Title: The provincial American and other papers
Author: Nicholson, Meredith
Language: English
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OTHER PAPERS ***



By Meredith Nicholson

  THE PROVINCIAL AMERICAN AND OTHER PAPERS.

  A HOOSIER CHRONICLE. With illustrations.

  THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. With illustrations.

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK



The Provincial American



  The Provincial American

  And Other Papers

  By
  Meredith Nicholson

  [Illustration]

  London
  CONSTABLE & CO. LIMITED
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  1913



  COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED



  To

  George Edward Woodberry

  Guide, Counselor
  And the most inspiring of Friends
  This Volume is Dedicated
  With grateful and affectionate
  Regard

  _Indianapolis, September 1912._



Contents


  THE PROVINCIAL AMERICAN                   1

  EDWARD EGGLESTON                         33

  A PROVINCIAL CAPITAL                     55

  EXPERIENCE AND THE CALENDAR              89

  SHOULD SMITH GO TO CHURCH?              115

  THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN                  159

  THE SPIRIT OF MISCHIEF: A DIALOGUE      187

  CONFESSIONS OF A “BEST-SELLER”          205


  These papers, with one exception, have appeared in the _Atlantic
  Monthly_. A part of “Experience and the Calendar,” under another
  title, was published in the _Reader Magazine_.



  The Provincial American
  And Other Papers



The Provincial American

  _Viola._ What country, friends, is this?

  _Captain._                  This is Illyria, lady.

  _Viola._ And what should I do in Illyria?
         My brother he is in Elysium.

                                     _Twelfth Night._


I AM a provincial American. My forebears were farmers or country-town
folk. They followed the long trail over the mountains out of Virginia
and North Carolina, with brief sojourns in western Pennsylvania and
Kentucky. My parents were born, the one in Kentucky, the other in
Indiana, within two and four hours of the spot where I pen these
reflections, and I had voted before I saw the sea or any Eastern city.

In attempting to illustrate the provincial point of view out of my
own experiences I am moved by no wish to celebrate either the Hoosier
commonwealth--which has not lacked nobler advertisement--or myself; but
by the hope that I may cheer many who, flung by fate upon the world’s
byways, shuffle and shrink under the reproach of their metropolitan
brethren.

Mr. George Ade has said, speaking of our fresh-water colleges, that
Purdue University, his own _alma mater_, offers everything that Harvard
provides except the sound of _a_ as in “father.” I have been told that
I speak our _lingua rustica_ only slightly corrupted by urban contacts.
Anywhere east of Buffalo I should be known as a Westerner; I could not
disguise myself if I would. I find that I am most comfortable in a town
whose population does not exceed a fifth of a million,--a place in
which men may relinquish their seats in the street car to women without
having their motives questioned, and where one calls the stamp-clerk at
the post-office by his first name.


I

Across a hill-slope that knew my childhood, a bugle’s grieving melody
used to float often through the summer twilight. A highway lay
hidden in the little vale below, and beyond it the unknown musician
was quite concealed, and was never visible to the world I knew.
Those trumpetings have lingered always in my memory, and color my
recollections of all that was near and dear in those days. Men who had
left camp and field for the soberer routine of civil life were not yet
fully domesticated. My bugler was merely solacing himself for lost joys
by recurring to the vocabulary of the trumpet. I am confident that he
enjoyed himself; and I am equally sure that his trumpetings peopled the
dusk for me with great captains and mighty armies, and touched with a
certain militancy all my youthful dreaming.

No American boy born during or immediately after the Civil War can
have escaped in those years the vivid impressions derived from the
sight and speech of men who had fought its battles, or women who had
known its terror and grief. Chief among my playthings on that peaceful
hillside was the sword my father had borne at Shiloh and on to the sea;
and I remember, too, his uniform coat and sash and epaulets and the
tattered guidon of his battery, that, falling to my lot as toys, yet
imparted to my childish consciousness a sense of what war had been. The
young imagination was kindled in those days by many and great names.
Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman were among the first lispings of Northern
children of my generation; and in the little town where I was born
lived men who had spoken with them face to face. I did not know, until
I sought them later for myself, the fairy-tales that are every child’s
birthright; and I imagine that children of my generation heard less of

      “old, unhappy, far-off things,
  And battles long ago,”--

and more of the men and incidents of contemporaneous history. Great
spirits still on earth were sojourning. I saw several times, in his
last years, the iron-willed Hoosier War Governor, Oliver P. Morton. By
the time I was ten, a broader field of observation opening through my
parents’ removal to the state capital, I had myself beheld Grant and
Sherman; and every day I passed in the street men who had been partners
with them in the great, heroic, sad, splendid struggle. These things
I set down as a background for the observations that follow,--less as
text than as point of departure; yet I believe that bugler, sounding
“charge” and “retreat” and “taps” in the dusk, and those trappings of
war beneath whose weight I strutted upon that hillside, did much toward
establishing in me a certain habit of mind. From that hillside I have
since ineluctably viewed my country and my countrymen and the larger
world.

Emerson records Thoreau’s belief that “the flora of Massachusetts
embraced almost all the important plants of America,--most of the oaks,
most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the
nuts. He returned Kane’s ‘Arctic Voyage’ to a friend of whom he had
borrowed it, with the remark that most of the phenomena noted might be
observed in Concord.”

The complacency of the provincial mind is due less, I believe, to
stupidity and ignorance, than to the fact that every American county
is in a sense complete, a political and social unit, in which the
sovereign rights of a free people are expressed by the court-house and
town hall, spiritual freedom by the village church-spire, and hope
and aspiration in the school-house. Every reader of American fiction,
particularly in the realm of the short story, must have observed the
great variety of quaint and racy characters disclosed. These are the
_dramatis personæ_ of that great American novel which some one has said
is being written in installments. Writers of fiction hear constantly of
characters who would be well worth their study. In reading two recent
novels that penetrate to the heart of provincial life, Mr. White’s “A
Certain Rich Man” and Mrs. Watts’s “Nathan Burke,” I felt that the
characters depicted might, with unimportant exceptions, have been found
almost anywhere in those American States that shared the common history
of Kansas and Ohio. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his admirable novels of
New England, has shown how closely the purely local is allied to the
universal.

When “David Harum” appeared, characters similar to the hero of that
novel were reported in every part of the country. I rarely visit
a town that has not its cracker-barrel philosopher, or a poet who
would shine but for the callous heart of the magazine editor, or an
artist of supreme though unrecognized talent, or a forensic orator
of wonderful powers, or a mechanical genius whose inventions are
bound to revolutionize the industrial world. In Maine, in the back
room of a shop whose windows looked down upon a tidal river, I have
listened to tariff discussions in the dialect of Hosea Biglow; and a
few weeks later have heard farmers along the un-salt Wabash debating
the same questions from a point of view that revealed no masted ships
or pine woods, with a new sense of the fine tolerance and sanity and
reasonableness of our American people. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, one of
our shrewdest students of provincial character, introduced me one day
to a friend of his in a village near Indianapolis who bore a striking
resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and who had something of Lincoln’s
gift for humorous narration. This man kept a country store, and his
attitude toward his customers, and “trade” in general, was delicious in
its drollery. Men said to be “like Lincoln” have not been rare in the
Mississippi Valley, and politicians have been known to encourage belief
in the resemblance.

Colonel Higginson once said that in the Cambridge of his youth any
member of the Harvard faculty could answer any question within the
range of human knowledge; whereas in these days of specialization some
man can answer the question, but it may take a week’s investigation to
find him. In “our town”--“a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing,
sir, but mine own!”--I dare say it was possible in that _post-bellum_
era to find men competent to deal with almost any problem. These were
mainly men of humble beginnings and all essentially the product of our
American provinces. I should like to set down briefly the ineffaceable
impression some of these characters left upon me. I am precluded by a
variety of considerations from extending this recital. The rich field
of education I ignore altogether; and I may mention only those who have
gone. As it is beside my purpose to prove that mine own people are
other than typical of those of most American communities, I check my
exuberance. Sad, indeed, the offending if I should protest too much!


II

In the days when the bugle still mourned across the vale, Lew Wallace
was a citizen of my native town of Crawfordsville. There he had
amused himself, in the years immediately before the civil conflict,
in drilling a company of “Algerian Zouaves” known as the “Montgomery
Guards,” of which my father was a member, and this was the nucleus of
the Eleventh Indiana Regiment which Wallace commanded in the early
months of the war. It is not, however, of Wallace’s military services
that I wish to speak now, nor of his writings, but of the man himself
as I knew him later at the capital, at a time when, in the neighborhood
of the federal building at Indianapolis, any boy might satisfy his
longing for heroes with a sight of many of our Hoosier Olympians. He
was of medium height, erect, dark to swarthiness, with finely chiseled
features and keen black eyes, with manners the most courtly, and a
voice unusually musical and haunting. His appearance, his tastes, his
manner, were strikingly Oriental.

He had a strong theatric instinct, and his life was filled with
drama--with melodrama, even. His curiosity led him into the study
of many subjects, most of them remote from the affairs of his day.
He was both dreamer and man of action; he could be “idler than the
idlest flowers,” yet his occupations were many and various. He was an
aristocrat and a democrat; he was wise and temperate, whimsical and
injudicious in a breath. As a youth he had seen visions, and as an old
man he dreamed dreams. The mysticism in him was deep-planted, and he
was always a little aloof, a man apart. His capacity for detachment was
like that of Sir Richard Burton, who, at a great company given in his
honor, was found alone poring over a puzzling Arabic manuscript in an
obscure corner of the house. Wallace, like Burton, would have reached
Mecca, if chance had led him to that adventure.

Wallace dabbled in politics without ever being a politician; and
I might add that he practiced law without ever being, by any high
standard, a lawyer. He once spoke of the law as “that most detestable
of human occupations.” First and last he tried his hand at all the
arts. He painted a little; he moulded a little in clay; he knew
something of music and played the violin; he made three essays in
romance. As boy and man he went soldiering; he was a civil governor,
and later a minister to Turkey. In view of his sympathetic interest in
Eastern life and character, nothing could have been more appropriate
than his appointment to Constantinople. The Sultan Abdul Hamid,
harassed and anxious, used to send for him at odd hours of the night
to come and talk to him, and offered him on his retirement a number of
positions in the Turkish Government.

With all this rich experience of the larger world, he remained the
simplest of natures. He was as interested in a new fishing-tackle as in
a new book, and carried both to his houseboat on the Kankakee, where,
at odd moments, he retouched a manuscript for the press, or discussed
politics with the natives. Here was a man who could talk of the “Song
of Roland” as zestfully as though it had just been reported from the
telegraph-office.

I frankly confess that I never met him without a thrill, even in his
last years and when the ardor of my youthful hero-worship may be said
to have passed. He was an exotic, our Hoosier Arab, our story-teller
of the bazaars. When I saw him in his last illness, it was as though
I looked upon a gray sheik about to fare forth unawed toward unmapped
oases.

No lesson of the Civil War was more striking than that taught by the
swift transitions of our citizen soldiery from civil to military life,
and back again. This impressed me as a boy, and I used to wonder, as I
passed my heroes on their peaceful errands in the street, why they had
put down the sword when there must still be work somewhere for fighting
men to do. The judge of the federal court at this time was Walter Q.
Gresham, brevetted brigadier-general, who was destined later to adorn
the Cabinets of Presidents of two political parties. He was cordial and
magnetic; his were the handsomest and friendliest of brown eyes, and a
noble gravity spoke in them. Among the lawyers who practiced before him
were Benjamin Harrison and Thomas A. Hendricks, who became respectively
President and Vice-President.

Those Hoosiers who admired Gresham ardently were often less devotedly
attached to Harrison, who lacked Gresham’s warmth and charm. General
Harrison was akin to the Covenanters who bore both Bible and sword
into battle. His eminence in the law was due to his deep learning
in its history and philosophy. Short of stature, and without grace
of person,--with a voice pitched rather high,--he was a remarkably
interesting and persuasive speaker. If I may so put it, his political
speeches were addressed as to a trial judge rather than to a jury, his
appeal being to reason and not to passion or prejudice. He could, in
rapid flights of campaigning, speak to many audiences in a day without
repeating himself. He was measured and urbane; his discourses abounded
in apt illustrations; he was never dull. He never stooped to pietistic
clap-trap, or chanted the jaunty chauvinism that has so often caused
the Hoosier stars to blink.

Among the Democratic leaders of that period, Hendricks was one of the
ablest, and a man of many attractive qualities. His dignity was always
impressive, and his appearance suggested the statesman of an earlier
time. It is one of immortality’s harsh ironies that a man who was a
gentleman, and who stood moreover pretty squarely for the policies that
it pleased him to defend, should be published to the world in a bronze
effigy in his own city as a bandy-legged and tottering tramp, in a
frock coat that never was on sea or land.

Joseph E. McDonald, a Senator in Congress, was held in affectionate
regard by a wide constituency. He was an independent and vigorous
character who never lost a certain raciness and tang. On my first
timid venture into the fabled East I rode with him in a day-coach from
Washington to New York on a slow train. At some point he saw a peddler
of fried oysters on a station platform, alighted to make a purchase,
and ate his luncheon quite democratically from the paper parcel in his
car seat. He convoyed me across the ferry, asked where I expected to
stop, and explained that he did not care for the European plan himself;
he liked, he said, to have “full swing at a bill of fare.”

I used often to look upon the towering form of Daniel W. Voorhees, whom
Sulgrove, an Indiana journalist with a gift for translating Macaulay
into Hoosierese, had named “The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.” In a
crowded hotel lobby I can still see him, cloaked and silk-hatted, the
centre of the throng, and my strict upbringing in the antagonistic
political faith did not diminish my admiration for his eloquence.

Such were some of the characters who came and went in the streets of
our provincial capital in those days.


III

In discussions under captions similar to mine it is often maintained
that railways, telegraphs, telephones, and newspapers are so knitting
us together, that soon we shall all be keyed to a metropolitan pitch.
The proof adduced in support of this is the most trivial, but it
strikes me as wholly undesirable that we should all be ironed out and
conventionalized. In the matter of dress, for example, the women of our
town used to take their fashions from “Godey’s” and “Peterson’s” _via_
Cincinnati; but now that we are only eighteen hours from New York, with
a well-traveled path from the Wabash to Paris, my counselors among the
elders declare that the tone of our society--if I may use so perilous
a word--has changed little from our good old black alpaca days. The
hobble skirt receives prompt consideration in the “Main” street of any
town, and is viewed with frank curiosity, but it is only a one day’s
wonder. A lively runaway or the barbaric yawp of a new street fakir may
dethrone it at any time.

New York and Boston tailors solicit custom among us semi-annually, but
nothing is so stubborn as our provincial distrust of fine raiment.
I looked with awe, in my boyhood, upon a pair of mammoth blue-jeans
trousers that were flung high from a flagstaff in the centre of
Indianapolis, in derision of a Democratic candidate for governor, James
D. Williams, who was addicted to the wearing of jeans. The Democrats
sagaciously accepted the challenge, made “honest blue jeans” the
battle-cry, and defeated Benjamin Harrison, the “kid-glove” candidate
of the Republicans. Harmless demagoguery this, or bad judgment on the
part of the Republicans; and yet I dare say that if the sartorial issue
should again become acute in our politics the banner of bifurcated
jeans would triumph now as then. A Hoosier statesman who to-day
occupies high office once explained to me his refusal of sugar for his
coffee by remarking that he didn’t like to waste sugar that way; he
wanted to keep it for his lettuce! I do not urge sugared lettuce as
symbolizing our higher provincialism, but mayonnaise may be poison to
men who are nevertheless competent to construe and administer law.

It is much more significant that we are all thinking about the same
things at the same time, than that Farnam Street, Omaha, and Fifth
Avenue, New York, should vibrate to the same shade of necktie. The
distribution of periodicals is so managed that California and Maine
cut the leaves of their magazines on the same day. Rural free delivery
has hitched the farmer’s wagon to the telegraph-office, and you can’t
buy his wife’s butter now until he has scanned the produce market in
his newspaper. This immediacy of contact does not alter the provincial
point of view. New York and Texas, Oregon and Florida will continue to
see things at different angles, and it is for the good of all of us
that this is so. We have no national political, social, or intellectual
centre. There is no “season” in New York, as in London, during which
all persons distinguished in any of these particulars meet on common
ground. Washington is our nearest approach to such a meeting-place,
but it offers only short vistas. We of the country visit Boston
for the symphony, or New York for the opera, or Washington to view
the government machine at work, but nowhere do interesting people
representative of all our ninety millions ever assemble under one roof.
All our capitals are, as Lowell put it, “fractional,” and we shall
hardly have a centre while our country is so nearly a continent.

Nothing in our political system could be wiser than our dispersion into
provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the States and we
should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known
walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride
are in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system
makes possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the
whole country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind
is so open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. Even the most buckramed
conservative on the eastern coast-line, scornful of the political
follies of our far-lying provinces, must view with some interest the
dallyings of Oregon with the Referendum, and of Des Moines with the
Commission System. If Milwaukee wishes to try socialism, the rest of us
need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its
problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.

States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays
the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana’s amiable
feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister’s rejection or
acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of noblest
intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow
citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. It
is no great matter, but in open convention also I have perished by the
sword. Nothing can thwart the chastening hand of a righteous people.

All passes; humor alone is the touchstone of democracy. I search the
newspapers daily for tidings of Kansas, and in the ways of Oklahoma
I find delight. The Emporia “Gazette” is quite as patriotic as the
Springfield “Republican” or the New York “Post,” and to my own taste,
far less depressing. I subscribed for a year to the Charleston “News
and Courier,” and was saddened by the tameness of its sentiments; for
I remember (it must have been in 1883) the shrinking horror with which
I saw daily in the Indiana Republican organ a quotation from Wade
Hampton to the effect that “these are the same principles for which
Lee and Jackson fought four years on Virginia’s soil.” Most of us are
entertained when Colonel Watterson rises to speak for Kentucky and
invokes the star-eyed goddess. When we call the roll of the States, if
Malvolio answer for any, let us suffer him in patience and rejoice in
his yellow stockings. “God give them wisdom that have it; and those
that are fools, let them use their talents.”

Every community has its dissenters, protestants, kickers, cranks; the
more the merrier. My town has not lacked impressive examples, and I
early formed a high resolve to strive for membership in their execrated
company. George W. Julian,--one of the noblest of Hoosiers,--who had
been the Free-Soil candidate for Vice-President in 1852, a delegate to
the first Republican convention, five times a member of Congress, a
supporter of Greeley’s candidacy, and a Democrat in the consulship of
Cleveland, was a familiar figure in our streets. In 1884 I was dusting
law-books in an office where mug-wumpery flourished, and where the
iniquities of the tariff, Matthew Arnold’s theological opinions, and
the writings of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley were discussed at intervals
in the days’ business.


IV

Many complain that we Americans give too much time to politics, but
there could be no safer outlet for that “added drop of nervous fluid”
which Colonel Higginson found in us and turned over to Matthew Arnold
for further analysis. No doubt many voices will cry in the wilderness
before we reach the promised land. A people which has been fed on the
Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh’s chariots. It is in the
blood to resent the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely.
The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must always be
fashioning a crown for Cæsar or rehearsing his funeral rites. No great
danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the remotest
citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the governmental
mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if it doesn’t
run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the men he
helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of him, he
pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to turn the
rascals out.

Mr. Bryce wrote: “This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this
sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the
affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied
but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the
Multitude.” It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena
of the score of years that has elapsed since Mr. Bryce’s “American
Commonwealth” appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the
crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child’s
surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose
mechanism had baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after
all, the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt,
but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the
individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable
acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it.
With all our faults and defaults of understanding,--populism, free
silver, Coxey’s army, and the rest of it,--we of the West have not done
so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows
his way to the oak tree!

Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The
campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of
“silent” voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the
managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the
Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously
hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he
advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention
succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois
have sent to Washington seven Presidents, elected for ten terms.
Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said
that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people
of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of
their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the Presidents; and
it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully
acquiesced. In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted
himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and
character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen
verily that

  “Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
  Shall constitute a state.”

Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world’s tour, declared
that it was not that the hero had walked “with kings with even pace the
round world’s promenade”;--

  “But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
  Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
  Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the
    front,
  Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
    world’s promenade,
  Were all so justified.”

What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of
little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,--we
are deficient in the graces,--we are prone to boast,--and we lack
in those fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the
metropolis. We like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish.
Our commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter’s camp-fires, and
we are all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of
what democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be.
That saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the
tall corn. We are old enough now--we of the West--to have built up in
ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part
of the continuing, unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these
days to “wobble right” than we are to stand fast or march forward like
an army with banners.

We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature,
politics--nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to
us. If these things don’t come to us, we go to them. We are more truly
representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins,
because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh,
so many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one
thing. We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows
it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have
no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia
seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western
school-teachers who don’t see Europe for three hundred dollars every
summer get at least as far East as Concord, to be photographed “by the
rude bridge that arched the flood.”

That fine austerity which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering
on the Boston and New York express is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From
gentlemen cruising in day-coaches--dull wights who advertise their
personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen
planted sturdily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets--one may
learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. “Sit over,
brother; there’s hell to pay in the Balkans,” remarks the gentleman who
boarded the interurban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as
lief discuss the Papacy or child labor, if revolutions are not to your
liking.

In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening
home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England
festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard
of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our
meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is “to be
shown.”

Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and
brood. In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd
students of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he
“commutes” homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without
being shot through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper
thoroughly. When he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the
powers that be, his wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator
from a Middle Western State, making a campaign for renomination
preliminary to the primaries, warned the people in rural communities
against the newspaper and periodical press with its scandals and
heresies. “Wait quietly by your firesides, undisturbed by these false
teachings,” he said in effect; “then go to your primaries and vote
as you have always voted.” His opponent won by thirty thousand,--the
amiable answer of the little red school-house.


V

A few days ago I visited again my native town. On the slope where I
played as a child I listened in vain for the mourning bugle; but on the
college campus a bronze tablet commemorative of those sons of Wabash
who had fought in the mighty war quickened the old impressions. The
college buildings wear a look of age in the gathering dusk.

  “Coldly, sadly descends
  The autumn evening. The field
  Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
  Of withered leaves, and the elms,
  Fade into dimness apace,
  Silent; hardly a shout
  From a few boys late at their play!”

Brave airs of cityhood are apparent in the town, with its paved
streets, fine hall and library; and everywhere are wholesome life,
comfort, and peace. The train is soon hurrying through gray fields and
dark woodlands. Farmhouses are disclosed by glowing panes; lanterns
flash fitfully where farmers are making all fast for the night. The
city is reached as great factories are discharging their laborers, and
I pass from the station into a hurrying throng homeward bound. Against
the sky looms the dome of the capitol; the tall shaft of the soldiers’
monument rises ahead of me down the long street and vanishes starward.
Here where forests stood seventy-five years ago, in a State that has
not yet attained its centenary, is realized much that man has sought
through all the ages,--order, justice, and mercy, kindliness and good
cheer. What we lack we seek, and what we strive for we shall gain. And
of such is the kingdom of democracy.



