THE PROGNOSTICATOR’S CLUB
The young disciple minister and I decide that the people of Springfield
who see the vision of the city of the future should be brought together,
and we write some carefully worded invitations. We organize a
Prognosticator’s Club and meet in the Sun Parlor of the Leland Hotel.
One of the first to join, after our florist friend and the great hostess
of Springfield, is John Fletcher, a Doubter. He is a person in whom we
place much confidence in practical affairs. He is high authority in the
financial circles of Springfield. He is religious, on Sunday only, from
eleven till twelve-thirty, when he sits in his pew. He represents the
present State House view which takes for granted that the fewer ideas
men have the better, if only the crowd in power “get theirs.” The
general assumption is:—politics is business and business is politics and
the only worth while citizens are those that “get the money,” and, of
course, those others who keep it safely and who correctly add the
accounts till the money is wanted. They hate any new current in any
party. And they hate the idea of any clan wanting anything except
established well-dressed bank accounts to rule the city. Children are
sent to universities to polish their manners, but not to bring back any
changed thoughts on these subjects.
The gentleman who incarnates this dream lives in the north, is therefore
a Republican. He is quite sure the Emancipation Proclamation meant that
millionaires are exempt from criticism, except from other millionaires
or their shrewedest lackeys, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was
sent forth into the world to establish more thoroughly the lackey, the
toady, the tuft hunter, the snob, the bootlicker, and the parasite, in
the service of the stupidest holders of money and land. He will defend
this position quite ardently, almost in those terms, and he is quite
sure that anyone who protests against his views is a “red.” And “red,”
“radical,” “anarchist,” and “liberal” are absolutely synonymous,
according to his thinking. He is sure that anyone who does not want to
be a millionaire or serve one well is contemplating arson. He is quite
sure that every large bank account is automatically moral, that every
small one is almost moral, and the one crime is to be without money. He
is quite convinced that Abraham Lincoln died to establish such ideals
more firmly in the Republican Party, and when he is in the South he
maintains that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson lived and toiled and
suffered to establish them in the Democratic Party, and did it with
eminent success: that all other notions have been recently imported from
the shameful streets of Russia. When he sent his son to college he urged
him to spend money on the conservative professors and their sons and
daughters, and to put the radical professors in bad odor with the “best
fellows,” and get them fired as soon as the trustees would listen to one
so young.
All this point of view is in my friend’s tone of voice and gesture. He
has inherited part of his money, and married the rest, and the income
pays for a good caretaker. He himself is a physician for the most
extensively landed families in central Illinois. He dresses well, so
people think he knows all about medicine. He is squarely set, has a
heavy jaw, a steadying manner, a kindly disposition, pays the best
salaries to his office boy and secretaries and the people who work his
farms. He has the greatest aversion to oaths, bad manners, adultery, and
has a literary turn. Though he looks like an old prize fighter with a
touch of deacon-sleekness, he reads Montaigne, Lord Chesterfield,
Thackeray, Shakespeare, and the like. He enjoys discussing in the most
sympathetic way every human trait that has to do with purely domestic
dramatic and personal emotions. His wife is a valiant Daughter of the
American Revolution and his daughter belongs to the most snobbish
sorority to be discovered for miles. He has been “right in the wagon”
whenever a bit of near royalty has passed through Springfield, and his
manner though blunt, was deferential. His wildest turn is for radical
painters, and he has the best collection west of the Hudson of the now
forgotten cubists.
Of far different sort is the next member of our Club. She is of the fine
nerved creatures of this world, a spring beauty in whose conversation I
take delight. She is a teacher in one of the Springfield ward schools,
and a sober little reader of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and we quarrel a
bit about that. But her taste there represents her desire for fine
grained English whatever the thought conveyed. When Clara Horton takes
delight in life, it comes in a flash that sets her friends aflame. The
school marm is gone. She ceases to admonish me. The imaginary eyes of
her censorious pupils are banished, and I am no longer a pupil, and she
is the daughter of a nymph of the most delicate mood and a faun of the
gentlest sort. Her whole physical fabric is aglow with the idea of the
book or the event or the mere day’s sunshine or tomorrow’s movie. Her
skin shows the whiteness of a stock that has been too inbred for many
generations for complete vigor, the gentle nymph and the gentle faun met
too often, and there were not quite enough bullies or peasants among her
far European ancestors. Her people have been for many generations in
America. Every line of her family, north and south, has been remembered
with the greatest comprehension of every taste and impulse. She gets her
silky black hair from one grandmother, and her thousand dimples from
another no doubt. She openly hates the complacency of our “first
families.” Ideas go pouring through her head, all the time.
