that yellowish-gray or grayish-yellow light that had so disturbed
the slumbers of others in that apartment. My awakening was so complete
that all my faculties were alert at once. I felt under my pillow and
found my weapon there. I looked to its chambers and found the charges
undisturbed. The caps were in place, and I felt myself armed for any
encounter.
But I had resolved in advance, to be deliberate, self-possessed, and
calm, whatever might happen, and I kept faith with myself. Instead of
hastily springing from the bed I lay there for a time watching the weird
light as it slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in intensity, and
trying to decide whether they were right who had described as "yellowish
gray" or they who had called it "grayish yellow." I decided that the
gray distinctly predominated, but in the meanwhile the steady increase
in the light and in its pervasiveness warned me, and I slipped out of
bed, taking my pistol with me, to the dressing case on the other side
of the room--the side on which the great oaken door opened.
The rain was still beating heavily against the window blinds, and the
strange, yellowish gray light was still slowly but steadily increasing.
I was resolute, however, in my determination not to be disturbed or
hurried by any manifestation. In response to that determination I
glanced at the mirror and decided that the mysterious light was
sufficient for the purpose, and I resolved I would shave.
Having done so, I bathed--a little hurriedly, perhaps, because of the
rapidly increasing light. I was deliberate, however, in donning my
clothing, and not until I was fully dressed did I turn to leave the
room. Glancing at every object in it--all now clearly visible, though
somewhat shadowy in outline--I decided at last upon my retreat. I turned
the key, and the bolt in the lock shot back with sound enough to startle
calmer nerves than mine.
I turned the knob, but the door refused to open!
For a moment I was puzzled. Then I remembered that it was a double lock.
A second later I was out of that chamber, and the oaken door of it was
securely shut behind me.
I went down the great stairway, slowly, deliberately, in pursuance of my
resolution; I entered the large hallway below, and thence passed into
the oak-wainscoted dining-room, where I sat down to breakfast with the
rest of the company.
It was nine o'clock of a dark, rainy morning.
XXV
In Virginia at the time of which I am writing, everybody, men, women,
and children, read books and talked about them. The annual output of
the publishers was trifling then, as compared with the present flood of
new books, and as a consequence everybody read all the new books and
magazines, and everybody talked about them as earnestly as of politics
or religion. Still more diligently they read old books, the classics of
the language. Literature was regarded as a vital force in human affairs,
and books which in our time might relieve the tedium of a railway
journey and be forgotten at its end, were read with minute attention and
discussed as earnestly as if vital interests had depended upon an
accurate estimation of their quality.
As a consequence, authorship was held in strangely glamorous esteem. I
beg pardon of the English language for making that word "glamorous"; it
expresses my thought, as no other term does, and it carries its meaning
on its face.
[Sidenote: The "Solitary Horseman"]
I remember that in my student days in Richmond there came a visitor
who had written one little book--about Rufus Choate, I think, though
I can find no trace of it in bibliographies. I suspect that he was a
very small author, indeed, in Boston, whence he came, but he was an
AUTHOR--we always thought that word in capital letters--and so he was
dined and wined, and entertained, and not permitted to pay his own hotel
bills or cab charges, or anything else.
Naturally a people so disposed made much of their own men of letters,
of whom there was quite a group--if we reckon their qualifications as
generously as the Virginians did. Among them were three at least whose
claim to be regarded as authors was beyond dispute. These were John
Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and the English novelist, G. P. R. James,
who at that time was serving as British consul at Richmond. And there
was Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, who played the part of literary queen
right royally.
Mr. James was a conspicuous figure in Richmond. He was a robust
Englishman in his late fifties, rather short and rather stout.
The latter impression was aided by the fact that in his afternoon
saunterings about the town, he usually wore a sort of roundabout, a
coat that ended at his waist and had no tails to it. To the ribald
and the jocular he was known as "the Solitary Horseman" because of his
habit of introducing novels or chapters with a lonely landscape in which
a "solitary horseman" was the chief or only figure. To those of us who
were disposed to be deferential he was known as "the Prince Regent,"
in memory of the jest perpetrated by one of the wits of the town.