Edward Eggleston



Edward Eggleston


THE safest appeal of the defender of realism in fiction continues to
be to geography. The old inquiry for the great American novel ignored
the persistent expansion by which the American States were multiplying.
If the question had not ceased to be a burning issue, the earnest
seeker might now be given pause by the recent appearance upon our maps
of far-lying islands which must, in due course, add to the perplexity
of any who wish to view American life steadily or whole. If we should
suddenly vanish, leaving only a solitary Homer to chant us, we might
possibly be celebrated adequately in a single epic, but as long as we
continue malleable and flexible we shall hardly be “begun, continued,
and ended” in a single novel, drama, or poem. He were a much-enduring
Ulysses who could touch once at all our ports. Even Walt Whitman, from
the top of his omnibus, could not see across the palms of Hawaii or the
roofs of Manila; and yet we shall doubtless receive, in due course,
bulletins from the Dialect Society with notes on colonial influences in
American speech. Thus it is fair to assume that in the nature of things
we shall rely more and more on realistic fiction for a federation of
the scattered States of this decentralized and diverse land of ours
in a literature which shall become our most vivid social history. We
cannot be condensed into one or a dozen finished panoramas; he who
would know us hereafter must read us in the flashes of the kinetoscope.

Important testimony to the efficacy of an honest and trustworthy
realism has passed into the record in the work of Edward Eggleston, our
pioneer provincial realist. Eggleston saw early the value of a local
literature, and demonstrated that where it may be referred to general
judgments, where it interprets the universal heart and conscience, an
attentive audience may be found for it. It was his unusual fortune to
have combined a personal experience at once varied and novel with a
self-acquired education to which he gave the range and breadth of true
cultivation, and, in special directions, the precision of scholarship.
The primary facts of life as he knew them in the Indiana of his
boyhood took deep hold upon his imagination, and the experiences of
that period did much to shape his career. He knew the life of the Ohio
Valley at an interesting period of transition. He was not merely a
spectator of striking social phenomena; but he might have said, with a
degree of truth, _quorum pars magna fui_; for he was a representative
of the saving remnant which stood for enlightenment in a dark day
in a new land. Literature had not lacked servants in the years of
his youth in the Ohio Valley. Many knew in those days the laurel
madness; but they went “searching with song the whole world through”
with no appreciation of the material that lay ready to their hands at
home. Their work drew no strength from the Western soil, but was the
savorless fungus of a flabby sentimentalism. It was left for Eggleston,
with characteristic independence, to abandon fancy for reality. He
never became a great novelist, and yet his homely stories of the
early Hoosiers, preserving as they do the acrid bite of the persimmon
and the mellow flavor of the pawpaw, strengthen the whole case for a
discerning and faithful treatment of local life. What he saw will not
be seen again, and when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “Roxy” cease to
entertain as fiction they will teach as history.

The assumption in many quarters that “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was
in some measure autobiographical was always very distasteful to Dr.
Eggleston, and he entered his denial forcibly whenever occasion
offered. His own life was sheltered, and he experienced none of the
traditional hardships of the self-made man. He knew at once the
companionship of cultivated people and good books. His father, Joseph
Cary Eggleston, who removed to Vevay, Indiana, from Virginia in
1832, was an alumnus of William and Mary College, and his mother’s
family, the Craigs, were well known in southern Indiana, where they
were established as early as 1799. Joseph Cary Eggleston served in
both houses of the Indiana Legislature, and was defeated for Congress
in the election of 1844. His cousin, Miles Cary Eggleston, was a
prominent Indiana lawyer, and a judge in the early days, riding the
long Whitewater circuit, which then extended through eastern Indiana
from the Ohio to the Michigan border. Edward Eggleston was born at
Vevay, December 10, 1837. His boyhood horizons were widened by the
removal of his family to New Albany and Madison, by a sojourn in the
backwoods of Decatur County, and by thirteen months spent in Amelia
County, Virginia, his father’s former home. There he saw slavery
practiced, and he ever afterward held anti-slavery opinions. There
was much to interest an intelligent boy in the Ohio Valley of those
years. Reminiscences of the frontiersmen who had redeemed the valley
from savagery seasoned fireside talk with the spice of adventure;
Clark’s conquest had enrolled Vincennes in the list of battles of the
Revolution; the battle of Tippecanoe was recent history; and the long
rifle was still the inevitable accompaniment of the axe throughout
a vast area of Hoosier wilderness. There was, however, in all the
towns--Vevay, Brookville, Madison, Vincennes--a cultivated society, and
before Edward Eggleston was born a remarkable group of scholars and
adventurers had gathered about Robert Owen at New Harmony, in the lower
Wabash, and while their experiment in socialism was a dismal failure,
they left nevertheless an impression which is still plainly traceable
in that region. Abraham Lincoln lived for fourteen years (1816-30) in
Spencer County, Indiana, and witnessed there the same procession of the
Ohio’s argosies which Eggleston watched later in Switzerland County.

Edward Eggleston attended school for not more than eighteen months
after his tenth year, and owing to ill health he never entered college,
though his father, who died at thirty-four, had provided a scholarship
for him. But he knew in his youth a woman of unusual gifts, Mrs. Julia
Dumont, who conducted a dame school at Vevay. Mrs. Dumont is the
most charming figure in early Indiana history, and Dr. Eggleston’s
own portrait of her is at once a tribute and an acknowledgment. She
wrote much in prose and verse, so that young Eggleston, besides the
stimulating atmosphere of his own home, had before him in his formative
years a writer of somewhat more than local reputation for his intimate
counselor and teacher. His schooling continued to be desultory, but
his curiosity was insatiable, and there was, indeed, no period in
which he was not an eager student. His life was rich in those minor
felicities of fortune which disclose pure gold to seeing eyes in
any soil. He wrote once of the happy chance which brought him to a
copy of Milton in a little house where he lodged for a night on the
St. Croix River. His account of his first reading of “L’Allegro” is
characteristic: “I read it in the freshness of the early morning, and
in the freshness of early manhood, sitting by a window embowered with
honeysuckles dripping with dew, and overlooking the deep trap-rock
dalles through which the dark, pine-stained waters of the St. Croix
River run swiftly. Just abreast of the little village the river
opened for a space, and there were islands; and a raft, manned by two
or three red-shirted men, was emerging from the gorge into the open
water. Alternately reading ‘L’Allegro’ and looking off at the poetic
landscape, I was lifted out of the sordid world into a region of
imagination and creation. When, two or three hours later, I galloped
along the road, here and there overlooking the dalles and river, the
glory of a nature above nature penetrated my being; and Milton’s song
of joy reverberated still in my thoughts.” He was, it may be said, a
natural etymologist, and by the time he reached manhood he had acquired
a reading knowledge of half a dozen languages. We have glimpses of him
as chain-bearer for a surveying party in Minnesota; as walking across
country toward Kansas, with an ambition to take a hand in the border
troubles; and then once more in Indiana, in his nineteenth year, as
an itinerant Methodist minister. He rode a four-week circuit with
ten preaching places along the Ohio, his theological training being
described by his statement that in those days “Methodist preachers
were educated by the old ones telling the young ones all they knew.”
He turned again to Minnesota to escape malaria, preaching in remote
villages to frontiersmen and Indians, and later he ministered to
churches in St. Paul and elsewhere. He held, first at Chicago and later
at New York, a number of editorial positions, and he occasionally
contributed to juvenile periodicals; but these early writings were in
no sense remarkable.

“The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared serially in “Hearth and Home” in
1871. It was written in intervals of editorial work and was a _tour
de force_ for which the author expected so little publicity that he
gave his characters the names of persons then living in Switzerland
and Decatur counties, Indiana, with no thought that the story would
ever penetrate to its habitat. But the homely little tale, with all
its crudities and imperfections, made a wide appeal. It was pirated at
once in England; it was translated into French by “Madame Blanc,” and
was published in condensed form in the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and
later, with one of Mr. Aldrich’s tales and other stories by Eggleston,
in book form. It was translated into German and Danish also. “Le
Maître d’Ecole de Flat Creek” was the title as set over into French,
and the Hoosier dialect suffered a sea-change into something rich and
strange by its cruise into French waters. The story depicts Indiana
in its darkest days. The State’s illiteracy as shown by the census of
1830 was 14.32 per cent as against 5.54 in the neighboring State of
Ohio. The “no lickin’, no learnin’” period which Eggleston describes
is thus a matter of statistics; but even before he wrote the old
order had changed and Caleb Mills, an alumnus of Dartmouth, had come
from New England to lead the Hoosier out of darkness into the light
of free schools. The story escaped the oblivion which overtakes most
books for the young by reason of its freshness and novelty. It was,
indeed, something more than a story for boys, though, like “Tom Sawyer”
and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” it is listed among books of permanent
interest to youth. It shows no unusual gift of invention; its incidents
are simple and commonplace; but it daringly essayed a record of local
life in a new field, with the aid of a dialect of the people described,
and thus became a humble but important pioneer in the development of
American fiction. It is true that Bret Harte and Mark Twain had already
widened the borders of our literary domain westward; and others, like
Longstreet, had turned a few spadefuls of the rich Southern soil; but
Harte was of the order of romancers, and Mark Twain was a humorist,
while Longstreet, in his “Georgia Scenes,” gives only the eccentric and
fantastic. Eggleston introduced the Hoosier at the bar of American
literature in advance of the Creole of Mr. Cable or the negro of
Mr. Page or Mr. Harris, or the mountaineer of Miss Murfree, or the
delightful shore-folk of Miss Jewett’s Maine.

Several of Eggleston’s later Hoosier stories are a valuable testimony
to the spiritual unrest of the Ohio Valley pioneers. The early Hoosiers
were a peculiarly isolated people, shut in by great woodlands. The
news of the world reached them tardily; but they were thrilled by new
versions of the Gospel brought to them by adventurous evangelists,
whose eloquence made Jerusalem seem much nearer than their own national
capital. Heated discussions between the sects supplied in those days
an intellectual stimulus greater than that of politics. Questions
shook the land which were unknown at Westminster and Rome; they are
now well-nigh forgotten in the valley where they were once debated so
fiercely. The Rev. Mr. Bosaw and his monotonously sung sermon in “The
Hoosier Schoolmaster” are vouched for, and preaching of the same sort
has been heard in Indiana at a much later period than that of which
Eggleston wrote. “The End of the World” (1872) describes vividly the
extravagant belief of the Millerites, who, in 1842-43, found positive
proof in the Book of Daniel that the world’s doom was at hand. This
tale shows little if any gain in constructive power over the first
Hoosier story, and the same must be said of “The Circuit Rider,”
which portrays the devotion and sacrifice of the hardy evangelists of
the Southwest among whom Eggleston had served. “Roxy” (1878) marks
an advance; the story flows more easily, and the scrutiny of life is
steadier. The scene is Vevay, and he contrasts pleasantly the Swiss
and Hoosier villagers, and touches intimately the currents of local
religious and political life. Eggleston shows here for the first time a
capacity for handling a long story. The characters are of firmer fibre;
the note of human passion is deeper, and he communicates to his pages
charmingly the atmosphere of his native village,--its quiet streets
and pretty gardens, the sunny hills and the broad-flowing river.
Vevay is again the scene in “The Hoosier Schoolboy” (1883), which is,
however, no worthy successor to “The Schoolmaster.” The workmanship
is infinitely superior to that of his first Hoosier tale, but he had
lost touch, either with the soil (he had been away from Indiana for
more than a decade), or with youth, or with both, and the story is flat
and tame. After another long absence he returned to the Western field
in which he had been a pioneer, and wrote “The Graysons” (1888), a
capital story of Illinois, in which Lincoln is a character. Here and in
“The Faith Doctor,” a novel of metropolitan life which followed three
years later, the surer stroke of maturity is perceptible; and the short
stories collected in “Duffles” include “Sister Tabea,” a thoroughly
artistic bit of work, which he once spoke of as being among the most
satisfactory things he had written.

       *       *       *       *       *

A fault of all of Eggleston’s earlier stories is their too serious
insistence on the moral they carried--a resort to the Dickens method
of including Divine Providence among the _dramatis personæ_; but this
is not surprising in one in whom there was, by his own confession,
a life-long struggle “between the lover of literary art and the
religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.”
There is little humor in these tales,--there was doubtless little
in the life itself,--but there is abundant good nature. In all he
maintains consistently the point of view of the realist, his lapses
being chiefly where the moralist has betrayed him. There are many
pictures which denote his understanding of the illuminative value
of homely incident in the life he then knew best; there are the
spelling-school, the stirring religious debates, the barbecue, the
charivari, the infare, glimpses of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” and the
“Hard Cider” campaign. Those times rapidly receded; Indiana is one of
the older States now, and but for Eggleston’s tales there would be no
trustworthy record of the period he describes.

Lowell had made American dialect respectable, and had used it as the
vehicle for his political gospel; but Eggleston invoked the Hoosier
_lingua rustica_ to aid in the portrayal of a type. He did not,
however, employ dialect with the minuteness of subsequent writers,
notably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley; but the Southwestern idiom
impressed him, and his preface and notes in the later edition of
“The Schoolmaster” are invaluable to the student. Dialect remains in
Indiana, as elsewhere, largely a matter of observation and opinion.
There has never been a uniform folk-speech peculiar to the people
living within the borders of the State. The Hoosier dialect, so called,
consisting more of elisions and vulgarized pronunciations than of true
idiom, is spoken wherever the Scotch-Irish influence is perceptible
in the West Central States, notably in the southern counties of Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois. It is not to be confounded with the cruder
speech of the “poor-whitey,” whose wild strain in the Hoosier blood was
believed by Eggleston to be an inheritance of the English bond-slave.
There were many vague and baffling elements in the Ohio Valley speech,
but they passed before the specialists of the Dialect Society could
note them. Mr. Riley’s Hoosier is more sophisticated than Eggleston’s,
and thirty years of change lie between them,--years which wholly
transformed the State, physically and socially. It is diverting to
have Eggleston’s own statement that the Hoosiers he knew in his youth
were wary of New England provincialisms, and that his Virginia father
threatened to inflict corporal punishment on his children “if they
should ever give the peculiar vowel sound heard in some parts of New
England in such words as ‘roof’ and ‘root.’”

While Eggleston grew to manhood on a frontier which had been a
great battle-ground, the mere adventurous aspects of this life
did not attract him when he sought subjects for his pen; but the
culture-history of the people among whom his life fell interested
him greatly, and he viewed events habitually with a critical eye. He
found, however, that the evolution of society could not be treated
satisfactorily in fiction, so he began, in 1880, while abroad, the
researches in history which were to occupy him thereafter to the end of
his life. His training as a student of social forces had been superior
to any that he could have obtained in the colleges accessible to him,
for he had seen life in the raw; he had known, on the one hand, the
vanishing frontiersmen who founded commonwealths around the hunters’
camp-fires; and he had, on the other, witnessed the dawn of a new
era which brought order and enlightenment. He thus became a delver in
libraries only after he had scratched under the crust of life itself.
While he turned first to the old seaboard colonies in pursuit of his
new purpose, he brought to his research an actual knowledge of the
beginnings of new States which he had gained in the open. He planned a
history of life in the United States on new lines, his main idea being
to trace conditions and movements to remotest sources. He collected
and studied his material for sixteen years before he published any
result of his labors beyond a few magazine papers. “The Beginnings of a
Nation” (1896) and “The Transit of Civilization” (1901) are only part
of the scheme as originally outlined, but they are complete as far
as they go, and are of permanent interest and value. History was not
to him a dusty lumber room, but a sunny street where people came and
went in their habits as they lived; and thus, in a sense, he applied
to history the realism of fiction. He pursued his task with scientific
ardor and accuracy, but without fussiness or dullness. His occupations
as novelist and editor had been a preparation for his later work, for
it was the story quality that he sought in history, and he wrote with
an editorial eye to what is salient and interesting. It is doubtful
whether equal care has ever been given to the preparation of any other
historical work in this country. The plan of the books is in itself
admirable, and the exhaustive character of his researches is emphasized
by copious notes, which are hardly less attractive than the text they
amplify and strengthen. He expressed himself with simple adequacy,
without flourish, and with a nice economy of words; but he could, when
he chose, throw grace and charm into his writing. He was, in the best
sense, a humanist. He knew the use of books, but he vitalized them from
a broad knowledge of life. He had been a minister, preaching a simple
gospel, for he was never a theologian as the term is understood, but he
enlisted zealously in movements for the bettering of mankind, and his
influence was unfailingly wholesome and stimulating.

His robust spirit was held in thrall by an invalid body, and throughout
his life his work was constantly interrupted by serious illnesses;
but there was about him a certain blitheness; his outlook on life
was cheerful and sanguine. He was tremendously in earnest in all his
undertakings and accomplished first and last an immense amount of
work,--preacher, author, editor, and laborious student, his industry
was ceaseless. His tall figure, his fine head with its shock of white
hair, caught the attention in any gathering. He was one of the most
charming of talkers, leading lightly on from one topic to another.
No one who ever heard his voice can forget its depth and resonance.
Nothing in our American annals is more interesting or more remarkable
than the rise of such men, who appear without warning in all manner
of out-of-the-way places and succeed in precisely those fields which
environment and opportunity seemingly conspire to fortify most strongly
against them. Eggleston possessed in marked degree that self-reliance
which Higginson calls the first requisite of a new literature, and
through it he earned for himself a place of dignity and honor in
American letters.



A Provincial Capital



A Provincial Capital


THE Hoosier is not so deeply wounded by the assumption in Eastern
quarters that he is a wild man of the woods as by the amiable
condescension of acquaintances at the seaboard, who tell him, when he
mildly remonstrates, that his abnormal sensitiveness is provincial.
This is, indeed, the hardest lot, to be called a “mudsill” and then
rebuked for talking back! There are, however, several special insults
to which the citizen of Indianapolis is subjected, and these he resents
with all the strength of his being. First among them is the proneness
of many to confuse Indianapolis and Minneapolis. To the citizen of the
Hoosier capital, Minneapolis seems a remote place, that can be reached
only by passing through Chicago. Still another source of intense
annoyance is the persistent fallacy that Indianapolis is situated on
the Wabash River. There seems to be something funny about the name
of this pleasant stream,--immortalized in late years by a tuneful
balladist,--which a large percentage of the people of Indianapolis have
never seen except from a car window. East of Pittsburg the wanderer
from Hoosierdom expects to be asked how things are on the Waybosh,--a
pronunciation which, by the way, is never heard at home. Still another
grievance that has embittered the lives of Indianapolitans is the
annoying mispronunciation of the name of their town by benighted
outsiders. Rural Hoosiers, in fact, offend the ears of their city
cousins with Indianopolis; but it is left usually for the Yankee
visitor to say _Injun_apolis, with a stress on _Injun_ which points
rather unnecessarily to the day of the war-whoop and scalp-dance.

Indianapolis--like Jerusalem, “a city at unity with itself,” where the
tribes assemble, and where the seat of judgment is established--is
in every sense the capital of all the Hoosiers. With the exception
of Boston, it is the largest state capital in the country; and no
other American city without water communication is so large. It is
distinguished primarily by the essentially American character of its
people. A considerable body of Germans contributed much first and last
to its substantial growth, not only by the example of their familiar
industry and frugality, but in later years through their intelligent
interest in all manner of civic improvement, in general education,
and in music and art. Only in the past decade has there been any
perceptible drift of undesirable immigrants from southeastern Europe to
our city and the problems they create have been met promptly by wise
agencies of social service. There was an influx of negroes at the close
of the war, and the colored voters (about seventy-five hundred in 1912)
add considerably to our political perplexities.

Indiana was admitted as a State in 1816, and the General Assembly,
sitting at Corydon in 1821, designated Indianapolis, then a settlement
of struggling cabins, as the state capital. The name of the new town
was not adopted without a struggle, Tecumseh, Suwarro, and Concord
being proposed and supported, while the name finally chosen aroused
the hostility of those who declared it unmelodious and etymologically
abominable. It is of record that the first mention of the name
Indianapolis in the legislature caused great merriment. The town was
laid out in broad streets, which were quickly adorned with shade
trees that are an abiding testimony to the foresight of the founders.
Alexander Ralston, one of the engineers employed in the first survey,
had served in a similar capacity at Washington, and the diagonal
avenues and the generous breadth of the streets are suggestive of
the national capital. The urban landscape lacks variety: the town is
perfectly flat, and in old times the mud was intolerable, but the trees
are a continuing glory.

Central Indiana was not, in 1820, when the first cabin was built, a
region of unalloyed delight. The land was rich, but it was covered with
heavy woods, and much of it was under water. Indians still roamed the
forests, and the builder of the first cabin was killed by them. There
were no roads, and White River, on whose eastern shore the town was
built, was navigable only by the smallest craft. Mrs. Beecher, in “From
Dawn to Daylight,” described the region as it appeared in the forties:
“It is a level stretch of land as far as the eye can reach, looking
as if one good, thorough rain would transform it into an impassable
morass. How the inhabitants contrive to get about in rainy weather,
I can’t imagine, unless they use stilts. The city itself has been
redeemed from this slough, and presents quite a thriving appearance,
being very prettily laid out, with a number of fine buildings.” Dr.
Eggleston, writing in his novel “Roxy” of the same period, lays stress
on the saffron hue of the community, the yellow mud seeming to cover
all things animate and inanimate.

But the founders possessed faith, courage, and hardihood, and “the
capital in the woods” grew steadily. The pioneers were patriotic and
religious; their patriotism was, indeed, touched with the zeal of
their religion. For many years before the Civil War a parade of the
Sunday-school children of the city was the chief feature of every
Fourth of July celebration. The founders labored from the first in
the interest of morality and enlightenment. The young capital was
a converging point for a slender stream of population that bore in
from New England, and a broader current that swept westward from the
Middle and Southeastern States. There was no sectional feeling in those
days. Many of the prominent settlers from Kentucky were Whigs, but
a newcomer’s church affiliation was of far more importance than his
political belief. Membership in a church was a social recommendation
in old times, but the importance of religion seemed to diminish as the
town passed the two-hundred-thousand mark. Perhaps two hundred thousand
is the dead-line--I hope no one will press me too hard to defend this
suggestion--beyond which a community loses its pristine sensitiveness
to benignant influences; but there was indubitably in the history of
our capital a moment at which we became disagreeably conscious that we
were no longer a few simple and well-meaning folk who made no social
engagements that would interfere with Thursday night prayer-meeting,
but a corporation of which we were only unconsidered and unimportant
members.

The effect of the Civil War upon Indianapolis was immediate and
far-reaching. It emphasized, through the centralizing there of the
State’s military energy, the fact that it was the capital city,--a
fact which until that time had been accepted languidly by the average
Hoosier countryman. The presence within the State of an aggressive body
of sympathizers with Southern ideas directed attention throughout the
country to the energy and resourcefulness of Morton, the War Governor,
who pursued the Hoosier Copperheads relentlessly, while raising a
great army to send to the seat of war. Again, the intense political
bitterness engendered by the war did not end with peace, or with the
restoration of good feeling in neighboring States, but continued for
twenty-five years more to be a source of political irritation, and,
markedly at Indianapolis, a cause of social differentiation. In the
minds of many, a Democrat was a Copperhead, and a Copperhead was an
evil and odious thing. Referring to the slow death of this feeling,
a veteran observer of affairs who had, moreover, supported Mr.
Cleveland’s candidacy twice, recently said that he had never been able
wholly to free himself from this prejudice. But the end really came
in 1884, with the reaction against Blaine, which was nowhere more
significant of the flowering of independence than at Indianapolis.

