flashes of genuine sagacity; even Bob’s stockbroker view of the sexual
duel, given such a male as Kirby and such females as Becky, is probably
more sound than not. But the chief fascination of the story, I am bound
to say, lies in its very deficiencies as a human document and a work
of art--in its naïve lack of humor, its elaborate laboring of the
obvious, its incredible stiltedness and triteness. There are passages
that actually suggest Daisy Ashforth. For example: “She was biting her
nails while talking to Delaher, and biting them after he left. _Then
she put on white cotton gloves to prevent this nervous habit._” Again
(Kirby has abandoned Becky for another girl, Charlotte, formerly his
stenographer):
“_May I say something to you?_” she whispered at last.
“What is it, Charlotte?”
“I want a child, and a child with you.”
Somehow, this “May I say something to you?” gives me vast delight: the
respectful politeness of the perfect stenographer surviving into the
most confidential of moments! No such child is achieved--Charlotte,
in fact, dies before it can be born--, and so we miss her courteous
request for permission to name it after its father. But she and
Kirby, alas, sin the sin, and what is worse, they sin it under his
mother’s roof. What is still worse, they do it with her knowledge and
connivance. She is greatly taken, in fact, with Charlotte, and advises
Kirby to marry her. I quote her argument:
“If Byron had mistresses he was also a rider and a fencer and a poet;
and if Webster may have been a drinker, he was great as a lawyer
and a speaker. If Charlotte has had extra-marital relationships,
she is a capable housekeeper, a good secretary, a woman skilled
in many things; and she has all kinds of virtues, like humor and
self-control, and the spirit of happiness, and an essential honesty.”
I leave the rest to posterity! What will it make of Masters as
novelist? When it turns from the heroic and lovely lines of “Ann
Rutledge” to the astounding banalities of “Mirage” what will it say?
III. IN MEMORIAM: W. J. B.
Has it been duly marked by historians that the late William Jennings
Bryan’s last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A
curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most
sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most
successful. His quarry, of course, was not _Musca domestica_ but _Homo
neandertalensis_. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up
and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of
Chautauqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of Idealism ran in the
veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and
men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were
full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (_Alosa sapidissima_)--there
the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He
knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the
most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city
proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated
his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered
him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years.
But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away
the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities
of the air--out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance
to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The
news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would
choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge
his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and
enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not
known since Johann fell to Herod’s ax.
There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days
were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found
him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes.
He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the
refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main
street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland
valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms
and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust--so
accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up
early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill.
He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked
country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked the
country sounds and country smells. I believe that this liking was
sincere--perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no
uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted
him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy
Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but
wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks
he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he
was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while
that they were laughing at him--if not at his baroque theology, then at
least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him.
To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end,
as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns,
they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the
peer of Abraham. His old enemy, Wilson, aspiring to the same white and
shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His
place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved
any of his hair, then it is curing gallstones down there to-day.
But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear,
of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended
too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully
literate men, even of the kind who write school-books. There was a
scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more
than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the
most romantic editorial writer could dredge up, save in the humorless
South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused
by his earnestness--that under his clowning, as under that of the
juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But
this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said
of Mary Baker G. Eddy, the late Czar Nicholas, or Czolgosz. The truth
is that even Bryan’s sincerity will probably yield to what is called,
in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed
imperialism in the Philippines, or when he fed it with deserving
Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the
Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and
began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed
against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform,
with a grave reserved among the generals? Was he sincere when he
denounced the late John W. Davis, or when he swallowed Davis? Was he
sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark?
Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he
bawled for the faggot and the stake in Tennessee?
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was
sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded
by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany
without shame or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the
first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.
It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled,
that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a
high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around
him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological
hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and
noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a
gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What
animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply
ambition--the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar
of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes.
He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming
half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits
against their betters, that he himself might shine. His last battle
will be grossly misunderstood if it is thought of as a mere exercise
in fanaticism--that is, if Bryan the Fundamentalist Pope is mistaken
for one of the bucolic Fundamentalists. There was much more in it than
that, as everyone knows who saw him on the field. What moved him, at
bottom, was simply hatred of the city men who had laughed at him so
long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted
for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against
them, to punish them for their execution upon him by attacking the very
vitals of their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of any
merely religious frenzy, however inordinate. When he began denouncing
the notion that man is a mammal even some of the hinds at Dayton
were agape. And when, brought upon Darrow’s cruel hook, he writhed
and tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawling against the baldest
elements of sense and decency like a man frantic--when he came to that
tragic climax of his striving there were snickers among the hinds as
well as hosannas.