Mr. James's three initials, which prompted John G. Saxe to say that
he "got at the font his strongest claims to be reckoned a man of
letters"--stood for "George Payne Rainsford," but he rarely used anything
more than the initials--G. P. R. When a certain voluble gentlewoman asked
Tom August what the initials stood for he promptly replied:
"Why, George Prince Regent, of course. And his extraordinary courtesy
fully justifies his sponsors in baptism for having given him the name."
The lady lost no time in telling everybody of the interesting fact--and
the novelist became "Prince Regent James" to all his Richmond friends
from that hour forth.
John R. Thompson was the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_.
Scholar, poet, and man of most gentle mind, it is not surprising that
in later years, when the old life was war-wrecked, Mr. William Cullen
Bryant made him his intimate friend and appointed him to the office of
literary editor of the _Evening Post_, which Mr. Bryant always held to
be the supreme distinction possible to an American man of letters. I
being scarcely more than a boy studying law in the late fifties, knew
him only slightly, but my impression of him at that time was, that with
very good gifts and a certain charm of literary manner, he was not yet
fully grown up in mind. He sought to model himself, I think, upon his
impressions of N. P. Willis, and his aspiration to be recognized as a
brilliant man of society was quite as marked as his literary ambition.
He was sensitive to slights and quite morbidly apprehensive that those
about him might think the less of him because his father was a hatter.
Socially at that time and in that country men in trade of any kind were
regarded as rather inferior to those of the planter class.
When I knew Thompson better in after years in New York he had outgrown
that sort of nonsense, and was a far more agreeable companion because
of the fact.
[Sidenote: John Esten Cooke--Gentleman]
Chief among the literary men of Richmond was John Esten Cooke. His novel
"The Virginia Comedians" had made him famous in his native state, and
about the time I write of--1858-9--he supplemented it with another story
of like kind, "Henry St. John, Gentleman." As I remember them these were
rather immature creations, depending more upon a certain grace of manner
for their attractiveness than upon any more substantial merit. Certainly
they did not compare in vigor or originality with "Surrey of Eagle's
Nest" or any other of the novels their author wrote after his mind had
been matured by strenuous war experience. But at the time of which I
write they gave him a literary status such as no other Virginian of the
time could boast, and for a living he wrote ceaselessly for magazines
and the like.
The matter of getting a living was a difficult one to him then, for the
reason that with a pride of race which some might think quixotic, he had
burdened his young life with heavy obligations not his own. His father
had died leaving debts that his estate could not pay. As the younger man
got nothing by inheritance, except the traditions of honor that belonged
to his race, he was under no kind of obligation with respect to those
debts. But with a chivalric loyalty such as few men have ever shown,
John Esten Cooke made his dead father's debts his own and little by
little discharged them with the earnings of a toilsome literary
activity.
His pride was so sensitive that he would accept no help in this, though
friends earnestly pressed loans upon him when he had a payment to meet
and his purse was well-nigh empty. At such times he sometimes made his
dinner on crackers and tea for many days together, although he knew he
would be a more than welcome guest at the lavish tables of his many
friends in Richmond. It was a point of honor with him never to accept
a dinner or other invitation when he was financially unable to dine
abundantly at his own expense.
The reviewer of one of my own stories of the old Virginia life, not
long ago informed his readers that of course there never were men so
sensitively and self-sacrificingly honorable as those I had described in
the book, though my story presented no such extreme example of the man
of honor as that illustrated in Mr. Cooke's person and career.
I knew him intimately at that time, his immediate friends being my own
kindred. Indeed, I passed one entire summer in the same hospitable house
with him.
