Hotel Washington
San Francisco

23 November, 1938

Dear Hapgood:

Hagedorn's biography of Robinson did a good turn in inform-
you that "I still live", to quote words uttered by Daniel Webster on his
death-bed. Perhaps it would be truer to say that I still exist, for I am
not in a particularly hilarious mood these days, though, as Mr Thanksgiving
Day comes to-morrow, perhaps I ought to add that I have some things to be
thankful for. When we last met, which was shortly after the Armistice, I
was at least a semi-invalid, suffering from a fistula, and had undergone
two unsuccessful operations. Doctors said that I was probably a hopeless
case, and advised me to spend no more money for a cure. The fact was that
I had no more to spend at the time. I had opposed America's entrance into
the war, had attacked Mr. Wilson's later policies with more fervor than
discretion, and the result was that many a door that had formerly been
open to me was open no more, and among the closed doors I had to reckon
those of my nearest relatives. But for the fact that I was finally able
to get assistance from the Carnegie Fund of the Authors' Club, it is dif-
ficult to prophesy what the upshot would have been. Eventually I went to
Washington and obtained a sinecure as a clerk on one of the House Com-
mittees. I had nothing to do, but draw my salary; and though that was only
eighty dollars a month it was enough to keep me in a modest way. But I
also received fifteen dollars a week from a congressman for whom I did a
little writing, and I picked up a little money from other sources. Once I
received fifty dollars for a bit of publicity writing that consumed only
four hours of my time. Later I went to Chicago and became a member of
the editorial staff of The Journal there. At the end of six months, how-
ever, I was completely broken down, and I returned to New York. Old friends
friends began to smile once more on meeting me, my near relatives ditto.
After a time I went to Montreal to live, since I was desirous of getting

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out of a country capable of enacting an Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, and I remained in Montreal for nearly a year. Probably I should either be there still or dead, if I had not heard of a New York surgeon of German extraction who was said to be a wizard in curing fistulas. I returned to New York and went under his care. It took thirteen operations and subsequent medical treatment to effect the cure, but at the end of precisely 365 days from the time I went to him I was discharged as cured.

I then went to Washington and was soon made a Commissioner of Conciliation in the Department of Labour, but my real duties consisted in writing speeches, state papers, and even some of the more important letters of the Secretary of Labour. Amongst other things I wrote the address of welcome to the United States that he delivered before the Catholic Eucharistic Congress. I was with him for three years and a half, leaving to become the associate editor of a publication that soon went up the spout. Afterwards I was the ghost for a senator for a year.

Like yourself, I became the victim of a gigantic carbuncle while in Massachusetts, and had two months of the damned thing. Was in the Massachusetts General Hospital for some time. It was suggested to me that it would be well for me to spend the winter in a warm climate, which accounts for my being in California. I spent seven months in Los Angeles, loafing; then came to San Francisco, becoming an Associate Editor, and later Editor, of The Argonaut.

You now have, in rough outline, the main details of my life since we last met. I have been on The Argonaut now for a little over four years.

I was delighted to learn that you have written your autobiography and that it is to appear so soon. I shall read it with great interest, for I know that it must be interesting. I often wondered what you were doing, for I never saw your name in print in connexion with any work.

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It surprised me to learn that one of your present addresses is
Winchester, New Hampshire, for my father was born in that town almost 118
years ago, and my grandfather was born in the adjoining to town of Rich-
mond back in the eighteenth century. My father was very young, however,
when his father migrated to Massachusetts, to become one of the contrac-
tors who dug the Blackstone Canal which connected the cities of
Providence and Worcester in the days before railroad transportation
transportation had come. Later my grandfather became the superintendant of
the canal, and did very well for himself by speculating in real estate
along its banks.

Fifty years ago my father had many cousins in Winchester, and twice
to town he took me there when I was very young. I have seen the town only once
since, and that was eight or nine years ago when I was a child motoring to
Keene. Whether there are any Sabens in Winchester now, I do not know. I
am afraid that I took less interest in my father's relatives than I
have taken.

I should know that I am sure that I never had a letter from one of them, and that I
never wrote one. If there are any Sabens in Winchester now, I am ignorant
of their given names, and if I knew their names, I should not be able to
place them.

During the last two or three months I have not been feeling quite
as well as would seem desirable, for I have been very ill and robust, and only
a few months ago I took a seven mile walk over the hills of this hilly
city without suffering the slightest fatigue, which means something
when a man is far along in his 69th year. I had a young companion in
Washington, a student of music, who delighted in walking, and we walked
together over many of the hills of northern Virginia. One afternoon we
walked twenty miles, at the end of which my young companion was a bit
tired, but I felt as fresh as I did at the beginning.

