world. Give him a full glass, a roistering companion, and he could race
with the devil himself. Give him the noblest words of penitence and he
could produce the accompanying remorseful emotions. He could shrive
himself with the dignity and majesty of a saint. So now for the moment
he was every whit David broken by his transgression. Grief descended
upon him and shook him like a blessing:
‘Hear me speedily, O Lord: my spirit faileth,’ he read on woefully.
‘Hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into
the pit.’ And so on until he came to the end.
I did not understand, but I felt the wind of sorrow blowing from the
eloquent lips of my father. I was bursting with emotion, my lips
primped, my eyes fixed upon him full of tears. The one thing that
restrained me was mother’s inscrutable face. She not only understood
the Psalm but the man who was reading it. She simply used this method
to change the scenes of his singularly adaptable spirit.
‘Let us pray,’ he rumbled in a choked voice.
I have a lively recollection of this prayer. It was a good one. Very
few people have the real gift of prayer, and then only under the
emotional pressure of remorse. I have heard the ring of platform
oratory many a time in the prayer of a saint who had nothing but his
congregation’s sins of which to repent. Father, splendidly poised
on one knee, recited a psalm of his own to the Lord, not so good as
David’s but along the same line. He cast his iniquities from him in
sentences that clashed like bright swords. Sobs shook him. I was
also deeply moved, as I am to this day by great music of powerful
prayers. Kneeling like a little rag doll, very low before my chair, I
accompanied him with sounds of grief, meows of a kitten saint, decently
repressed until, casting a watery glance through my fingers, I saw
father wiping his face on the blue window curtains. This was too much.
I keened my nose and let out a wail that steadied the great mourner and
ended his petition.
VII
MY MOTHER’S GOD
I suppose there are still such husbands in the world, but I am
wondering if there are any more women like mother. Maybe she would
be called a pill now. Looking back, the methods she used to restore
father’s soul do seem drastic. She loved him with a shrewd tenderness;
but let him break his traveling gait toward Heaven and she was the
most adroit persecutor of the damned and fallen I have ever known. She
kept a good little house not more than one short prayer path from the
gates of Heaven. Everything in it was clean, white where it should
be white, glistening where it should shine. If by chance an unworthy
person crossed her threshold, he brought his former virtues with him
and practiced them. She demanded at least a noble deceit of goodness.
This was the kind of father I had, and this was my mother. I was a sort
of human hybrid composed of these two natures. Nothing could cure me
of a dangerous likeness to father. I was closer kin to him in mind and
spirit. I may have inherited some invincible stamina from mother, a
capacity for standards and principles. My notion is that father merely
begot me, and that mother continued to exercise the same functions to
me morally that she did physically before I was born. She produced
qualities of character in me which went far toward determining my
woman’s life afterwards. She had Moses’ gift for guiding me and
controlling the rabble in me.
But I have never reached the promised land. Neither did the children
of Israel under Moses. No one does. Your Moses is too much of a
disciplinarian. Looking back now at my wilderness, it seems to me if I
make the last stretch it will be upon the wings of a spirit inherited
from father. But I shall never make it now. I shall pass like other
people who have been anxious to be good all their lives--barely in
sight of that fair and happy land. I have been encompassed about by
too great a cloud of witnesses to just righteousness. The burden of
being obedient to mother’s God, and later on to the God of a still
more drastic saint, has wearied me. I am too tired now to shout and be
happy. I shall probably die up here in a high place, barely in sight of
the promised land as usual.
I have often wondered how real saints feel about this. I know how they
talk, but do they in their secret hearts as humans sometimes regret
the hard and narrow way? Isn’t there something unsatisfied in them
to the last? Have they been entirely gratified? Can one ever have in
this world the peace promised? Maybe we do at the last moment. I am
expecting it then. But one moment, with your breath already leaving
you, is a short time to enjoy what you have spent a lifetime to win.
As near as I can make out, we cannot obey the Scriptures and be as
much like the Lord as we claim to be. There is too much submission,
too much bondage to sacrifice. We do not seem to have arrived yet at
that almighty mental poise where we can punish as He does. Vengeance is
still His. Our minds have dropped a stitch somewhere between the Ten
Commandments and that beatitude which reads: ‘Blessed are ye, when men
shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil
against you, for my sake, ... for great is your reward in heaven.’
