--a pagan and a worshipper of Pan, loving the woods and waters,
and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto
by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for
worship made stately and to order on certain recurring calendar
days) rather than to most of the brick and mortar pens that are
supposed to hold in some way that which the visible universe no
more contains than the works of his hands contain the sculptor
who makes them; for I take it that the glittering show revealed
by the mightiest telescope, or by the hope mightier even than the
imagination of the highest mind, is but as a parcel of motes
shining in a single thin beam of the great sun unseen and hidden
behind shutters never to be wide opened.
Our "Virginia Realist" needed not to call upon his imagination for
personalities with which to fill his free-hand sketches of nature, for
there was in his kindly humor and geniality a charm which drew forth
from all he met just the qualities necessary to fill in his world with
the characters he desired. A wide and deep sympathy enabled him to
make that world so real and true that his readers entered it at once
and found therein such entertaining companionship that they were fain
to abide there ever after.
In 1835, when a boy fresh from Parley's History of America, the future
humorist made a journey from Cumberland County to Lynchburg, hearing
by the way alarming sounds which the initiated recognized as the
report of the blasting of rocks on the "Jeems and Kanawha Canell." To
the boy, with second-hand memories of Washington and his men tramping
confusedly about his mind, the noises signified a cannonade and he
waited in terrified excitement for the British bullet that was to put
him beyond the conflicts of the world, trying to postpone the evil
moment by hiding between two large men who were fellow-passengers with
him. This was in the days when the celebrated "Canell" was a subject
for the imagination to contemplate as a triumph of futurity and an
object for hope to feed upon--a period in which the traveller embarked
upon a fascinating batteau and spent a week of dreamy beauty in
sailing from Lynchburg to Richmond and ten days back to the hill city.
Time was not money in those days, it was vision and peace and color
and sunshine and all wherein the soul of man delighteth itself and
reveleth in the joy of living. The stream of imagination was no more
dammed than the river in which "shad used to run to Lynchburg,"
showing a highly developed æsthetic taste on the part of the shad. The
youthful traveller went to the Eagle Hotel and took a view of Main
Street and dared not even wonder if he should ever be big enough to
live in Richmond. Rapt soul of youth's dawn, with myriad dreams all to
vanish when the sun rises upon the morning!
On his return from an absence of two years in the North the great
Canal was completed and, while his early impression of the
unparallelled magnitude of the Queen City had suffered revision, his
visions of journeying by canal were yet to be realized. At the foot of
Eighth Street, Richmond, he took the packet-boat, passed under Seventh
Street bridge, and with the other passengers lingered on deck to see
Richmond slowly disappear in the distance. That night the doleful
packet-horn, contrasted with his memory of the cheerful, musical note
of the old stage-horn, brought to the lad his first realization of the
inadequacies of modern improvements.
Ascending the James the traveller had a view of the best of the old
Virginia life, its wealth of beauty, its home comfort, its atmosphere
of serenity, of old memories, rich and vivid, like the wine that lay
cob-webbed in ancestral cellars, of gracious hospitality, of a softly
tinted life like the color in old pictures and the soul in old books.
The gentle humorist lived to see that life pass away from the Old
Dominion and all too soon he vanished into another world where, like
all true Virginians, he expected to find the old home-life again.
These canal days were in the early Dickens period, and occasionally
the youthful traveller could not resist the temptation to go below and
lose himself in those pages which had then almost as potent a charm in
their novelty as they have now in their friendly familiarity. But the
river-isle, which held an interest in futurity for him because of his
intention to found a romance there when he should be "big enough to
write for the papers," would draw him back to the deck. There was a
path across the hills that the passengers must follow, disembarking
for that purpose. Near Manchester was a haunted house which he looked
upon with those ghostly shivers that made a person so delightfully
uncomfortable, for he, like the rest of us, did believe in ghosts,
whatever he might say to the contrary. There was the ruined mill and,
best of all, the Three-Mile Lock, inspiring him with the highest
ambition of his life, to be a lock-keeper. Then came Richmond; the
metropolis of the world, to the young voyager.
[Illustration: DR. GEORGE W. BAGBY
From the portrait in the possession of the family]
Dr. Bagby studied for his profession at the Medical College of the
University of Pennsylvania and from there went to Lynchburg, opening
an office where now stands the opera house. Unfortunately for his
professional career but happily for the cause of the literature of
Virginia life, the office of the _Lynchburg Virginian_ was near, and
its editor, Mr. James McDonald, proved a kindred soul to the young
physician. In the absences of the editor, Dr. Bagby filled his chair
and fell a victim to the fascination with which the Demon of the
Fourth Estate lures his chosen to their doom. In Lynchburg he first
found his true calling and there, too, he met with his first failure,
the demise of the _Lynchburg Express_, of which he was part owner, and
which went to the wall by reason of the well-known weakness of genius
in regard to business matters.
