James Lane Allen

“ BEN DOOLITTLE TO BEVERLEY SANDS
June 13.
DEAR BEVERLEY:
You are perfectly right not to tell Tilly about the ferns. Here I come in: there must always be things that a man must refuse to tell a woman. As soon as he tells her everything, she puts her foot on his neck. I have always refused even to tell Polly some things, not that they might not be told, but that Polly must not be told them; not for the things' sake, but for Polly's good—and for a man's peaceful control of his own life.
For whatever else a woman marries in a man, one thing in him she must marry: a rock. ”

“ That is, you have already disposed of yourself, breath and soul, to Ben; and while you are waiting for the marriage ceremony, you have espoused in his behalf what you consider your best and strongest trait—loyalty. Under the goadings of this vampire trait you will, a few years after marriage, have devoured all there is of Ben alive and will have taken your seat beside what are virtually his bones. As the years pass, the more ravenously you will preside over the bones. Never shall the world say that Polly Boles was disloyal to whatever was left of her dear Ben Doolittle! ”

“ I being in New York with my heart set on building whatever share I could of American literature upon Kentucky foundations, I at work on a novel, remembered that hot August afternoon, the dry spring, and in imagination restored the scene as it had been in the Kentucky of the pioneers.
I now await with eagerness all further felicities that may originate in a woodland scene that did not exist. What else will grow for me out of ferns that never grew? ”

“ POLLY BOLES TO BEN DOOLITTLE
The Franklin Flats,
June 6.
MY DEAR BEN:
Your writing to me for the name of a Louisville florist is one of your flimsiest subterfuges. What you wished to receive from me was a letter of reassurance. You were disagreeable on your last visit and you have since been concerned as to how I felt about it afterwards. Now you try to conciliate me by invoking my aid as indispensable. That is like you men! If one of you can but make a woman forget, if he can but lead her to forgive him, by flattering her with the idea that she is indispensable! And that is like woman! ”

“ I have never, by the way, mentioned to Tilly this matter of the ferns. My first idea was to surprise her: as some day we strolled through the Blackthorne garden he would point to the Kentucky specimens flourishing there in honour of me. I have always observed that any unexpected pleasure flushes her face with a new light, with an effulgence of fresh beauty, just as every disappointment makes her suddenly look old and rather ugly. ”

“ For Hodge is English landscape gardening in human shape. He is the benevolent spirit of the English turf, a malign spirit to English weeds. He is wall ivy, a root, a bulb, a rake, a wheelbarrow of spring manure, a pile of autumn leaves, a crocus. In a distant future mythology of our English rural life he will perhaps rank where he belongs—as a luminary next in importance to the sun: a two-legged god be-earthed in old clothes, with a stiff back, a stiff temper, the jaw of the mastiff and the eye of a prophet. ”

“ The only true lovers, the only real lovers, that women ever have are men of imagination. Why should these men send a common florist's flowers! They grow and offer their own—the roses of Elysium!
To pass on, you must still have clinging to your memory, like bats to a darkened, disused wall, the addresses of various Louisville florists who, by daylight or candlelight and no light at all, were the former emissaries of your folly and your fickleness. Will you send me at once the address of a firm in whose hands I could safely entrust this very high-minded international piece of business? ”

“ I desire the ferns not only because you have interested me in your Kentucky by making it a living, lovely reality, but because I have become interested in your art and in you. While I read your book I believed that I saw the hand of youth joyously at work, creating where no hand had created before; or if on its chosen scene it found a ruin, then joyously trying to re-create reality from that ruin. But to create where no hand has created before, or to create them again where human things lie in decay—that to me is the true energy of literature. ”

“ Inasmuch as you are now a New York lawyer and inasmuch as New York lawyers charge for everything—concentration of mind, if they have any mind, tax on memory and tax on income, their powers of locomotion and of prevarication, club dues and death dues, time and tumult, strikes and strokes, and all other items of haste and waste, you are authorised to regard this letter a professional demand and to let me have a reasonable bill at a not too early date. Charge for whatever you will, but, I charge you, charge me not for your friendship. "Naught that makes life most worth while can be had for gold." ”