Some years after the war our acquaintance was renewed, and from that
time until his death he made my house his abiding place whenever he had
occasion to be in New York. Time had wrought no change in his nature. He
remained to the end the high-spirited, duty-loving man of honor that I
had known in my youth; he remained also the gentle, affectionate, and
unfailingly courteous gentleman he had always been.
He went into the war as an enlisted man in a Richmond battery, but was
soon afterward appointed an officer on the staff of the great cavalier,
J. E. B. Stuart.
"I wasn't born to be a soldier," he said to me in after years. "Of
course I can stand bullets and shells and all that, without flinching,
just as any man must if he has any manhood in him, and as for hardship
and starvation, why, a man who has self-control can endure them when
duty demands it, but I never liked the business of war. Gold lace on
my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red
and yellow calico with turkey feathers in my headgear to add to the
gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is the
fit work of brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are
organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is
really nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to
the imagination. As an old soldier, you know how small a part personal
gallantry plays in the machine work of war nowadays."
[Sidenote: How Jeb Stuart Made a Major]
Nevertheless, John Esten Cooke was a good soldier and a gallant one. At
Manassas I happened to see him at a gun which he was helping to work and
which we of the cavalry were supporting. He was powder-blackened and he
had lost both his coat and his hat in the eagerness of his service at
the piece; but during a brief pause in the firing he greeted me with a
rammer in his hand and all the old cheeriness in his face and voice.
On Stuart's staff he distinguished himself by a certain laughing
nonchalance under fire, and by his eager readiness to undertake Stuart's
most perilous missions. It was in recognition of some specially daring
service of that kind that Stuart gave him his promotion, and Cooke used
to tell with delight of the way in which the great boyish cavalier did
it.
"You're about my size, Cooke," Stuart said, "but you're not so broad in
the chest."
"Yes, I am," answered Cooke.
"Let's see if you are," said Stuart, taking off his coat as if stripping
for a boxing match. "Try that on."
Cooke donned the coat with its three stars on the collar, and found it
a fit.
"Cut off two of the stars," commanded Stuart, "and wear the coat to
Richmond. Tell the people in the War Department to make you a major and
send you back to me in a hurry. I'll need you to-morrow."
When I visited him years afterwards at The Briars, his home in the
Shenandoah Valley, that coat which had once been Stuart's, hung upon the
wall, as the centerpiece of a collection of war relics, cherished with
pride of sentiment but without a single memory that savored of animosity.
The gentle, courteous, kindly man of letters who cherished these things
as mementoes of a terrible epoch had as little in his bearing to suggest
the temper of the war time as had his old charger who grazed upon the
lawn, exempt from all work as one who had done his duty in life and was
entitled to ease and comfort as his reward.
XXVI
The old life of the Old Dominion is a thing of the dead past, a memory
merely, and one so different from anything that exists anywhere on earth
now, that every reflection of it seems the fabric of a dream. But its
glamor holds possession of my mind even after the lapse of half a
century of years, and the greatest joy I have known in life has come
from my efforts to depict it in romances that are only a veiled record
of facts.
It was not a life that our modern notions of economics can approve, but
it ministered to human happiness, to refinement of mind, to culture, and
to the maintenance of high ideals of manhood and womanhood. It bred a
race of men who spoke the truth, lived uprightly, and met every duty
without a shadow of flinching from personal consequences. It reared a
race of women fit to be the wives and mothers of such men. Under its
spell culture was deemed of more account than mere education; living was
held in higher regard than getting a living; refinement meant more than
display; comfort more than costliness, and kindliness in every word and
act more than all else.
[Sidenote: A Plantation Modernized]
I know an old plantation where for generations a family of brave men and
fair women dwelt in peace and ministered in gracious, hospitable ways to
the joy of others. Under their governance there was never any thought of
exploiting the resources of the plantation for the sake of a potential
wealth that seemed superfluous to people of contented mind who had
enough. The plantation supported itself and all who dwelt upon it--black
and white. It educated its sons and daughters and enabled them to
maintain a generous hospitality. More than this they did not want or
dream of wanting.
