"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."
He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him,
and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two
is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would
never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his
other brother was Peter Pan.
Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the taking of
sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester Hills for gunsites
against the Mexican invasion. And we have made lists of guns, and
medicines, and tinned things, in case we should ever happen to go
elephant-shooting in Africa. But we weren't going to hurt the
elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a hippopotamus and he was always ashamed
and sorry. I think he never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind
of a sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said the
last word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in "The Bar
Sinister"?--"where nobody hunts us, and there is nothing to hunt."
Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most exciting of all
sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He hunted for wounded men who
were out in front of the trenches and still under fire, and found some
of them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an
honorary member of their regiment just because he was charming and a
faithful friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a
brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even
better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have
dusted every corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in
which he played a heroic or successful part. Always he was running at
top speed, or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of
water (for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the
worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole truth with
lightning flashes of wit and character building and admiration or
contempt. Until the invention of moving pictures the world had nothing
in the least like his talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had
developed and prepared the slides, his words sent the light through
them, and lo and behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own
mind, exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the spoken
word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of things that he had
seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived. The history of the last
thirty years, its manners and customs and its leading events and
inventions, cannot be written truthfully without reference to the
records which he has left, to his special articles and to his letters.
Read over again the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March
of the Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too
zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is dead, the
world can never be the same again.
But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter will come in
due time before the unerring tribunal of posterity.
One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into contact
with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own use (he uses a
good deal, because every day he does the work of five or six men), he
distributes the inexhaustible remainder among those who most need it.
Men go to him tired and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be
alive, still gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil
himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same
effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute
energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way
of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and
discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the
scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a
book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and
from the receiver there poured into you affection and encouragement.
But the great times, of course, were when he came in person, and the
temperature of the house, which a moment before had been too hot or too
cold, became just right, and a sense of cheerfulness and well-being
invaded the hearts of the master and the mistress and of the servants
in the house and in the yard. And the older daughter ran to him, and
the baby, who had been fretting because nobody would give her a
double-barrelled shotgun, climbed upon his knee and forgot all about
the disappointments of this uncompromising world.
He was touchingly sweet with children. I think he was a little afraid
of them. He was afraid perhaps that they wouldn't find out how much he
loved them. But when they showed him that they trusted him, and,
unsolicited, climbed upon him and laid their cheeks against his, then
the loveliest expression came over his face, and you knew that the
great heart, which the other day ceased to beat, throbbed with an
exquisite bliss, akin to anguish.
One of the happiest days I remember was when I and mine received a
telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And I thank God that
little Miss Hope is too young to know what an appalling loss she has
suffered. . . .
Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter was allowed
to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could wait on the table (and
though I say it, that shouldn't, she could do this beautifully, with
dignity and without giggling), and perhaps the dinner was good, or R.
H. D. thought it was, and in that event he must abandon his place and
storm the kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps the gardener
was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He, too, came in for
praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese iris so beautiful; as for
his, they wouldn't grow at all. It wasn't the iris, it was the man
behind the iris. And then back he would come to us, with a wonderful
story of his adventures in the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and
leaving behind him a cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of
life, and a gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the
Actinidia vines.
It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that he was
with us most and we learned to know him best, and that he and I became
dependent upon each other in many ways.
Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very difficult and
complicated. And he who had given so much friendship to so many people
needed a little friendship in return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a
time to live in a house whose master and mistress loved each other, and
where there were children. Before he came that first year our house
had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend."
Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first days of
the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't draw all the time,
but we pretended that it did, and with much pretense came faith. From
the fireplace that smoked to the serious things of life we extended our
pretendings, until real troubles went down before them--down and out.
It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest spring I ever
lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spiraeas
were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet
violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep
pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were
in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In
the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every
morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the
woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire (that didn't smoke
because of pretending) and talked until the next morning. He was one
of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest pleasure not in
looking backward or forward, but in what is going on at the moment.
Weeks did not have to pass before it was forced upon his knowledge that
Tuesday, the fourteenth (let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew
it the moment he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived the Tuesday sunshine
making patterns of bright light upon the floor. The sunshine rejoiced
him and the knowledge that even before breakfast there was vouchsafed
to him a whole hour of life. That day began with attentions to his
physical well-being. There were exercises, conducted with great vigor
and rejoicing, followed by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and joyous
singing of ballads.
At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and, copied in
marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood
six feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine head
carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a
child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him.
He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but
so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days
that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his hands flat upon the floor.