“ Never does a turtle get from under his carapace, and never does the man-turtle get beyond the shovel of his five senses. Of course you realise that not during our friendship have I paid you so extravagant a compliment. For the human race has to be largely made up of millions of land-turtles. They cause the world to go slowly, and it is the admirable stability of their lives neither to soar nor to sink. You are a land-turtle, Benjamin Doolittle, Esquire; you live under the shell of the practical; that is, you have no imagination ”

“ Home to his practice with that still fluttering psyche! And then the path—the domestic path—stretching straight onward across the fields of life—what of his psyche then? Will she fold her wings on a bed-post—year after year slowly opening and unfolding those brilliant wings amid the cob-webs of the same bed-post?...
I cannot write of human life unless I can forgive life. How forgive unless I can understand? I have wrought with all that is within me to understand Polly—her treachery up to the last moment, her betrayal of Ben's devotion. ”

“ The whole sky is one exquisite blue—no sign of any storm-plan far or near. The July air blows as cool as early May. I sit at my window writing and it flows over me in soft waves, the fragrances of the green park below my window enter my room and encircle me like living human tendernesses. At this moment, I suppose, Tilly is dressing for her wedding, and I—God knows why—am thinking of old-time Kentucky gardens in one of which she played as a child. ”

“ This is now Hodge's plight: he is uncertain whether the plants were some you had ordered, or were a gift to you from some friend, or merely a gratuitous advertisement by an American nurseryman. Whether yours or another's, of much value to you or none, he resolved that they should not enter the garden. There was no place for them in the garden without there being a place for their Latin names in his head, and his head would hold no more. At least his temper is the same that has incited all English rebellion: human nature need not stand for it! ”

“ That, by the way, has been an old bone of contention between you and me, Polly, my chosen rib—a silent bone, but still sometimes, I fear, a slightly rheumatic bone. But when will a woman learn that her heavenly charm to a man lies in the thought that he can place her and keep her in a world, into which his troubles cannot come. Thus he escapes from them himself. Let him once tell his troubles to her and she becomes the mirror of them—and possibly the worst kind of mirror.
Beverley has told Tilly nothing of all this entanglement with ferns, I have not told you. ”

“ ME—Sal Blivvens!
But of what use is it for us poor, common-clay, rough, ordinary men who have no imagination—of what use is it for us to attack you superior fellows who have it, have imagination? You are the Russians of the human mind, and when attacked on your frontiers, you merely retreat into a vast, unknown, uninvadable country. The further you retire toward the interior of your mysterious kingdom, the nearer you seem to approach the fortresses of your strength. ”

“ I always think of an American cocksure as looking like Michael Angelo's Moses—colossal law-giver, a hyper-stupendous fellow. And I have often thought that a regiment of American cocksures would be the most terrific spectacle on a battlefield that the rest of the human race could ever face. Just now it has occurred to me that it was your great Emerson who spoke best on the weakness of the superlative—the cocksure is the human superlative. ”

“ I have never been able to get a clear idea what a novelist is. The novelists that I superficially encounter seem to have no clear idea what they are themselves. No two of them agree. But each of them agrees that his duty and business in life is to imagine things and then notify people that those things are true and that they—people—should buy those things and be grateful for them and look up to the superior person who concocted them and wrote them down. ”

“ I arranged that when Ned died, his neighbours all felt sorry and wished him a green turf for his grave. Sal, I felt sure, survived him as one who all her life walks past every human heart and enters none—being always dead-sure, always dead-right; for the human heart rejects perfection in any human being.
I recognise you as belonging to the large tough family of the human cocksures. Sal Blivvens belonged to it—dead-sure, dead-right, every time. We have many of the cocksures in England, you must have many of them in the United States. ”

“ A few days ago I received a letter from the great English novelist, Edward Blackthorne, in praise of my work. The great Edward reads my books and the great Ben Doolittle doesn't—score heavily for the aforesaid illustrious Eddy.
Of course I have for years known that you do not cast your legal or illegal eyes on fiction, though not long ago I heard you admit that you had read "Ten Thousand a Year." On the ground, that it is a lawyer's novel: which is no ground at all, a mere mental bog. ”

“ This will be the end of the friendship between Drs. Marigold and Mullen: their wives will see to that. So much the better: scattered impostors do least harm.
I have struggled to understand the mystery of her choice as to how she should be married. Surely marriage, in the existence of any one, is the hour when romance buds on the most prosaic stalk. It budded for Polly and she eloped! It was a short troubled flight of her heavy mind without the wings of imagination. ”