Following the formative period, which may be said to have ended with
the Civil War, came an era of prosperity in business, and even of
splendor in social matters. Some handsome habitations had been built in
the _ante-bellum_ days, but they were at once surpassed by the homes
which many citizens reared for themselves in the seventies. These
remain, as a group, the handsomest residences that have been built at
any period in the history of the city. Life had been earnest in the
early days, but it now became picturesque. The terms “aristocrats”
and “first families” were heard in the community, and something of
traditional Southern ampleness and generosity crept into the way of
life. No one said _nouveau riche_ in those days; the first families
were the real thing. No one denied it, and misfortune could not shake
or destroy them.

A panic is a stern teacher of humility, and the financial depression
that fell upon the country in 1873 drove the lesson home remorselessly
at Indianapolis. There had been nothing equivocal about the boom.
Western speculators had not always had a fifty-year-old town to operate
in,--the capital of a State, a natural railway centre,--no arid village
in a hot prairie, but a real forest city that thundered mightily in the
prospectus. There was no sudden collapse; a brave effort was made to
ward off the day of reckoning; but this only prolonged the agony. Among
the victims there was little whimpering. A thoroughbred has not proved
his mettle until he has held up his head in defeat, and the Hoosier
aristocrat went down with his flag flying. Those that had suffered
the proud man’s contumely then came forth to sneer. An old-fashioned
butternut Democrat remarked, of a banker who failed, that “no wonder
Blank busted when he drove to business in a carriage behind a nigger
in uniform.” The memory of the hard times lingered long at home and
abroad. A town where credit could be so shaken was not, the Eastern
insurance companies declared, a safe place for further investments;
and in many quarters Indianapolis was not forgiven until an honest,
substantial growth had carried the lines of the city beyond the _terra
incognita_ of the boom’s outer rim.

Many of the striking characteristics of the true Indianapolitan are
attributable to those days, when the city’s bounds were moved far
countryward, to the end that the greatest possible number of investors
might enjoy the ownership of town lots. The signal effect of this
dark time was to stimulate thrift and bring a new era of caution and
conservatism; for there is a good deal of Scotch-Irish in the Hoosier,
and he cannot be fooled twice with the same bait. During the period of
depression the town lost its zest for gayety. It took its pleasures a
little soberly; it was notorious as a town that welcomed theatrical
attractions grudgingly, though this attitude must be referred back also
to the religious prejudices of the early comers. Your Indianapolitan
who has personal knowledge of the panic, or who had listened to the
story of it from one who weathered the storm, has never forgotten
the discipline of the seventies: though he has reached the promised
land, he still remembers the hot sun in the tyrant’s brickyards. So
conservatism became the city’s rule of life. The panic of 1893 caused
scarcely a ripple, and the typical Indianapolis business man to this
day is one who minds his barometer carefully.

Indianapolis became a city rather against its will. It liked its own
way, and its way was slow; but when the calamity could no longer be
averted, it had its trousers creased and its shoes polished, and
accepted with good grace the fact that its population had reached two
hundred thousand, and that it had crept to a place comfortably near
the top in the list of bank clearances. A man who left Indianapolis in
1885, returned in 1912--the Indianapolitan, like the cat in the ballad,
always comes back; he cannot successfully be transplanted--to find
himself a stranger in a strange city. Once he knew all the people who
rode in chaises; but on his return he found new people flying about in
automobiles that cost more than any but the most prosperous citizen
earned in the horse-car days; once he had been able to discuss current
topics with a passing friend in the middle of Washington Street; now he
must duck and dive, and keep an eye on the policeman if he would make
a safe crossing. He is asked to luncheon at a club; in the old days
there were no clubs, or they were looked on as iniquitous things; he is
carried off to inspect factories which are the largest of their kind in
the world. At the railroad yards he watches the loading of machinery
for shipment to Russia and Chili, and he is driven over asphalt streets
to parks that had not been dreamed of before his term of exile.

Manufacturing is the great business of the city, still sootily
advertised on the local countenance in spite of heroic efforts to
enforce smoke-abatement ordinances. There are nearly two thousand
establishments within its limits where manufacturing in some form is
carried on. Many of these rose in the day of natural gas, and it was
predicted that when the gas had been exhausted the city would lose
them; but the number has increased steadily despite the failure of the
gas supply. There are abundant coal-fields within the State, so that
the question of fuel will not soon be troublesome. The city enjoys,
also, the benefits to be derived from the numerous manufactories in
other towns of central Indiana, many of which maintain administrative
offices there. It is not only a good place in which to make things,
but a point from which many things may be sold to advantage. Jobbing
flourished even before manufacturing attained its present proportions.
The jobbers have given the city an enviable reputation for enterprise
and fair dealing. When you ask an Indianapolis jobber whether the
propinquity of St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Cleveland is not
against him, he answers that he meets his competitors daily in every
part of the country and is not afraid of them.

Indianapolis was long a place of industry, thrift, and comfort, where
the simple life was not only possible but necessary. Its social
entertainments were of the tamest sort, and the change in this respect
has come only within a few years,--with the great wave of growth and
prosperity that has wrought a new Indianapolis from the old. If left
to itself, the old Indianapolis would never have known a horse show or
a carnival,--would never have strewn itself with confetti, or boasted
the greatest automobile speedway in the world; but the invading
time-spirit has rapidly destroyed the walls of the city of tradition.
Business men no longer go home to dinner at twelve o’clock and take a
nap before returning to work; and the old amiable habit of visiting for
an hour in an office where ten minutes of business was to be transacted
has passed. A town is at last a city when sociability has been squeezed
out of business and appointments are arranged a day in advance by
telephone.

The distinguishing quality of Indianapolis continues, however, to be
its simple domesticity. The people are home-loving and home-keeping. In
the early days, when the town was a rude capital in the wilderness, the
citizens stayed at home perforce; and when the railroad reached them
they did not take readily to travel. A trip to New York is still a much
more serious event, considered from Indianapolis, than from Denver or
Kansas City. It was an Omaha young man who was so little appalled by
distance that, having an express frank, he formed the habit of sending
his laundry work to New York, to assure a certain finish to his linen
that was unattainable at home. The more the Hoosier travels, the more
he likes his own town. Only a little while ago an Indianapolis man who
had been in New York for a week went to the theatre and saw there a
fellow-townsman who had just arrived. He hurried around to greet him at
the end of the first act. “Tell me,” he exclaimed, “how is everything
in old Indianapolis?”

The Hoosiers assemble at Indianapolis in great throngs with slight
excuse. In addition to the steam railroads that radiate in every
direction interurban traction lines have lately knit new communities
into sympathetic relationship with the capital. One may see the real
Hoosier in the traction station,--and an ironed-out, brushed and
combed Hoosier he is found to be. You may read the names of all the
surrounding towns on the big interurban cars that mingle with the
local traction traffic. They bring men whose errand is to buy or sell,
or who come to play golf on the free course at Riverside Park, or on
the private grounds of the Country Club. The country women join their
sisters of the city in attacks upon the bargain counters. These cars
disfigure the streets, but no one has made serious protest, for are not
the Hoosiers welcome to their capital, no matter how or when they visit
it; and is not this free intercourse, as the phrase has it, “a good
thing for Indianapolis”? This contact between town and country tends to
stimulate a state feeling, and as the capital grows this intimacy will
have an increasing value.

There is something neighborly and cozy about Indianapolis. The man
across the street or next door will share any good thing he has with
you, whether it be a cure for rheumatism, a new book, or the garden
hose. It is a town where doing as one likes is not a mere possibility,
but an inherent right. The woman of Indianapolis is not afraid to
venture abroad with her market-basket, albeit she may carry it in
an automobile. The public market at Indianapolis is an ancient and
honorable institution, and there is no shame but much honor in being
seen there in conversation with the farmer and the gardener or the
seller of herbs, in the early hours of the morning. The market is so
thoroughly established in public affection that the society reporter
walks its aisles in pursuit of news. The true Indianapolis housewife
goes to market; the mere resident of the city orders by telephone,
and meekly accepts what the grocer has to offer; and herein lies a
difference that is not half so superficial as it may sound, for at
heart the people who are related to the history and tradition of
Indianapolis are simple and frugal, and if they read Emerson and
Browning by the evening lamp, they know no reason why they should
not distinguish, the next morning, between the yellow-legged chicken
offered by the farmer’s wife at the market and frozen fowls of doubtful
authenticity that have been held for a season in cold storage.

The narrow margin between the great parties in Indiana has made the
capital a centre of incessant political activity. The geographical
position of the city has also contributed to this, the state leaders
and managers being constant visitors. Every second man you meet is a
statesman; every third man is an orator. The largest social club in
Indiana exacts a promise of fidelity to the Republican party,--or did,
until insurgency made the close scrutiny of the members’ partisanship
impolite if not impolitic!--and within its portals chances and changes
of men and measures are discussed tirelessly. And the pilgrim is not
bored with local affairs; not a bit of it! Municipal dangers do not
trouble the Indianapolitan; his eye is on the White House, not the town
hall. The presence in the city through many years of men of national
prominence--Morton, Harrison, Hendricks, McDonald, English, Gresham,
Turpie, of the old order, and Fairbanks, Kern, Beveridge, and Marshall
in recent years--has kept Indianapolis to the fore as a political
centre. Geography is an important factor in the distribution of favors
by state conventions. Rivalry between the smaller towns is not so
marked as their united stand against the capital, though this feeling
seems to be abating. The city has had, at least twice, both United
States Senators; but governors have usually been summoned from the
country. Harrison was defeated for governor by a farmer (1876), in a
heated campaign, in which “Kid-Gloved Harrison” was held up to derision
by the adherents of “Blue-Jeans Williams.” And again, in 1880, a
similar situation was presented in the contest for the same office
between Albert G. Porter and Franklin Landers, both of Indianapolis,
though Landers stood ruggedly for the “blue jeans” idea.

The high tide of political interest was reached in the summer and fall
of 1888, when Harrison made his campaign for the presidency, largely
from his own doorstep. Marion County, of which Indianapolis is the
seat, was for many years Republican; but neither county nor city has
lately been “safely” Democratic or Republican. At the city election
held in October, 1904, a Democrat was elected mayor over a Republican
candidate who had been renominated in a “snap” convention, in the face
of aggressive opposition within his party. The issue was tautly drawn
between corruption and vice on the one hand and law and order on the
other. An independent candidate, who had also the Prohibition support,
received over five thousand votes.

The difficulties in the way of securing intelligent and honest city
government have, however, multiplied with the growth of the city. The
American municipal problem is as acutely presented in Indianapolis
as elsewhere. The more prosperous a city the less time have the
beneficiaries of its prosperity for self-government. It is much simpler
to allow politicians of gross incapacity and leagued with vice to
levy taxes and expend the income according to the devices and desires
of their own hearts and pockets than to find reputable and patriotic
citizens to administer the business. Here as elsewhere the party
system is indubitably at the root of the evil. It happens, indeed,
that Indianapolis is even more the victim of partisanship than other
cities of approximately the same size for the reason that both the old
political organizations feel that the loss of the city at a municipal
election jeopardizes the chances of success in general elections. Just
what effect the tariff and other national issues have upon street
cleaning and the policing of a city has never been explained. It is
interesting to note that the park board, whose members serve without
pay, has been, since the adoption of the city charter, a commission
of high intelligence and unassailable integrity. The standard having
been so established no mayor is likely soon to venture to consign this
board’s important and responsible functions to the common type of city
hall hangers-on.

It is one of the most maddening of the anomalies of American life
that municipal pride should exhaust its energy in the exploitation of
factory sites and the strident advertisement of the number of freight
cars handled in railroad yards, while the municipal corporation itself
is turned over to any band of charlatans and buccaneers that may seek
to capture it. In 1911-12 the municipal government had reached the
lowest ebb in the city’s history. It had become so preposterous and
improvement was so imperatively demanded that many citizens, both as
individuals and in organizations, began to interest themselves in plans
for reform. The hope here as elsewhere seems to be in the young men,
particularly of the college type, who find in local government a fine
exercise for their talents and zeal.

In this connection it may be said that the Indianapolis public
schools owe their marked excellence and efficiency to their complete
divorcement from political influence. This has not only assured the
public an intelligent and honest expenditure of school funds, but
it has created a corps spirit among the city’s teachers, admirable
in itself, and tending to cumulative benefits not yet realized. The
superintendent of schools has absolute power of appointment, and he is
accountable only to the commissioners, and they in turn are entirely
independent of the mayor and other city officers. Positions on the
school board are not sought by politicians. The incumbents serve
without pay, and the public evince a disposition to find good men and
to keep them in office.

The soldiers’ monument at Indianapolis is a testimony to the deep
impression made by the Civil War on the people of the State. The
monument is to Indianapolis what the Washington Monument is to the
national capital. The incoming traveler beholds it afar, and within the
city it is almost an inescapable thing, though with the advent of the
sky-scraper it is rapidly losing its fine dignity as the chief incident
of the skyline. It stands in a circular plaza that was originally a
park known as the “Governor’s Circle.” This was long ago abandoned as
a site for the governor’s mansion, but it offered an ideal spot for
a monument to Indiana soldiers, when, in 1887, the General Assembly
authorized its construction. The height of the monument from the street
level is two hundred and eighty-four feet and it stands on a stone
terrace one hundred and ten feet in diameter. The shaft is crowned by
a statue of Victory thirty-eight feet high. It is built throughout of
Indiana limestone. The fountains at the base, the heroic sculptured
groups “War” and “Peace,” and the bronze astragals representing the
army and navy, are admirable in design and execution. The whole effect
is one of poetic beauty and power. There is nothing cheap, tawdry, or
commonplace in this magnificent tribute of Indiana to her soldiers. The
monument is a memorial of the soldiers of all the wars in which Indiana
has participated. The veterans of the Civil War protested against this,
and the controversy was long and bitter; but the capture of Vincennes
from the British in 1779 is made to link Indiana to the war of the
Revolution; and the battle of Tippecanoe, to the war of 1812. The
war with Mexico, and seven thousand four hundred men enlisted for the
Spanish War are likewise remembered. It is, however, the war of the
Rebellion, whose effect on the social and political life of Indiana
was so tremendous, that gives the monument its great cause for being.
The white male population of Indiana in 1860 was 693,348; the total
enlistment of soldiers during the ensuing years of war was 210,497! The
names of these men lie safe for posterity in the base of the gray shaft.

The newspaper paragrapher has in recent years amused himself at the
expense of Indiana as a literary centre, but Indianapolis as a village
boasted writers of at least local reputation, and Coggeshall’s “Poets
and Poetry of the West” (1867) attributes half a dozen poets to the
Hoosier capital. The Indianapolis press has from the beginning been
distinguished by enterprise and decency, and in several instances by
vigorous independence. The literary quality of the city’s newspapers
was high, even in the early days, and the standard has not been
lowered. Poets with cloaks and canes were, in the eighties, pretty
prevalent in Market Street near the post-office, the habitat then of
most of the newspapers. The poets read their verses to one another and
cursed the magazines. A reporter for one of the papers, who had scored
the triumph of a poem in the “Atlantic,” was a man of mark among the
guild for years. The local wits stabbed the fledgeling bards with their
gentle ironies. A young woman of social prominence printed some verses
in an Indianapolis newspaper, and one of her acquaintances, when asked
for his opinion of them, said they were creditable and ought to be set
to music--and played as an instrumental piece! The wide popularity
attained by Mr. James Whitcomb Riley quickened the literary impulse,
and the fame of his elders and predecessors suffered severely from
the fact that he did not belong to the cloaked brigade. General Lew
Wallace never lived at Indianapolis save for a few years in boyhood,
while his father was governor, though toward the end of his life
he spent his winters there. Maurice Thompson’s muse scorned “paven
ground,” and he was little known at the capital even during his term
of office as state geologist, when he came to town frequently from his
home in Crawfordsville. Mr. Booth Tarkington, the most cosmopolitan of
Hoosiers, has lifted the banner anew for a younger generation through
his successful essays in fiction and the drama.

If you do not in this provincial capital meet an author at every
corner, you are at least never safe from men and women who read
books. In many Missouri River towns a stranger must still listen to
the old wail against the railroads; at Indianapolis he must listen to
politics, and possibly some one will ask his opinion of a sonnet, just
as though it were a cigar. A judge of the United States Court sitting
at Indianapolis, was in the habit of locking the door of his private
office and reading Horace to visiting attorneys. There was, indeed,
a time--_consule Planco_--when most of the federal officeholders
at Indianapolis were bookish men. Three successive clerks of the
federal courts were scholars; the pension agent was an enthusiastic
Shakespearean; the district attorney was a poet; and the master of
chancery a man of varied learning, who was so excellent a talker that,
when he met Lord Chief Justice Coleridge abroad, the English jurist
took the Hoosier with him on circuit, and wrote to the justice of the
American Supreme Court who had introduced them, to “send me another man
as good.”

It is possible for a community which may otherwise lack a true local
spirit to be unified through the possession of a sense of humor; and
even in periods of financial depression the town has always enjoyed
the saving grace of a cheerful, centralized intelligence. The first
tavern philosophers stood for this, and the courts of the early times
were enlivened by it,--as witness all Western chronicles. The Middle
Western people are preëminently humorous, particularly those of the
Southern strain from which Lincoln sprang. During all the years that
the Hoosier suffered the reproach of the outside world, the citizen of
the capital never failed to appreciate the joke when it was on himself;
and looking forth from the wicket of the city gate, he was still more
keenly appreciative when it was “on” his neighbors. The Hoosier is a
natural story-teller; he relishes a joke, and to talk is his ideal of
social enjoyment. This was true of the early Hoosier, and it is true
to-day of his successor at the capital. The Monday night meetings of
the Indianapolis Literary Club--organized in 1877 and with a continuous
existence to this time--have been marked by racy talk. The original
members are nearly all gone; but the sayings of a group of them--the
stiletto thrusts of Fishback, the lawyer; the droll inadvertences of
Livingston Howland, the judge; and the inimitable anecdotes of Myron
Reed, soldier and preacher--crept beyond the club’s walls and became
town property. This club is old and well seasoned. It is exclusive--so
much so that one of its luminaries remarked that if all of its members
should be expelled for any reason, none could hope to be readmitted.
It has entertained but four pilgrims from the outer world,--Matthew
Arnold, Dean Farrar, Joseph Parker, and John Fiske.

The Hoosier capital has always been susceptible to the charms of
oratory. Most of the great lecturers in the golden age of the American
lyceum were welcomed cordially at Indianapolis. The Indianapolis pulpit
has been served by many able men, and great store is still set by
preaching. When Henry Ward Beecher ministered to the congregation of
the Second Presbyterian Church (1838-46), his superior talents were
recognized and appreciated. He gave a series of seven lectures to the
young men of the city during the winter of 1843-44, on such subjects as
“Industry,” “Gamblers and Gambling,” “Popular Amusements,” etc., which
were published at Indianapolis immediately, in response to an urgent
request signed by thirteen prominent citizens.

The women of Indianapolis have aided greatly in fashioning the city
into an enlightened community. The wives and daughters of the founders
were often women of cultivation, and much in the character of the city
to-day is plainly traceable to their work and example. During the
Civil War they did valiant service in caring for the Indiana soldier.
They built for themselves in 1888 a building--the Propylæum--where
many clubs meet; and they were long the mainstay of the Indianapolis
Art Association, which, by a generous and unexpected bequest a few
years ago, now boasts a permanent museum and school. It is worth
remembering that the first woman’s club--in the West, at least--was
organized on Hoosier soil--at Robert Owen’s New Harmony--in 1859.
The women of the Hoosier capital have addressed themselves zealously
in many organizations to the study of all subjects related to good
government. The apathy bred of commercial success that has dulled the
civic consciousness of their fathers and husbands and brothers has had
the effect of stimulating their curiosity and quickening their energies
along lines of political and social development.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have been retouching here and there this paper as it was written ten
years ago. In the intervening decade the population of Indianapolis has
increased 38.1 per cent, jumping from 169,161 to 233,650, and passing
both Providence and Louisville. Something of the Southern languor that
once seemed so charming--something of what the plodding citizens of
the mule-car days liked to call “atmosphere”--has passed. And yet the
changes are, after all, chiefly such as address the eye rather than
the spirit. There are more people, but there are more good people!
The coming of the army post has widened our political and social
horizons. The building of the Homeric speedway that has caused us to
be written large on the world’s pink sporting pages, and the invasion
of foreigners, have not seriously disturbed the old neighborliness,
kindliness, and homely cheer. Elsewhere in these pages I mention the
passing of the church as the bulwark behind which this community had
entrenched itself; and yet much the same spirituality that was once
observable endures, though known by new names.

The old virtues must still be dominant, for visitors sensitive to
such impressions seem to be conscious of their existence. Only to-day
Mr. Arnold Bennett, discoursing of America in “Harper’s Magazine,”
finds here exactly the things whose passing it is the local fashion
to deplore. In our maple-lined streets he was struck by the number of
detached houses, each with its own garden. He found in these homes “the
expression of a race incapable of looking foolish, of being giddy, of
running to extremes.” And I am cheered by his declaration of a belief
that in some of the comfortable parlors of our quiet thoroughfares
there are “minor millionaires who wonder whether, outsoaring the
ambition of a bit of property, they would be justified in creeping
downtown and buying a cheap automobile!” And I had been afraid that
every man among us with anything tangible enough to mortgage had
undertaken the task of advertising one of our chief industries by
modernizing Ezekiel’s vision of the wheels!

It is cheering to know that this pilgrim from the Five Towns thought
us worthy of a place in his odyssey, and that his snapshots reveal so
much of what my accustomed eyes sometimes fail to see. I am glad to
be reëstablished by so penetrating an observer in my old faith that
there are planted here on the West Fork of White River some of the
roots of “essential America.” If we are not typical Americans we offer
the nearest approach to it that I, in my incurable provincialism, know
where to lay hands on.



Experience and the Calendar



Experience and the Calendar


“USELESS, quite useless, young man,” said the doctor, pursing his
lips; and as he has a nice feeling for climax, he slapped the reins on
Dobbin’s broad back and placidly drove away.

Beneath that flapping gray hat his wrinkled face was unusually
severe. His eyes really seemed to flash resentment through his green
spectacles. The doctor’s remark related to my manipulation of a new
rose-sprayer which I had purchased this morning at the village hardware
store, and was directing against the pests on my crimson ramblers when
he paused to tell me that he had tried that identical device last year
and found it worthless. As his shabby old phaeton rounded the corner, I
turned the sprayer over to my young undergraduate friend Septimus, and
hurried in to set down a few truths about the doctor.

He is, as you may already have guessed, the venerable Doctor
Experience, of the well-known university that bears his name. He is
a person of quality and distinction, and the most quoted of all the
authorities on life and conduct. How empty the day would be in which
we did not hear some one say, “Experience has taught me--” In the
University of Experience the Doctor fills all the chairs; and all his
utterances, one may say, are _ex cathedra_.