We are short on giving out these rewards. Maybe we are still so vicious
it would not be safe to trust us with administering justice one to
another according to the Lord’s way. We must go to a court and get
balled up with an attorney to obtain our rights, and maybe have the
decision go against us. Or we must go to a church conference and get
balled up with the presiding elder and get very little satisfaction
there for our wrongs compared to the way we could satisfy ourselves
if it were not for sitting down dutifully and being persecuted for
righteousness’ sake. Maybe we should go on turning the other cheek a
while longer; but my experience has been that there is very little
gratification of the vanity of the human soul in turning the other
cheek, or giving a man your coat also because he took your cloak. It
leaves you naked, cold, and bruised in the face, and the other fellow
strutting around bragging at your expense. Compare that with the way
the Lord punishes evildoers and you get an inkling of what I mean--and
the chief reason why I am writing this history. My mind has misled me
frequently through the Scriptures.
VIII
BOOK LEARNING
Ignorance is a curse, but it depends upon what kind of knowledge
you get whether that is not even more of a curse. For this reason I
have become a bit squeamish about education. Occasionally, when I am
suffering from the effects of some regrettable wisdom I have acquired,
the very sight or sound of the word gives me a sinking sensation, as
one feels when reminded of fate. It smacks too much of Calvinism, a
willful, worldly form of predestination by which the mind, morals, and
future of a youth are determined. We can teach him a lie by concealing
part of the truth, knob him like a hydra-horned monster with false
ideals and he has no defense. We can substitute a code of ethics
for religion without letting him know that ethics is a variable and
frequently very free translation we make of the will of God in the
minds of men.
The product of such a system of education we have in the present
generation of young people. They are being deprived of their legal
relations to the Almighty. They are running true to form, predestined
to their courses by what they have not been taught, obedience to that
law which we older people call God. To be brought up illiterate in the
spirit seems to me a frightful state of ignorance and very dangerous. I
prefer real Calvinism, though I was born and bred a Methodist, because
according to that old doctrine some of us at least were elected to
salvation.
Methods of education were much more primitive when I was a child.
You learned your Catechism and the Ten Commandments first; then your
alphabet. I knew who made the heavens and the earth, that Adam was the
first man and Eve the first woman, before I was five years old; but
I must have been nearly six before I could distinguish between the
little _b_ and the little _d_ of the alphabet. They seemed very small
and negligible compared with the hills and skies and trees to which I
had been accustomed. I was frightfully lonely with my a, b, abs. What
I spelled out by the hardest was not interesting. I had the prescience
of all things and must now be turned back to learn little words in a
book that I had always used in speaking. I could not be impressed when
w-h-a-t turned out to be ‘what.’ I lacked the erudite instinct which
makes scholars.
My only interest in words to-day is to find the one needed, preferably
a small one; young, active, and properly colored to use for expressing
that feeling which became a thought, if you can say it or write
it down. I have never had the least cultural curiosity about the
ancestry of a word, whether Greek or Latin or even older, though I
have sometimes had the feeling that I might be using a smooth, wise
word which had formerly been in the employ of Socrates. But never one
accustomed to Marcus Aurelius’s way of thinking--a good man as pagans
go, but reduced to a negative state by the quality of his spirit.
I have often wondered if literary people as a class show any aptitude
for grammar in their youth. My suspicion is that it is chiefly those
who speak correctly--you may say, from a sense of duty; not naturally,
nor with any charm--who take to the drudgery of studying English
composition. They are of that class who read your book, not for
the taste or flavor of the story you tell, but to find a misplaced
adverb or the tail of a participle sticking out in the wrong place.
Meanness of mind can sink no lower than this, because it is clothed in
such outrageous respectability. You cannot call him a hypocrite for
directing your attention to a grammatical error on the one hundred and
twenty-fifth page of your narrative; yet he is one, plucking at the
mote of an outlawed word with a beam in his own eye. I never knew one
who could write an interesting sentence, though a child could parse it.
The only indication I showed of literary sense from the beginning was
a distaste for the study of grammar. I remember how small I was, and
how desolate, being obliged to sit in the house and learn a lesson in
Smith’s English Grammar. And it is still a queer thing from my point
of view that men have been burned at the stake for choosing their own
doctrines from the Scriptures; but so far as I know, the author of
a textbook designed to cower the mind of a child has never suffered
martyrdom. I am not implying a disposition to thrust a blazing fagot
into the beard of a professional grammarian; but it does seem strange
when you think about it that no man has ever been punished for devising
textbook tortures for children.
