Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Woman Behind The Books - Memoirs & Private Letters (Including The Complete Anne of Green Gables Series, Emily Starr Trilogy & The Blue Castle). Lucy Maud Montgomery
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a tall glass vase or low bowl, as suits the flower, I put a few blossoms of one kind with a bit of foliage or fern and then sit back and adore them. At the most I never put more than two kinds together. More would swear at each other, seems to me. You like the red rose best? I don’t quarrel with your taste. I can quite understand a person liking red roses best. I don’t, simply because I don’t fancy red as a colour in anything except nasturtiums. The pink roses are my favourites—deep pink at heart, shading to almost white on the outer petals like a blush dying away. We have an old-fashioned hardy June rose in our garden here, a pink one, which for purity of colour surpasses anything I ever saw. It is only semi-double and loses its beauty when fully expanded but its half open buds are things to thank God for.
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Glad you liked “The Choice.” No, I didn’t invent the metre. Saw it somewhere and fancied it. It is effective but hard to handle on account of the triple rhyme and the accent falling on the first syllable of the rhyme. Don’t ask me to label the metre! I couldn’t if I tried. I don’t know a solitary thing about the names of metres. When I begin to write a poem the words seem to fall naturally into the rhythm best suited to the idea and I just let them fall and devote my energies to hunting out rhymes which I do in a very mechanical and cold-blooded way, using a little rhyming dictionary I made myself. (Tennyson used a rhyming dictionary you know. How nice to be like him in something!!) Sometimes I write a whole poem without a single rhyme in it. Then, when I’ve caged my ideas I substitute end words that rhyme and there you are!
What do you think! I got a letter from Miriam today. Everything comes to those who will but wait. I was glad to hear from her. The letter was very Miriamesque. I must answer her soon although I feel rather out of touch with her as a correspondent. She wrote quite frankly upon the subject of her marriage but, unless she has also written so to you, I shall not discuss it as she probably meant it to be regarded as confidential although not explicitly saying so. She seems to be happy with a decent, non-rapturous workaday happiness that isn’t such a bad thing as the world goes.
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Thank you for your frank answer to my question of the Christ. I share your views. I’d like to discuss the matter but it’s too big a subject to be handled by letter. I never say much about it to anybody. Like you, I cannot accept the divinity of Christ. I regard him as immeasurably the greatest of all great teachers and as the son of God in the same sense that any man inspired of God is a son of God. Further than this I cannot, as yet at least, go. I believe that He was truly sent from and of God, as are all great teachers. And possibly he may also stand as an emblem of man in his highest and yet-to-be-attained development—the perfect flower of the tree of life blooming before its time as an earnest of what may be.
It seems to me that the discovery of the processes of evolution dealt the death blow to the old theology of Christ dying for Adam’s sin. If man rose up from a lower form, as all scientists now agree, there was no “fall” and consequently no need of any “sacrifice” to square God and man.
The idea that Christ must have been a wilful imposter if he were not divine does not disturb me. Even if the gospels, written 30, 50, 60 or 80 years after his death, give us his words and meaning correctly—a very doubtful thing in my opinion—it does not disturb me to believe that he, in common with most great teachers and reformers, had an element of fanaticism—for want of a better word—in his character. It seems to me that it is a necessary ingredient in a highly-organized, sensitive character to enable it to make headway against a brutal world and all its sins and follies. Without it, it could not stand against its foes.
But, as I have said, the subject is too big for a letter. I’ll meddle with it no further—in bulk, at least. Now and then, I may jot down a detail or so, as it occurs to me.
I received your second letter the very day I got a couple of extra Sunday mags, that I had sent for, one of which I meant for you but didn’t send it since you already had it. No, I don’t remember where or how the idea came to me. When I come across an idea for story or poem—or rather when an idea for such comes across me, which seems the better way to put it—I at once jot it down in my notebook. Weeks, months, often years after, when I want an idea to work up I go to the notebook and select one that suits my mood or magazine. I found the germ of the “Letters” in an old Halifax note book, inscribed as follows “Man writes love letters to girl, not intending to send them. Jealous woman sends them. Girl loves him.” That’s all I know about it now.
I’ve been very busy all June, writing. Got a good deal done. Gunters Magazine, New York, a new concern, sent me $25 for a short story. I was surprised to get such a good price as I did not think the Magazine was any great shakes, judging by its contents.
The National sent $10 for story accepted last winter which is to be published in July. Will try to send you copy. The Designer sent $20 for a story and Modern Women $15. Their prices seem to be rising. What with a number of smaller checks here & there I picked up over $100 since June came in. Wish I could do as well every month but there’s generally a famine after a feast.
This sheet is started just to say good-bye in a decent space. I shall not try to spread any ideas over it. Good luck and good cheer, comrade.
Fraternally yours,
L. M. Montgomery.
Cavendish, P.E.I.,
Sunday Evening,
April 8, 1906.
My dear Mr. W.:—
I’ve just roused up from a long twilight visit to my castle in Spain. For the past hour I have been lying on a couch in my den beside a dying fire—that is, my body was lying there but my soul was far away in a dreamland of imagination, where everything lost or missed in my present existence is mine. What a blessing it is that we can so dream into life the things we desire! Are you too an owner of a Spanish castle? And how often do you let yourself visit your estate? I go there in the twilight, being too busy at other times to remember my duties as Chatelaine. Outside, it is a cold, blustery April rain, the air all mist the ground all mud. But in fancy I’ve been far away beyond the mud and mist to “cloudless realms and starry skies.”
Now for your letter.
Yes, our Literary Society paper—the Cavendish Literary Annual—came off on schedule time and was fairly good, though we—the editors—“say it as oughtn’t.” We had a number of contributions from various writers, one all the way from Scotland so our table of contents was quite cosmopolitan.
I was concerned at what you said about your inability to write. Surely you’ve let yourself drift into dangerous shallows. Perhaps you are spending too much time in your castles in Spain! If so, adopt my plan—seek them only at twilight or midnight and accept your exile at other times. There is no power that so speedily rusts as that of expression. So to work at once, stick to it, write something every day, even if you burn it up after writing it. Otherwise you’ll atrophy to a certainty. There! I hate giving advice as cordially as I hate taking it. I’m glad that’s over!!!!
My flowers are all done—the daffodils and hyacinths at least. But I’ve some house roses coming out and a big Easter lily. I’ve been coaxing the latter along with an eye to next Sunday and I think it is going to be out in time. I’m expecting great things of it for it was a big bulb and has grown thriftily.
Oh, yes, it is fascinating to suppose that we go from one existence to another, with the restful sleep of so-called death between! To me, the idea is a thousand fold more attractive than that of the Christian’s heaven with its unending spiritual joys. I’d rather life as it is in this world, accepting all its ups and downs, its sorrows and pains for its joys and delights, than such. Besides, even the ideas of people who call themselves devout Christians about heaven are almost ludicrously vague and shapeless—and they don’t seem to find the prospect especially inviting either. At least, they never seem in any hurry to go there—far from it. And how illogical they are. For example: I was recently talking to a middle-aged woman who had lost a young sister from death. She said “it was so sad to see a young person die, without having lived