The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman (1904)

The now-forgotten Carman is a New World variant of the 90s aesthete. The key difference seems to be a sense of Arts and Crafts washing through the high language. I can imagine him togged in 'artistic' clothing wandering windswept Canadian beaches, taking in the implications on Art, and his art, that Nature inspired. Not at all a dandified, tailed aesthete of the London type. But many of his preoccupations in these thirty-two essays are those we might expect. Beauty rules supreme, and casts her spells through the seasons, writing, and personal philosophy. There is a strange two-speed quality here, too, though. Some essays are pointed, clear, resounding searchings. Others are a little lost in their own verbiage, or in half-ideas. Apparently he lived in a menage-a-trois with a couple and dabbled in early examples of mind-body-spirit alternative philosophies, but there is no sense of revolution in this work, just an endearing dedication to simple principles. I've not yet read his poetry, which was apparently the crowning achievement of his career. As an example of the art of essay-writing, this is a flawed and yet engaging pleasure.

Commonplace Book

'...he must enlist the sympathetic help of words by using them kindly and rightly according to their nature and genius, and as they belong, and not antagonize them by misapplication. I have known writers who established a reputation for great cleverness simply by the misuse of words. Their style was called original. It was. For pure unmitigated cruelty to our tiny, long-suffering servants, these patient words, it was unmatched. Now a man who will mutilate his mother tongue merely to display his own agility is no better than a heathen. It is so needless, too. For to the generous and sedulous master, what revelations of undreamed beauty, what marvels of import, will not words impart?'

from Atmosphere, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Commonplace Book

'...No sentiment, only a sharp pain, a pain incredibly naked and real. In the last conscious second of the fatal spin, in the moment when the flames covered him or the hot bullet got him, or when his nerve broke like an over-strained rope, parting strand by strand, the pilot's brain clicked, "This is it." Always that flash of recognition, the knowledge that the thing long awaited had come. The spirit can be shorn away by a thought sharper than a bayonet. The one sure thing was that the moment would come, death within death, the moment before the crash. It wasn't the crash you thought of, but the split second when you saw it leap at you, the echo before the event. It came, it always came, one way or another. Either you stuck it and went out on mission after mission till you were killed. Or you didn't stick it and the mainspring broke. Whichever way it was, your fate stood beside you like a visible presence. The Bridegroom. The Master of the House.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Commonplace Book

'...An unflinching observance of duty, unmodified by any other idea, by mercy, by love, by gentleness, by generosity, might readily lead to almost inhuman hardness. The devotee of duty may become an unlovely and pestiferous monomaniac, a burden to himself and an infliction to others. We all know how angular and sour and uncomfortable a fanatic can be. It matters not whether he is a religious fanatic or a free-thinker, his inordinate devotion to his one conception of life is a nuisance. He is so stiff-necked that he cannot see anything outside of his own pasture. The beautiful plasticity of human nature at its best seems to have been left out of him.'

from The Debauchery of Mood, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Commonplace Book

'...Good fortune, true success, is the indwelling radiance and serenity that comes and goes so mysteriously in every human tenement. Expect her not, and she arrives; seek to detain her with elaborate argument or excuse, and she is gone. Yet must the door ever be open for her coming, and the board spread for her entertainment...'

from Good Fortune, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Commonplace Book

'...He had seen the great inverted miracle of the dry spell worked upon that undefended earth, and it had become one of the master images of his mind just as the Brooding Anzac had. In some odd way they were connected like strophe and antistrophe, question and answer, the filament of their relationship so fine that any explanation must break it. That country had the look of eternity in good years or bad. When it was in good heart you could only believe that it was inexhaustible; under drought you could not believe that it would ever live again. It was absolute, it went beyond eternity because it cast eternity like a vestment..'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Commonplace Book

'...And let the young men of our generation mark the present chapter, that they may know the virtue residing in a tail-coat, and cling to it, whether buffeted by the waves, or burnt out by the fire, of evil angry fortune. His tail-coat safe, the youthful Briton is always ready for any change in the mind of the moody Goddess. And it is an almost certain thing that, presuming her to have a damsel of condition in view for him as a compensation for the slaps he has received, he must lose her, he cannot enter a mutual path with her, if he shall have failed to retain this article of a black tail, his social passport. I mean of course that he retain respect for the article in question. Respect for it firmly seated in his mind, the tail may be said to be always handy. It is fortune's uniform in Britain: the candlestick, if I may dare to say so, to the candle; nor need any young islander despair of getting to himself her best gifts, while he has her uniform at command, as glossy as may be.'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter VII)