There are twenty-two families living on that plantation now, most of
them growing rich or well-to-do by the cultivation of the little truck
farms into which the broad acres have been parceled out. The woodlands
that used to shelter the wild flowers and furnish fuel for the great
open fireplaces, have been stripped to furnish kindling wood for kitchen
ranges in Northern cities. Even the stately locust trees that had shaded
the lawns about the old mansion have been converted into policemen's
clubs and the like, and potatoes grow in the soil where greensward used
to carpet the house grounds.
Economically the change means progress and prosperity, of course, but to
me the price paid for it seems out of proportion to the goods secured.
But then I am old-fashioned, and perhaps, in spite of the strenuous life
I have led, I am a sentimentalist,--and sentiment is scorned as silly in
these days.
There is another aspect of the matter that deserves a word, and I have a
mind to write that word even at risk of anathema from all the altars of
sociology. At seventy years of age one is less sensitive to criticism
than at thirty.
All the children of the twenty-two truck farming families on that old
plantation go to school. They are taught enough to make out bills, add
up columns of figures, and write business letters to their commission
merchants. That is what education means now on that plantation and on
hundreds of others that have undergone a like metamorphosis. No thought
or dream of culture enters into the scheme. Under the old system
rudimentary instruction was merely a stepping stone by which to climb
up to the education of culture. Under the theories of economics it is
a great gain thus to substitute rudimentary instruction for all in the
place of real education and culture for a class. But is it gain? Is the
world better off with ten factory hands who can read, write, and cipher,
than with one Thomas Jefferson or George Wythe or Samuel Adams or
Chancellor Livingston who knows how to think? Are ten factory girls or
farmers' wives the full equivalent of one cultured gentlewoman presiding
gracefully and graciously over a household in which the amenities of
life are more considered than its economics?
Meanwhile the education of the race of men and women who once dwelt
there has correspondingly lost its culture aspect. The young men of that
old family are now bred to be accountants, clerks, men of business, who
have no time to read books and no training that leads to the habit of
thinking; the young women are stenographers, telegraph operators, and
the like. They are estimable young persons, and in their way charming.
But is the world richer or poorer for the change?
It is not for me to answer; I am prejudiced, perhaps.
However it may be, the old life is a thing completely dead and done
for, and the only compensation is such as the new affords. Everything
that was distinctive in that old life was burned out by the gunpowder
of the Civil War. Even the voices of the Virginia women--once admired
throughout the land--are changed. They still say "right" for "very," and
"reckon" for "think," and their enunciation is still marked by a certain
lack of emphasis, but it is the voice of the peacock in which they speak,
not that of the dove.
[Sidenote: An Old Fogy's Questionings]
Whenever I ask myself the questions set down above, I find it necessary
to the chastening of my mind to recite my creed:
I believe that every human being born into this world has a right to do
as he pleases, so long as in doing as he pleases he does not interfere
with the equal right of any other human being to do as he pleases;
I believe in the unalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness;
I believe that it is the sole legitimate function of government to
maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone.
Nevertheless, I cannot escape a tender regret when I reflect upon what
we have sacrificed to the god Progress. I suppose it is for the good
of all that we have factories now to do the work that in my boyhood
was done by the village carpenter, tanner, shoemaker, hatter, tailor,
tin-smith, and the rest; but I do not think a group of factory "hands,"
dwelling in repulsively ugly tenement buildings and dependent upon
servitude to the trade union as a means of escaping enslavement by an
employing corporation, mean as much of human happiness or signify as
much of helpful citizenship as did the home-owning, independent village
workmen of the past. In the same way I do not think the substitution
of a utilitarian smattering for all for the education and culture
of a class has been altogether a gain. As I see young men flocking by
thousands to our universities, where in earlier times there were scant
hundreds in attendance, I cannot avoid the thought that most of these
thousands have just enough education of the drill sort to pass the
entrance examinations and that they go to the universities, not for
education of the kind that brings enlargement of mind, but for technical
training in arts that promise money as the reward of their practice.
