Notes on The Conservative, the amateur journalism paper issued by H.P. Lovecraft from 1915-1923.
Part Two: the July 1915 issue.
As war rages in Europe, Lovecraft presents his second issue. To front the paper he publishes the westerner Ira Cole’s poem “A Dream of a Golden Age”. Elegiac, bucolic, pastoral, though with a conventional Dante-like hint of the supernatural…
My spirit guide told wondrous tales of yore,
And strove by magic, and in mystic ways,
To show the splendour of those other days;
Lovecraft remarks that this poem is only Cole’s “second metrical effort”, which makes me wonder if Lovecraft may have revised some of the metre. (Lovecraft uses the British spelling of the latter word).
Lovecraft follows with an apt essay on metrical regularity in poetry. He traces rhythm to “the prehuman age” and to natural pulses ranging from the slow seasons to human walking. Rhythm is therefore a natural and ancient instinct and this has informed a time-tested tradition. Certain types of metre have been found over time to be more fit for “certain types of thought” than others. Modernists who abandon the ancient tradition…
cannot but be a race of churlish, cacophonous hybrids [uttering] amorphous outcries
As in the first issue’s poem (his own), we see here imagery that he will later use in fiction.
His “Editorial” briefly states what he understands to be his own core “conservatism” at summer 1915. His conservatism was not economic at this time, and even many decades later he was still an economic illiterate. He is mostly oppositional and reactionary, a rather doomed position for a conservative who might also want to guide the world into and through a rapidly emerging modernity. He is opposed to liquor, in favour of personal abstinence and legal Prohibition of liquor by the state. Even in 1915 this was a potent political topic, though today we associate it with the gangsters of the 1920s and 30s. What he evocatively calls the “Hydra-monster Rum” must be actively fought, he says. He is against anarchy (by which he means anarchism, then a far more potent creed than after its violent suppression by post-1917 international communism) and socialism (at 1915 Soviet style post-1917 Russian revolutionary communism was not yet a force in the world).
He is actively for domination by the English backed by a “healthy militarism” aligned with national patriotism. And yet at 1915 his beloved British Empire was only a decade or so beyond its mature height (say, 1904-1909) and was ruling a quarter of the world’s people, so again he is really defending what already exists. He doesn’t elaborate on why this domination should be favoured (e.g.: abolishing the slave trade; ending petty inter-tribal feuds and local wars; developing agriculture and animal husbandry; opening up and regularising local trade and shipping; offering a reliable international currency with trading regulations; enforcing the rule of laws well-known and administered; secure land tenure; permissionless travel on new railroads and roads; basic literacy and a free press; sanitation, dentistry and medicine; libraries and museums that rescued regional history and traditions from destruction by an inexorable modernity; widespread education and un-cheatable sit-down exams that allowed talent to rise above caste and creed, and so on). Perhaps, in 1915, he doesn’t need to elborate… since such things are still in existence and are obvious to all. But anyway the above non-bracketed items are his core, as stated in 1915.
Among his critics he notes Rheinhart Kleiner’s more measured response to his journal’s first issue. Kleiner, already an expert in light verse, frowned only on “art-shot” rhyming in the first issue’s opening poem. Kleiner may at first seem to mean by this that the rhymes used were a little too forced, in trying to make an ‘arty’ impact on the reader. But a glance at the subsequent issue — on the theme of ‘Allowable Rhyme’ — suggests that Kleiner’s objection was spurred by Lovecraft’s occasional use of casual rather than over-arty rhyming.
This contact suggests a likely date for the first Kleiner correspondence, and I find that S.T. Joshi sees it the same way…
he came in touch with Lovecraft only when Lovecraft issued the first number of his Conservative in March 1915
Amateur election musings follow, though even here there is one point of interest. We see that Lovecraft is comfortable with the concept of what is now called ‘the Anglosphere’…
Why should we not spread throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon world, fostering amateur journalism wherever our language is spoken and written?
In the following article — on John Russell, an amateur Scots dialect poet often working in the ‘Burns’ style — he uses the seemingly clumsy “North Britain” to indicate Scotland. This made me wonder if his embrace of the terminology of the motherland was as yet a little shaky. Yet one finds that to have been an antiquarianism, used in the 18th and early 19th century. For instance it can be found in the book title Views in North Britain: Illustrative of the Works of Robert Burns (1805) and elsewhere. Even at this early date, Lovecraft is starting to slip obsolete antiquarian phrases into his writing.
His article on Russell also mentions various worthy Scotsmen including a “Lord Kames”, who it turns out was an 18th century philosopher interested in establishing the broad periods of upward human development (hunters, herders, farmers, chieftains/tribes, marketplaces/feudalism).
Lovecraft then responds to what he portrays as an anarchist pamphlet, though one apparently issued by the Blue Pencil Club of Brooklyn. A Lovecraftian might now think of this Club as a group of rather sedate amateurs. But perhaps the Club was more fiery in those days? Lovecraft chafes at a love of Walt Whitman, whose poetry and person he detests. But the pamphlet’s writer was in part responding to the new movie The Birth of a Nation, which prompts Lovecraft to state that he had not seen the movie. He had however read and seen the “crude and melodramatic” play and novel (1905, one of a trilogy) on which the movie was based. Lovecraft reveals he has… “made a close historical study” of the Klan and he believes them to no longer be in existence as an Order (though their former costumes and iconography are still sometimes adopted by thugs, he believes). Lovecraft saves his starkest condemnation for last, taking the pamphlet’s writer very strongly to task for encouraging his wartime readers to “refuse military service when summoned”. A brief glance at following issues of The Conservative suggests the matter develops further later in the year.
He concludes with a measured public letter of candidacy by Leo Fritter, his chosen candidate for President in his part of the amateur journalism world.
Lastly, I should add that in this issue he offers three short untranslated quotes in Latin:
1)
“Ver erat aeternum, placidique tepentibus auris
Mulcebant zephyri natos sine semine flores”. – OVID (said of the first ‘Golden Age’).
“The spring [of fresh water] flowed eternally, calm and singing to the ear,
The zephyrs [i.e. soft moist winds] were feeding flowers born without seed.”
2)
“Deteriores omnus sumus licentia.” – TERENCE.
“Suffering always follows licence”.
For clearer sense it might run: “We all suffer if one man gives himself license [to ignore the rules].” Anyone who has had to negotiate a bicycle-path which has many anti-motorcycle gates knows the sentiment well.
3)
On the critics of The Conservative, who perhaps hope to kill it off with words…
“Fragili quaerens illidere dentem, Offender solido” – HORACE.
“Bite softly, for you may find something hard” or “Bite into something fragile, hit something solid”.
For clearer sense it might run: “Those who bite unwarily into something they deem to be fragile or soft, may be jarred to discover their tooth has struck something hard and solid.” This was probably especially the case in an era when bread might have bits of grit and grindstone in it.