He is as respectable for purposes of quotation as Thomas à Kempis or
Benjamin Franklin. We really imagine--we who are alumni of the old
doctor’s ivy-mantled knowledge-house, and who recall the austerity
of his curriculum and the frugality of Sunday evening tea at his
table--that his own courses were immensely profitable to us. We
remember well how he warned us against yielding to the persuasions
of the world, the flesh, and the devil, illustrating his points with
anecdotes from his own long and honorable career. He used to weep over
us, too, in a fashion somewhat dispiriting; but we loved him, and
sometimes as we sit in the winter twilight thinking of the days that
are no more, we recall him in a mood of affection and regret, and do
not mind at all that cheerless motto in the seal of the university
corporation, “_Experientia docet stultos_,” to which he invariably
calls attention after morning prayers.

“My young friends,” he says, “I hope and trust that my words may be
the means of saving you from much of the heartache and sorrow of this
world. When I was young--”

This phrase is the widely accepted signal for shuffling the feet and
looking bored. We turn away from the benign doctor at his reading-desk,
fumbling at that oft-repeated lecture which our fathers and
grandfathers remember and quote,--we turn our gaze to the open windows
and the sunlight. The philosophy of life is in process of making out
there,--a new philosophy for every hour, with infinite spirit and
color, and anon we hear bugles crying across the hills of our dreams.
“When I was young!” If we were not the politest imaginable body of
students,--we who take Doctor Experience’s course because it is (I
blush at the confession) a “snap,”--we should all be out of the window
and over the hills and far away.

The great weakness of Experience as a teacher lies in the fact that
truth is so alterable. We have hardly realized how utterly the snows
and roses of yesteryear vanish before the amiable book agent points
out to us the obsolete character of our most prized encyclopædia. All
books should be purchased with a view to their utility in lifting the
baby’s chin a proper distance above the breakfast table; for, quite
likely, this will soon become their sole office in the household.
Within a fifteen-minute walk of the window by which I write lives a
man who rejects utterly the idea that the world is round, and he is
by no means a fool. He is a far more interesting person, I dare say,
than Copernicus or Galileo ever was; and his strawberries are the
earliest and the best produced in our township. Truth, let us say, is a
continuing matter, and hope springeth eternal. This is where I parted
company with the revered doctor long ago. His inability to catch bass
in the creek isn’t going to keep me at home to-morrow morning. For all
I care, he may sit on his veranda and talk himself hoarse to his old
friend, Professor Killjoy, whose gum shoes and ear-muffs are a feature
of our village landscape.

When you and I, my brother, are called on to address the young, how
blithely we congratulate our hearers upon being the inheritors of the
wisdom of all the ages. This is one of the greatest of fallacies. The
twentieth century dawned upon American States that were bored by the
very thought of the Constitution, and willing to forget that venerable
document at least long enough to experiment with the Initiative, the
Referendum, and the Recall. What some Lord Chief Justice announced
as sound law a hundred years ago means nothing to commonwealths
that have risen since the motor-car began honking in the highway.
On a starry night in the spring of 1912 a veteran sea-captain, with
wireless warnings buttoned under his pea-jacket, sent the finest ship
in the world smashing into an iceberg. All the safety devices known
to railroading cannot prevent some engineer from occasionally trying
the experiment of running two trains on a single track. With the full
weight of the experience of a thousand years against him the teller
begins to transfer the bank’s money to his own pocket, knowing well the
hazard and the penalty.

We pretend to invoke dear old Experience as though he were a god,
fondly imagining that an honest impulse demands that we appeal to him
as an arbiter. But when we have submitted our case and listened to
his verdict, we express our thanks and go away and do exactly as we
please. We all carry our troubles to the friends whose sympathy we know
outweighs their wisdom. We want them to pat us on the back and tell us
that we are doing exactly right. If by any chance they are bold enough
to give us an honest judgment based on real convictions, we depart
with a grievance, our confidence shaken. We lean upon our friends, to
be sure; but we rely upon them to bail us out after the forts of folly
have crashed about our ears and we pine in the donjon, rather than on
their advice that might possibly have preserved us on the right side
of the barricade. And I may note here, that of all the offices that
man may undertake, that of the frank friend is the most thankless. The
frank friend! It is he who told you yesterday that you were looking
wretchedly ill. Doctor Experience had warned _him_; and he felt it to
be his duty to stop _you_ in your headlong plunge. To-morrow he will
drop in to tell you in gentle terms that your latest poem is--well, he
hates to say it--but he fears it isn’t up to your old mark! The frank
friend, you may remember, is Doctor Experience’s favorite pupil.

We are all trying to square wisdom with our own aims and errors.
Professional men, whose business is the giving of advice, are fully
aware of this. Death is the only arbiter who can enforce his own writs,
and it is not for man to speak a final word on any matter.

I was brought up to have an immense respect--reverence, even--for
law. It seemed to me in my youth to embody a tremendous philosophy.
Here, I used to say, as I pondered opinion and precedent,--here is
the very flower and fruit of the wisdom of the ages. I little dreamed
that both sides of every case may be supported by authorities of equal
dignity. Imagine my bewilderment when I found that a case which is
likely to prove weak before one infallible judge may be shifted with
little trouble to another, equally infallible, but with views known
to be friendly to the cause in question. I sojourned for a time in a
judicial circuit where there was considerable traveling to be done by
the court and bar. The lawyer who was most enterprising in securing a
sleeping-car stateroom wherein to play poker--discreetly and not too
successfully--with the judge, was commonly supposed to have the best
chance of winning his cases.

Our neighbors’ failures are really of no use to us. “No Admittance”
and “Paint” are not accepted by the curious world as warnings, but as
invitations.

  “A sign once caught the casual eye,
    And it said, ‘Paint’;
  And every one who passed it by,
    Sinner or saint,
  Into the fresh green color must
    Make it his biz
  A doubting finger-point to thrust,
  That he, accepting naught on trust,
    Might say, ‘It is, it is!’”

Cynic, do I hear? The term is not one of opprobrium. A cynic is the
alert and discerning man who declines to cut the cotton-filled pie or
pick up the decoy purse on All Fools’ Day.

We are bound to test for ourselves the identical heating apparatus
which the man next door cast away as rubbish last spring. We know
why its heat units were unsatisfactory to him,--it was because his
chimneys were too small; and though our own are as like them as two
peas we proceed to our own experiment with our eyes wide open. Mrs. B
telephones to Mrs. A and asks touching the merits, habits, and previous
condition of servitude of the cook Mrs. A discharged this morning. Mrs.
A, who holds an honorary degree bestowed upon her by the good Doctor
Experience, leans upon the telephone and explains with conscientious
detail the deficiencies of Mary Ann. She does as she would be done by
and does it thoroughly. But what is her astonishment to learn the next
day that Mary Ann’s trunk has been transferred to Mrs. B’s third story;
that Mary Ann’s impossible bread and deadly cake are upon Mrs. B’s
table! Mrs. B, too, took a course of lectures under Doctor Experience,
and she admires him greatly; but what do these facts avail her when
guests are alighting at the door and Mary Ann is the only cook visible
in the urban landscape? Moreover, Mrs. A _always was_ (delectable
colloquialism!) a hard mistress, and Mrs. B must, she feels, judge of
these matters for herself. And so--so--say we all of us!

Men who have done post-graduate work in the good doctor’s school are
no better fortified against error than the rest of us who may never
have got beyond his kindergarten. The results might be different if it
were not that Mistress Vanity by her arts and graces demoralizes the
doctor’s students, whose eyes wander to the windows as she flits across
the campus. Conservative bankers, sage lawyers, and wise legislators
have been the frequent and easy prey of the gold-brick operator. The
police announce a new crop of “suckers” every spring,--which seems to
indicate that Mistress Vanity wields a greater influence than Doctor
Experience. These words stare at me oddly in type; they are the symbols
of a disagreeable truth,--and yet we may as well face it. The eternal
ego will not bow to any dingy doctor whose lectures only illustrate his
own inability to get on in the world.

The best skating is always on thin ice,--we like to feel it crack and
yield under our feet; there is a deadly fascination in the thought of
the twenty or forty feet of cold water beneath. Last year’s mortality
list cuts (dare I do it?) no ice with us; we must make our own
experiments, while the doctor screams himself hoarse from his bonfire
on the bank. He has held many an inquest on this darkling shore of
the river of time, and he will undoubtedly live to hold many another;
but thus far we have not been the subjects; and when it comes to the
mistakes of others we are all delighted to serve on the coroner’s jury.

It isn’t well for us to be saved from too many blunders; we need the
discipline of failure. It is better to fail than never to try, and
the man who can contemplate the graveyard of his own hopes without
bitterness will not always be ignored by the gods of success.

Septimus had a narrow escape yesterday. He was reading “Tom Jones”
in the college library, when the doctor stole close behind him and
Septimus’s nervous system experienced a terrible shock. But it was
the doctor’s opportunity. “Read biography, young man; biographies of
the good and great are veritable textbooks in this school!” So you
may observe Septimus to-day sprawled under the noblest elm on the
campus, with his eyes bulging out as he follows Napoleon on the retreat
from Russia. He has firmly resolved to profit by the failure of “the
darkly-gifted Corsican.” To-morrow evening, when he tries to hitch the
doctor’s good old Dobbin to the chapel bell, and falls from the belfry
into the arms of the village constable, he is far more tolerant of
Napoleon’s mistakes. An interesting biography is no more valuable than
a good novel. If life were an agreed state of facts and not a joyful
experiment, then we might lean upon biography as final; but in this and
in all matters, let us deal squarely with Youth. Boswell’s “Johnson” is
only gossip raised to the highest power; the reading of it will make
Septimus cheerfuler, but it will not keep him from wearing a dinner
coat to a five o’clock tea or teach him how to earn more than four
dollars a week.

We have brought existence to an ideal state when at every breakfast
table we face a new world with no more use for yesterday than for the
grounds of yesterday’s coffee. The wisdom behind us is a high wall
which we cannot scale if we would. Its very height is tempting, but
there is no rose-garden beyond it--only a bleak plain with the sea of
time gnawing its dreary shores.

To be old and to know ten thousand things--there is something august
and majestic in the thought; but to be young and ignorant, to see
yesterday pass, a shining ripple on the flood of oblivion, and then to
buckle down to the day’s business,--there’s a better thing than being
old and wise! We are forever praising the unconscious ease of great
literature; and that ease--typical of the life and time reflected--was
a thing of the day, with no yesterdays’ dead weight dragging it down.
Whitman’s charm for those of us who like him lies in the fact that he
doesn’t invite us to a rummage sale of cast-off raiment, but offers
fabrics that are fresh and in new patterns. We have all known that same
impatience of the past that he voices so stridently. The world is as
new to him as it was to Isaiah or Homer.

  “When I heard the learned astronomer,
  When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me,
  When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and
    measure them;
  When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
    applause in the lecture room,
  How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick,
  Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
  In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
  Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

The old doctor can name all the stars without a telescope, but he does
not know that in joy they “perform their shining.” The real note in
life is experiment and quest, and we are detached far more than we
realize from what was and concerned with what is and may be.

There is a delightful comedy,--long popular in England and known in
America, in which a Martian appears on earth to teach Dickens-like
lessons of unselfishness to men. Since witnessing it, I have often
indulged in speculations as to the sensations of a pilgrim who might
wing his way from another star to this earth, losing in the transition
all knowledge of his own past--and come freshly upon our world and its
achievements, beholding man at his best and worst without any knowledge
whatever of our history or of the evolution through which we have
become what we are. There you would have a critic who could view our
world with fresh eyes. What we were yesterday would mean nothing to
him, and what we are to-day he might judge honestly from a standpoint
of utility or beauty. Not what was old or new, but what was good, would
interest him--not whether our morals are better than those of our
ancestors, but whether they are of any use at all. The croaking plaint
of Not-What-It-Used-To-Be, the sanguine It-Will-Come-In-Time, would
have no meaning for such a judge.

“And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that
tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience,
hope.”

The conjunction of these last words is happy. Verily in experience lies
our hope. In learning what to do and what not to do, in stumbling,
falling to rise again and faring ever upward and onward. Yes, in and
through experience lies our hope, but not, O brother, a wisdom gained
vicariously,--not yours for me nor mine for you,--nor from enduring
books, charm they never so wisely,--but every one of us, old and young,
for himself.

Literature is rich in advice that is utterly worthless. Life’s “Book
of Don’ts” is only read for the footnotes that explain why particular
“don’ts” failed,--it has become in reality the “Book of Don’ts that
Did.” It is pleasant to remember that the gentle Autocrat, a man of
science as well as of letters, did not allow professional courtesy to
stand in the way of a characteristic fling at Doctor Experience. He
goes, in his contempt, to the stupid creatures of the barnyard, and
points in high disdain to “that solemn fowl, Experience, who, according
to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs.”

If the old doctor were to be taken at his own valuation and we should
be disposed to profit by his teachings, our lives would be a dreary
round; and youth, particularly, would find the ginger savorless in the
jar and the ale stale in the pot. I saw my venerable friend walking
abroad the other day in the flowered dressing-gown which he so much
affects, wearing his familiar classroom smile. I heard him warning
a boy, who was hammering a boat together out of wretchedly flimsy
material, that his argosy would never float; but the next day I saw the
young Columbus faring forth, with his coat for sail, and saw him turn
the bend in the creek safely and steer beyond “the gray Azores” of his
dreams.

The young admiral cannot escape the perils of the deep, and like St.
Paul he will know shipwreck before his marine career is ended; but why
discourage him? Not the doctor’s hapless adventures, but the lad’s own
are going to make a man of him. I know a town where, thirty years ago,
an afternoon newspaper failed about once every six months. There was,
so the wiseacres affirmed, no manner of use in trying it again. But
a tow-headed boy put his small patrimony into a venture, reinforced
it with vigorous independence and integrity, and made it a source of
profit to himself and a valued agent in the community. In twenty years
the property sold for a million dollars. Greatness, I assure Septimus,
consists in achieving the impossible.

  “Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
  Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
  And marching single in an endless file,
  Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
  To each they offer gifts after his will,
  Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
  I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
  Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
  Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
  Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
  Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”

The season is at hand when Time throws his annual challenge in our
teeth. The bell tinkles peremptorily and a calendar is thrust upon
us. November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of
another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer
possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow
hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam
the door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new,
whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the
calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant
who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time; for that
sharp elbow in the ribs has prodded many a noble soul to his death.
These pretty devices that we are asked to hang upon our walls are the
seductive advertisements of an insinuating and implacable foe. We are
asked to be _particeps criminis_ in his hideous trade, for must I
not tear off and cast as rubbish to the void a day, a week, a month,
that I may not have done with at all? Why, may I ask, should I throw
my yesterdays into the waste-basket? Yet if I fail, falling only a
few leaves behind, is not my shameless inefficiency and heedlessness
paraded before the world? How often have I delivered myself up to my
enemies by suffering April to laugh her girlish laughter through torrid
July? I know well the insinuating smile of the friend who, dropping in
on a peaceful morning, when Time, as far as I am concerned, has paused
in the hay-field to dream upon his scythe handle, walks coolly to the
calendar and brings me up to date with a fine air of rebuke, as though
he were conferring the greatest favor in the world. I am sure that I
should have no standing with my neighbors if they knew that I rarely
wind my watch and that the clocks in my house, save one or two that
are kept going merely to avoid explanations, are never wound.

There is a gentle irony in the fact that the most insolent dispensers
of calendars are the life insurance companies. It is a legitimate
part of their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and
if they can accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up
before us, in compact form, the slight round of the year, they are
doing much to impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most
reasonable expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of
these soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as
to say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for
there’s no saying when you will get another.” You, my friend, with your
combined calendar and memorandum always before you, may pledge all your
to-morrows if you will; but as for me the Hypocritic Days, the Barefoot
Dervishes, may ring my bell until they exhaust the battery without
gaining a single hour as my grudging alms.

We are all prone to be cowards, and to bend before the tyrant whose
banner is spread victoriously on all our walls. Poets and philosophers
aid and abet him; the preachers are forever telling us what a dreadful
fellow he is, and warning us that if we don’t get on the good side
of him we are lost forever,--mere wreckage on a grim, inhospitable
shore. Hypocrisy and false oaths are born of such teaching. Januarius,
let us remember, was two-faced, and it has come about naturally that
New Year’s oaths carry a reserve. They are not, in fact, serious
obligations. It is a poor soul that sets apart a certain number of days
for rectitude, and I can’t for the life of me see anything noble in
making a constable of the calendar. I find with joy that I am freeing
myself of the tyrant’s thrall. I am never quite sure of the day of the
week; I date my letters yesterday or to-morrow with equal indifference.
June usually thrusts her roses into my windows before I change the year
in dating my letters. The magazines seem leagued with the calendar for
man’s undoing. I sometimes rush home from an inspection of a magazine
counter in mad haste to get where Oblivion cannot stretch forth a
long, lean arm and pluck me into the eternal shades; for I decline
with all the strength of my crude Western nature, to countenance the
manufacture of yesterdays, no matter how cheerful they may be, out of
my confident to-morrows. A March magazine flung into the teeth of a
February blizzard does not fool the daffodils a particle. This stamping
of months that have not arrived upon our current literature is nothing
more or less than counterfeiting;--or rather, the issuing of false
currency by the old Tyrant who stands behind the counter of the Bank
of Time. And there is the railway time-table,--the unconscious comic
utterance of the _Zeitgeist_! If the 12.59 is one minute or one hour
late, who cares, I wonder? Who am I, pray, that I should stuff my
pocket with calendars and time-tables? Why not throw the charts to the
fishes and let the winds have their will with us awhile! Let us, I beg,
leave some little margin in our lives for the shock of surprise!

The Daughters of Time are charming young persons, and they may offer
me all the bread, kingdoms, stars they like; but they must cheer up
or keep out of my front yard! No shuffling around, like Barefoot
Dervishes; but in golden sandals let them come, and I will kindle a
fire of next year’s calendars in their honor. When the snows weigh
heavily upon the hills, let us not mourn for yesterday or waste time
in idle speculations at the fireside, but address ourselves manfully
to the hour’s business. And as some of the phrases of Horace’s ode to
Thaliarchus rap for attention in an old file box at the back of my
head, I set down a pleasant rendering of them by Mr. Charles Edmund
Merrill, Jr.

  “To-morrow? Shall the fleeting years
    Abide our questioning? They go
  All heedless of our hopes and fears.
  To-morrow? ’Tis not ours to know
    That we again shall see the flowers.
  To-morrow is the gods’, but oh,
    To-day is ours.”

We all salute heartily and sincerely the “grandeur and exquisiteness”
of old age. It is not because Doctor Experience is old that we distrust
his judgment; it is not his judgment that we distrust half so much as
his facts. They are good, as facts go, but we are all foreordained and
predestined to reap our own crop. He need not take the trouble to nail
his sign, “No thoroughfare,” on the highways that have perplexed him,
for we, too, must stray into the brambles and stumble at the ford. It
is decreed that we sail without those old charts of his, and we drop
our signal-books and barometer overboard without a qualm. The reefs
change with every tide, adding zest to our adventure; and while the
gulfs may wash us down, there’s always the chance that, in our own way
and after much anxious and stupid sailing, we may ground our barnacled
hulks on the golden sands of the Happy Isles. Our blood cries for the
open sea or the long white road, and

  “Rare the moment and exceeding fleet
    When the spring sunlight, tremulous and thin,
  Makes glad the pulses with tumultuous beat
    For meadows never won nor wandered in.”



Should Smith go to Church?



Should Smith go to Church?


I THINK he should. Moreover, I think I should set Smith an example by
placing myself on Sunday morning in a pew from which he may observe me
at my devotions. Smith and I attended the same Sunday school when we
were boys, and remained for church afterwards as a matter of course.
Smith now spends his Sunday mornings golfing, or pottering about his
garden, or in his club or office, and after the midday meal he takes a
nap and loads his family into a motor for a flight countryward. It must
be understood that I do not offer myself as a pattern for Smith. While
I resent being classified with the lost sheep, I am, nevertheless,
a restless member of the flock, prone to leap the wall and wander.
Smith is the best of fellows,--an average twentieth-century American,
diligent in business, a kind husband and father, and in politics
anxious to vote for what he believes to be the best interests of the
country.

In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to go
to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who were
not affiliated with some church were looked upon as lawless pariahs.
An infidel was a marked man: one used to be visible in the streets I
frequented, and I never passed him without a thrill of horror. Our
city was long known as “a poor theatre town,” where only Booth in
_Hamlet_ and Jefferson in _Rip_ might be patronized by church-going
people who valued their reputations. Yet in the same community no
reproach attaches to-day to the non-church-going citizen. A majority of
the men I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church.
Most of them are in nowise antagonistic to religion; they are merely
indifferent. Clearly, there must be some reason for this change. It
is inconceivable that men would lightly put from them the faith of
their fathers through which they are promised redemption from sin and
everlasting life.

Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold
upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-repeated
statement that we Americans are not as deeply swayed by religion as
in other times; but this seems to me a case of whistling through a
graveyard on a dark night.

A recent essayist,[1] writing defensively of the church, cries, in
effect, that it is moving toward the light; don’t shoot! He declares
that no one who has not contributed something toward the solution of
the church’s problem has earned the right to criticize. I am unable to
sympathize with this reasoning. The church is either the repository
of the Christian religion on earth, the divinely inspired and blessed
tabernacle of the faith of Christ, or it is a stupendous fraud. There
is no sound reason why the church should not be required to give an
account of its stewardship. If it no longer attracts men and women in
our strenuous and impatient America, then it is manifestly unjust to
deny to outsiders the right of criticism. Smith is far from being a
fool, and if by his test of “What’s in it for me?” he finds the church
wanting, it is, as he would say, “up to the church” to expend some of
its energy in proving that there is a good deal in it for him. It is
unfair to say to Smith, who has utterly lost touch with the church,
that before he is qualified to criticize the ways and the manners of
churches he must renew an allegiance which he was far too intelligent
and conscientious to sever without cause.

Nor can I justly be denied the right of criticism because my own
ardor is diminished, and I am frequently conscious of a distinct
lukewarmness. I confess to a persistent need in my own life for the
support, the stimulus, the hope, that is inherent in the teachings
of Christianity; nevertheless the church--that is to say, the
Protestantism with which I am familiar--has seemed to me increasingly
a wholly inadequate medium for communicating to men such as Smith and
myself the help and inspiration of the vision of Christ. There are
far too many Smiths who do not care particularly whether the churches
prosper or die. And I urge that Smith is worthy of the church’s best
consideration. Even if the ninety-and-nine were snugly housed in the
fold, Smith’s soul is still worth the saving.

  “I don’t want to go no furder
  Than my Testyment fer that.”

Yet Smith doesn’t care a farthing about the state of his soul. Nothing,
in fact, interests him less. Smith’s wife had been “brought up in the
church,” but after her marriage she displayed Smith to the eyes of the
congregation for a few Easter Sundays and then gave him up. However,
their children attend Sunday school of a denomination other than that
in which the Smiths were reared, and Smith gives money to several
churches; he declares that he believes churches are a good thing, and
he will do almost anything for a church but attend its services. What
he really means to say is that he thinks the church is a good thing for
Jones and me, but that, as for himself, he gets on comfortably without
it.