And I cannot help wondering if the change which relegates the Arts
course to a subordinate place in the university scheme is altogether a
change for the better. Economically it is so, of course. But economics,
it seems to me, ought not to be all of human life. Surely men and women
were made for something more than mere earning capacity.
But all this is blasphemy against the great god Progress and heresy to
the gospel of Success. Its voice should be hushed in a land where fame
is awarded not to those who think but to those who organize and exploit;
where men of great intellect feel that they cannot afford to serve the
country when the corporations offer them so much higher salaries; and
where it is easier to control legislation and administration by purchase
than by pleading.
The old order changed, both at the North and at the South when the war
came, and if the change is more marked in the South than at the North it
is only because the South lost in the struggle for supremacy and
suffered desolation in its progress.
XXVII
I have elsewhere pointed out in print that Virginia did not want war,
or favor secession. Her people, who had already elected the avowed
emancipationist, John Letcher, to be their governor, voted by heavy
majorities against withdrawal from the Union. In her constitutional
convention, called to consider what the old mother state should do after
the Cotton States had set up a Southern Confederacy, the dominant force
was wielded by such uncompromising opponents of secession as Jubal A.
Early, Williams C. Wickham, Henry A. Wise, and others, who when war came
were among the most conspicuous fighters on the Southern side. It is
important to remember that, as Farragut said, Virginia was "dragooned
out of the Union," in spite of the abiding unwillingness of her people.
[Sidenote: Under Jeb Stuart's Command]
I was a young lawyer then, barely twenty-one years of age. I spoke
and voted--my first vote--against the contemplated madness. But in
common with the Virginians generally, I enlisted as soon as war became
inevitable, and from the 9th of April, 1861, to the 9th of April,
1865--the date of Lee's surrender--I was a soldier in active service.
I was intensely in earnest in the work of the soldier. As I look back
over my seventy years of life, I find that I have been intensely in
earnest in whatever I have had to do. Such things are temperamental, and
one has no more control over his temperament than over the color of his
eyes and hair.
Being intensely in earnest in the soldier's work, I enjoyed doing it,
just as I have keenly enjoyed doing every other kind of work that has
fallen to me during a life of unusually varied activity.
I went out in a company of horse, which after brief instruction at
Ashland, was assigned to Stuart's First Regiment of Virginia Cavalry.
The regiment was composed entirely of young Virginians who, if not
actually "born in the saddle," had climbed into it so early and lived in
it so constantly that it had become the only home they knew. I suppose
there was never gathered together anywhere on earth a body of horsemen
more perfectly masters of their art than were the men of that First
Regiment, the men whom Stuart knew by their names and faces then,
and whose names and faces he never afterward forgot, for the reason,
as he often said to us, that "You First Regiment fellows made me a
Major-General." Even after he rose to higher rank and had scores of
thousands of cavaliers under his command, his habit was, when he wanted
something done of a specially difficult and dangerous sort, to order a
detail from his old First Regiment to do it for him.
The horsemanship of that regiment remained till the end a model for
emulation by all the other cavalry, and, in view of the demonstrations
of it in the campaign preceding Manassas (Bull Run) it is no wonder that
when the insensate panic seized upon McDowell's army in that battle the
cry went up from the disintegrated mob of fugitives that they could not
be expected to stand against "thirty thousand of the best horsemen since
the days of the Mamelukes." The "thirty thousand" estimate was a gross
exaggeration, Stuart's command numbering in fact only six or seven
hundred, but the likening of its horsemanship to that of the Mamelukes
was justified by the fact.
As a robust young man who had never known a headache I keenly enjoyed
the life we cavalrymen led that summer. It was ceaselessly active--for
Stuart's vocabulary knew not the word "rest"--and it was all out of
doors in about as perfect a summer climate as the world anywhere
affords.