Upon the collapse of the _Express_ Dr. Bagby went to Washington as
correspondent for a number of papers, and while there attained
distinction as a humorist through the "Letters of Mozis Addums,"
written for the _Southern Literary Messenger_, of Richmond.
His abiding place is of hazy uncertainty, one of his kinsmen
saying--"He didn't live anywhere," He might as well have dwelt in his
own "Hobgoblinopolis." His wanderings had taught him the peculiar
charm of the Virginia roads of that day, as evidenced by the
aspiration of "Mozis Addums" when contemplating the limitations of his
"Fifty Millions":
I want to give Virginia a perfect system of county roads, so that
one may get off at a station and go to the nearest country-house
without breaking his neck, and it would take five hundred
millions to do that.
It may be, as the doctor laments, that "The old Virginia gentleman,
All of the olden time," has passed away, the colonial house is
modernized, and the ghost, the killing of whom would be "an enormity
far greater than the crime of killing a live man," has been laid to
rest for half a century, but the old scenes and the old-time life come
back to us who once knew it, in the pages of the perennial boy who
recalls the time when "me and Billy Ivins and the other fellows set
forth with six pine poles and a cymling full of the best and biggest
fishing worms," to fish in the Appomattox where it "curves around the
foot of Uncle Jim's plantation," and where there is a patriarchal
beech with a tangle of roots whereon the Randolphs of historic note
were wont to repose in the days long gone. This fishing party is under
the fair October skies when "the morn, like an Eastern queen, is
sumptuously clad in blue and gold; the sheen of her robes in dazzling
sunlight, and she comes from her tent of glistening, silken, celestial
warp, beaming with tender smiles." "It is a day of days for flatback,
provided the moon is right." But "Billy Ivins swears that the
planetary bodies have nothing to do with fish--it's all confounded
superstition." So they cast in their hooks, "Sutherland's best," and
talk about Harper's Ferry and "old Brown" until one of the party
"thinks he has a nibble" and begs for silence, which at once
supervenes out of respect for the momentous interests hanging in the
balance. When the excitement is over the frivolous Bagby takes
advantage of the relief from suspense to make an exasperating pun,
after the manner of a newspaper man, and "Billy Ivins swears he will
kill him for a fool."
Oh, there were great old times on the Appomattox in the olden days,
before its waves had turned battle-red and flashed that savage tint
along the river-bank for all coming time.
[Illustration: "AVENEL"
The home of the Burwells, where Dr. Bagby spent many happy days]
A part of the conversation shows us that this fishing expedition took
place in the autumn of 1859, not a year before Dr. Bagby was called to
the post of editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, taking the
place of the poet, John R. Thompson, who was sent to England to lead
the forlorn hope of a magazine to represent the Southern cause in
London. A banquet was given at Zetelle's restaurant as a farewell to
Mr. Thompson and welcome to Dr. Bagby.
The office of the _Messenger_ was in the Law Building, a four-storied
structure erected in 1846 on the southeast corner of Capitol Square,
fronting on Franklin Street. Here he was hard at work, making the
_Messenger_ worthy of its former editors, his predecessor, Mr.
Thompson, Mr. White, of early days, Edgar A. Poe, and a succession of
brilliant writers, only less widely known, when the guns before Sumter
tempted the new editor to the field, a position for which he was ill
fitted as to physical strength, whatever might be the force of his
patriotism. He was soon running risks of pneumonia from the effects of
over-drilling and the chilling breezes from Bull Run Mountain, and
making up his mind "not to desert, but to get killed at the first
opportunity," that being the most direct route he could think of to
the two prime essentials of life, a clean shirt and solitude. He
neither deserted nor was killed, but was detailed to write letters and
papers for one of the officers, and slept through the fight of the
18th at Manassas as a result of playing night orderly from midnight to
morning.
Under the cloudless sky of the perfect Sunday, the twenty-first, he
watched the progress of the battle till the cheer that rang from end
to end of the Confederate line told him that the South had won. After
midnight that night he carried to the telegraph office the message in
which President Davis announced the victory and, walking back through
the clear, still night, saw the comet, forerunner of evil, hanging
over the field, as if in recognition of a fiery spirit on earth akin
to its own. At headquarters on Monday, the 22d, he looked out at the
pouring rain and raged over the inaction which kept the victorious
army idle on the field of victory instead of following up the
advantage by a march into the enemy's Capital, a movement which he
thought could have been carried through to complete success.
Having watched over his wounded friend, Lieutenant James K. Lee, until
death came with eternal peace. Dr. Bagby was sent with the dead
soldier to Richmond and soon afterward was discharged because of ill
health, "and thus ended the record of an unrenowned warrior."
He returned to his work on the _Messenger_ and the editorial sanctum
became the meeting place of the wits of Richmond. It was here that the
celebrated Confederate version of "Mother Goose" was evolved from the
conjoined wisdom of the circle and written with the stub of the
editorial pencil on the "cartridge-paper table-cloth," one stanza
dealing with a certain Northern general thus:
Little Be-Pope came on with a lope,
Jackson, the Rebel, to find him;
He found him at last, then ran very fast,
With his gallant invaders behind him.