My only recollections of this book were the punishments I received
because it remained a mystery to me, and the number of hard and fast
rules in it that I learned but could not apply. When it was done and
over with, the residuum of information left in my mind never to be
forgotten was that ‘Active verbs govern the objective case.’ I have
noticed that they do in every walk of life. In those days I developed a
personal sympathy for the noun in the objective case. It was frequently
knocked down and trampled upon by the noun in the nominative case. It
was the victim of an active verb.
By this time I have my own ideas about the virtue and value of words.
Their worth depends entirely upon the person who uses them. They betray
more than the mind; they betray the man. The somnambulant charm of De
Quincey’s writings was due to his constant use of the passive verb.
They are nearly all drugged and recumbent. There are peaks of the
purest inspiration in Whitman’s poetry, rough tablelands that stretch
away into light and darkness, written with a rhythm of words so harsh
and strong that one hears the hoarse shouts of a man with a great
and joyful heart. But the lowlands of his thoughts are covered with
a growth of monstrous words. My belief is that those who revere him
as a poet quote him less often on this account than his ostentatious
disciples who camp most frequently in the lower regions of his genius.
And there are the decadent writers who use words frequently that bloom
like fair frail blossoms on a dung heap--but always a line somewhere
which betrays the odor of the soil.
The reason why the minor poets are minor is because the thoughts they
have can only be sung in slender, pale, poignant words. It is not
beauty they express so much as frailty. Poe’s tales and poetry always
fascinated me, but they reveal the dipsomaniacal genius of the man.
David was shrewder than a psalmist is supposed to be when he cried
out, ‘Oh ... that mine enemy had written a book!’ I do not know how
the theologians interpret this passage, but it is perfectly clear to
me that David was no mean psychologist. No man ever wrote a book that
did not betray him if you know how to read it. If he has an illiterate
nature and all the words at a scholar’s command, the thing he writes
may be useful like a record; but it will not have the convincing charm
of life. He sustains the same relation to literature that a ploughman
does to a painter, an artisan to an architect--useful, but not nearly
so interesting to know.
As for the mere grammar of language, it is essential if you have no
ear for composing a sentence, as notes are for one who has no ear for
music and must strum it as it is written for him. I am deficient there,
having no skill in the harmonies of singing sounds; but I came out of
ten generations of men who used words as the winds use the clouds,
roughly or gently, according to the velocity of their moods. And I
contend that there are some things to be said so quickly by way of
interpreting a man or a meaning that if you stop long enough to reduce
it to a parsing symmetry you have lost the breath of life in the truth
you meant to convey.
Compared with the modern child, I was stupid. I did not know anything.
I was simply a medium of sensations, experiencing joy in the sun,
living confidentially with the grass, moved to this or that adventure
as the wind blows. I was without self-consciousness, that first
symptom of vanity in a mind beginning to be, so attractive in young
children, so offensive in men and women. I was strangely lacking in
the monkey curiosity peculiar to the bright child. I came silently by
my own knowledge without asking questions. There was no sense in what
I learned, but much enchantment. I was closer kin to the earth than
mere mind ever makes us. I knew the leaves on the trees as you hear
conversation, and the sky was very near, like a roof over my head.
IX
SCHOOL DAYS
I attended the old field school at broken intervals in these days. What
I remember about that is the path across the hills to this school, the
scent of ripe maypops in the long grass, the passion flowers blooming
like lace among the corn, dew on everything; the way the gray gables
of the schoolhouse showed against the sky, the little winds that
accompanied me on summer days fragrant as the breath of the fields.
They are like verses I learned long ago. If I need one in a cheerful
tale now I always go back and copy the little a-b-c breeze that used
to blow the grass into billows and turn the leaves on a certain poplar
tree like a thousand tiny silver fans as we went by together.
