Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 8

I write myself; therefore I feel free to say what I please about authors; but if you, sir, or madam, who read, but do not write, were to give voice to the reflections that are even now beginning to distill from my pencil, I should doubtless resent them. And here, indeed, I am faced by the sudden reflection that much of what I say myself I might resent in the mouths of others. This leads to a whole new train of thought, which, however, I refuse to take, and board instead the one I set out for,--The Authors' Unlimited. There are many things to be remarked about authors, but in so short a paper it is possible to touch upon only a very few. One of the first facts that strikes the investigator in this field is that members of my profession do not always appear to endear themselves to those with whom they have dealings.

'What do you think of authors?' I once asked an editor.

'I hate 'em!' he answered without a moment's hesitation.

Another editor a.s.sured me, with a weary sigh, that authors were 'kittle cattle.' This affords a writer a little leap of amus.e.m.e.nt. So editors suffer from authors, even as authors from editors! Well, yes, we _are_ kittle cattle! But some of this is due, no doubt, to what people expect of us. I was presented once to a lady who immediately fixed me with an eager eye.

'I am making a study of the habits of authors,' she announced. (Here a dreadful sinking of the heart a.s.sailed me.) 'Kindly tell me at what hour you retire.'

'Usually at half-past ten,' I answered wretchedly.

At that, as I had expected, her eyebrows went up. 'The author of _When All Was Dark_,' she informed me, 'sits up all night. She says she cannot sleep until she has savored the dawn.' However, she was kind enough to give me another chance. 'What do you eat?' she asked.

'Three hearty meals a day,' I answered.

'Not _breakfast_!' she pleaded. 'Why, St. George Dreamer _never_ takes more than three drops of brandy on a lump of sugar in the morning. Just the sight of a coffee cup will upset his work for a week.'

And then she left me, sure, I have no doubt, that no real author could confess to such distressingly normal habits as mine.

Doubtless she is an eager reader of all those little paragraphs informing us how authors write. How this one has to have his black mammy rub his head for an hour before he can even think of work; and that one confesses that to write a love scene she must have the odor of decayed bananas in the room. Well, the world would be a sadder place without these little paragraphs. Would that I had something of a like nature to offer! But alas! I have no black mammy, and the smell of over-ripe fruit leaves my hero cold. Also, to give forth such gems of information one must be able to observe a certain rule. It is, Don't laugh or you might wake up. This rule is always sacredly in force at literary gatherings.

The fact of being an author, and of being at an authors' meeting, induces, it appears, an intense seriousness. In my younger days I did not realize this, and once at a gathering of this nature, I asked a carefree question. 'Do you think,' I inquired of the author next me, 'that it is possible for an unmusical person to write verse?'

I confess now that I put the question somewhat in the spirit of the Irishman, who, asking after his friend's health, added, 'Not that I care a d.a.m.n, but it makes conversation.' Heaven defend me from ever again making so much conversation! A gleam shot up in my author's eye. 'Let us go over and ask Professor ---- ' he cried. 'He wrote _What Poets Cannot Do_. He's just the man to tell us!' And before I could escape, he dragged me through the press of authors, and flung me before the professor, with the tag, 'Unmusical, but aspires to write verse,--is this possible?'

I know now how the beetle feels beneath the microscope. Seeing the little group we made, two young authors 'hurried up, and more, and more, and more.' They surrounded me to listen, to inspect, to comment; they asked one another eager questions about me, they compared notes, they appealed to the author of _What Poets Cannot Do_, and always their dreadful eyes were fixed upon me. Never, never again will I dare the dreadful seriousness of an authors' meeting with an idle question!

I have also learned another lesson. It is how to converse with authors.

I shudder now to think of my early and crude attempts in this matter.

The remembrance of one particular occasion stands out with dreadful vividness. I had been introduced to a distinguished writer. She raised her eyes to mine for a wan instant, a pale flicker of recognition pa.s.sed over her face, and then--silence. Readers,--nay, let me call you friends while I make this terrible confession,--_I broke that silence!_ I was young; I did not understand. I do now. I have never been able since to read 'The Ancient Mariner'--I know too well the awfulness of having shot an albatross. 'The lady,' I said to my inexperienced self, 'does not care to converse; she expects you to do so.' Accordingly, I broke into light and cheerful talk, something in conversation corresponding, I fear, to what in dry goods the clerk recommends as 'a nice line of spring styles.' I realize that only a series of ill.u.s.trations can make the situation clear. Imagine then, if you please, a tinkling cymbal serenading a smouldering volcano; a puppy trying to woo the Sphinx to a game of tag; sunlit waves breaking upon a 'stern and rock-bound coast,'

and you may get a faint idea of the situation. I began almost immediately to experience that far-from-home sensation of which Humpty-Dumpty speaks with so much feeling. As I beheld one after another of my little remarks dash itself to nothingness against that stern and rock-bound coast, only the time and the place kept me from bursting into tears. Fortunately it did not last too long. In another minute one or the other of us would have shattered into the maniac's wild laughter.

And I have every reason to fear that I should have been that one.

Others, however, realizing the awful thing I was doing, rushed up and separated us. Sympathetic hands were stretched to her; low words were murmured, and she was drawn into a secluded corner where her silence might be preserved from any further onslaughts of a like sacrilegious nature. But no one stretched a hand to _me_; no sympathetic words were murmured in _my_ ear!

I now know that in conversations with authors there should be long pauses. This is because every remark, after being received by the ear, must be submitted to a strict brain a.n.a.lysis, and then given a soul-bath before it is proper to venture a reply. I have found, also, that in answering too quickly, I myself lose caste. I now make it a point never to respond to a question addressed to me by an author until I have counted twenty. If the author is very distinguished, I make it fifty for good measure.

Much more remains to be said about authors. I realize that I have, as it were, merely sc.r.a.ped the surface of the subject. s.p.a.ce, however, allows me only room to add one last anecdote. But this one may indeed prove more illuminating than all that has gone before. Once, then, in a certain city where I was visiting, I was invited to attend a meeting of its authors' club. 'Now at this meeting,' I instructed myself before going, 'you will probably encounter the most serious species of author native to this climate.' Accordingly I set forth with a light and expectant heart. As I entered the hall I was aware of another person entering from an opposite door,--a serious, awkward person, with just that peculiar, vague, and almost feeble-minded expression that I have come to a.s.sociate with writers in general. 'Behold, my child, the SERIOUS AUTHOR,' I commented happily to myself. I looked again, and saw it was _myself in a mirror_!

The Provincial American

By Meredith Nicholson

_Viola._ What country, friends, is this?

_Captain._ Illyria, lady.

_Viola._ And what should I do in Illyria?

My brother he is in Elysium.

_--Twelfth Night._

I am a provincial American. My forbears 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 was a grown man and had voted before I saw the sea or any Eastern city.

In attempting to ill.u.s.trate 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 n.o.bler advertis.e.m.e.nt--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 freshwater 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,--the kind of place that enjoys street-car transfers, a woman's club, and a post office with carrier delivery.

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 recollection 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 pa.s.sed 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 Th.o.r.eau's belief that 'the flora of Ma.s.sachusetts 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 courthouse 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 personae_ 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. 'Woodchuck sessions' have been held by many American legislatures.

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 the 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 of humorous narration.

This man kept a country store, and his att.i.tude 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 has 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 he was always busy about something. 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 ma.n.u.script 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, hara.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.script for the press, and 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 pa.s.sed. 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.