And the great danger both to the church and to Smith lies in the fact
that he does apparently get on so comfortably without it!


I

My personal experiences of religion and of churches have been rather
varied, and while they present nothing unusual, I shall refer to them
as my justification for venturing to speak to my text at all. I was
baptized in the Episcopal Church in infancy, but in about my tenth
year I began to gain some knowledge of other Protestant churches. One
of my grandfathers had been in turn Methodist and Presbyterian, and I
“joined” the latter church in my youth. Becoming later a communicant of
the Episcopal Church, I was at intervals a vestryman and a delegate to
councils, and for twenty years attended services with a regularity that
strikes me as rather admirable in the retrospect.

As a boy I was taken to many “revivals” under a variety of
denominational auspices, and later, as a newspaper reporter, I was
frequently assigned to conferences and evangelistic meetings. I made my
first “hit” as a reporter by my vivacious accounts of the performances
of a “trance” revivalist, who operated in a skating-rink in my
town. There was something indescribably “woozy” in those cataleptic
manifestations in the bare, ill-lighted hall. I even recall vividly
the bump of the mourners’ heads as they struck the floor, while the
evangelist moved among the benches haranguing the crowd. Somewhat
earlier I used to delight in the calisthenic performances of a “boy
preacher” who ranged my part of the world. His physical activities were
as astonishing as his volubility. At the high moment of his discourse
he would take a flying leap from the platform to the covered marble
baptismal font. He wore pumps for greater ease in these flights, and
would run the length of the church with astonishing nimbleness, across
the backs of the seats over the heads of the kneeling congregation.
I often listened with delicious horripilations to the most startling
of this evangelist’s perorations, in which he described the coming of
the Pale Rider. It was a shuddersome thing. The horror of it, and the
wailing and crying it evoked, come back to me after thirty years.

The visit of an evangelist used to be an important event in my
town; converts were objects of awed attention, particularly in the
case of notorious hardened sinners whose repentance awakened the
greatest public interest and sympathy. Now that we have passed the
quarter-million mark, revivals cause less stir, for evangelists of
the more militant, spectacular type seem to avoid the larger cities.
Those who have never observed the effect of a religious revival upon
a community not too large or too callous to be shaken by it have no
idea of the power exerted by the popular evangelist. It is commonly
said that these visits only temporarily arrest the march of sin; that
after a brief experience of godly life the converts quickly relapse;
but I believe that these strident trumpetings of the ram’s horn are
not without their salutary effect. The saloons, for a time at least,
find fewer customers; the forces of decency are strengthened, and the
churches usually gain in membership. Most of us prefer our religion
without taint of melodrama, but it is far from my purpose to asperse
any method or agency that may win men to better ways of life.

At one time and another I seem to have read a good deal on various
aspects of religion. Newman and the Tractarians interested me
immensely. I purchased all of Newman’s writings, and made a collection
of his photographs, several of which gaze at me, a little mournfully
and rebukingly, as I write; for presently I took a cold plunge into
Matthew Arnold, and Rome ceased to call me. Arnold’s writings on
religious subjects have been obscured by the growing reputation of his
poetry; but it was only yesterday that “Literature and Dogma” and “God
and the Bible” enjoyed great vogue. He translated continental criticism
into terms that made it accessible to laymen, and encouraged liberal
thought. He undoubtedly helped many to a new orientation in matters of
faith.

My reading in church history, dogma, and criticism has been about
that of the average layman. I have enjoyed following the experiments
of the psychical researchers, and have been a diligent student of
the proceedings of heresy trials. The Andover case and the Briggs
controversy once seemed important, and they doubtless were, but they
established nothing of value. The churches are warier of heresy trials
than they were; and in this connection I hold that a clergyman who
entertains an honest doubt as to the virgin birth or the resurrection
may still be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. To unfrock him merely
arouses controversy, and draws attention to questions that can never
be absolutely determined by any additional evidence likely to be
adduced. The continuance in the ministry of a doubter on such points
becomes a question of taste which I admit to be debatable; but where,
as has happened once in late years, the culprit was an earnest and
sincere doer of Christianity’s appointed tasks, his conviction served
no purpose beyond arousing a species of cynical enjoyment in the bosom
of Smith, and of smug satisfaction in those who righteously flung a
well-meaning man to the lions.

Far more serious are the difficulties of those ministers of every shade
of faith who find themselves curbed and more or less openly threatened
for courageously attacking evils they find at their own doors by those
responsible for the conditions they assail. Only recently two or
three cases have come to my attention of clergymen who had awakened
hostility in their congregations by their zeal in social service. The
loyal support of such men by their fellows seems to me far nobler than
the pursuit of heretics. The Smiths of our country have learned to
admire courage in their politics, and there is no reason for believing
that they will not rally to a religion that practices it undauntedly.
Christ, of all things, was no coward.

There is, I believe, nowhere manifest at this time, within the larger
Protestant bodies at least, any disposition to defend the inerrancy of
the Bible, and this is fortunate in that it leaves the churches free to
deal with more vital matters. It seems fair to assume that criticism
has spent its force, and done its worst. The spirit of the Bible has
not been harmed by it. The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence
of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity,
mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism.
The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by
dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more
strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits,
who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer heaven
than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were wonderfully
realized in their own hearts and lives. And the essentials of Christ’s
teachings have lost nothing by criticism.

The Smiths who have drifted away from the churches will hardly be
brought back to the pews by even the most scholarly discussion of
doubtful texts. Smith is not interested in the authenticity of lines or
chapters, nor do nice points of dogma touch the affairs of his life or
the needs of his soul. The fact that certain gentlemen in session at
Nicæa in A.D. 325 issued a statement of faith for his guidance strikes
him as negligible; it does not square with any need of which he is
conscious in his own breast.

A church that would regain the lost Smiths will do well to satisfy that
large company of the estranged and the indifferent that one need not
believe all that is contained between the lids of the Bible to be a
Christian. Much of the Bible is vulnerable, but Jesus explained himself
in terms whose clarity has in nowise been clouded by criticism. Smith
has no time, even if he had the scholarship, to pass upon the merits of
the Book of Daniel; but give him Christ’s own words without elucidation
and he is at once on secure ground. There only lately came into my
hands a New Testament in which every utterance of Jesus is given the
emphasis of black-face type, with the effect of throwing his sayings
into high relief; and no one reading his precepts thus presented can
fail to be impressed by the exactness with which He formulated his
“secret” into a working platform for the guidance of men. Verily there
could be no greater testimony to the divine authority of the Carpenter
of Nazareth than the persistence with which his ideal flowers upon the
ever-mounting mass of literature produced to explain Him.


II

Smith will not be won back to the church through appeals to theology,
or stubborn reaffirmations of creeds and dogmas. I believe it may
safely be said that the great body of ministers individually recognize
this. A few cling to a superstition that there is inherent in religion
itself a power which by some sort of magic, independently of man, will
make the faith of Christ triumphant in the world. I do not believe
so; Smith could not be made to think so. And Smith’s trouble is, if I
understand him, not with faith after all, but with works. The church
does not impress him as being an efficient machine that yields adequate
returns upon the investment. If Smith can be brought to works through
faith, well enough; but he is far more critical of works than of faith.
Works are within the range of his experience; he admires achievement:
show him a foundation of works and interest him in strengthening that
foundation and in building upon it, and his faith will take care of
itself.

The word we encounter oftenest in the business world nowadays is
“efficiency”; the thing of which Smith must first be convinced is that
the church may be made efficient. And on that ground he must be met
honestly, for Smith is a practical being, who surveys religion, as
everything else, with an eye of calculation. At a time when the ethical
spirit in America is more healthy and vigorous than ever before, Smith
does not connect the movements of which he is aware in business and
politics with religion. Religion seems to him to be a poor starved side
issue, not a source and guiding spirit in the phenomena he observes and
respects.

The economic waste represented in church investment and administration
does not impress Smith favorably, nor does it awaken admiration in
Jones or in me. Smith knows that two groceries on opposite sides of the
street are usually one too many. We used to be told that denominational
rivalry aroused zeal, but this cannot longer be more than an absurd
pretense. This idea that competition is essential to the successful
extension of Christianity continues to bring into being many crippled
and dying churches, as Smith well knows. And he has witnessed, too,
a deterioration of the church’s power through its abandonment of
philanthropic work to secular agencies, while churches of the familiar
type, locked up tight all the week save for a prayer-meeting and
choir-practice, have nothing to do. What strikes Smith is their utter
wastefulness and futility.

The lack of harmony in individual churches--and there is a good deal
of it--is not reassuring to the outsider. The cynical attitude of
a good many non-church-going Smiths is due to the strifes, often
contemptibly petty, prevailing within church walls. It seems difficult
for Christians to dwell together in peace and concord. In almost every
congregation there appears to be a party favorable to the minister and
one antagonistic to him. A minister who seemed to me to fill more fully
the Christian ideal than any man I have known was harassed in the most
brutal fashion by a congregation incapable of appreciating the fidelity
and self-sacrifice that marked his ministry. I recall with delight
the fighting qualities of another clergyman who was an exceptionally
brilliant pulpit orator. He was a Methodist who had fallen to the lot
of a church that had not lately been distinguished for able preaching.
This man filled his church twice every Sunday, and it was the one
sought oftenest by strangers within the city’s gates; yet about half
his own membership hated him cordially. Though I was never of his
flock, I enjoyed his sermons; and knowing something of his relations
with the opposition party in his congregation, I recall with keenest
pleasure how he fought back. Now and then an arrow grazed his ear; but
he was unheedful of warnings that he would be pilloried for heresy. He
landed finally in his old age in an obscure church, where he died,
still fighting with his back to the wall. Though the shepherd’s crook
as a weapon is going out of style, I have an idea that clergymen who
stand sturdily for their own ideals receive far kindlier consideration
than those who meekly bow to vestries, trustees, deacons, elders, and
bishops.

Music has long been notoriously a provoker of discord. Once in
my news-hunting days I suffered the ignominy of a “scoop” on a
choir-rumpus, and I thereupon formed the habit of lending an anxious
ear to rumors of trouble in choir-lofts. The average ladder-like _Te
Deum_, built up for the display of the soprano’s vocal prowess, has
always struck me as an unholy thing. I even believe that the horrors of
highly embellished offertories have done much to tighten purse-strings
and deaden generous impulses. The presence behind the pulpit of a
languid quartette praising God on behalf of the bored sinners in the
pews has always seemed to me the profanest of anomalies. Nor has long
contemplation of vested choirs in Episcopal churches shaken my belief
that church music should be an affair of the congregation.

There seems to exist inevitably, even in the smallest congregation, “a
certain rich man” whose opinions must be respected by the pulpit. The
minister of a large congregation confessed to me despairingly, not long
ago, that the courage had been taken out of him by the protests evoked
whenever he touched even remotely upon social topics like child labor,
or shorter hours for workingmen. There were manufacturers in that
church who would not “stand for it.” Ministers are warned that they
must attend to their own business, which is preaching the Word of God
not so concretely or practically as to offend the “pillars.”

Just what is it, I wonder, that a minister may preach without hazarding
his job? It is said persistently that the trouble with the church at
the present day is that the ministers no longer preach the Word of God;
that if Christian Truth were again taught with the old vigor, people
would hear it gladly. This is, I believe, an enormous fallacy. I know
churches where strict orthodoxy has been preached uninterruptedly for
years, and which have steadily declined in spite of it--or because
of it. Not long ago, in a great assembly of one of the strongest
denominations, when that cry for a return to the “Old Bible Truth” was
raised, one minister rose and attacked the plea, declaring that he had
never faltered in his devotion to ancient dogma, and yet his church
was dying. And even so, many churches whose walls echo uninterruptedly
an absolutely impeccable orthodoxy are failing. We shall not easily
persuade Smith to forego the golf-links on Sunday morning to hear the
“Old Gospel Truth” preached in out-worn, meaningless phrases. Those old
coins have the gold in them, but they must be recast in new moulds if
they are again to pass current.


III

The difficulties of the clergy are greatly multiplied in these days.
The pulpit has lost its old authority. It no longer necessarily follows
that the ministers are the men of greatest cultivation in their
community. The Monday morning newspapers formerly printed, in my town,
pretty full excerpts of sermons. I recall the case of one popular
minister whose sermons continued to be printed long after he had
removed to another city. Nowadays nothing from the pulpit that is not
sensational is considered worth printing. And the parson has lost his
social importance, moving back slowly toward his old place below the
salt. He used to be “asked,” even if he was not sincerely “expected” at
the functions given by his parishioners; but this has changed now that
fewer families have any parson to invite.

A minister’s is indubitably the hardest imaginable lot. Every one
criticizes him. He is abused for illiberality, or, seeking to be all
things to all men, he is abused for consorting with sinners. His
door-bell tinkles hourly, and he must answer the behest of people
he does not know, to marry or bury people he never heard of. He is
expected to preach eloquently, to augment his flock, to keep a hand
on the Sunday school, to sit on platforms in the interest of all good
causes, and to bear himself with discretion amid the tortuous mazes
of church and secular politics. There seem to be, in churches of all
kinds, ambitious pontiffs--lay popes--possessed of an ambition to hold
both their fellow laymen and their meek, long-suffering minister in
subjection. Why anyone should wish to be a church boss I do not know;
and yet the supremacy is sometimes won after a struggle that has
afforded the keenest delight to the cynical Smiths on the outside. One
must view these internecine wars more in sorrow than in anger. They
certainly contribute not a little to popular distrust of the church as
a conservator of love and peace.

There are men in the ministry who can have had no clear vocation to the
clerical life; but there are misfits and failures in all professions.
Some of these, through bigotry or stupidity, do much to justify Smith’s
favorite dictum that there is as much Christianity outside the church
as within it. Now and then I find a Smith whose distrust of religion
is based upon some disagreeable adventure with a clergyman, and I
can’t deny that my own experiences with the cloth have been, on one or
two occasions, disturbing. As to the more serious of these I may not
speak, but I shall mention two incidents, for the reason that they are
such trifles as affect Smith with joy. Once in a parish-meeting I saw
a bishop grossly humiliated for having undertaken to rebuke a young
minister for wearing a chasuble, or not wearing it, or for removing
it in the pulpit, or the other way round,--at any rate, it was some
such momentous point in ecclesiastical millinery that had loosened
a frightful fury of recrimination. The very sight or suggestion
of chasubles has ever since awakened in me the most unchristian
resentment. While we fought over the chasuble I suppose people actually
died within bow-shot of the church without knowing that “if any man sin
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.”

And speaking of bishops, I venture the interpolation that that office,
believed by many to be the softest berth in Zion as it exists in the
Episcopal Church, is in fact the most vexatious and thankless to
which any man can aspire; nor have I in mind the laborious lives of
adventurous spirits like Whipple, Hare, and Rowe, but others who carry
the burdens of established dioceses, where the troubles of one minister
are multiplied upon the apostolic head by the number of parishes in his
jurisdiction.

Again, at a summer resort on our North Atlantic Coast once familiar to
me, there stood, within reach of fierce seas, one of the most charming
of churches. It was sought daily by visitors, and many women, walking
the shore, used to pause there to rest, for prayer, or out of sheer
curiosity. And yet it appeared that no woman might venture into this
edifice hatless. The _locum tenens_, recalling St. Paul’s question
whether it is “comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered,” was so
outraged by the visits of hatless women to the church that he tacked
a notice on the door setting forth in severe terms that, whereas men
should enter the church bareheaded, women should not desecrate the
temple by entering uncovered. I remember that when I had read that
warning, duly signed with the clergyman’s name, I sat down on the rocks
and looked at the ocean for a long time, marveling that a sworn servant
of God, consecrated in his service by the apostles’ successors, able
to spend a couple of months at one of the pleasantest summer resorts
in America, should have been horror-struck at the unholy intrusion of
a hatless girl in his church, when people in the hot city he had fled
suffered and died, ignorant of the very name of Christ.


IV

“My church home” is an old phrase one still hears in communities
whose social life is not yet wholly divorced from the church. There
is something pleasant and reassuring in the sound of it; and I do not
believe we shall ever have in America an adequate substitute for that
tranquility and peace which are still observable in towns where the
church retains its hold upon the larger part of the community, and
where it exercises a degree of compulsion upon men and women who find
in its life a faith and hope that have proved not the least strong of
the bulwarks of democracy. In wholly strange towns I have experienced
the sense of this in a way I am reluctant to think wholly sentimental.
Where, on crisp winter evenings, the young people come trooping happily
in from the meetings of their own auxiliary societies, where vim and
energy are apparent in the gathering congregation, and where one sees
with half an eye that the pastor is a true leader and shepherd of his
flock--in such a picture there must be, for many of us, something
that lays deep hold upon the heart. They are not concerned in such
gatherings with higher criticism, but with cleanness and wholesomeness
of life, and with that faith, never to be too closely scrutinized or
analyzed, that “singeth low in every heart.”

One might weep to think how rare those pictures must become--one
might weep if there were not the great problems now forced upon us,
of chance and change, that drive home to all thinking men and women
the great need of infusing the life of the spirit into our industrial
and political struggles. If, in the end, our great experiment in
self-government fail, it will be through the loss of those spiritual
forces which from the beginning have guided and ruled us. It is only
lately that we have begun to hear of Christian socialism, and a
plausible phrase it is; but true democracy seems to me essentially
Christian. When we shall have thoroughly christianized our democracy,
and democratized our Christianity, we shall not longer yield to moods
of despair, or hearken to prophets of woe.

The Smith for whom I presume to speak is not indifferent to the call of
revitalized democracy. He has confessed to me his belief that the world
is a kindlier place, and that more agencies of helpfulness are at work,
than ever before; and to restore the recalcitrant Smith to the church
it is necessary first of all to convince him that the church honestly
seeks to be the chief of such agencies. The Young Men’s Christian
Association, the Charity Organization Society, and the Settlement House
all afford outlets for Smith’s generous benevolences. And it was a dark
day for the church when she allowed these multiplying philanthropies
to slip away from her. Smith points to them with a flourish, and says
that he prefers to give his money where it is put to practical use. To
him the church is an economic parasite, doing business on one day of
the week, immune from taxation, and the last of his neighbors to scrape
the snow from her sidewalks! The fact that there are within fifteen
minutes’ walk of his house half a dozen churches, all struggling to
maintain themselves, and making no appreciable impression upon the
community, is not lost upon Smith,--the practical, unemotional, busy
Smith. Smith speaks to me with sincere admiration of his friend, the
Salvation Army major, to whom he opens his purse ungrudgingly; but the
church over the way--that grim expensive pile of stone, closed for all
but five or six hours of the week!--Smith shakes his head ruefully when
you suggest it. It is to him a bad investment that ought to be turned
over to a receiver for liquidation.

Smith’s wife has derived bodily and spiritual help from Christian
Science, and Smith speaks with respect of that cult. He is half
persuaded that there must be something in it. A great many of the
Smiths who never had a church tie, or who gave up church-going,
have allied themselves with Christian Science,--what many of Mrs.
Eddy’s followers in familiar talk abbreviate as “Science,” as though
Science were the more important half of it. This proves at least that
the Smiths are not averse to some sort of spiritual food, or quite
clearly demonstrates a dissatisfaction with the food they had formerly
received. It proves also that the old childlike faith in miracles is
still possible even in our generation. Christian Science struts in
robes of prosperity in my bailiwick, and its followers pain and annoy
me only by their cheerful assumption that they have just discovered God.

Smith’s plight becomes, then, more serious the more we ponder his case;
but the plight of the church is not less grave to those who, feeling
that Christianity has still its greatest work to do, are anxious for
its rejuvenation. As to whether the church should go to Smith, or Smith
should seek the church, there can be no debate. Smith will not seek the
church; it must be on the church’s initiative that he is restored to
it. The Layman’s Forward Movement testifies to the awakened interest
of the churches in Smith. As I pen these pages I pick up a New York
newspaper and find on the pages devoted to sports an advertisement
signed by the Men and Religion Forward Movement, calling attention to
the eight hundred and eighty churches, Protestant and Catholic, and the
one hundred and seven synagogues in the metropolis,--the beginning,
I believe, of a campaign of advertising on sporting pages. I repeat,
that I wish to belittle no honest effort in any quarter or under any
auspices to interest men in the spiritual life; but I cannot forbear
mentioning that Smith has already smiled disagreeably at this effort to
catch his attention. Still, if Smith, looking for the baseball score,
is reminded that the church is interested in his welfare, I am not one
to sit in the scorner’s seat.


V

A panacea for the ills of the church is something no one expects
to find; and those who are satisfied with the church as it stands,
and believe it to be unmenaced by danger,--who see the Will of God
manifested even in Smith’s disaffection, will not be interested in
my opinion that, of all the suggestions that have been made for the
renewal of the church’s life, church union, upon the broadest lines,
directed to the increase of the church’s efficiency in spiritual and
social service, is the one most likely to bring Smith back to the fold.
Moreover, I believe that Smith’s aid should be invoked in the business
of unification, for the reason that on patriotic grounds, if no other,
he is vitally concerned in the welding of Christianity and democracy
more firmly together. Church union has long been the despair and the
hope of many sincere, able, and devoted men, who have at heart the best
interests of Christendom, and it is impossible that any great number
of Protestants except the most bigoted reactionaries can distrust the
results of union.

The present crisis--for it is not less than that--calls for more
immediate action by all concerned than seems imminent. We have heard
for many years that “in God’s own time” union would be effected; and
yet union is far from being realized. The difficulty of operating
through councils and conventions is manifest. These bodies move
necessarily and properly with great deliberation. Before the great
branches of Protestantism have reconciled their differences, and agreed
upon a _modus vivendi_, it is quite possible that another ten or twenty
years may pass; and in the present state of the churches, time is of
the essence of preservation and security.

While we await action by the proposed World Conference for the
consideration of questions touching “faith and order,” much can be
done toward crystallizing sentiment favorable to union. A letter
has been issued to its clergy by the Episcopal Church, urging such
profitable use of the interval of waiting; and I dare say the same
spirit prevails in other communions. A purely sentimental union will
not suffice, nor is the question primarily one for theologians or
denominational partisans, but for those who believe that there is
inherent in the method and secret of Jesus something very precious that
is now seriously jeopardized, and that the time is at hand for saving
it, and broadening and deepening the channel through which it reaches
mankind.


VI

In the end, unity, if it ever take practical form, must become a
local question. This is certainly true in so far as the urban field
is concerned, and I may say in parenthesis that, in my own state,
the country churches are already practicing a kind of unification,
in regions where the automobile and the interurban railway make it
possible for farm and village folk to run into town to church. Many
rural churches have been abandoned and boarded up, their congregations
in this way forming new religious and social units. I suggest that in
towns and cities where the weaknesses resulting from denominational
rivalry are most apparent, the problems of unification be taken up in
a purely local way. I propose the appointment of local commissions,
representative of all Protestant bodies, to study the question and
devise plans for increasing the efficiency of existing churches, and
to consider ways and means of bringing the church into vital touch
with the particular community under scrutiny. This should be done in a
spirit of absolute honesty, without envy, hatred, or malice. The test
of service should be applied relentlessly, and every religious society
should make an honest showing of its conditions and needs.