“ But I can't have that woman as my secretary! I dictate my novels. Novels are matters of the emotions. The secretary of a novelist must not interfere with the flow of his emotions. If I were dictating to this woman, she would be like an organ-grinder, and I should be nothing but a little hollow-eyed monkey, wondering what next to do, and too terrified not to do something; my poor brain would be unable even to hesitate about an idea for fear she would think my ideas had given out. Besides she would be the living presence of this whole Pharaoh's plague of Nile Green ferns. ”

“ We are just beginning to find out that the dramas of childhood are the playgrounds of life's battlefields. The ones prepare for the others. A nature that will cling to a rag doll without any return, will cling to a rag husband without any return. A child's loyalty to an automaton prepares a woman for endurance of an automaton. Dolls have been the undoing and the death of many wives.
A multitude of dolls would have been needed to supply the six destructive little girls of my mother's household. We soon broke our china tea sets or, more gladly, smashed one another's. ”

“ To know that my Kentucky stories are liked in England—England which, remaining true to so many great traditions, holds fast to the classic tradition in her literature.
The putting forth of your own personal influence in my behalf is a source of joy and pride; and your wish to have Kentucky ferns growing in your garden in token of me is the most inspiring event yet to mark my life. ”

“ I repeat that we English novelists are a species of greyhound for running down on the most distant horizon any scampering, half-terrified rabbit of a compliment. But I freely confess that nature loaded me beyond the tendency of being a mere greyhound. I am a veritable elephant in the matter, being marvelously equipped with a huge, flexible proboscis which is not only adapted to admit praise but is quite capable of actively reaching around in every direction to procure it. Even the greyhound cannot run forever; but an elephant, if he once possess it, will wave such a proboscis till he dies. ”

“ It is murder; Hodge is an assassin: he will kill what he hates, if he dares. I have been so aroused to defend his faithful character that I have devised two pleadings: first, Hodge is the essence of British parliaments, the sum total of British institutions; therefore he patriotically believes that things British should be good enough for the British—of course, their own ferns. At other times I am rather inclined to surmise that his malice and murderous resentment are due to his inability to take on any more Latin, least of all imported Latin. ”

“ Blackthorne, I need hardly say that the only two shadows I could ever think of casting on the woman I married would be that of my umbrella whenever it rained, and that of her parasol whenever the sun shone. But I do maintain that if there is not enough sunshine for the men and women in the world, if there has to be some casting of shadows in the competition and the crowding, I do maintain that the casting of the shadow would better be left to the man. ”

“ Now the disappointment: no Blackthornes, no English celebrities to greet us as American celebrities, no courtesies from critics, no lawns, no tea nor toast nor being toasted. Merely two unknown, impoverished young Yankee tourists, trying to get out of chilly England what can be gotten by anybody with a few, a very few, dollars.
But Tilly dreads disappointment as she dreads disease. To her disappointment is a disease in the character of the person who inflicts the disappointment. Once I tried to get you to read one of Balzac's masterpieces, The Magic Skin. ”

“ With your inborn and over-indulged willfulness you love to break through the actual and to revel in the imaginary. I have become rather used to this as one of your growing traits and I am therefore not surprised that in this letter you say things which, if seriously spoken, would insult your sex and would make them recoil from you—or make them wish to burn you at the stake. When you march up Fifth Avenue with your company of girls in that kind of procession, there will not be any Fifth Avenue: you will be tramping through the slums where you belong. ”

“ The cocksures are people who have no dim borderland around their minds, no twilight between day and darkness. They see everything as they see a highly coloured rug on a well-lighted floor. There is either rug or no rug, either floor or no floor. No part of the floor could possibly be rug and no part of the rug could possibly be floor. A cocksure, as a lawyer, is the natural prosecuting attorney of human nature's natural misgivings and wiser doubts and nobler errors. How the American cocksures of their day despised the man Washington, who often prayed for guidance ”

“ And finally, you will find enclosed a brief with which, were I to appear in Court against you, as Mr. Sands's lawyer, I should hold you up to public view as what you are.
I shall merely add that I have often met you in the courtroom as the kind of criminal who believes without evidence and who distrusts without reason; who is, therefore, ready to blast a character upon suspicion. If he dislikes the person, in the absence of evidence against him, he draws upon the dark traits of his own nature to furnish the evidence. ”