gt-wenley Lib 7-29-39

A

WISE man has said that there is a difference between fact and

truth. He has also told us that things may be true and still not be so. The truth as to the love story of Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene von Donniges can only be told by adhering strictly to the facts. Facts are not only stubborn things, but often very inconvenient; yet in this instance the simple facts fall easily into dramatic form, and the only way to tell the story seems to be to let it tell itself. Dramas are made up of incidents that have happened to somebody sometime, but in no instance that I ever heard of have all the situations pictured in a play happened to the persons who played the parts. The business of the playwright is selection and rejection, and usually the dramatic situations revealed have been culled from very many lives over a long course of years. Here the author need but reveal the tangled skein woven by Fate, Meddling Parents, Pride, Prejudice, Caprice, Ambition, Passion. In other words it is human nature in a tornado, and human nature is a vagrant ship, with a spurious chart, an uncertain compass, a drunken pilot, a mutinous crew and a crazy captain.

The moral seems to be that the tragedy of existence lies in inter-
posing that newly discovered thing called intellect into the delicate
affairs of life, instead of having faith in God, and moving serenely with
the eternal tide.

Moses struck the rock, and the waters gushed forth; but if Moses
had found a spring in the desert and then toiled mightily to smother
it with a mountain of arid sand, I doubt me much whether the name
of Moses would now live as one of the saviors of the world.
Parties with an eczema for management would do well to Butt their
Heads three times against the Wall and take note that the Wall falls
not. Then and then only are they safe from Megalocephalia. There
are temptations in life that require all of one's will to succumb to;
and he who resists not the current of his being, nor attempts to dam
the fountain of life for another, shall be crowned with bay and be fed
on ambrosia in Elysium.