Upon the trial-balance thus struck there should be, wherever needed,
an entirely new redistribution of church property, based wholly upon
local and neighborhood needs. For example, the familiar, badly housed,
struggling mission in an industrial centre would be able at once to
anticipate the fruits of years of labor, through the elimination of
unnecessary churches in quarters already over-supplied. Not only
should body and soul be cared for in the vigorous institutional church,
the church of the future, but there is no reason why the programme
should not include theatrical entertainments, concerts, and dances.
Many signs encourage the belief that the drama has a great future in
America, and the reorganized, redistributed churches might well seize
upon it as a powerful auxiliary and ally. Scores of motion-picture
shows in every city testify to the growing demand for amusement, and
they conceal much mischief; and the public dance-house is a notorious
breeder of vice.

Let us consider that millions of dollars are invested in American
churches, which are, in the main, open only once or twice a week, and
that fear of defiling the temple is hardly justification for the small
amount of actual service performed by the greater number of churches of
the old type. By introducing amusements, the institutional church--the
“department church,” if you like--would not only meet a need, but it
would thus eliminate many elements of competition. The people living
about a strong institutional church would find it, in a new sense, “a
church home.” The doors should stand open seven days in the week to
“all such as have erred and are deceived”; and men and women should be
waiting at the portals “to comfort and help the weak-hearted; and to
raise up those who fall.”

If in a dozen American cities having from fifty thousand to two or
three hundred thousand inhabitants, this practical local approach
toward union should be begun in the way indicated, the data adduced
would at least be of importance to the convocations that must
ultimately pass upon the question. Just such facts and figures as could
be collected by local commissions would naturally be required, finally,
in any event; and much time would be saved by anticipating the call for
such reports.

I am familiar with the argument that many sorts of social service are
better performed by non-sectarian societies, and we have all witnessed
the splendid increase of secular effort in lines feebly attacked and
relinquished, as though with a grateful sigh, by the churches. When the
Salvation Army’s trumpet and drum first sounded in the market-place,
we were told that that valiant organization could do a work impossible
for the churches; when the Settlement House began to appear in American
cities, that, too, was undertaking something better left to the
sociologist. Those prosperous organizations of Christian young men and
women, whose investment in property in our American cities is now very
great, are, also, we are assured, performing a service which the church
could not properly have undertaken. Charity long ago moved out of the
churches, and established headquarters in an office with typewriter and
telephone.

If it is true that the service here indicated is better performed by
secular organizations, why is it that the power of the church has
steadily waned ever since these losses began? Certainly there is little
in the present state of American Protestantism to afford comfort to
those who believe that a one-day-a-week church, whose apparatus is
limited to a pulpit in the auditorium, and a map of the Holy Land in
the Sunday-school room, is presenting a veritable, living Christ to the
hearts and imaginations of men.

And on the bright side of the picture it should be said that nothing in
the whole field of Christian endeavor is more encouraging or inspiring
than an examination of the immense social service performed under the
auspices of various religious organizations in New York City. This
has been particularly marked in the Episcopal Church. The late Bishop
Potter, and his successor in the metropolitan diocese, early gave great
impetus to social work, and those who contend that the church’s sole
business is to preach the Word of God will find a new revelation of
the significance of that Word by a study of the labors of half a dozen
parishes that exemplify every hour of every day the possibilities of
efficient Christian democracy.

The church has lost ground that perhaps never can be recovered. Those
who have established secular settlements for the poor, or those who
have created homes for homeless young men and women, can hardly be
asked to “pool” and divide their property with the churches. But,
verily, even with all the many agencies now at work to ameliorate
distress and uplift the fallen, the fields continue white already to
the harvest, and the laborers are few. With the church revitalized,
and imbued with the spirit of utility and efficiency so potent in our
time, it may plant its wavering banner securely on new heights. It may
show that all these organizations that have sapped its strength, and
diminished the force of its testimony before men, have derived their
inspiration from Him who came out of Nazareth to lighten all the world.


VII

The reorganization of the churches along the line I have indicated
would work hardship on many ministers. It would not only mean that many
clergymen would find themselves seriously disturbed in positions long
held under the old order, but that preparation for the ministry would
necessarily be conducted along new lines. The training that now fits a
student to be the pastor of a one-day-a-week church would be worthless
in a unified and socialized church.

“There are diversities of gifts”; but “it is the same God which worketh
all in all.” In the departmental church, with its chapel or temple
fitly adorned, the preaching of Christ’s message would not be done
by a weary minister worn by the thousand vexatious demands upon a
minister’s time, but by one specially endowed with the preaching gift.
In this way the prosperous congregation would not enjoy a monopoly of
good preaching. Men gifted in pastoral work would specialize in that,
and the relationship between the church and the home, which has lost
its old fineness and sweetness, would be restored. Men trained in
that field would direct the undertakings frankly devised to provide
recreation and amusement. Already the school-house in our cities is
being put to social use; in the branch libraries given by Mr. Carnegie
to my city, assembly-rooms and kitchens are provided to encourage
social gatherings; and here is another opportunity still open to the
church if it hearken to the call of the hour.

In this unified and rehabilitated church of which I speak,--the
every-day-in-the-week church, open to all sorts and conditions of
men,--what would become of the creeds and the old theology? I answer
this first of all by saying that coalition in itself would be a supreme
demonstration of the enduring power and glory of Christianity. Those
who are jealous for the integrity of the ancient faith would manifestly
have less to defend, for the church would be speaking for herself in
terms understood of all men. The seven-day church, being built upon
efficiency and aiming at definite results, could afford to suffer men
to think as they liked on the virgin birth, the miracles, and the
resurrection of the body, if they faithfully practiced the precepts of
Jesus.

This busy, helpful, institutional church, welcoming under one roof men
of all degrees, to broaden, sweeten, and enlighten their lives, need
ask no more of those who accept its service than that they believe in
a God who ever lives and loves, and in Christ, who appeared on earth
in His name to preach justice, mercy, charity, and kindness. I should
not debate metaphysics through a barred wicket with men who needed the
spiritual or physical help of the church, any more than my neighbor,
Smith, that prince of good fellows, would ask a hungry tramp to saw a
cord of wood before he gave him his breakfast.

Questions of liturgy can hardly be a bar, nor can the validity of
Christian orders in one body or another weigh heavily with any who are
sincerely concerned for the life of the church and the widening of its
influence. “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them
also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become
one flock, one shepherd.” I have watched ministers in practically every
Christian church take bread and break it, and bless the cup, and offer
it in the name of Jesus, and I have never been able to feel that the
sacrament was not as efficacious when received reverently from one as
from another.

If wisdom and goodness are God, then foolish, indeed, is he who would
“misdefine these till God knows them no more.” The unified seven-day
church would neglect none of “the weightier matters of the law, justice
and mercy and faith,” in the collecting of tithe of mint and anise and
cummin. It would not deny its benefits to those of us who are unblest
with deep spiritual perception, for it is by the grace of God that we
are what we are. “I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the
understanding also: I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with
the understanding also. Else if thou bless with the spirit, how shall
he that filleth the place of the unlearned say the Amen at thy giving
of thanks, seeing he knoweth not what thou sayest?”

  “Hath man no second life?--_Pitch this one high!_
    Sits there no judge in Heaven our sins to see?--
  _More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_
  Was Christ a man like us? _Ah, let us try
    If we, then, too, can be such men as he!_”

Somewhere there is a poem that relates the experience of a certain
humble priest, who climbed the steeple of his church to commune more
nearly with God. And, as he prayed, he heard the Voice answering, and
asked, “Where art thou, Lord?” and the Lord replied, “Down here, among
my people!”



The Tired Business Man



The Tired Business Man


I

SMITH flashed upon me unexpectedly in Berlin. It was nearly a year
ago, just before the summer invasion of tourists, and I was reading
the letters of a belated mail over my coffee, when I was aroused by an
unmistakable American voice demanding water. I turned and beheld, in
a sunny alcove at the end of the restaurant, my old friend Smith who
had dropped his newspaper for the purpose of arraigning a frightened
and obtuse waiter for his inability to grasp the idea that persons
in ordinary health, and reasonably sane, do, at times, use water as
a beverage. It was not merely the alarmed waiter and all his tribe
that Smith execrated: he swept Prussia and the German Empire into the
limbo of lost nations. Mrs. Smith begged him to be calm, offering
the plausible suggestion that the waiter couldn’t understand a word
of English. She appealed to a third member of the breakfast party, a
young lady, whose identity had puzzled me for a moment. It seemed
incredible that this could be the Smiths’ Fanny, whom I had dandled
on my knee in old times,--and yet a second glance convinced me that
the young person was no unlikely realization of the promise of the
Fanny who had ranged our old neighborhood at “home” and appalled us,
even at five, by her direct and pointed utterances. If the child may
be mother to the woman, this was that identical Fanny. I should have
known it from the cool fashion in which she dominated the situation,
addressing the relieved waiter in his own tongue, with the result that
he fled precipitately in search of water--and ice, if any, indeed, were
obtainable--for the refreshment of these eccentric Americans.

When I crossed to their table I found Smith still growling while he
tried to find his lost place in the New York stock market in his
London newspaper. My appearance was the occasion for a full recital
of his wrongs, in that amusing hyperbole which is so refreshing in
all the Smiths I know. He begged me to survey the table, that I might
enjoy his triumph in having been able to surmount local prejudice
and procure for himself what he called a breakfast of civilized food.
The continental breakfast was to him an odious thing: he announced
his intention of exposing it; he meant to publish its iniquity to the
world and drive it out of business. Mrs. Smith laughed nervously. She
appeared anxious and distraught and I was smitten with pity for her.
But there was a twinkle in Miss Smith’s eye, a smile about her pretty
lips, that discounted heavily the paternal fury. She communicated, with
a glance, a sense of her own attitude toward her father’s indignation:
it did not matter a particle; it was merely funny, that was all, that
her father, who demanded and commanded all things on his own soil,
should here be helpless to obtain a drop of cold water with which to
slake his thirst when every one knew that he could have bought the
hotel itself with a scratch of the pen. When Smith asked me to account
for the prevalence of hydrophobia in Europe it was really for the joy
of hearing his daughter laugh. And it is well worth anyone’s while to
evoke laughter from Fanny. For Fanny is one of the prettiest girls
in the world, one of the cleverest, one of the most interesting and
amusing.


II

As we lingered at the table (water with ice having arrived and the
Stars and Stripes flying triumphantly over the pitcher), I was brought
up to date as to the recent history of the Smiths. As an old neighbor
from home they welcomed me to their confidence. The wife and daughter
had been abroad a year with Munich as their chief base. Smith’s
advent had been unexpected and disturbing. Rest and change having
been prescribed, he had jumped upon a steamer and the day before our
encounter had joined his wife and daughter in Berlin. They were waiting
now for a conference with a German neurologist to whom Smith had been
consigned--in desperation, I fancied--by his American doctor. Mrs.
Smith’s distress was as evident as his own irritation; Miss Fanny
alone seemed wholly tranquil. She ignored the apparent gravity of the
situation and assured me that her father had at last decided upon
a long vacation. She declared that if her father persisted in his
intention of sailing for New York three weeks later, she and her mother
would accompany him.

While we talked a cablegram was brought to Smith; he read it and
frowned. Mrs. Smith met my eyes and shook her head; Fanny frugally
subtracted two thirds of the silver Smith was leaving on the tray as
a tip and slipped it into her purse. It was a handsome trinket, the
purse; Fanny’s appointments all testified to Smith’s prosperity and
generosity. I remembered these friends so well in old times, when they
lived next door to me in the Mid-Western town which Smith, ten years
before, had outgrown and abandoned. His income had in my observation
jumped from two to twenty thousand, and no one knew now to what
fabulous height it had climbed. He was one of the men to reckon with
in the larger affairs of “Big Business.” And here was the wife who
had shared his early struggles, and the child born of those contented
years, and here was Smith, with whom in the old days I had smoked my
after-breakfast cigar on the rear platform of a street car in our town,
that we then thought the “best town on earth,”--here were my old
neighbors in a plight that might well tax the renowned neurologist’s
best powers.

What had happened to Smith? I asked myself; and the question was also
in his wife’s wondering eyes. And as we dallied, Smith fingered his
newspaper fretfully while I answered his wife’s questions about our
common acquaintances at “home” as she still called our provincial
capital.

It was not my own perspicacity but Fanny’s which subsequently made
possible an absolute diagnosis of Smith’s case, somewhat before the
cautious German specialist had announced it. From data supplied by
Fanny I arrived at the conclusion that Smith is the “tired business
man,” and only one of a great number of American Smiths afflicted with
the same malady,--bruised, nerve-worn victims of our malignant gods of
success. The phrase, as I shall employ it here, connotes not merely the
type of iron-gray stock broker with whom we have been made familiar
by our American drama of business and politics, but his brother (also
prematurely gray and a trifle puffy under the eyes) found sedulously
burning incense before Mammon in every town of one hundred thousand
souls in America. I am not sure, on reflection, that he is not visible
in thriving towns of twenty-five thousand,--or wherever “collateral”
and “discount” are established in the local idiom and the cocktail is a
medium of commercial and social exchange. The phenomena presented by my
particular Smith are similar to those observed in those lesser Smiths
who are the restless and dissatisfied biggest frogs in smaller puddles.
Even the farmers are tired of contemplating their glowing harvests and
bursting barns and are moving to town to rest.


III

Is it possible that tired men really wield a considerable power and
influence in these American States so lately wrested from savagery?
Confirmation of this reaches us through many channels. In politics we
are assured that the tired business man is a serious obstructionist
in the path of his less prosperous and less weary brethren engaged
upon the pursuit of happiness and capable of enjoying it in successes
that would seem contemptibly meagre to Smith. Thousands of Smiths
who have not yet ripened for the German specialists are nevertheless
tired enough to add to the difficulty of securing so simple a thing as
reputable municipal government. It is because of Smith’s weariness and
apathy that we are obliged to confess that no decent man will accept
the office of mayor in our American cities.

In my early acquaintance with Smith--in those simple days when he had
time to loaf in my office and talk politics--an ardent patriotism
burned in him. He was proud of his ancestors who had not withheld their
hand all the way from Lexington to Yorktown, and he used to speak
with emotion of that dark winter at Valley Forge. He would look out
of the window upon Washington Street and declare, with a fine sweep
of the hand, that “We’ve got to keep all this; we’ve got to keep it
for these people and for our children.” He had not been above sitting
as delegate in city and state conventions, and he had once narrowly
escaped a nomination for the legislature. The industry he owned and
managed was a small affair and he knew all the employees by name. His
lucky purchase of a patent that had been kicked all over the United
States before the desperate inventor offered it to him had sent his
fortunes spinning into millions within ten years. Our cautious banker
who had vouchsafed Smith a reasonable guarded credit in the old days
had watched, with the mild cynical smile peculiar to conservative
bank presidents, the rapid enrollment of Smith’s name in the lists of
directors of some of the solidest corporations known to Wall Street.
It is a long way from Washington Street to Wall Street, and men who
began life with more capital than Smith never cease marveling at the
ease with which he effected the transition. Some who continue where
he left them in the hot furrows stare gloomily after him and exclaim
upon the good luck that some men have. Smith’s abrupt taking-off would
cause at least a momentary chill in a thousand safety-vault boxes.
Smith’s patriotism, which in the old days, when he liked to speak of
America as the republic of the poor, and when he knew most of the
“Commemoration Ode” and all of the “Gettysburg Address” by heart, is
far more concrete than it used to be. When Smith visits Washington
during the sessions of Congress the country is informed of it. It is
he who scrutinizes new senators and passes upon their trustworthiness.
And it was Smith who, after one of these inspections, said of a member
of our upper chamber that, “He’s all right; he speaks our language,”
meaning not the language of the “Commemoration Ode” or the “Gettysburg
Address,” but a recondite dialect understood only at the inner gate of
the money-changers.


IV

No place was ever pleasanter in the old days than the sitting-room
of Smith’s house. It was the coziest of rooms and gave the lie to
those who have maintained that civilization is impossible around a
register. A happy, contented family life existed around that square
of perforated iron in the floor of the Smiths’ sitting-room. In the
midst of arguments on life, letters, the arts, politics, and what-not,
Smith would, as the air grew chill toward midnight, and when Mrs.
Smith went to forage for refreshments in the pantry, descend to the
cellar to renew the flagging fires of the furnace with his own hands.
The purchase of a new engraving, the capture of a rare print, was
an event to be celebrated by the neighbors. We went to the theatre
sometimes, and kept track of the affairs of the stage; and lectures
and concerts were not beneath us. Mrs. Smith played Chopin charmingly
on a piano Smith had given her for a Christmas present when Fanny
was three. They were not above belonging to our neighborhood book
and magazine club, and when they bought a book it was a good one. I
remember our discussions of George Meredith and Hardy and Howells,
and how we saved Stockton’s stories to enjoy reading them in company
around the register. A trip to New York was an event for the Smiths
in those days as well as for the rest of us, to be delayed until just
the right moment for seeing the best plays, and an opera, with an
afternoon carefully set apart for the Metropolitan Museum. We were glad
the Smiths could go, even if the rest of us couldn’t; for they told us
all so generously of their adventures when they came back! They kept a
“horse and buggy,” and Mrs. Smith used to drive to the factory with
Fanny perched beside her to bring Smith home at the end of his day’s
work.

In those days the Smiths presented a picture before which one might be
pardoned for lingering in admiration. I shall resent any suggestions
that I am unconsciously writing them down as American _bourgeois_ with
the contemptuous insinuations that are conveyed by that term. Nor were
they Philistines, but sound, wholesome, cheerful Americans, who bought
their eggs direct from “the butterman” and kept a jug of buttermilk in
the ice-box. I assert that Smiths of their type were and are, wherever
they still exist, an encouragement and a hope to all who love their
America. They are the Americans to whom Lincoln became as one of
Plutarch’s men, and for whom Longfellow wrote “The Children’s Hour,”
and on whom Howells smiles quizzically and with complete understanding.
Thousands of us knew thousands of these Smiths only a few years ago,
all the way from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. I linger upon
them affectionately as I have known and loved them in the Ohio
Valley, but I have enjoyed glimpses of them in Kansas City and Omaha,
Minneapolis and Detroit, and know perfectly well that I should find
them realizing to the full life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
in many other regions,--for example, with only slight differences of
background, in Richmond, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont. And in
all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or
Boston or New York on his way to a sanatorium or Bad Neuheim and a
German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old
friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flower-gardens
and the cozy verandas (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long
summer evenings) and their gusty registers for compact and steam-heated
apartments with only the roof-garden overhead as a breathing-place.

There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising
a baneful influence. We have fallen into the habit of laying many of
our national sins at his door, and usually with reason. His hand is
hardly concealed as he thrusts it nervously through the curtains of
legislative chambers, state and national. He invades city halls and
corrupts municipal councils. Even the fine arts are degraded for his
pleasure. Smith, it seems, is too weary from his day’s work to care for
dramas

  “That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
  Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”

He is one of the loyalest patrons of that type of beguilement known
as the “musical comedy,” which in its most engaging form is a naughty
situation sprinkled with cologne water and set to waltz time. Still,
if he dines at the proper hour at a Fifth Avenue restaurant and eats
more and drinks more than he should (to further the hardening of his
arteries for the German specialist), he may arrive late and still
hear the tune every one on Broadway is whistling. The girl behind the
book-counter knows Smith a mile off, and hands him at once a novel that
has a lot of “go” to it, or one wherein “smart” people assembled in
house-parties for week-ends, amuse themselves by pinning pink ribbons
on the Seventh Commandment. If the illustrations are tinted and the
first page opens upon machine-gun dialogue, the sale is effected all
the more readily. Or, reluctant to tackle a book of any sort, he may
gather up a few of those magazines whose fiction jubilantly emphasizes
the least noble passions of man. And yet my Smith delighted, in those
old days around the register, in Howells’s clean, firm stroke; and we
were always quoting dear Stockton--“black stockings for sharks”--“put
your board money in the ginger jar.” What a lot of silly, happy,
comfortable geese we were!

It seems only yesterday that the first trayful of cocktails jingled
into a parlor in my town as a prelude to dinner; and I recall the
scandalous reports of that innovation which passed up and down the
maple-arched thoroughfares that give so sober and cloistral an air to
our residential area. When that first tray appeared at our elbows,
just before that difficult moment when we gentlemen of the provinces,
rather conscious at all times of our dress-coats, are wondering whether
it is the right or left arm we should offer the lady we are about
to take in, we were startled, as though the Devil had invaded the
domestic sanctuary and perched himself on the upright piano. Nothing is
more depressing than the thought that all these Smiths, many of whose
fathers slept in the rain and munched hard-tack for a principle in
the sixties, are unable to muster an honest appetite, but must pucker
their stomachs with a tonic before they can swallow their daily bread.
Perhaps our era’s great historian will be a stomach specialist whose
pages, bristling with statistics and the philosophy thereof, will
illustrate the undermining and honeycombing of our institutions by gin
and bitters.


V

The most appalling thing about us Americans is our complete
sophistication. The English are children. An Englishman is at no
moment so delightful as when he lifts his brows and says “Really!” The
Frenchman at his sidewalk table watches the world go by with unwearied
delight. At any moment Napoleon may appear; or he may hear great news
of a new drama, or the latest lion of the salon may stroll by. Awe and
wonder are still possible in the German, bred as he is upon sentiment
and fairy-lore: the Italian is beautifully credulous. On my first visit
to Paris, having arrived at midnight and been established in a hotel
room that hung above a courtyard which I felt confident had witnessed
the quick thrusts of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, I wakened at an early
hour to the voice of a child singing in the area below. It has always
seemed to me that that artless song flung out upon the bright charmed
morning came from the very heart of France! France, after hundreds of
years of achievement, prodigious labor, and staggering defeat, is still
a child among the nations.

Only the other day I attended a prize-fight in Paris. It was a gay
affair held in a huge amphitheatre and before a great throng of
spectators of whom a third were women. The match was for twenty rounds
between a Frenchman and an Australian negro. After ten rounds it was
pretty clear that the negro was the better man; and my lay opinion was
supported by the judgment of two American journalists, sounder critics
than I profess to be of the merits of such contests. The decision was,
of course, in favor of the Frenchman and the cheering was vociferous
and prolonged. And it struck me as a fine thing that that crowd could
cheer so lustily the wrong decision! It was that same spirit that
led France forth jauntily against Bismarck’s bayonets. I respect the
emotion with which a Frenchman assures me that one day French soldiers
will plant the tri-color on the Brandenburg Gate. He dreams of it as a
child dreams of to-morrow’s games.

But we are at once the youngest and the oldest of the nations. We are
drawn to none but the “biggest” shows, and hardly cease yawning long
enough to be thrilled by the consummating leap of death across the
four rings where folly has already disproved all natural laws. The
old prayer, “Make me a child again just for to-night,” has vanished
with the belief in Santa Claus. No American really wants to be a child
again. It was with a distinct shock that I heard recently a child of
five telephoning for an automobile in a town that had been threatened
by hostile Indians not more than thirty years ago. Our children avail
themselves with the coolest condescension of all the apparatus of our
complex modern life: they are a thousand years old the day they are
born.