As for the families representing the defended and entrenched fortunes of
Springfield, theirs is still the practice of keeping their children out
of public school, for fear of contamination with teachers who read such
papers as _The Atlantic Monthly_, and other vulgar publications. The
children must be sent off to teachers who flatter and flatter and
flatter. But we do not talk about these matters generally. We talk about
New Springfield.
The Prognosticators discover that still others have been dreaming
joyfully all alone of the future of Springfield. One fiery artist of our
town brings in quite definite testimony. He was born in the village of
Rochester, near to Springfield, but has no sign in his manner of being a
citizen of the United States. Quite an old man, Gregory Webster has the
ways of boulevard heroes of Paris who swung their canes like
swashbucklers, among the cafes, in 1876. He speaks English with a French
accent. Yet he has been a tremendous force for good in the history of
American Art. Thousands upon thousands of pupils have passed through his
studios. He has been a courageous patron of young artists. With
infallible taste he has purchased their best pictures, as soon as their
pictures were good, thereby giving them reputations twenty years sooner,
and himself “going broke.” He has championed the most elegant
craftsmanship. In torrents of tireless language, with an unflagging zeal
and animation, he has talked down and out the cheap and popular
conception of the uses of art. He has exalted the great portrait
masters. He has exalted brushwork and drawing into a ritual, and good
color into a finality of the soul. He has been marvelously generous in
his sympathy and his patience with budding talent, and therefore the
artists’ aspiration of America for a whole generation has come to his
front door. He is, in actual subject matter, in his own pictures an
unimaginative creature. He is able to paint fishes better than men and
rabbits better than women, and yet, since he painted fishes and rabbits
with Olympian finality, they have been enshrined in the highest
galleries of the world next to portraits of human creatures by Rembrandt
and Hals and Velasquez.
A stranger to these others comes to me. Nathan Levi, son of one of the
Rabbis of our tiny Springfield Ghetto. He at once wins my heart. I have
always found myself in peculiar sympathy with the Jews. Once past the
moment of shyly seeking my confidence, he is full of the Jewish
expressiveness and demonstration. He is astonished beyond measure to
discover a double consciousness within himself. In this century he is as
orthodox as his father, and a young man devoted to the routine of the
pawn shop. In 2018 he is in a hundred ways opposite.
Another newcomer, Margaret Evans, is a Christian Science Reader. She is
beautiful, in this day, and though she does not speak of her mirror in
2018, as does the headlong Jewish boy, I know she will always be
beautiful in body and soul. She has fathomed the holy grace and immortal
gladness of her teaching, and I can well believe she is immortal in this
place, under our oak and apple trees.
Still another is a Springfield Negress who is a preacher among her own
people. She has not a single Caucasian contour to her face or figure,
yet all the world must admit that Daisy Pearl Johnson is beautiful as
she is divinely young. She is “black but comely,” according to the
scripture. And she is eager in all the matters of the mind and spirit.
Another prophet, Nathaniel Davidson, gathers several denominations under
one temporary roof, and preaches to them about hell. He was once a Y. M.
C. A. physical director, and he ranges in attributes from Caliban to
higher things, and looks much like Douglas Fairbanks and William. A.
Sunday. He receives an invitation to join the Prognosticator’s Club.
Then there is a woman who was a welfare worker in France. Ruth Everett
has such a sleek and sophisticated grace, and her face is so snobbish
yet so Alexandrian Greek that I have often called her “The Daughter of
Lysippus.” In every line is the elegance that old sculptor might have
loved. In pomp, upon her throne, and she makes any chair her throne, she
is like “Sara Siddons as the Tragic Muse” as painted by Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
And here you have men and women who see the vision, each in a strange
and mystical fashion.