I suppose that when one gets to be as old as we are, it is not
as easy to make friends of strangers as it is when one is young. I have
not made many here, but, then, I have not tried to make them. I have a

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library of some three thousand volumes, to which I am an constantly making additions, and the greater part of my time is spent in reading. But I realise that I ought to cultivate the social side more. But there are many other things that I ought to do likewise. Unfortunately, perhaps, I am not able to take the common run of mankind very seriously; indeed my attitude towards such is not much different from that of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Well, I see that I have written to you at considerable length, and it may be that I have become prolix. But I was genuinely glad to hear from you once more, and it is my hope that I shall continue to do so. I have never forgotten the evening when we met in Heidelberg through Leo Stein, or the night when I got drunk, and "talked", as you later wrote, "like an angel." I suspect that many would have written, "like a devil". By the way, what has become of Leo Stein? Mabel Dodge once gave me his address in Europe, and I wrote to him and received a reply. But, at a later date, when I went to his cousin's business address in New York (I had a slight acquaintance with that cousin) in order to get it once more, I was treated so coldly by the office force (the cousin was not in) that I gave up the attempt to get it. It looked as if Leo had become almost as difficult to reach as royalty.

21 January, 1939

Dear Hapgood:

remiss

I fear that I have also been a little negligent in the matter of answering your letter, but I had a week in the St. Francis Hospital recently, and have been literally swamped with work since coming out. I am feeling very well, however, at present, better in fact than I have felt for a year, so there is not much need of complaint on my part, save for the fact that my doctor will not allow me to imbibe alcoholic beverages. Even that personal prohibition is not bothering me much. After a man has had a good whack at a thing for nearly fifty years, he ought not to oppose strenuously a little abstinence.

I was sorry to learn that you suffer from neuritis, for I know from what I have heard that it is a painful affliction, and four attacks of pneumonia are more than any human being should be called upon to endure. It surprises me that you survived them all, though it should not be necessary to add that it gratifies me deeply that you did.

I was surprised to learn that Powers Hapgood is your nephew, for I had always taken him to be your son. Some of his labor pieces I have read either in The Nation or The New Republic, or in both. He appears to be devoted to the strenuous life, for I have read of his working in coal mines. Well, he is welcome to it, if he likes that sort of thing. Like Karl Marx, I much prefer writing about labour conditions to experiencing them in my own person. Even so, I doubt very much whether your nephew or myself is capable of understanding the typical labourer. Many years ago, while taking a walk on one of the hottest of summer days, I saw a man ploughing the old-fashioned way in a field. He had the reins of his horse around his neck, and his hands were on the handle of the plough. When he came close to me, I spoke to him sympathetically, expressing my feeling that it must be terrible to plough on so hot a day. But my sympathy was quite wasted. He looked at me

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with a beaming countenance, and declared that he would rather plough than eat.

In my opinion few workers or slaves dislike their status, if they are not taught to dislike it by men and women who move in the higher walks of life. The southern slave was not in favour of abolition. Many an old slave of the days before the Civil War I conversed with more than a generation ago when I was visiting the South, and every mother's son of them told me that he was happier in slavery than he had ever been since. All spoke of former slavery as if it were an idyllic sort of thing. The first/slave with whom I conversed had come to Massachusetts to live, and I catechised him when only fifteen years of age. He told me quite frankly that he wished he were a slave still in slavery, for in that status he always had enough to eat, a place to sleep, etc. Since his emergence from slavery, he had, he said, gone hungry, without the shelter of a roof and various other creature necessities and comforts. Democracy, socialism and communism were all born out of aristocratic minds which allowed their sympathy to outrun facts. I agree with Byron that he who would be free must himself strike the blow; and it is also my opinion that if a man of low degree does not care to strike it, it is much better to let him alone. I used to consider myself a reformer, but I have long since ceased to do so. The reformer deforms more than he reforms. At least so it seems to me.

I suppose that one might call me a modified Nietzschean. I read Nietzsche when in Germany, and he made a great impression on me. True, I think that he was a bit too disdainful when he spoke disparagingly of sympathy and pity, but in his harsher moods he was talking to himself most of the time, for he was himself of a most sympathetic disposition and prone to be pityful. It used to be said of him, in the days of his professorship, that if one of his pupils, in XXX an oral examination, could not pass in his subject, it proved that he knew nothing of the subject, since Nietzsche would almost answer one of his own questions when he had a halting student before him.

No doubt I am quite behind the times. Living in this post-war world I

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Desire to be. If I could, I would turn back the hands of the world's clock to the Age of Pericles.

One almost never hears a good word for the principle of laissez-faire to-day. Almost everybody says that it has been tried and that it has failed. My contention is that the economic and political philosophies of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden and Herbert Spencer never have been tried, that when some countries made a feeble effort to try them they botched the philosophy. Imagine anybody referring to America as a country in which the principle of laissez-faire had prevailed, when it indulged in the highest protective tariff known to the world, and ~~that~~ our government grants to railroad corporations and the like, and even went over, in prohibiting the liquor traffic, to what I call Moral Bolshevism.