The farmer who once welcomed the lightning-rod salesman as a friend of
mankind is moving to town now and languidly supervising the tilling
of his acres from an automobile. One of these vicarious husbandmen,
established in an Indiana county seat, found it difficult to employ
his newly acquired leisure. The automobile had not proved itself a toy
of unalloyed delight, and the feet that had followed unwearied the hay
rake and plow faltered upon the treads of the mechanical piano. He
began to alternate motor flights with more deliberate drives behind a
handsome team of blacks. The eyes of the town undertaker fell in mortal
envy upon that team and he sought to buy it. The tired husbandman
felt that here, indeed, was an opportunity to find light gentlemanly
occupation, while at the same time enjoying the felicities of urban
life, so he consented to the use of his horses, but with the distinct
understanding that he should be permitted to drive the hearse!


VI

If we are not, after all, a happy people, in the full enjoyment of
life and liberty, what is this sickness that troubleth our Israel?
Why huddle so many captains within the walls of the city, impotently
whining beside their spears? Why seek so many for rest while this our
Israel is young among the nations? “Thou hast multiplied the nation and
not increased the joy; they joy before thee according to the joy in
harvest and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.” Weariness fell
upon Judah, and despite the warnings of noble and eloquent prophets she
perished. It is now a good many years since Mr. Arnold cited Isaiah
and Plato for our benefit to illustrate his belief that with us, as
with Judah and Athens, the majority are unsound. And yet from his essay
on Numbers--an essay for which Lowell’s “Democracy” is an excellent
antidote--we may turn with a feeling of confidence and security to that
untired and unwearying majority which Arnold believed to be unsound.
Many instances of the soundness of our majority have been afforded
since Mr. Arnold’s death, and it is a reasonable expectation that, in
spite of the apparent ease with which the majority may be stampeded, it
nevertheless pauses with a safe margin between it and the precipice.
Illustrations of failure abound in history, but the very rise and
development of our nation has discredited History as a prophet. In
the multiplication of big and little Smiths lies our only serious
danger. The disposition of the sick Smiths to deplore as unhealthy and
unsound such a radical movement as began in 1896, and still sweeps
merrily on in 1912, never seriously arrests the onward march of
those who sincerely believe that we were meant to be a great refuge
for mankind. If I must choose, I prefer to take my chances with the
earnest, healthy, patriotic millions rather than with an oligarchy of
tired Smiths. Our impatience of the bounds of law set by men who died
before the Republic was born does not justify the whimpering of those
Smiths who wrap themselves in the grave-clothes of old precedents,
and who love the Constitution only when they fly to it for shelter.
Tired business men, weary professional men, bored farmers, timorous
statesmen are not of the vigorous stuff of those

  “Who founded us and spread from sea to sea
    A thousand leagues the zone of liberty,
  And gave to man this refuge from his past,
    Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”

Our country’s only enemies are the sick men, the tired men, who have
exhausted themselves in the vain pursuit of vain things; who forget
that democracy like Christianity is essentially social, and who
constitute a sick remnant from whom it is devoutly to be hoped the
benign powers may forever protect us.


VII

It was a year ago that I met my old friend Smith, irritable, depressed,
anxious, in the German capital. This morning we tramped five miles,
here among the Vermont hills where he has established himself. Sound
in wind and limb is my old neighbor, and his outlook on life is sane
and reasonable. I have even heard him referring, with something of
his old emotion, to that dark winter at Valley Forge, but with a new
hopefulness, a wider vision. He does not think the American Republic
will perish, even as Nineveh and Tyre, any more than I do. He has
come to a realization of his own errors and he is interested in the
contemplation of his own responsibilities. And it is not the German
specialist he has to thank for curing his weariness half so much as
Fanny.

Fanny! Fanny is the wisest, the most capable, the healthiest-minded
girl in the world. Fanny is adorable! As we trudged along the road,
Smith suddenly paused and lifted his eyes to a rough pasture slightly
above and beyond us. I knew from the sudden light in his face that
Fanny was in the landscape. She leaped upon a wall and waved to us. A
cool breeze rose from the valley and swept round her. As she poised
for a moment before running down to join us in the road, there was
about her something of the grace and vigor of the Winged Victory as
it challenges the eye at the head of the staircase in the Louvre. She
lifted her hand to brush back her hair,--that golden crown so loved by
light! And as she ran we knew she would neither stumble nor fall on
that rock-strewn pasture. When she reached the brook she took it at a
bound, and burst upon us radiant.

It had been Fanny’s idea to come here, and poor, tired, broken,
disconsolate Smith, driven desperate by the restrictions imposed upon
him by the German doctors, and only harassed by his wife’s fears,
had yielded to Fanny’s importunities. I had been so drawn into their
affairs that I knew all the steps by which Fanny had effected his
redemption. She had broken through the lines of the Philistines and
brought him a cup of water from that unquenchable well by the gate for
which David pined and for which we all long when the evil days come.
The youth of a world that never grows old is in Fanny’s heart. She is
to Smith as a Goddess of Liberty in short skirt and sweater, come down
from her pedestal to lead the way to green pastures beside waters of
comfort. She has become to him not merely the spirit of youth but of
life, and his dependence upon her is complete. It was she who saved him
from himself when to his tired eyes it seemed that

                    “All one’s work is vain,
  And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,
  With even the short mirage of morning gone,
  No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh
  Where a weary man might lay him down and die.”

Later, as we sat on Smith’s veranda watching the silver trumpet of the
young moon beyond the pine-crowned crest, with the herd a dark blur
in the intervening meadows, and sweet clean airs blowing out of the
valley, it somehow occurred to me that Fanny of the adorable head,
Fanny gentle of heart, quick of wit, and ready of hand, is the fine
essence of all that is worthiest and noblest in this America of ours.
In such as she there is both inspiration to do and the wisdom of peace
and rest. As she sits brooding with calm brows, a quiet hand against
her tanned cheek, I see in her the likeness of a goddess sprung of
loftier lineage than Olympus knew, for in her abides the spirit of that
old and new America that labors in the sun and whose faith is in the
stars.



  The Spirit of Mischief:
  A Dialogue



The Spirit of Mischief: A Dialogue

  If I could find a higher tree
  Farther and farther I should see,
  To where the grown-up river slips
  Into the sea among the ships.

  To where the roads on either hand
  Lead onward into fairyland,
  Where all the children dine at five,
  And all the playthings come alive.

                                    R. L. S.


JESSAMINE and I had been out sailing. We came back to find the house
deserted, and after foraging in the pantry, we made ourselves at home
in the long unceiled living-room, which is one of the pleasantest
lounging-places in the world. A few pine-knots were smouldering in the
fireplace, and, as I have reached an age when it is pleasant to watch
the flames, I poked a little life into the embers and sat down to
contemplate them from the easiest chair the camp afforded. Jessamine
wearily cast herself upon the couch near by without taking off her coat.

Jessamine is five and does as she likes, and does it perversely,
arbitrarily, and gracefully, in the way of maids of five. In the pantry
she had found her way to marmalade with an ease and certainty that
amazed me; and she had, with malice aforethought, made me _particeps
criminis_ by teaching me how to coax reluctant, tight-fitting olives
from an impossible bottle with an oyster-fork.

Jessamine is difficult. I thought of it now with a pang, as her brown
curls lay soft against a red cushion and she crunched a biscuit,
heavily stuccoed with marmalade, with her little popcorn teeth.
I have wooed her with bonbons; I have bribed her with pennies;
but indifference and disdain are still my portion. To-day was my
opportunity. The rest of the household had gone to explore the village
bazaars, and we were left alone. It was not that she loved me more,
but the new nurse less; and, as sailing had usually been denied her,
she derived from our few hours in my catboat the joy of a clandestine
adventure. We had never been so much together before. I wondered how
long the spell of our sail would last. Probably, I reflected, until the
wanderers came back from town to afford a new diversion; or until her
nurse came to carry her away to tea. For the moment, however, I felt
secure. The fire snapped; the clock ticked insistently; my face burned
from its recent contact with a sharp west wind, which had brought white
caps to the surface of the lake and a pleasant splash to the beach at
our front door. Jessamine folded her arms, rested her head upon them,
and regarded me lazily. She was slim and lean of limb, and the lines
she made on the couch were long. I tried to remember whether I had ever
seen her still before.

“You may read, if you like,” she said.

“Thank you; but I’d rather have you tell me things,” I answered.

I wished to be conciliatory. At any moment, I knew she might rise and
vanish. My tricks of detention had proved futile a thousand times;
I was always losing her. She was a master opportunist. She had, I
calculated, a mood a minute, and the mood of inaction was not often one
of them.

“There are many, many things I’d like to have you tell me, Mischief,” I
said. “What do you think of when you’re all alone; what do you think of
me?”

“Oh! I never think of you when I’m all alone.”

“Thank you, Mischief. But I wonder whether you are quite frank. You
must think of me sometimes. For example,--where were you when you
thought of knotting my neckties all together, no longer ago than
yesterday?”

“Oh!” (It is thus she begins many sentences. Her “Ohs” are delightfully
equivocal.)

“Perhaps you’d rather not tell. Of course, I don’t mind about the ties.”

“It was nice of you--not to mind.”

Suddenly her blue eyes ceased to be. They are little pools of blue,
like mountain lakes. I was aware that the dark lashes had stolen down
upon her brown cheek. She opened her eyes again instantly.

“I wish I hadn’t found your ties. Finding them made a lot of trouble
for me. I was looking for your funny little scissors to open the door
of my doll-house that was stuck, and I saw the ties. Then I remembered
that I needed a rope to tie Adolphus--that’s the woolly dog you bought
for my birthday--to my bed at night; and neckties make very good ropes.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Mischief.”

“There’s a prayer they say in church about mischief--” she began
sleepily.

“‘From all evil and mischief; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of
the Devil?’” I quoted.

“That is it! and there’s something in it, too, about everlasting
damnation, that always sends shivers down my back.”

She frowned in a puzzled way. I remembered that once, when Jessamine
and I went to church together, she had, during the reading of the
litany, so moved a silk hat on the next seat that its owner crushed it
hideously when he rose from his knees.

The black lashes hid the blue eyes once more, and she settled her head
snugly into her folded arms.

“Why,” she murmured, “do you call me Mischief? I’m not Mischief; I’m
Jessamine.”

“You are the Spirit of Mischief,” I answered; and she made no reply.

The water of the lake beat the shore stormily.

“The Spirit of Mischief.”

Jessamine repeated the words sleepily. I had never thought of them
seriously before, and had applied them to her thoughtlessly. Is there,
I asked myself, a whimsical spirit that possesses the heart of a
child,--something that is too swift for the slow pace of adult minds;
and if there be such, where is its abiding-place?

“I’m the Spirit of Mischief!”

There, with her back to the fire, stood Jessamine, but with a
difference. Her fists were thrust deep down into the pockets of her
coat. There was a smile on her face that I did not remember to have
seen before. The wind had blown her hair into a sorry tangle, and
it was my fault--I should have made her wear her tam-o’-shanter in
the catboat! An uncle may mean well, but, after all, he is no fit
substitute for a parent.

“So you admit it, do you? It is unlike you to make concessions.”

“You use long words. Uncles _always_ use long words. It is one of the
most foolish things they do.”

“I’m sorry. I wish very much not to be foolish or naughty.”

“I have wished that many times,” she returned gravely. “But naughtiness
and mischief are not the same thing.”

“I believe that is so,” I answered. “But if you are really the Spirit
of Mischief,--and far be it from me to doubt your word,--where is your
abiding-place? Spirits must have abiding-places.”

“There are many of them, and they are a long way off. One is where the
four winds meet.”

“But that--that isn’t telling. Nobody knows where that is.”

“Everybody doesn’t,” said the Spirit of Mischief gently, as one who
would deal forbearingly with dullness.

“Tell me something easier,” I begged.

“Well, I’ll try again,” she said. “Sometimes when I’m not where four
winds meet, I’m at the end of all the rainbows. Do you know that place?”

“I never heard of it. Is it very far away?”

“It’s farther than anything--farther even than the place where the
winds meet.”

“And what do you do there? You must have bags and bags of gold, O
Spirit.”

“Yes. Of course. I practice hiding things with them. That is why no one
ever found a bag of gold at the end of a rainbow. I have put countless
ones in the cave of lost treasure. There are a great many things there
besides the bags of gold,--things that parents, and uncles, and aunts
lose,--and never find any more.”

“I wish I could visit the place,” I said with a sigh. “It would be
pleasant to see a storehouse like that. It would have, I may say,
a strong personal interest. Only yesterday I contributed a valued
scarf-pin through the agency of a certain mischievous niece; and I
shall be long in recovering from the loss of that miraculous putter
that made me a terror on the links. My golf can never be the same
again.”

“But you never can see the place,” she declared. “A time comes when you
can’t find it any more, the cave of lost treasure--or the place where
four winds meet--or the end of all the rainbows.”

“I suppose I have lost my chance,” I said.

“Oh, long ago!” exclaimed the Spirit disdainfully. “It never lasts
beyond six!”

“That has a wise sound. Pray tell me more! Tell me, I beg, how you have
endured this harsh world so long.”

This, I thought, was a poser; but she answered readily enough.

“I suppose, because I am kindred of so many, many things that live on
forever. There are the colors on water when the sun strikes it through
clouds. It can be green and gold and blue and silver all at once; and
then there is the foam of the white caps. It is foam for a moment and
then it is just water again. And there is the moonlight on rippling
water, that goes away and never comes any more--not just the same. The
mirth in the heart of a child is like all these things; and the heart
of a child is the place I love best.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure it is better than the place where all the
winds meet, or that other rainbow-place that you told me about.”

“And then,” she began again, “you know that children say things
sometimes just in fun, but no one ever seems to understand that.”

“To be sure,” I said feelingly, remembering how Jessamine loved to
tease and plague me.

“But there isn’t any harm in it--any more than--”

“Yes?” a little impatiently.

“Than in the things the pines say when the wind runs over the top
of them. They are not--not important, exactly,--but they are always
different. That is the best thing about being a child--the being
different part. You have a grown-up word that means always just the
same.”

“Consistent?” I asked.

“That is it. A child that is consistent is wrong some way. But I don’t
remember having seen any of that kind.”

A smile that was not the smile of Jessamine stole into the Spirit’s
face. It disconcerted me. I could not, for the life of me, decide how
much of the figure before me was Jessamine and how much was really the
Spirit of Mischief, or whether they were both the same.

“Being ignorant, you don’t know what the mirth in a child is--you”
(scornfully) “who pretend to measure all people by their sense of
humor. It’s akin to the bubbling music of the fountain of youth, and
you do the child and the world a wrong when you stifle it. A child’s
glee is as natural as sunshine, and carries no burden of knowledge; and
that is the precious thing about it.”

“I’m sure that is true,” I said; but the Spirit did not heed me. She
went on, in a voice that suggested Jessamine, but was not hers.

“Many people talk solemnly about the imagination of children, as
though it were a thing that could be taught from books or prepared in
laboratories. But children’s mischief, that is so often complained of,
is the imaginations’ finest flower.”

“The idea pleases me. I shall make a note of it.”

“The very day,” continued the Spirit, “that you sat at table and talked
learnedly about the minds of children and how to promote in them a
love of the beautiful, your Jessamine had known a moment of joy. She
had lain in the meadow and watched the thistledown take flight,--a
myriad of those flimsy argosies. And she had fashioned a story about
them, that they rise skyward to become the stuff that white clouds are
made of. And the same day she asked you to tell her what it is the
robins are so sorry about when they sing in the evening after the other
birds have gone. Now the same small head that thought of those things
contrived also the happy idea of cooking a doll’s dinner in the chafing
dish,--an experiment that resulted, as you may remember, in a visit
from both the doctor and the fire-insurance adjuster.”

My heart was wrung as I recalled the bandages on Jessamine’s slender
brown arms.

“Yes, O Spirit!” I said. “I’m learning much. Pray tell me more!”

“We like very much for science to let us alone--”

“But hygiene--and all those life-saving things--”

“Oh, yes,” she said patronizingly; “they’re all very well in their
way. It’s better for science to kill bugs than for the bugs to kill
children. But I mean other kinds of sciences that are not nearly so
useful--pedagogical and the like, that are trying to kill the microbe
of play. Leave us, oh, leave us that!”

“That is a new way of putting it. We oldsters soon forget how to play,
alackaday!”

She went on calmly. “Work that you really love isn’t work any
more--it’s play.”

“That’s a little deep for me--”

“It’s true, though, so you’d better try to understand. If you paint
a picture and work at it,--slave over it and are not happy doing
it,--then your picture is only so many pennies’ worth of paint. The
cruelest thing people can say of a book or a picture is, ‘Well, he
worked hard at it!’ The spirit of mischief is only the spirit of play;
and the spirit of play is really the spirit of the work we love.

“It’s too bad that you are not always patient with us,” the Spirit
continued. (I noted the plural. Clearly Jessamine and the Spirit were
one!)

“I’m sorry, too,” I answered contritely.

“The laws of the foolish world do not apply to childhood at all.
Children are born into a condition of ideality. They view everything
with wonder and awe, and you and all the rest of the grown-up world
are busy spoiling their illusions. How happy you would be if you could
have gone on blowing bubbles all your days!”

“True, alas, too true!”

The face of the Spirit grew suddenly very old.

“Life,” she said, “consists largely in having to accept the fact that
we cannot do the things we want to do. But in the blessed days of
mischief we blow bubbles in forbidden soap and water with contraband
pipes--and do not know that they are bubbles!”

“That is the fine thing about it, O Spirit--the sweet ignorance of it!
I hope I understand that.”

“I see that you are really wiser than you have always seemed,” she
said, with her baffling smile. “Mischief, as you are prone to call so
many things that children do, is as wholesome and sweet as a field
of clover. I, the Spirit of Mischief, have a serious business in the
world, which I’ll tell you about, as you are old and know so little.
I’m here to combat and confuse the evil spirits that seek to stifle the
good cheer of childhood. These little children that always go to bed
without a fuss and say good night very sweetly in French, and never
know bread and butter and jam by their real names--you really do not
like them half as well as you like natural children. You remember that
you laughed when Jessamine’s French governess came, and left the second
day because the black cat got into her trunk. There was really no harm
in that!”

The Spirit of Mischief laughed. She grew very small, and I watched
her curiously, wondering whether she was really a creature of this
work-a-day world. Then suddenly she grew to life-size again, and
laughed gleefully, standing with her hands thrust deep into her coat
pockets.

“Jessamine!” I exclaimed. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was, a little bit; but you--you snored awfully,” she said, “and
waked me up.”

She still watched me, laughing; and looking down I saw that she had
been busy while I slept. A barricade of books had been built around
me,--a carefully wrought bit of masonry, as high as my knees.

“You’re the wicked giant,” declared Jessamine, quite in her own manner,
and with no hint of the half-real, elfish spirit of my dream. “And I’m
the good little Princess that has caught you at last. And I’ll never
let you out of the tower--Oh they’re coming! They’re coming!”

She flashed to the door and out upon the veranda where steps had
sounded, leaving me to deliver myself from the tower of the Spirit of
Mischief with the ignorant hands of Age.



Confessions of a “Best-Seller”



Confessions of a “Best-Seller”


THAT my name has adorned best-selling lists is more of a joke than my
harshest critics can imagine. I had dallied awhile at the law; I had
given ten full years to journalism; I had written criticism, and not a
little verse; two or three short stories of the slightest had been my
only adventure in fiction; and I had spent a year writing an essay in
history, which, from the publisher’s reports, no one but my neighbor
and my neighbor’s wife ever read. My frugal output of poems had pleased
no one half so much as myself; and having reached years of discretion I
carefully analyzed samples of the ore that remained in my bins, decided
that I had exhausted my poetical vein, and thereupon turned rather
soberly to the field of fiction.

In order to qualify myself to speak to my text, I will say that in
a period of six years, that closed in January, 1909, my titles were
included fifteen times in the “Bookman” list of best-selling books.
Two of my titles appeared five times each; one of them headed the list
three months successively. I do not presume to speak for others with
whom I have crossed swords in the best-selling lists, but I beg to
express my strong conviction that the compilation of such statistics
is quite as injurious as it is helpful to authors. When the “six
best-selling” phrase was new the monthly statement of winners may have
carried some weight; but for several years it has really had little
significance. Critical purchasers are likely to be wary of books so
listed. It is my impression, based on talks with retail dealers in many
parts of the country, that they often report as “best-sellers” books of
which they may have made large advance purchases, but which are selling
slowly. Their aim is, of course, to force the book into the list, and
thereby create a false impression of its popularity.

I think that most publishers, and many authors who, like myself,
have profited by the making of these lists, would gladly see them
discontinued. The fact remains, however, that the best novels by the
best English and American writers have generally been included in these
lists. Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Ward, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Wister,
“Kate Douglas Wiggin,” Miss Johnston, and Mr. William de Morgan have,
for example, shared with inferior writers the ignominy of popular
success. I do not believe that my American fellow citizens prefer trash
to sound literature. There are not enough novels of the first order,
not enough books of the style and solidity of “The House of Mirth”
and “Joseph Vance,” to satisfy the popular demand for fiction; and
while the people wait, they take inferior books, like several bearing
my own name, which have no aim but to amuse. I know of nothing more
encouraging to those who wish to see the American novel go high and
far than the immediate acceptance among us of the writings of Mr.
William de Morgan, who makes no concession, not even of brevity, to the
ever-increasing demand for fiction.

I spent the greater part of two years on my first novel, which dealt
with aspects of life in an urban community which interested me; and
the gravest fault of the book, if I am entitled to an opinion, is
its self-consciousness,--I was too anxious, too painstaking, with the
result that those pages seem frightfully stiff to me now. The book was
launched auspiciously; my publisher advertised it generously, and it
landed safely among the “six best-sellers.” The critical reception of
the book was cordial and friendly, not only in the newspaper press,
but in the more cautious weekly journals. My severest critic dealt far
more amiably with my book than I should have done myself, if I had
sat in judgment upon it. I have been surprised to find the book still
remembered, and its quality has been flung in my face by critics who
have deplored my later performances.

I now wrote another novel, to which I gave even greater care, and
into it I put, I think, the best characterizations I have ever done;
but the _soupçon_ of melodrama with which I flavored the first novel
was lacking in the second, and it went dead a little short of fifteen
thousand--the poorest sale any of my books has had.

A number of my friends were, at this time, rather annoyingly directing
my attention to the great popular successes of several other American
writers, whose tales were, I felt, the most contemptible _pastiche_,
without the slightest pretense to originality, and having neither form
nor style. It was in some bitterness of spirit that I resolved to try
my hand at a story that should be a story and nothing else. Nor should
I storm the capitals of imaginary kingdoms, but set the scene on my own
soil. Most, it was clear, could grow the flowers of Zenda when once the
seed had been scattered by Mr. Hawkins. Whether Mr. Hawkins got his
inspiration from the flora of Prince Otto’s gardens, and whether the
Prince was indebted in his turn to Harry Richmond, is not my affair. I
am, no doubt, indebted to all three of these creations; but I set my
scene in an American commonwealth, a spot that derived nothing from
historical association, and sent my hero on his adventures armed with
nothing more deadly than a suit-case and an umbrella. The idea is not
original with me that you can make anything interesting if you know
how. It was Stevenson, I believe, who said that a kitchen table is a
fair enough subject for any writer who knows his trade. I do not cite
myself as a person capable of proving this; but I am satisfied that
the chief fun of story-telling lies in trying, by all the means in a
writer’s power, to make plausible the seemingly impossible. And here,
of course, I am referring to the story for the story’s sake,--not to
the novel of life and manners.