The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at his door
you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly. He was hard at
work, doing unto others what others had done unto him. You were a
stranger to him; some magazine had accepted a story that you had
written and published it. R. H. D. had found something to like and
admire in that story (very little perhaps), and it was his duty and
pleasure to tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would
send you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had
drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden promise in a
half-column of unsigned print; R. H. D. would find you out, and find
time to praise you and help you. So it was that when he emerged from
his room at sharp eight o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and
hungry, and whistled and double-shuffled with his feet, out of
excessive energy, and carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and
letters and telegrams.
Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a sullen,
dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced
in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is, or
ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest.
Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of
statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.
Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's work
(else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free
conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a
newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so
much as a wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom.
He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say,
he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious
ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He
did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously
human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of
corresponding, "The German March through Brussels," was probably
written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks he was
the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no
facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any
facility that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy
and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every
phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of,
the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases,
paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over
again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to
describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and
elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail which the
most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with
reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a process
of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to
recall; and after each omission he would ask himself: "Does the
picture remain?" If it did not, he restored the detail which he had
just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so
on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the
reader one of those, swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures (complete in
every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and
continuously adorned.
But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of holiday, R. H.
D. emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one
hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about
every writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven
words. He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he
wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes
that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch.
A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had
denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never
seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect
for his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of
the best Havana tobacco. At a time of his own deliberate choosing,
often after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his
cigar. He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and
he used all the smoke there was in it.
He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch
whiskey. But these things were friends to him, and not enemies. He
had toward food and drink the Continental attitude; namely, that
quality is far more important than quantity; and he got his
exhilaration from the fact that he was drinking champagne and not from
the champagne. Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions of
right and wrong he had a will of iron. All his life he moved
resolutely in whichever direction his conscience pointed; and, although
that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes
of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I think it can never
once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some
critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are
impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never called upon
his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or
self-mastery of which his own life could not furnish examples.
Fortunately, he did not have for his friends the same conscience that
he had for himself. His great gift of eyesight and observation failed
him in his judgments upon his friends. If only you loved him, you
could get your biggest failures of conduct somewhat more than forgiven,
without any trouble at all. And of your molehill virtues he made
splendid mountains. He only interfered with you when he was afraid
that you were going to hurt some one else whom he also loved. Once I
had a telegram from him which urged me for heaven's sake not to forget
that the next day was my wife's birthday. Whether I had forgotten it
or not is my own private affair. And when I declared that I had read a
story which I liked very, very much and was going to write to the
author to tell him so, he always kept at me till the letter was written.
Have I said that he had no habits? Every day, when he was away from
her, he wrote a letter to his mother, and no swift scrawl at that, for,
no matter how crowded and eventful the day, he wrote her the best
letter that he could write. That was the only habit he had. He was a
slave to it.
Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence. They threw
their arms about each other and rocked to and fro for a long time. And
it hadn't been a long absence at that. No ocean had been between them;
her heart had not been in her mouth with the thought that he was under
fire, or about to become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been
away upon a little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried
treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's skull and
a broken arrowhead, and R. H. D. had been absent from his mother for
nearly two hours and a half.
I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail to give
more than a few hints of what he was like. There isn't much more space
at my command, and there were so many sides to him that to touch upon
them all would fill a volume. There were the patriotism and the
Americanism, as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones, and from
which sprang all those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers:
those trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those
quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and dexterous
exposures of this and that, from an absolutely unexpected point of
view. He was a quickener of the public conscience. That people are
beginning to think tolerantly of preparedness, that a nation which at
one time looked yellow as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White,
and Blue is owing in some measure to him.
R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He
thought that peace at the price which our country has been forced to
pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of those who have
gradually taught this country to see the matter in the same way.
I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the surface of
my subject. And that is a failure which I feel keenly but which was
inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to say of those deplorable
"personal interviews" which appear in the newspapers, and in which the
important person interviewed is made by the cub reporter to say things
which he never said, or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a
fifteen-dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week brain."
There is, however, one question which I should attempt to answer. No
two men are alike. In what one salient thing did R. H. D. differ from
other men--differ in his personal character and in the character of his
work? And that question I can answer off-hand, without taking thought,
and be sure that I am right.
An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the Recording
Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic to which even his
brilliancy, his clarity of style, his excellent mechanism as a writer
are subordinate; and to which, as a man, even his sense of duty, his
powers of affection, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness are
subordinate, too; and that characteristic is cleanliness. The biggest
force for cleanliness that was in the world has gone out of the
world--gone to that Happy Hunting Ground where "Nobody hunts us and
there is nothing to hunt."