Upon that hook, in truth, Bryan committed suicide, as a legend as well
as in the body. He staggered from the rustic court ready to die, and
he staggered from it ready to be forgotten, save as a character in a
third-rate farce, witless and in poor taste. It was plain to everyone
who knew him, when he came to Dayton, that his great days were behind
him--that, for all the fury of his hatred, he was now definitely an
old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant
manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a
close glance showed him as carefully shaven as an actor, and clad in
immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and
it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, in the obscene manner
of the late Samuel Gompers. The resonance had departed from his voice;
what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows
that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In the old days, under the magic
of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was
always audible.
When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the office
of the rustic lawyers who were his associates in the Scopes case, the
trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I
had printed in the _Nation_, a week or so before, an article arguing
that the Tennessee anti-evolution law, whatever its wisdom, was at
least constitutional--that the rustics of the State had a clear right
to have their progeny taught whatever they chose, and kept secure from
whatever knowledge violated their superstitions. The old boy professed
to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders
to understand that I was a publicist of parts. Not to be outdone, I
admired the preposterous country shirt that he wore--sleeveless and
with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two ambassadors.
But that was the last touch of amiability that I was destined to see
in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By
the end of the week he was simply a walking fever. Hour by hour he
grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal
magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my
place in the courtroom, standing upon a table, I looked directly down
upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes
fascinated me; I watched them all day long. They were blazing points
of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then
they wandered to me, and I got my share, for my reports of the trial
had come back to Dayton, and he had read them. It was like coming under
fire.
Thus he fought his last fight, thirsting savagely for blood. All sense
departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He
descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates at the trial
table blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up--to
lead his forlorn mob of imbeciles against the foe. That foe, alas,
refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the whole battle as
a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the
prevailing spirit. One day he lured poor Bryan into the folly I have
mentioned: his astounding argument against the notion that man is a
mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe in it.
There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency
of the Republic--there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering
stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him
on: he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice.
So he was prepared for the final slaughter. He came into life a hero,
a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor
mountebank.
The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in America
in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the
campaign of 1896. He will be remembered perhaps, as its supreme
impostor, the _reductio ad absurdum_ of its pretension. Bryan came very
near being President. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected.
He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for
Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and
the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare
to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President
of the United States may be an ass, but he at least doesn’t believe
that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and
that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly
on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors
waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue
Room. We have escaped something--by a narrow margin, but still we have
escaped.
That is, so far. The Fundamentalists, once apparently sweeping all
before them, now face minorities prepared for battle even in the
South--here and there with some assurance of success. But it is too
early, it seems to me, to send the firemen home; the fire is still
burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at
any moment. The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his
malice, started something that it will not be easy to stop. In ten
thousand country towns his old heelers, the evangelical pastors, are
propagating his gospel, and everywhere the yokels are ready for it.
When he disappeared from the big cities, the big cities made the
capital error of assuming that he was done for. If they heard of him
at all, it was only as a crimp for real-estate speculators--the heroic
foe of the unearned increment hauling it in with both hands. He seemed
preposterous, and hence harmless. But all the while he was busy among
his old lieges, preparing for a _jacquerie_ that should floor all his
enemies at one blow. He did his job competently. He had vast skill at
such enterprises. Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will
hit a Fundamentalist almost everywhere in the United States to-day.
They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their _shamans_, and with
a saint, now, to venerate. They are thick in the mean streets behind
the gas-works. They are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden
for mortal minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in
little red schoolhouses. They march with the Klan, with the Christian
Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order of United American Mechanics,
with the Epworth League, with all the rococo bands that poor and
unhappy folk organize to bring some light of purpose into their lives.
They have had a thrill, and they are ready for more.
Such is Bryan’s legacy to his country. He couldn’t be President, but he
could at least help magnificently in the solemn business of shutting
off the Presidency from every intelligent and self-respecting man.
The storm, perhaps, won’t last long, as time goes in history. It may
help, indeed, to break up the democratic delusion, now already showing
weakness, and so hasten its own end. But while it lasts it will blow
off some roofs.