I shall be glad to continue the correspondence, now happily renewed. I do not suppose that you approve of all my ideas. I hope you don't. I should very much dislike living in a world in which most persons agreed with me. We live in a rotten world now, but a world in which everybody said "the same thing", as St. Paul wanted his converts to do, would be a world too monotonous to provide me with the slightest edification. Unlike yourself, I do not call myself a Christian; I am a pretty thorough-going Pagan. However, I am not opposed to a religion for Pagans; and I am even willing to admit that a stronger argument can be made for the doctrine of individual immortality/ than against it. But of course this involves animal immortality, in which plant Agassiz believed, and perhaps it involves also animal immortality, in which Sir J.E.Smith, the greatest British botanist of his day, believed.

9 September, 1939

Dear Hapgood:

Your autobiography finally reached me, and I have read the greater part of it in the hours when sleep descends upon men, though not so uniformly on me, and I wish to tell you how much I have enjoyed it. You have unquestionably done a great piece of work. How I wish that some of the worthies of antiquity, the men of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, had done something comparable to it! What indeed would we not give to have the autobiography of a man like Plato or Vergil or St. Paul, done with the same admirable frankness that you have displayed in the writing of your own ! The individual was first born in Ancient Greece, but there is not a single Greek known to us in something like his totality. We have the Memorabilia of Socrates by Xenophon, the Platonic Dialogues which also reveal Socrates as seen through a temperament, and the gossipy lives of the philosophers as given by Diogenes Laertius, in which it is sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to separate fact from fiction; but there is neither an autobiography nor a worthy biography.

Naturally no small part of the enjoyment that I have had in reading your autobiography comes from my acquaintance, large or slight, with the men and women whose paths crossed mine as well as your own. Leo Stein I once knew well; Mabel Dodge I must have met not less than a dozen times; On one or more occasions I came in contact with Robert Herrick, Walter Lippmann, Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Howe (Mrs. Howe asked me if I were an Episcopalian clergyman, saying that I looked like one), H.J. Wright, to name only a handful of your characters.

I spotted, of course, on page 132, your references to me. I had clean forgotten speaking to you about my father's youthful love affair, but, since you know the story, I must have done so. None the less I hope that I have become something other than the "Heidelberg wreck" you have described. My name may have been written in water, unlike that of Keats, who

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thought that his own had been written thus; but even I have found now and
then that the winds and the waves have borne mine to some hospitable mind,
or generous heart. Years after it was written and printed a man living
in Kansas, unbeknown to me, wrote to my address given in Who's Who, saying
that he had read my essay on *The Loneliness of Life* in the Forum magazine
where it had first appeared, in 1913, and once a year every year thereafter.
Having read it again the night before, he felt that he must write me a letter
of appreciation. That essay and eight others, some of which had first seen
the light in the Forum were gathered together by Mitchell Kennerley, and
published under the title of *The Spirit of Life* twenty-five years ago last
month. I have eight other books in manuscript, the last written (here in San
Francisco) being *The Views of a Modern Pagan*.

These may also see the light some day; if they do not perhaps it will
not greatly matter. To myself I seem as one who long ago, either as angel
or devil, left his ancestral heaven or hell in search of an adventure, and,
himself
getting lost, found my way on the wrong road, the road that ultimately
brought me to this pebble of a planet which men call the earth. Some com-
pensations, however, I have had. I belong to no group, and do not fit well
into one; but I have had the satisfaction of seeing my name in a book,
where I was spoken of as "unknown to America....one of its foremost phi-
losophers". Another, writing twenty-five years ago in the Milwaukee Journal,
said of my book that he found "the same spaciousness, the same contempt for
current beliefs and conventions, the same seriousness and sincerity as in
Emerson", adding that "he could give here only the merest suggestion of the
power and virility and breadth of these essays....There is a salty, astrin-
gent flavor to Mr. Saben's work which is sadly needed to give tone to the
flabby thinking of the age." I could quote a few other equally flattering
remarks, including a few recent ones by Nicholas Murray Butler, who is not
quite so much of a Tory at bottom as he is often assumed to be. Dr. Butler
wrote of my article on Calvin Coolidge, which so moved one of Coolidge's
admirers --a wealthy merchant--to aversion that he immediately cancelled
his subscription to The Argonaut,--Dr. Butler wrote of it that it was "a gem".

He has also written that he not only reads, but rereads my articles, and that, whether agreeing or disagreeing, he finds them admirable for their style, more admirable indeed than the articles of any other journalist in America today. All of which is not so bad for the "Heidelberg Wreck" of forty-three years ago--is it?

