and I will laugh at you for having too much of world
concern in your heart. The blessings do not come to those who are
"troubled about many things." The soul is an individual, you know.
We are saved by units not en masse. Every individual is a species
--isn't that what splendid Bergson says? So come away from
responsibilities and let your poor heart, which is so unselfish
that it cannot rest, indulge itself in the luxury of a peaceful
forgetting, for a few days.
Practically, this seems like a good place--the process is to
reduce you to a pulp and then gradually restore you to form. I am
just emerging from the mash.
Do give my greetings--graduated calorically as your judgment
suggests--to the many friends in your neighborhood who have
forgotten me.
Devotedly, yet very sore,
F. K. L.
[September]
This is a sentimental letter from a sentimentalist to a sent--,
for a sent--. It is by way of atonement, chiefly. I want to be
forgiven for all the hard things I have said to you. I feel that I
owe you much, at least a good word, for all the bad ones I have
given you.
You are a health-giver. That's not such a bad name, is it? In fact
I don't know a better. It doesn't sound sentimental, no husband
would be alarmed by it, and yet it carries in it implications of
gaiety and tenderness and rompishness with a touch of mysterious
adoration. Altogether it is a very real large word that does not
signify virtues but rather attractivenesses. Mind, I don't say
that you have not the virtues--all of them, offensive and
defensive, but the attractivenesses make life, don't they? And to
be a health-giver is not merely to have charm. That is the spell-
casting power, to be filled with witchery, to be a witch. Yes, I
believe it is something like that--very much in fact, but the
witchery must be balsamic, it must be radiant, it must go out in
rays or circles or waves, because it can't help going out, not
purposefully and selfishly, like the casting of a net--it must be
balsamic and radiant, the outbreathing of pines.
Now this is a very nice name I have called you--you can put it
into Latin or Greek or French and make it sound much better to the
unimaginative. But you deserve it, and I hope my little girl will
become one.
FRANKLIN K. LANE