It's Me O Lord [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION for excerpts from Ifs me o Lord by Rockwell Kent Many years ago a certain very amusing and, consequently, very popular American cartoonist showed, in the first of two pictures, a baby in his cradle surrounded by admiring grown-ups. The baby was making baby noises, like "mama, dada," "google, google god." And everyone was crying "Listen to him. He can talk. How wonderful." And the second picture showed the baby as a grown-up man, dressed in evening clothes and speaking at a big banquet. But all the guests were yawning or talking to each other, some even saying, "What's the matter with him? What a bore. Why doesn't he shut up?" And the moral of this little story is at least the moral that I find in it for the young students of English for whom this book, I am told, is intended—the moral is that in whatever language we may come to speak or write we must, first of all, have something worthwhile to say, and, secondly, that we must speak or write it clearly. But there is a third admonition, one of which I am reminded of by the title of the larger book of mine from which the excerpts of this book are drawn: It's Me, 0 Lord (the title being the first line of an American Negro hymn, or "spiritual", which continues in equally ungrammatical English, "T'aint my mother, faint my father, But it's me", etc.). The admonition is that in all we say or write or draw or paint or dance we be ourselves, and no one else. For personal integrity is the most precious attribute that any of the arts can have.