Letters to His Children — 51. Quentin's 'Exquisite Jest', Tom Pinch, 'Martin Chuzzlewit', Good Reading For Pacifists

DEAR ARCHIE:

Friday night Quentin had three friends, including the little Taft boy, to spend the night with him.

They passed an evening and night of delirious rapture, it being a continuous rough-house save when they would fall asleep for an hour or two from sheer exhaustion.

I interfered but once, and that was to stop an exquisite jest of Quentin's, which consisted in procuring sulphureted hydrogen to be used on the other boys when they got into bed.

They played hard, and it made me realize how old I had grown and how very busy I had been these last few years, to find that they had grown so that I was not needed in the play.

Do you recollect how we all of us used to play hide-and-go-seek in the White House?

and have obstacle races down the hall when you brought in your friends?

Mother continues much attached to Scamp, who is certainly a cunning little dog.

He is very affectionate, but so exceedingly busy when we are out on the grounds, that we only catch glimpses of him zigzagging at full speed from one end of the place to the other.

The kitchen cat and he have strained relations but have not yet come to open hostility.

White House, Jan.

27, 1908. DEAR ARCHIE:

Scamp is really a cunning little dog, but he takes such an extremely keen interest in hunting, and is so active, that when he is out on the grounds with us we merely catch glimpses of him as he flashes by.

The other night after the Judicial Reception when we went up-stairs to supper the kitchen cat suddenly appeared parading down the hall with great friendliness, and was forthwith exiled to her proper home again.

TOM PINCH

White House, February 23, 1908. DEAREST KERMIT:

I quite agree with you about Tom Pinch.

He is a despicable kind of character; just the kind of character Dickens liked, because he had himself a thick streak of maudlin sentimentality of the kind that, as somebody phrased it, "made him wallow naked in the pathetic."

It always interests me about Dickens to think how much first-class work he did and how almost all of it was mixed up with every kind of cheap, second-rate matter.

I am very fond of him.

There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest.

Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not.

But a man might do some mighty good work and not be a gentleman in any sense.

"MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT" White House, February 29, 1908. DEAREST KERMIT:

Of course I entirely agree with you about "Martin Chuzzlewit."

But the point seems to me that the preposterous perversion of truth and the ill-nature and malice of the book are of consequence chiefly as indicating Dickens' own character, about which I care not a rap;

whereas, the characters in American shortcomings and vices and follies as typified are immortal, and, moreover, can be studied with great profit by all of us to-day.

Dickens was an ill-natured, selfish cad and boor, who had no understanding of what the word gentleman meant, and no appreciation of hospitality or good treatment.

He was utterly incapable of seeing the high purpose and the real greatness which (in spite of the presence also of much that was bad or vile) could have been visible all around him here in America to any man whose vision was both keen and lofty.

He could not see the qualities of the young men growing up here, though it was these qualities that enabled these men to conquer the West and to fight to a finish the great Civil War, and though they were to produce leadership like that of Lincoln, Lee, and Grant.

Naturally he would think there was no gentleman in New York, because by no possibility could he have recognized a gentleman if he had met one.

Naturally he would condemn all America because he had not the soul to see what America was really doing.

But he was in his element in describing with bitter truthfulness Scadder and Jefferson Brick, and Elijah Pogram, and Hannibal Chollup, and Mrs. Hominy and the various other characters, great and small, that have always made me enjoy "Martin Chuzzlewit."

Most of these characters we still have with us.

GOOD READING FOR PACIFISTS

March 4, 1908. DEAREST KERMIT:

You have recently been writing me about Dickens.

Senator Lodge gave me the following first-class quotation from a piece by Dickens about "Proposals for Amusing Posterity": "And I would suggest that if a body of gentlemen possessing their full phrenological share of the combative and antagonistic organs, could only be induced to form themselves into a society for Declaiming about Peace, with a very considerable war-whoop against all non-declaimers; and if they could only be prevailed upon to sum up eloquently the many unspeakable miseries and horrors of War, and to present them to their own country as a conclusive reason for its being undefended against War, and becoming a prey of the first despot who might choose to inflict those miseries and horrors--why then I really believe we should have got to the very best joke we could hope to have in our whole Complete Jest-Book for Posterity and might fold our arms and rest convinced that we had done enough for that discerning Patriarch's amusement."

This ought to be read before all the tomfool peace societies and anti-imperialist societies of the present-day.

QUENTIN AS A BALL-PLAYER

White House, March 8, 1908.