Don't think, however, that I resent your description of me as one. I do not resent it in the slightest. What you say of me at that time is true enough--it is, in fact, damnably true. Having risen above the mephitic atmosphere in which I was then submerged, I can laugh heartily at the accuracy of your description. No doubt some of the ancient scars are still visible, and it must be admitted that I still seem to many most persons not a little queer; but nobody accuses me of being a weak personality. I may still appear devilish, and I am certainly not popular; but, well along in my seventieth year, I am still a going concern.

Let me repeat how much I have enjoyed your latest book. It is, except for one that you gave me many years ago, the only work of yours that I have read, but the loss is mine, and I hope that before I go back to my ancestral heaven or hell, I shall be able to repair the omission. I shall review your autobiography in the columns of The Argonaut, and I shall have nothing but good and kindly words for it.

I think that you must have forgotten, when writing your autobiography, that I was present at Mabel Dodge's peyote party, and so was Robinson; but, like Max Eastman, we both retired from the scene before any evil could befall us. Is the peyote the same thing as mescal? A young German psychologist, Dr. Heinrich Klüver, who came to this country some years ago and lectured in various American universities, used to visit me in Washington (we have sat up until five in the morning, discussing all the problems in the universe), and later sent me a book he had written, describing the effect of mescal on him.

1 October, 1939

Dear Hapgood:

I have written a review of your autobiography which will appear in The Argonaut on Friday, October 6, a copy of which I shall send to you at Winchester, other copies being sent to your publishers, Harcourt, Brace and Company.

If permitted the space that an old time reviewer (he was a literary critic then, and should be now) was given, I might have been able to write more to the purpose than I have been able to do in the modern cribbed, cabined and confined state. But I trust that I have at least said something that will not displease you, but not only did I enjoy your book very much, but it seemed to me a valuable addition to our American literature.

I do not recall what time I left Mabelle Dodge's peyote party, though it was before Max Eastman left. She does not mention the fact that either Robinson or I were there in her autobiographical volume, Movers and Shakers, perhaps because it angered her slightly that we did not stay. I think that Robinson left because he was fearful of what might happen. My own reason for leaving was more prosaic. I had a lot of work to do for my paper the following day, and, knowing nothing of peyote, it seemed best not to experiment with a drug whose effects were unknown. But the beginning of the performance and the arrangements I remember very well. Harrington had been singing some time before I left, though all that I recall of his songs was something about "the dirty little coward who murdered Mr. Howard". I think that I never saw Mabel Dodge after the peyote party, and I was not in New York long after the event.

I met Percy Mackaye once at Mabel Dodge's, and have no very pleasing recollection of him. I was standing alone with my back to her piano when he came up to me, and said, "Who are you?" Smilingly, I replied that I was a man of no very great importance, a reply which evidently caused him to wonder

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why I was there. "Have you ever done anything ?" he demanded in a XEXEXXX rather disagreeable tone. I think I told him that I had never set the Hudson River on fire. But he was most damnably persistent. Had I done nothing, absolutely nothing ? Well, it happened that a copy of my book of essays reposed on the piano, The Spirit of Life, which had issued from the press of Mitchell Kennerley not xexxy many months before. He gave a squint at its outside, and said that he had never heard of it. I probably told him that he might not have missed much. Then he wanted to know if I knew any of his friends, or if any of his friends knew me. Of course I reminded him as gently as possible that, if he knew Mabel Dodge, I was acquainted with one of his friends. As that did not appear to satisfy him, I added that I was exceedingly well acquainted with Edwin Arlington Robinson. "Never heard him speak of you. Never heard him speak of you", he cried, regarded as an and his attitude was so pellucid as to convince me that I was an impostor who had succeeded in breaking into Mabel's circle by some kind of false pretense. That was the first and only time that I ever met him, and I have no desire ever to meet him again either in this world or the next.

I trust that I made it apparent in my last letter that I took not the slightest offense at your reference to me as a "Heidelberg wreck", for I realise that I must have been a more or less sorry spectacle at the time. It was evident that I must have impressed you in some degree, or you would not have kept the recollection of our meeting so green throughout the years.

I do not know whether Mrs. Hapgood remembers me or not. We did meet at Mabel Dodge's, but I think that few words were spoken by either of us. I have been both praised and censured for my alleged power as a conversationalist, but I know how to be silent, and often am. In fact I am an extremely good listener.

With kindest regards to Mrs. Hapgood and yourself,

I am

Winchester Route 3,
New Hampshire
October 18th [1940]

Mowry Saben
Hotel Washington
San Francisco

Dear Saben--

I have your priceless letter of Oct. 6th.
Perhaps the word fabulous is better than priceless. I enjoyed it
hugely. I would to God I could read Greek, I believe I would find them
much more modern than we are. There are certain elements in our civil-
ization which seem to be moving backwards. Your discourse on Aristo-
panes' comedies and your gossip about what happened among the dis-
tinguished is full of provocations to zestful emotions. These things
relieve me greatly; like being snipped east to Suez; only of course
there is much more to it than that--an infinite amount.