IV. THE HILLS OF ZION
It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton,
but I went down there very willingly, for I had good reports of the
sub-Potomac bootleggers, and moreover I was eager to see something of
evangelical Christianity as a going concern. In the big cities of the
Republic, despite the endless efforts of consecrated men, it is laid
up with a wasting disease. The very Sunday-school superintendents,
taking jazz from the stealthy radio, shake their fire-proof legs; their
pupils, moving into adolescence, no longer respond to the proliferating
hormones by enlisting for missionary service in Africa, but resort
to necking and petting instead. I know of no evangelical church from
Oregon to Maine that is not short of money: the graft begins to peter
out, like wire-tapping and three-card monte before it. Even in Dayton,
though the mob was up to do execution upon Scopes, there was a strong
smell of antinomianism. The nine churches of the village were all half
empty on Sunday, and weeds choked their yards. Only two or three of
the resident pastors managed to sustain themselves by their ghostly
science; the rest had to take orders for mail-order pantaloons or work
in the adjacent strawberry fields; one, I heard, was a barber. On the
courthouse green a score of sweating theologians debated the darker
passages of Holy Writ day and night, but I soon found that they were
all volunteers, and that the local faithful, while interested in their
exegesis as an intellectual exercise, did not permit it to impede the
indigenous debaucheries. Exactly twelve minutes after I reached the
village I was taken in tow by a Christian man and introduced to the
favorite tipple of the Cumberland Range: half corn liquor and half
coca-cola. It seemed a dreadful dose to me, spoiled as I was by the
bootleg light wines and beers of the Eastern seaboard, but I found that
the Dayton illuminati got it down with gusto, rubbing their tummies and
rolling their eyes. I include among them the chief local proponents of
the Mosaic cosmogony. They were all hot for Genesis, but their faces
were far too florid to belong to teetotalers, and when a pretty girl
came tripping down the Main street, which was very often, they reached
for the places where their neckties should have been with all the
amorous enterprise of movie actors. It seemed somehow strange.
An amiable newspaper woman of Chattanooga, familiar with those uplands,
presently enlightened me. Dayton, she explained, was simply a great
capital like any other great capital. That is to say, it was to Rhea
county what Atlanta was to Georgia or Paris to France. That is to say,
it was predominantly epicurean and sinful. A country girl from some
remote valley of the county, coming into town for her semi-annual
bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, shivered on approaching
Robinson’s drug-store quite as a country girl from up-State New York
might shiver on approaching the Metropolitan Opera House or the Ritz
Hotel. In every village lout she saw a potential white-slaver. The hard
sidewalks hurt her feet. Temptations of the flesh bristled to all sides
of her, luring her to hell. This newspaper woman told me of a session
with just such a visitor, holden a few days before. The latter waited
outside one of the town hot-dog and coca-cola shops while her husband
negotiated with a hardware merchant across the street. The newspaper
woman, idling along and observing that the stranger was badly used by
the heat, invited her to step into the shop for a glass of coca-cola.
The invitation brought forth only a gurgle of terror. Coca-cola, it
quickly appeared, was prohibited by the country lady’s pastor, as
a levantine and hell-sent narcotic. He also prohibited coffee and
tea--and pies! He had his doubts about white bread and boughten meat.
The newspaper woman, interested, inquired about ice-cream. It was, she
found, not specifically prohibited, but going into a coca-cola shop to
get it would be clearly sinful. So she offered to get a saucer of it,
and bring it out to the sidewalk. The visitor vacillated--and came near
being lost. But God saved her in the nick of time. When the newspaper
woman emerged from the place she was in full flight up the street!
Later on her husband, mounted on a mule, overtook her four miles out
the mountain pike.
This newspaper woman, whose kindness covered city infidels as well as
Alpine Christians, offered to take me back in the hills to a place
where the old-time religion was genuinely on tap. The Scopes jury,
she explained was composed mainly of its customers, with a few Dayton
sophisticates added to leaven the mass. It would thus be instructive to
climb the heights and observe the former at their ceremonies. The trip,
fortunately, might be made by automobile. There was a road running out
of Dayton to Morgantown, in the mountains to the westward, and thence
beyond. But foreigners, it appeared, would have to approach the sacred
grove cautiously, for the upland worshipers were very shy, and at the
first sight of a strange face they would adjourn their orgy and slink
into the forest. They were not to be feared, for God had long since
forbidden them to practice assassination, or even assault, but if they
were alarmed a rough trip would go for naught. So, after dreadful
bumpings up a long and narrow road, we parked our car in a little
woodpath a mile or two beyond the tiny village of Morgantown, and made
the rest of the approach on foot, deployed like skirmishers. Far off
in a dark, romantic glade a flickering light was visible, and out of
the silence came the rumble of exhortation. We could distinguish the
figure of the preacher only as a moving mote in the light: it was like
looking down the tube of a dark-field microscope. Slowly and cautiously
we crossed what seemed to be a pasture, and then we crouched down along
the edge of a cornfield, and stealthily edged further and further. The
light now grew larger and we could begin to make out what was going on.
We went ahead on all fours, like snakes in the grass.