Typed Letter Signed

Washington, D.C.,, 1897. TLS as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to author Arlo Bates on Navy Department stationery, 1 1/2 pages, 29 September 1897. T. R. pauses in his official duties to send a warm and enthusiastic letter of appreciation to a fellow author and reveals some of his strong prejudices about modern literature. In part: " Just a line to say how very much I have enjoyed your volume of essays just out ( referring to Batres's "Talks on the Study of Literature"). "Cabot Lodge wrote me calling my attention to it, and I owe him a debt of gratitude...It did me good to see the straightforward fashion in which you dealt with Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Verlaine, Tolstoi and the decadents generally. I wish Howells could be persuaded to read and profit by what you have written! It seems to me, however, that both Meredith and Hardy in his latter books, beginning with 'Tess', show distinct symptoms of the same disease, although it takes very different form in the two cases." Later confessing his love for Longfellow and Sir Walter Scott, and the romantic s he writes: "....I may be a crank about all this, for I am extremely fond of a great deal of Macauley's ballad poetry, in spite of all the fustian that there is in parts of it." He further admits to always having "a dreadful mental limitation about the..popular part of Robinson Crusoe, and a good deal of 'Arabian Nights'". This letter is a revealing and wonderful expression of Roosevelt's passion for literature and ideas; and a poignant example of his unease over the erosion of the old Victorian absolutes in the face of the new cultural revolution he saw as morally ambiguous, iconoclastic and cynical. Contains some corrections, emendations and exclamations added in Roosevelt's hand.. Near Fine. 4to..