I want also to congratulate you, in addition
to your knowledge of Greek, on your knowledge of horsemanship. One
of the grandest things I ever heard of, is that you at 71 and more,
can still be a good soldier on a horse. I am also part way through
my 71st year and to ride a horse, for me now, would be tantamount
to suicide. There is much else that you say in this letter of yours,
which indicates that you were having a grand time when you wrote it.
your ecstatic remark about the private theatricals of your youth, and
private operettas, and the incentive of being an entertainer of his
fellows--all that comes home to me, for I have recently had the great-
est joy in dancing the rumba, in my own peculiar way, to the amusement
of my fellowmen.

Yes, Neith remembers you very well. I am wil-
lingly conveying to her your kindest regards, and she reciprocates by
enjoying your letters and hoping to see you again.

III3 Grinnell st.

Key West, Fla

Feb.18, '41

Dear Saben:

Your letter of Feb.6th was forwarded from the
publishers to Winchester, N.H., and thence to me here, and reached me
yesterday. I shall be here probably until the 1st of May. and then
after that my address will be Route 3, Winchester, N.H.

Yes, I would like to have my letters to you,
very much, and if for some not easily understood reason, you want to
keep them, I'll return them to you, after Neith has copied whatever she
thinks usable in the book. As a Hapgood I ought to be represented in it
to some extent, even if the letters have no intrinsic value.

Your long and amusing complaint about my hand-
writing made a deep and sympathetic impression on me; and if at any
time Neith should be too busy or too tired to type what I write you,
I shall make an attempt to print it

I don't feel so hopeless as you do about the
world, although I agree with everything you say about it. We are at the
end of an era, which whether it drags on only a decade or a number of
decades longer, is being pushed out to make room for forms which we
cannot now see at all. All the attempted remedies, such as communism,
Nazism, fascism and reform capitalism, are all doomed to extinction,
and for the same reason; they all cling to the belief in the material-
istic basis of human society, and that is where they are bound to go
wrong. I still cling to the democratic way of thinking, for I believe
there is a very slim connection between that and the new order, the real
revolution which is to come. I do not think that any living being now
feels this coming revolution, but I think that before very long a few
very sensitive persons will feel it and begin to express it, and then it
will grow apace. The world will eagerly grasp at something which enables
us to find some rational basis for the satisfaction of growing society,
which cannot be satisfied by the old forms. In the unconscious world

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There is an immense pressure, seeking to break through into a light that may be perceived.

I have no name for this revolution. To call it a new religion would not express it. To call it an idealistic revolution or a reversion to the ideal as a fundamental factor for social determination, instead of the materialistic conception of things, would introduce a sentimental element; while there is nothing sentimental about what is forced upon us as an absolute social need.

I am waiting for some indication on which to work. It will never of course come to me and probably not to my children; but at least I hope for my children that they will have this hope more intelligently than I, as their time will be nearer it than mine, and perhaps they can more consciously work for it, and that will be a great thing. Man certainly does not live by bread alone, in spite of all the materialistic philosophers, cynics to the contrary. And incidentally, it is only through the new order that I am trying to suggest, that man can get even bread.

I liked your letter very much, as I do all of your letters. Of course the decay of our order brings about the decay of our literature, as you well said; but the new order will again see a flowering of our literary and artistic experience, as well as building a gigantic overhead to the burst of Reason.

Faithfully yours,

24 February, 1941

Dear Hapgood:

I will forward your letters in a few days; that is, as soon as I can lay my hands on them all, for they are scattered now in various pigeon holes.

I thought that your street was Grinnell, but I could not be certain, as there was no word with which I could join it to make sense. I thought at one time that I had acquired some facility in deciphering script from my long experience with Robinson's letters, but I was not always successful with his. A long letter that I forwarded to his biographer was typed by his secretary, but neither Hagedorn nor she nor I could make out every word. My own handwriting is not very plain, but I seldom write in long hand now, and my hand trembles slightly when I attempt to do so. There is something very mysterious about the hand. When Carlyle was elected Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh over Disraeli (his opponent), he was unable to write his inaugural address, as he suffered from what is known to the medical profession as paralysis agitans. He could ride and hold in a mettlesome horse, but he could not hold a pen and write. There was consternation when he arrived in Edinburgh, for he had written no address, and never before in the history of the university had an inaugural address been delivered without manuscript. He was over seventy years of age, and a great part of the intellect of England, including Tyndall, Huxley and Lecky had arrived in the old capital Scottish XAXXIXIXX to hear him, for it was rightly thought that nothing like forthcoming his address had ever been heard there before. Could he speak extemporaneously? Would he not break down? Those were the queries. We know what happened. He rose and delivered an address that held his hearers spellbound for an hour and a half, and the stenographic report of it is well worth reading.

