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 damn, 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 passed
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 illustrations 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 analysis, 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 scraped the surface of the subject. Space, 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 associate 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 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 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 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 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 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. '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 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 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 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, 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 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 illustration; 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 like the European plan; 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 knitting us
together, so that soon we shall all be keyed to a metropolitan pitch.
The proof adduced in support of this is of 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 biennially, 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.