The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
in it yet for you. Why you look forty years younger than Joe
Redding--but don't tell him I told you.
LANE
To Mrs. Frederic Peterson
Rochester, Minnesota, April 26, [1921]
MY DEAR MRS. PETERSON,--... Once more I am going through the
grinding of the Mayo mill, and this time I hope to some concrete
purpose, and have an end to this coming out "by that same door
wherein I went" The dear old meditative, contemplative Orientals
threw up their hands in despair long years ago and found the
figure of the unending wheel to symbolize all processes and
procedures: a world, a universe, without termini. Sometimes I
think them right, but then again my western mind will not have it
that the riddle of the Sphinx may not be solved. Our assurance
meets every challenge; mystery may make us humble; we may be
baffled; but we do not despair because we know we are Gods to whom
all doors must open eventually. That seems to be the real
underlying strength of our position. Why men go on with research
excepting out of some such philosophy I cannot see--nor why they
go on with life.
Tell your good man that I long to look once more into the sweet
face of the Shepaug, and that while I have been wandering in the
delicious and rare places, I have not forgotten the fresh
wholesomeness of the Hoosatonic. My first visit shall be to the
meeting place of the Three Rivers. Why might not fortune lead us
to have a summer in Connecticut and a winter in California? "I
know a place where the wild thyme grows," many such places indeed,
and high hillsides of wild lilac and a wee mountain crowned with
the flowering manzanita. Oh, this world is a place to make souls
grow if one can get an apple tree, a pine and an oak, a few
lilies, a circle of crimson phlox, a stretch of moving water and a
sweep of sky, that can be called one's own.
We saw Cordy Severance's place on Sunday--went there from the
wedding of my boy to Catherine McCahill--and found a volume of the
Chinese Lyrics [Footnote: By Dr. Frederic Peterson.] in the big
room. Great chap Cordy, and a great room he has to play the organ
in, and more people love him than anyone else I know, for he loves
them with an aggressiveness that few men dare to show, that gives
him distinction and is a glory.
How far away the war seems--way back yonder with the fight for
Independence and the French Revolution, almost back to Caesar.
Well, I must quit mental meanderings. With all good will,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
To Roland Cotton Smith
Rochester, Minnesota, [April] 30
And you know that I cannot even write Spoon River! Vain man!
Strutting cock 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 apron 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 assert that the supply is
uniform, stationary in quantity 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 noblemindedness 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 shiftier, flashier 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 shine 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