I am glad to know that you are more optimistic than I in regard to the world's future. I dare say that you are right in respect of a part of your prediction, but it disturbs me to observe that the world has had at least six or seven civilizations perhaps the equal of our own, and that one and all they have vanished, leaving little of their knowledge and wisdom behind.

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We have Homer and Shakespeare, but how many Homers and Shakespeares the world may have lost through the disappearance of one civilization after another, who can compute? Is it not indeed possible that the occultists are right who say that ours is far from being the greatest civilization that the world has known, and that finer civilizations have disappeared leaving "not a wrack behind"? What do we really know in regard to the people, and the knowledge of the people, who built the Pyramids? I have read what seem to me fatuous hypotheses in regard to how these great monuments were built. I do not believe in any of them. I do not believe in any of them, because I do not believe that any modern engineer could erect a similar pyramid. And are all those old tales of a Golden Age purely mythological? I find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that a degenerate age could rise high enough in its conceptions of the past to imagine what has never been. I may be wrong. I state only my own opinion. Indeed I often wonder whether there be not a certain truth in the old theological dogma of the Fall of Man. The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is fiction, of course; I am not sure that there is no fact behind the fiction, and supporting it.

interpretation

I agree with you that the materialistic interpretation of history is fallacious, and I have read not only Karl Marx but Thorold Rogers. This interpretation does apply, however, to much of our history since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and it seems to me that this fact goes far to reveal what is the matter with our age. The steam-engine, the power-loom, the spinning-jenny and a vast amount of other machinery have entered into not long ago our blood and corrupted it. I said/to a man who was dilating earnestly on the gain that has accrued through the invention of the automobile: "I can love a horse, and have loved many of them, for I could feel my kinship with a living thing that has carried me where I wanted to go, but I cannot love an automobile--can you?" He admitted that he couldn't, but he still clung to his belief in the value of this thing of steel. I could agree with him, if it were not for a feeling that has grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength, that the invention of every machine has

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been more or less of a curse to humanity, inasmuch as it has led us to take a materialistic view of things--of human life itself--for which no machine could be a compensation. An age that was spiritually minded would not be harmed by machinery, but any age that is materialistically minded must be. A man who called on me one evening, observing on my shelves, Maeterlinck's work on THE LIFE OF THE BEE (he apparently failed to observe that I also had his LIFE OF THE ANT), wanted to know what good I got out of such reading, and he seemed to think that I had wasted my time when I told him how I had often spent hours in studying the habits of insects. Perhaps I quoted the line from Whitman in which he said that

"A mouse is enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

I have always striven to be broad-minded. I think that I was the first person in America to discuss at length the philosophy of Nietzsche, and I have dared to read the writings of every iconoclast from Thomas Paine to Karl Marx and Bakunin, not neglecting Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler. But I find that most of the persons with whom I come into contact, or whose writings I read, get little good from their reading. We have fallen on evil days. I used to believe in private capitalism, because I thought that only by means of the private ownership of property could we have true individuals. I am not wholly sure that I have been wrong in thus thinking. But an individual, in any true sense of the term, is as difficult to discover to-day as a white blackbird.

Most persons of our time do not seem to be anything definite. They remind me of clouds which change their shapes with every passing hour.

Yours sincerely,

13 June, 1941

Dear Hapgood:

It has always seemed a little strange to me that you should
have made your permanent residence in the town where my father was born,
though I think that his father must have migrated from the town when my
father was very young, since he never spoke of anything that occurred there
whether in his boyhood. I do not know the house where he was born is
still standing or not. Though I visited Winchester as a boy (the last time
at the age of 13), he did not point out such a house to me, and probably I
was not curious about the matter at the time. My father used to stay with
a cousin of his there named Henry Swan, who had a straw hat factory somewhere,
though I am inclined to think that it was not in the town. Yet it may have
been. Several years before I came to California I motored with my sister
through Winchester, and my sister pointed out to me what she believed to be
the Swan house, but she was not certain whether it was or not. I do not know
whether any of the family are now living or not. One of Swan's sons became
rather well known as a physician in Massachusetts, and I recall his writing
to my father at the time I was in Harvard that his father had lost most of
his property. A number of my father's Winchester cousins went to Boston and
prospered there until to the end of their days. My mother lived in Boston, and
she and my father were married in the old Puritan capital.

You asked me in regard to my illnesses. Well, I have been troubled with
two afflictions, one of them being an enlarged liver, though not, I suppose,
enlarged enough to make a good human pate de foie gras, if one can conceive
of a man being substituted for a goose. And I have also been troubled with
a dermatoid cyst on my right leg which broke--a very rate occurrence, I am
told. I am now, however, feeling very well, and even at my worst, except for
two weeks, did my work.