My two earliest books were clearly too deliberate. They were deficient
in incident, and I was prone to wander into blind alleys, and not
always ingenious enough to emerge again upon the main thoroughfare. I
felt that, while I might fail in my attempt to produce a romantic yarn,
the experience might help me to a better understanding of the mechanics
of the novel,--that I might gain directness, movement, and ease.

For my third venture I hit upon a device that took strong hold upon
my imagination. The idea of laying a trap for the reader tickled me;
and when once I had written the first chapter and outlined the last,
I yielded myself to the story and bade it run its own course. I was
never more honestly astonished in my life than to find my half-dozen
characters taking matters into their own hands, and leaving me the
merest spectator and reporter. I had made notes for the story, but in
looking them over to-day, I find that I made practically no use of
them. I never expect to experience again the delight of the winter I
spent over that tale. The sight of white paper had no terrors for me.
The hero, constantly cornered, had always in his pocket the key to his
successive dilemmas; the heroine, misunderstood and misjudged, was
struck at proper intervals by the spot-light that revealed her charm
and reëstablished faith in her honorable motives. No other girl in my
little gallery of heroines exerts upon me the spell of that young lady,
who, on the day I began the story, as I waited for the ink to thaw in
my workshop, passed under my window, by one of those kindly orderings
of Providence that keep alive the superstition of inspiration in the
hearts of all fiction-writers. She never came my way again--but she
need not! She was the bright particular star of my stage--its _dea ex
machina_. She is of the sisterhood of radiant goddesses who are visible
from any window, even though its prospect be only a commonplace city
street. Always, and everywhere, the essential woman for any tale is
passing by with grave mien, if the tale be sober; with upturned chin
and a saucy twinkle in the eye, if such be the seeker’s need!

I think I must have begun every morning’s work with a grin on my face,
for it was all fun, and I entered with zest into all the changes
and chances of the story. I was embarrassed, not by any paucity of
incident, but by my own fecundity and dexterity. The audacity of my
project used sometimes to give me pause; it was almost too bold a thing
to carry through; but my curiosity as to just how the ultimate goal
would be reached kept my interest keyed high. At times, feeling that I
was going too fast, I used to halt and write a purple patch or two for
my own satisfaction,--a harmless diversion to which I am prone, and
which no one could be cruel enough to deny me. There are pages in that
book over which I dallied for a week, and in looking at them now I find
that I still think them--as Mr. James would say--“rather nice.” And
once, while thus amusing myself, a phrase slipped from the pen which
I saw at once had been, from all time, ordained to be the title of my
book.

When I had completed the first draft, I began retouching. I liked my
tale so much that I was reluctant to part with it; I enjoyed playing
with it, and I think I rewrote the most of it three times. Contumelious
critics have spoken of me as one of the typewriter school of
fictionists, picturing me as lightly flinging off a few chapters before
breakfast, and spending the rest of the day on the golf-links; but I
have never in my life written in a first draft more than a thousand
words a day, and I have frequently thrown away a day’s work when I
came to look it over. I have refused enough offers for short stories,
serials, and book rights, to have kept half a dozen typewriters busy,
and my output has not been large, considering that writing has been,
for nearly ten years, my only occupation. I can say, with my hand on
my heart, that I have written for my own pleasure first and last, and
that those of my books that have enjoyed the greatest popularity were
written really in a spirit of play, without any illusions as to their
importance or their quick and final passing into the void.

When I had finished my story, I still had a few incidents and scenes
in my ink-pot; but I could not for the life of me get the curtain up,
once it was down. My little drama had put itself together as tight as
wax, and even when I had written an additional incident that pleased me
particularly, I could find no place to thrust it in. I was interested
chiefly in amusing myself, and I never troubled myself in the least as
to whether anyone else would care for the story. I was astonished by
its sale, which exceeded a quarter of a million copies in this country;
it has been translated into French, Italian, German, Danish, Swedish,
and Norwegian. I have heard of it all the way from Tokyo to Teheran.
It was dramatized, and an actor of distinction appeared in the stage
version; and stock companies have lately presented the play in Boston
and San Francisco. It was subsequently serialized by newspapers, and
later appeared in “patent” supplements. The title was paraphrased
by advertisers, several of whom continue to pay me this flattering
tribute.

I have speculated a good deal as to the success of this book. The
title had, no doubt, much to do with it; clever advertising helped
it further; the cover was a lure to the eye. The name of a popular
illustrator may have helped, but it is certain that his pictures did
not! I think I am safe in saying that the book received no helpful
reviews in any newspapers of the first class, and I may add that I
am skeptical as to the value of favorable notices in stimulating
the sale of such books. Serious novels are undoubtedly helped by
favorable reviews; stories of the kind I describe depend primarily upon
persistent and ingenious advertising, in which a single striking line
from the “Gem City Evening Gazette” is just as valuable as the opinion
of the most scholarly review. Nor am I unmindful of the publisher’s
labors and risks,--the courage, confidence, and genius essential to a
successful campaign with a book from a new hand, with no prestige of
established reputation to command instant recognition. The self-selling
book may become a “best-seller”; it may appear mysteriously, a “dark
horse” in the eternal battle of the books; but miracles are as rare
in the book trade as in other lines of commerce. The man behind the
counter is another important factor. The retail dealer, when he finds
the publisher supporting him with advertising, can do much to prolong a
sale. A publisher of long experience in promoting large sales has told
me that advertising is valuable chiefly for its moral effect on the
retailer, who, feeling that the publisher is strongly backing a book,
bends his own energies toward keeping it alive.

It would be absurd for me to pretend that the leap from a mild _succès
d’estime_ with sales of forty and fourteen thousand, to a delirious
gallop into six figures is not without its effect on an author, unless
he be much less human than I am. Those gentle friends who had intimated
that I could not do it once, were equally sanguine that I could not
do it again. The temptation to try a second throw of the dice after a
success is strong, but I debated long whether I should try my hand at
a second romance. I resolved finally to do a better book in the same
kind, and with even more labor I produced a yarn whose title--and the
gods have several times favored me in the matter of titles--adorned
the best-selling lists for an even longer period, though the total
sales aggregated less.

The second romance was, I think, better than the first, and its
dramatic situations were more picturesque. The reviews averaged better
in better places, and may have aroused the prejudices of those who shun
books that are countenanced or praised by the literary “high brows.” It
sold largely; it enjoyed the glory and the shame of a “best-seller”;
but here, I pondered, was the time to quit. Not to shock my “audience,”
to use the term of the trade, I resolved to try for more solid ground
by paying more attention to characterizations, and cutting down the
allowance of blood and thunder. I expected to lose heavily with the
public, and I was not disappointed. I crept into the best-selling list,
but my sojourn there was brief. It is manifest that people who like
shots in the dark will not tamely acquiesce in the mild placing of the
villain’s hand upon his hip pocket on the moon-washed terrace. The
difference between the actual shot and the mere menace, I could, from
personal knowledge, compute in the coin of the Republic.

When your name on the bill-board suggests battle, murder, and sudden
death, “hair-breadth’scapes, i’ th’ imminent deadly breach,” and
that sort of thing, you need not be chagrined if, once inside, the
eager throng resents bitterly your perfidy in offering nothing more
blood-curdling than the heroine’s demand (the scene being set for
five o’clock tea) for another lump of sugar. You may, if you please,
leave Hamlet out of his own play; but do not, on peril of your fame,
cut out your ghost, or neglect to provide some one to stick a sword
into Polonius behind the arras. I can take up that particular book now
and prove to any fair-minded man how prettily I could, by injecting a
little paprika into my villains, have quadrupled its sale.

Having, I hope, some sense of humor, I resolved to bid farewell to
cloak and pistols in a farce-comedy, which should be a take-off on my
own popular performances. Humor being something that no one should
tamper with who is not ready for the gibbet, I was not surprised that
many hasty samplers of the book should entirely miss the joke, or that
a number of joyless critics should have dismissed it hastily as merely
another machine-made romance written for boarding-school girls and the
weary commercial traveler yawning in the smoking-car. Yet this book
also has been a “best-seller”! I have seen it, within a few weeks,
prominently displayed in bookshop windows in half a dozen cities.

It was, I think, Mr. Clyde Fitch who first voiced the complaint that
our drama is seriously affected by the demand of “the tired business
man” to be amused at the theatre. The same may be said of fiction.
A very considerable number of our toiling millions sit down wearily
at night, and if the evening paper does not fully satisfy or social
diversion offer, a story that will hold the attention without too great
a tax upon the mind is welcomed. I should be happy to think that our
ninety millions trim the lamp every evening with zest for “improving”
literature; but the tired brain follows the line of least resistance,
which unfortunately does not lead to alcoves where the one hundred
best books wear their purple in solemn pomp. Even in my present mood
of contrition, I am not sneering at that considerable body of my
countrymen who have laid one dollar and eighteen cents upon the counter
and borne home my little fictions. They took grave chances of my boring
them; and when they rapped a second time on the counter and murmured
another of my titles, they were expressing a confidence in me which I
strove hard never to betray.

No one will, I am sure, deny me the satisfaction I have in the
reflection that I put a good deal of sincere work into those
stories,--for they are stories, not novels, and were written frankly
to entertain; that they are not wholly ill-written; that they contain
pages that are not without their grace; or that there is nothing
prurient or morbid in any of them. And no matter how jejune stories of
the popular romantic type may be,--a fact, O haughty critic, of which
I am well aware,--I take some satisfaction as a good American in the
knowledge that, in spite of their worthlessness as literature, they
are essentially clean. The heroes may be too handsome, and too sure
of themselves; the heroines too adorable in their sweet distress, as
they wave the white handkerchief from the grated window of the ivied
tower,--but their adventures are, in the very nature of things, _in
usum Delphini_.

Some of my friends of the writing guild boast that they never read
criticisms of their work. I have read and filed all the notices of my
stories that bore any marks of honesty or intelligence. Having served
my own day as reviewer for a newspaper, I know the dreary drudgery
of such work. I recall, with shame, having averaged a dozen books an
afternoon; and some of my critics have clearly averaged two dozen,
with my poor candidates for oblivion at the bottom of the heap! Much
American criticism is stupid or ignorant; but the most depressing, from
my standpoint, is the flippant sort of thing which many newspapers
print habitually. The stage, also, suffers like treatment, even in some
of the more reputable metropolitan journals. Unless your book affords a
text for a cynical newspaper “story,” it is quite likely to be ignored.

I cannot imagine that any writer who takes his calling seriously ever
resents a sincere, intelligent, adverse notice. I have never written
a book in less than a year, devoting all my time to it; and I resent
being dismissed in a line, and called a writer of drivel, by some
one who did not take the trouble to say why. A newspaper which is
particularly jealous of its good name once pointed out with elaborate
care that an incident, described in one of my stories as occurring
in broad daylight, could not have been observed in moonlight by one
of the characters at the distance I had indicated. The same reviewer
transferred the scene of this story half-way across the continent, in
order to make another point against its plausibility. If the aim of
criticism be to aid the public in its choice of books, then the press
should deal fairly with both author and public. And if the critics wish
to point out to authors their failures and weaknesses, then it should
be done in a spirit of justice. The best-selling of my books caused
a number of critics to remark that it had clearly been inspired by a
number of old romances--which I had not only never read, but of several
of them I had never even heard.

A Boston newspaper which I greatly admire once published an editorial
in which I was pilloried as a type of writer who basely commercializes
his talent. It was a cruel stab; for, unlike my heroes, I do not wear
a mail-shirt under my dress-coat. Once, wandering into a church in my
own city, at a time when a dramatized version of one of my stories was
offered at a local theatre, I listened to a sermon that dealt in the
harshest terms with such fiction and drama.

Extravagant or ignorant praise is, to most of us, as disheartening
as stupid and unjust criticism. The common practice of invoking
great names to praise some new arrival at the portal of fame cannot
fail to depress the subject of it. When my first venture in fiction
was flatteringly spoken of by a journal which takes its criticisms
seriously as evidencing the qualities that distinguish Mr. Howells, I
shuddered at the hideous injustice to a gentleman for whom I have the
greatest love and reverence; and when, in my subsequent experiments,
a critic somewhere gravely (it seemed, at least, to be in a spirit of
sobriety!) asked whether a fold of Stevenson’s mantle had not wrapped
itself about me, the awfulness of the thing made me ill, and I fled
from felicity until my publisher had dropped the heart-breaking phrase
from his advertisements. For I may be the worst living author, and at
times I am convinced of it; but I hope I am not an immitigable and
irreclaimable ass.

American book reviewers, I am convinced from a study of my returns
from the clipping bureaus for ten years, dealing with my offerings
in two kinds of fiction, are a solid phalanx of realists where they
are anything at all. This attitude is due, I imagine, to the fact
that journalism deals, or is supposed to deal, with facts. Realism is
certainly more favorably received than romance. I cheerfully subscribe
to the doctrine that fiction that lays strong hands upon aspects of
life as we are living it is a nobler achievement than tales that
provide merely an evening’s entertainment. Mr. James has, however,
simplified this whole question. He says, “The only classification of
the novel that I can understand is into that which has life, and that
which has it not”; and if we must reduce this matter of fiction to
law, his dictum might well be accepted as the first and last canon. And
in this connection I should like to record my increasing admiration
for all that Mr. James has written of novels and novelists. In one
place and another he has expressed himself fully and confidently on
fiction as a department of literature. The lecture on Balzac that he
gave in this country a few years ago is a masterly and authoritative
document on the novel in general. His “Partial Portraits” is a rich
mine of ripe observation on the distinguishing qualities of a number
of his contemporaries, and the same volume contains a suggestive and
stimulating essay on fiction as an art. With these in mind it seems to
me a matter for tears that Mr. James, with his splendid equipment and
beautiful genius, should have devoted himself so sedulously, in his own
performances in fiction, to the contemplation of cramped foreign vistas
and exotic types, when all this wide, surging, eager, laboring America
lay ready to his hand.

I will say of myself that I value style beyond most things; and that
if I could command it, I should be glad to write for so small an
audience, the “fit though few,” that the best-selling lists should
never know me again; for with style go many of the requisites of
great fiction,--fineness and sureness of feeling, and a power over
language by which characters cease to be bobbing marionettes and become
veritable beings, no matter whether they are Beatrix Esmonds, or
strutting D’Artagnans, or rascally Bartley Hubbards, or luckless Lily
Barts. To toss a ball into the air, and keep it there, as Stevenson
did so charmingly in such pieces as “Providence and the Guitar,”--this
is a respectable achievement; to mount Roy Richmond as an equestrian
statue,--that, too, is something we would not have had Mr. Meredith
leave undone. Mr. Rassendyll, an English gentleman playing at being
king, thrills the surviving drop of mediævalism that is in all of us.
“The tired business man” yields himself to the belief that the staccato
of hoofs on the asphalt street, which steals in to him faintly at his
fireside, is really an accompaniment to the hero’s mad ride to save the
king. Ah, the joy in kings dies hard in us!

Given a sprightly tale with a lost message to recover, throw in a fight
on the stair, scatter here and there pretty dialogues between the lover
and the princess he serves, and we are all, as we breathlessly follow,
the rankest royalists. Tales of real Americans, kodaked “in the sun’s
hot eye,” much as they refresh me,--I speak of myself now, not as a
writer or critic, but as the man in the street,--never so completely
detach the weary spirit from mundane things as tales of events that
never were on sea or land. Why should I read of Silas Lapham to-night,
when only an hour ago I was his competitor in the mineral-paint
business? The greatest fiction must be a criticism of life; but there
are times when we crave forgetfulness, and lift our eyes trustfully to
the flag of Zenda.

But the creator of Zenda, it is whispered, is not an author of the
first or even of the second rank, and the adventure story, at its
best, is only for the second table. I am quite aware of this. But
pause a moment, O cheerless one! Surely Homer is respectable; and the
Iliad, the most strenuous, the most glorious and sublime of fictions,
with the very gods drawn into the moving scenes, has, by reason of
its tremendous energy and its tumultuous drama, not less than for
its majesty as literature, established its right to be called the
longest-selling fiction of the ages.

All the world loves a story; the regret is that the great
novelists--great in penetration and sincerity and style--do not always
have the story-telling knack. Mr. Marion Crawford was, I should say,
a far better story-teller than Mr. James or Mr. Howells; but I should
by no means call him a better novelist. A lady of my acquaintance
makes a point of bestowing copies of Mr. Meredith’s novels upon young
working-women whom she seeks to uplift. I am myself the most ardent
of Meredithians, and yet I must confess to a lack of sympathy with
this lady’s high purpose. I will not press the point, but a tired
working-girl would, I think, be much happier with one of my own
beribboned confections than with even Diana the delectable.

Pleasant it is, I must confess, to hear your wares cried by the
train-boy; to bend a sympathetic ear to his recital of your merits,
as he appraises them; and to watch him beguile your fellow travelers
with the promise of felicity contained between the covers of the book
which you yourself have devised, pondered, and committed to paper.
The train-boy’s ideas of the essentials of entertaining fiction are
radically unacademic, but he is apt in hitting off the commercial
requirements. A good book, one of the guild told me, should always
begin with “talking.” He was particularly contemptuous of novels that
open upon landscape and moonlight,--these, in the bright lexicon of
his youthful experience, are well-nigh unsalable. And he was equally
scornful of the unhappy ending. The sale of a book that did not,
as he put it, “come out right,” that is, with the merry jingle of
wedding-bells, was no less than a fraud upon the purchaser. On one
well-remembered occasion my vanity was gorged by the sight of many
copies of my latest offering in the hands of my fellow travelers, as
I sped from Washington to New York. A poster, announcing my new tale,
greeted me at the station as I took flight; four copies of my book
were within comfortable range of my eye in the chair-car. Before the
train started, I was given every opportunity to add my own book to my
impedimenta.

The sensation awakened by the sight of utter strangers taking up your
story, tasting it warily, clinging to it if it be to their liking, or
dropping it wearily or contemptuously if it fail to please, is one of
the most interesting of the experiences of authorship. On the journey
mentioned, one man slept sweetly through what I judged to be the most
intense passage in the book; others paid me the tribute of absorbed
attention. On the ferry-boat at Jersey City, several copies of the book
were interposed between seemingly enchanted readers and the towers and
spires of the metropolis. No one, I am sure, will deny to such a poor
worm as I the petty joys of popular recognition. To see one’s tale
on many counters, to hear one’s name and titles recited on boats and
trains, to find in mid-ocean that your works go with you down to the
sea in ships, to see the familiar cover smiling welcome on the table
of an obscure foreign inn,--surely the most grudging critic would not
deprive a writer of these rewards and delights.

There is also that considerable army of readers who write to an
author in various keys of condemnation or praise. I have found
my correspondence considerably augmented by the large sales of a
book. There are persons who rejoice to hold before your eyes your
inconsistences; or who test you, to your detriment, in the relentless
scale of fact. Some one in the Connecticut hills once criticized
severely my use of “that” and “which,”--a case where an effort at
precision was the offense,--and I was involved, before I knew it, in a
long correspondence. I have several times been taken severely to task
by foes of tobacco for permitting my characters to smoke. Wine, I have
found, should be administered to one’s characters sparingly, and one’s
hero must never produce a flask except for restorative uses,--after,
let us say, a wild gallop, by night, in the teeth of a storm to relieve
a beleaguered citadel, or when the heroine has been rescued at great
peril from the clutch of the multitudinous sea. Those strange spirits
who pour out their souls in anonymous letters have not ignored me. I
salute them with much courtesy, and wish them well of the gods. Young
ladies whose names I have inadvertently applied to my heroines have
usually dealt with me in agreeable fashion. The impression that authors
have an unlimited supply of their own wares to give away is responsible
for the importunity of managers of church fairs, philanthropic
institutions, and the like, who assail one cheerfully through the
mails. Before autograph-hunters I have always been humble; I have felt
myself honored by their attentions; and in spite of their dread phrase,
“Thanking you in advance,”--which might be the shibboleth of their
fraternity, from its prevalence,--I greet them joyfully, and never
filch their stamps.

Now, after all, could anything be less harmful than my tales? The
casual meeting of my hero and heroine in the first chapter has always
been marked by the gravest circumspection. My melodrama has never been
offensively gory,--in fact, I have been ridiculed for my bloodless
combats. My villains have been the sort that anyone with any kind
of decent bringing-up would hiss. A girl in white, walking beside a
lake, with a blue parasol swinging back of her head, need offend no
one. That the young man emerging from the neighboring wood should not
recognize her at once as the young woman ordained in his grandfather’s
will as the person he must marry to secure the estate, seems utterly
banal, I confess; but it is the business of romance to maintain
illusions. Realism, with the same agreed state of facts, recognizes
the girl immediately--and spoils the story. Or I might put it thus:
in realism, much or all is obvious in the first act; in romance,
nothing is quite clear until the third. This is why romance is more
popular than realism, for we are all children and want to be surprised.
Why villains should always be so stupid, and why heroines should so
perversely misunderstand the noble motives of heroes, are questions I
cannot answer. Likewise before dear old Mistaken Identity--the most
venerable impostor in the novelist’s cabinet--I stand dumbly grateful.

On the stage, where a plot is most severely tested, but where the
audience must, we are told, always be in the secret, we see constantly
how flimsy a mask the true prince need wear. And the reason for this
lies in the primal and--let us hope--eternal childlikeness of the
race. The Zeitgeist will not grind us underfoot so long as we are
capable of joy in make-believe, and can renew our youth in the frolics
of Peter Pan.

You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam,
reverently dusting your Jane Austen,--I am sadder than you can be
that my talent is so slender; but is it not a fact that you have
watched me at my little tricks on the mimic stage, and been just a
little astonished when the sparrow, and not the dove, emerged from the
handkerchief? But you prefer the old writers; and so, dear friends, do
I!

Having, as I have confessed, deliberately tried my hand at romance
merely to see whether I could swim the moat under a cloud of
the enemy’s arrows, and to gain experience in the mechanism of
story-writing, I now declare (though with no illusion as to the
importance of the statement) that I have hung my sword over the
fireplace; that I shall not again thunder upon the tavern door at
midnight; that not much fine gold could tempt me to seek, by means
however praiseworthy, to bring that girl with the blue parasol to a
proper appreciation of the young gentleman with the suit-case, who even
now is pursuing her through the wood to restore her lost handkerchief.
It has been pleasant to follow the bright guidon of romance; even now,
from the window of the tall office-building in which I close these
reflections, I can hear the bugles blowing and look upon

  “Strangest skies and unbeholden seas.”

But I feel reasonably safe from temptation. Little that men do is,
I hope, alien to me; and the life that surges round me, and whose
sounds rise from the asphalt below, or the hurrying feet on the tiles
in my own corridor of this steel-boned tower,--the faint tinkle of
telephones, the click of elevator doors,--these things, and the things
they stand for, speak with deep and thrilling eloquence; and he who
would serve best the literature of his time and country will not ignore
them.


THE END



  The Riverside Press

  CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
  U . S . A



FOOTNOTE:


[1] “Heckling the Church,” _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1911.



TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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