The various authors were astonished to find their productions in the
next issue of the _Messenger_ and were later dismayed when the verses
were read at a meeting of the Mosaic Club, each with the name of the
writer attached.
While editor of the _Messenger_, Dr. Bagby wrote occasionally for the
_Richmond Examiner_, thereby becoming associated in a friendly way
with its editor, John M. Daniel, whose brilliant and continuous fight
upon the administration at Richmond kept him vividly before the
public. Though the genial doctor deplored the aggressiveness of the
_Examiner_, he could not resist the temptation to employ his trenchant
pen in treating of public affairs. This led to his possession of the
famous latchkey which "fitted the door of the house on Broad Street,
opposite the African Church," a key of which he wrote that it "has its
charm," and certainly one which he made more enchanting to his readers
than any other such article has ever proved.
These two men, so different in view-point and expression, so similar
in principle and purpose, met in Washington in 1861 at Brown's Hotel,
that famous old hostelry dear to the Southern heart in the years
before the tide of war swept the old Washington away forever and
brought a new South to take the place of the old plantation life.
Congenial as they were in many ways, the possession of the latchkey,
Dr. Bagby tells us, did not argue an intimate personal relation, as
the fancy of the brilliant editor of the _Examiner_ was apparently
changeable, and wavered when he discovered that his assistant neither
played chess nor talked sufficiently to inspire him to conversational
excellence. But the key opened to the younger man, whenever he so
willed, the pleasant three-storied brick house on Broad Street where
the valiant editor kept bachelor's hall in a manner that would suggest
the superfluity of complicating the situation with a wife and family.
That latchkey gave to its holder entrance to the first floor front
room parlor where hung two fine paintings, the special treasures of
the fastidious owner, and if he could not play chess upon the handsome
mosaic chess-table he could at least enjoy its artistic beauty. The
dining-room contained a set of solid antique-patterned tables to which
Mr. Daniel was wont to refer as the former property of "old
Memminger," that is, Secretary Memminger of the Confederate Treasury,
who had sold his household effects on leaving his home on Church Hill.
Over the mantel in the bachelor's chamber hung a miniature on ivory,
"the most beautiful I have ever seen," said the doctor, an unknown
beauty whose charms mystified as well as enchanted the observer; a
wondrously accomplished lady of title and wealth whom Mr. Daniel had
known abroad. The visitor must have viewed with some degree of
curiosity the effective arrangement of mirrors in the dressing-room,
whereby the owner of the mansion surveyed himself front, rear, head
and foot, as he made his toilet, perhaps reflecting humorously upon
the dismay of his manager, Mr. Walker, upon being advised as to the
necessity of wearing a white vest to a party: "But, Mr. Daniel,
suppose a man hasn't got a white vest and is too poor these war times
to buy one?" "---- it, sir! let him stay at home," was the decisive
answer.
On a second floor passage was an object which must have excited more
envy than the magnificent mirrors and solid old furniture were capable
of arousing--a bag of Java coffee, and coffee thirty dollars a
pound--the latter fact not deterring the luxurious owner of this
stately abode from imbuing his pet terriers with the coffee-drinking
habit. A little room cut off from a passage in the third story was a
library of old and rare editions of the classics. A back room, sunlit
and warm, gave a view of James River, the Henrico Hills, and the
spacious dells and forests of Chesterfield. To the mind of Dr. Bagby
all these things were represented by "John M. Daniel's Latchkey" and,
for all the charm of "Home, Sweet Home," is it not better to have the
privileges without the responsibilities of a latchkey?
Next to the editorial office of the _Messenger_ that of the _Daily
Examiner_ was the place with which Dr. Bagby was, perhaps, best
acquainted in Richmond. There, with the fiery editor, he spent his
evenings in reading proof, comforted by a mild cigar and protected by
a Derringer which Mr. Daniel would put on the table when he first
arrived, a not unnecessary precaution, for if there was one place more
dangerous than another in the Richmond of war days it was almost any
point in the near vicinity of the belligerent editor of the
_Examiner_.
Dr. Bagby was married to Miss Parke Chamberlayne of Richmond, and we
may be sure that she was the model from which he drew his charming
study of "the Virginia lady of the best type," who accompanies "The
Old Virginia Gentleman" in his pages.
After the close of the war Dr. Bagby attained high distinction as a
lecturer on Southern topics and later served his State as assistant
secretary. But in all that he did there was with him the lost dream of
the nation he had served so well through the dark and stormy years of
strife, and in August, 1883, he passed beyond into the land where
earth's broken hearts are renewed to youth.
It was written of him: "There is no man left in Virginia fit to lift
the lid of his inkstand."
"WOMAN AND POET"