What has become of Leo Stein? I have not heard from him for many years,
nor have I heard of him. I have his book on the ABC's of Aesthetics. His

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sister, Gertrude, appears still to be going strong. Though I met her in Heidelberg, I have never been able to read any of her books, and I doubt if I should be able to do so, if cast on a desert isle with nothing to read but her works.

I have also wondered where Santayana is living now. His home was in Rome, but it has occurred to me that he may have been obliged to leave Italian territory. I have nearly all his works, including his latest; but of the man himself I hear nothing. What an admirable style he has !

What you wrote of Frank Harris, in your autobiography, amused me. I met him through Mitchell Kennerley, and found him a good deal of a ruffian, but, as an artistic liar, he stands head and shoulders above any other man I have ever known.

Some years ago I read the autobiography of Emma Goldman, and observed a curious lapse in the woman's memory. She speaks of Horace Traubel, whom she first met, she says, in 1903 at a Walt Whitman Fellowship dinner. I can correct her memory, because I gave a course of twelve lectures in Philadelphia during the winter of 1900-1901, and Emma Goldman came to Philadelphia at the time to deliver a lecture on vice before the Ethical Fellowship over which Traubel presided. Traubel introduced me to her on this occasion, and as, after her lecture, there was a discussion of it, and voices from the audience called on me to take the floor, I took part in the discussion. Memory can be very treacherous at times. I met Herr Most about the same time, and had a long conversation with him, and found him rather likable, though previously I had been much prejudiced against him.

The Dark Mother, as Walt Whitman calls death, has been very busy amongst my friends and acquaintances since I came out here, and as the lights, one by one, go out, the world grows dark for me, as I supose it grows dark for all who, like myself, have entered their XXXXX seventy-second year. One of my old Harvard friends, who died not many months ago, had a firm faith in XXXXX astrology, and since his horoscope gave him seventy-seven years of life on our planet, he was dismayed to find that he had a cancer which would carry him off right speedily.

You are quite right in saying that even commonplace letters become

interesting when old. That is occasionally true of a commonplace book like-
wise. I have been able to read more than one which would never have been
perused by me at the time of its publication. This applies particularly to
biographies and autobiographies. I find a certain charm bequeathed by age
in Homer's catalogue of the ships in the *Iliad*.

I was sorry to learn that you have been afflicted with a chronic form of
bronchitis. It must be disagreeable. Fortunately, it is sometimes a factor
in promoting longevity, though doubtless for the same reason that impelled
Wendell
Oliver Holmes to say that the secret of longevity consists in getting
an incurable
disease when you are young.

5 October, 1941

Dear Hapgood:

Your letter came to me when I was very ill, and I am still ill, with a very peculiar type of influenza that has attacked virtually every part of my anatomy except my sexual parts; and I believe that the damned thing would attack them if it knew how. It has attacked my liver, stomach, intestines, bronchial tubes, lungs, throat, eyes and ears. The only thing that seemed to do me any good was whisky, and the only good that this did me was to make the flu travel from one part of me to another. Damned if I don't believe that it would have attacked those sexual parts of me, if it were not afraid of being laughed at. But I read all the plays of Aristophanes that have come down to us (there are 11 of them), and I have been full of belly laughter ever since, and I incline to believe that my influenza is a thing that insists on being taken seriously, quite unable to endure the laughter of an Aristophanes or the mockery of a Voltaire.

You have asked me a number of questions in regard to San Francisco, questions that I could have answered better a year ago than now. It is a very expensive city, one of the three most expensive cities in the United States. I have two rooms at this hotel--a sitting room and a bedroom, and I pay fifty dollars a month, and expect to be told any day that the exxix price has been raised. I recall that you have told me of suffering from two or three attacks of pneumonia, and I believe that this city is one of the worst in the world for anybody suffering from a pulmonary weakness, though it is probably much worse in the summer than in the winter. Many people wear winter overcoats here in the summer at night. I never have, but I am an exception to most human rules. We have in the winter tremendous rainfalls, and last winter the rainfall was so continuous that I came to hate the city with all my mind, heart and soul. I said that I would never spend another winter in this city, for I much prefer snow to rain.

I think that, if you are contemplating coming to California this winter, you would be well-advised to go either to Los Angeles, or, better still, to

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San Diego, which is a hundred miles farther south than Los Angeles. Los Angeles is 500 miles south of here. I spent two winters there, and I can testify to its fine winter climate. And it does not begin to have the amount of rain that deluges this city every winter. In some winters there is very little rain there. Some people prefer Pasadena to Los Angeles, but I do not. It is Pasadena on much higher ground, and, consequently, not so warm. I have gone to Pasadena from Los Angeles and found a distinct chill in the place, and returning to Los Angeles in the evening the weather was still warm.

I know nothing about Key West, for, though I have been close to the boundary line, I have never been in Florida. New Orleans is a city much to my liking, but every now and then a rainstorm comes, and for two or three days afterwards there is a chill in the air. But, apart from those days, you could walk in your shirtsleeves through the streets at nights.

I would like to write to you at greater length, but I am still feeling chap pretty rotten, and I have not the strength to go on. Dear old chap, forgive me for the weaknesses that the flu, seconded by age, has wrought. Though I always mean well, I am not always able to/well. But is any man ?

Most sincerely yours,

29 October, 1942

Dear Hapgood:

Your letter arrived this morning, and as I am to-day, if not a gentleman, at least a man, of leisure, I will answer it without delay.

I was sorry to learn that you are suffering so severely from physical and mental ills. Most of your trouble I believe to be mental, and it may come from a feeling which I myself possess, that life has really no meaning beyond the one that we give to it. This thing that is called the universe, though I agree with William James that it should be called the multiverse (if nulliverse does not designate it still better), is to me nothing but an aesthetic spectacle. The notion that there is a God who created it seems to me the acme of the ludicrous. There may be gods, there may be devils, but some of them more or less multipotent, but I am sure that they are all finite beings, devoid of omnipotence and omniscience. Kant, you know, demonstrated that the world which we know as a world which we create, and though he insisted that the thing in itself (Ding an sich) is unknown and unknowable by us, I have virtually come to believe that there is no thing in itself; that there is nothing in fact real, except the personal or individual minds and their mutual relationships, and that these are to be considered as so many points of force, or streams of consciousness. We create, or recreate, each other constantly, and perhaps everlastingly. Of course I got my notion of reality as consisting in mutual relationship from Hegel, though Schopenhauer and von Hartmann convinced me that the will is primary. Strictly speaking, there may be no such thing as death in the sense of extinction, in which case each of us is probably a Sisyphus, doomed to roll his stone everlastingly up a mountain, and destined to see it everlastingly roll to the bottom again. I do not know whether this will seem satisfactory to you or not; but I am quite content with it.

Physically I seem to be in excellent health at the present time. I am able to eat well, and have no digestive disorders. I can walk up the steepest hills of this hilly city without exhaustion, or puffing on the ascent. I am not yet worn out sexually, though my desires are not so keen as they were, and I am afraid that Priapus would not welcome me as heartily as in days of yore. At any rate, this god to whom the Roman maidens sacrificed their maidenheads in the temples, before giving themselves up to their husbands, was given a virile member, though it was of stone, in the temples, of a size which is beyond my

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Several years ago I was taken to the leading hospital of the city, and the doctor said that I had cirrhosis of the liver. But I was out of the hospital in a week or so, though I was told not to drink liquor of any kind, and for a time I didn't. But I drink anything that comes my way now, though not in the same quantity as before. I find that a good gin ale is the best thing for my intestinal tract, and I have seldom any trouble from it.

I am inclined to think that, if you can persuade your doctor to write you out a prescription for chloral, you will sleep, and have no more of the kind of distress at night of which you speak, and believe to be of the same kind as that from which De Quincey suffered. If you have not done so, why not give Freud a thorough reading? I have most of his works on my shelves, and have learned much from him. Perhaps you are too much of a Christian at heart. I am not a Christian at all, but a thorough Pagan, believing that the Greeks were the only people who really learned how to live, and sometimes I think, with the old clergyman mentioned in Hogg's Life of Shelley, that their writings make all subsequent writing superfluous, unless we can attain their attitude. But that is doubtless going too far. I read myself all kinds of works, and get something from even the worst of them. I am particularly interested now in the question of the historicity of Jesus. I believe him to have been both a philosophical and historical myth. Jesus, in my opinion, is the Joshua of old, Joshua, the son of Nun (which means fish). He was worshipped by a Galilean cult. I have not the time to go into the matter at length, but Joshua was which probably an eel, and the snake tempted Eve in the garden. By the curse, he became a snake, and it is interesting to note that Jesus was worshipped by some Christians as a lamb, by others as a fish, and by the Ophites as a snake. It was hundreds of years before he was pictured as crucified on a cross. The original pictures of him are as a lamb standing by the side of a cross. The nailing of story of the pinching his hands to the cross is found only in the Gospel of John; it was not until Justin Martyr wrote that anybody believed his feet to have been nailed also. Jesus finally became a personification of the sun, and his disciples were the twelve signs of the Zodiac. His teachings are hundreds of years older than his alleged time. If I harped on this subject long, I might bore you to death.

I shall be 73 if I live to the 24th day of next March.

I have income taxes to pay, but God only knows how I am going to pay this year's. I shall have little money to spend for anything else. The war situation doesn't look good to me.