Once when I was very young I was sent to the village school and came
for the first time in contact with the bold alacrity of the children
of the world, a very small world, but strange to me. They must have
bragged and boasted. Anyway, for the first time I remember being
troubled about my financial standing. I did not know whether my parents
were rich people or poor people, but it was apparent that there was
great satisfaction to be had from riches. Still, it was a delicate
matter, upon which I was loath to consult mother, who seemed to be
above such trivial considerations. One day when I could bear my anxiety
no longer I devoted myself secretly, like an expert accountant, to the
business of estimating the worth of our estate and determining once for
all the financial standing of my family. Followed such a feat of memory
as rarely has been equaled since Adam named all the beasts of the field
at one sitting. I forgot nothing, from father’s old army shawl to the
thousands of acres of land in the plantation. My scale of valuation
was eccentric, but exceedingly gratifying. We were very rich people, I
decided, although I doubt if I had ever seen a piece of money at this
time. We had servants and land and were really poverty-stricken.
It is a good thing to be born poor with an opulent mind. Fluctuations
in market values have less effect upon your strictly private fortune.
Wealth is a state of mind which many a rich man misses. I have no idea
how long I retained this notion of being an heiress, but I am moved to
tears and laughter by the quiet assurance I had, based upon our wealth,
to which I never referred. Children are very shrewd about preserving
their illusions. They conceal them from the diminishing knowledge of
others. I am wondering what might have happened if my young companions
had suspected the source of my ease and pride. And what would have been
the effect upon me if I had realized how anguishingly poor we were?
After all, it was not such a bad way to grow up--next door to the
kingdom of Heaven, believing myself to be the heir of a great fortune
and descended from great people.
I may have acquired some mettle of the spirit in these purely
imaginary circumstances which enabled me to bear with a better grace
the vicissitudes of the direst poverty later on, for I have never
felt poor. If I had a nickel in the machine drawer, I was doing very
well; if my husband had a dollar in his pocket, want and anxiety were
comfortably removed.
What I remember about myself during this period is different and more
engaging. It seems to me that from being a shy, silent child I became a
genial little girl. I remember jumping the rope at school and sharing
a playhouse under the trees with another little girl. But these were
diversions natural to my age, as a kitten chases its tail when not
otherwise occupied. I recall much more distinctly the satisfaction
with which I parted from these companions and took the lonely path
home across the fields. I had the happier feeling of being very much
abroad then as a bird must have on the wing in a wide space. I remember
the habit I had later on of walking in the flower garden late in the
evening until mother called me. I am certain that this was a kind
of enchantment I practiced, for I have no recollection of thinking
anything right or wrong, but only of feeling like a part of everything;
not that I could have defined the sensation then.
This habit of walking alone late in the evening has remained with me.
Sometimes for years it may be broken by circumstances or inevitable
companionships, only to be resumed again with precisely the same
somnambulant happiness I had when I was young. As near as I can tell
now, it is like resting from being mortal and old and tired. It is like
escaping from the weary consciousness of your own life, narrow and
familiar and full of thoughts that take hold of you like hands. Maybe
it is a little Enoch period I enjoy of not being.
My first appearance on the stage was during a school commencement
about this time. I was in a dialogue composed of little girls who were
supposed to impersonate flowers--the rose, the violet, the lily, for
example. I was the tulip. When my turn came to tell how it felt and
what it meant to be a tulip, I was so deeply moved that I had to be led
from the stage in tears. But I had felt the glare of the footlights in
my face and craved the opportunity to appear on the stage. My desire
was not to show off, but to move the audience. I had the true artistic
impulse.
There was a poem written about that time purporting to be the Lament
of the Empress Eugénie over the death of her son. The first line of it
ran: ‘Waileth a woman, “Oh, my God!”’ I remember smiting a cheerful
commencement audience one night with this thing, delivered in a voice
which ranged from soprano to a sobbing whisper, and with gestures of
the wildest grief. I suppose the poor empress conducted herself with
dignity in her sorrow, but whatever she said or did, she could not have
equaled my interpretation of her woe. The performance was received in
petrified silence, but I still believe the audience might have cheered
if it had not been so startled by the activity of my emotions.
I am probably the only person living who believes that I had histrionic
ability of no mean order. But I have never regretted missing the career
of a great tragedienne, on account of the well-known perversity and
stupidity of audiences. Sometimes they are elegant mobs who slay you
by omitting the encore. They are the majority and hold your fate in
their hands at every performance. But if you write a book, you are
the silent majority. The book keeps going the rounds, speaking your
mind, and you are not present when the reader or critic damns it. You
are probably writing another book. I prefer the safety and remoteness
of authorship, if for no other reason than that one may go on writing
no matter how she looks, whether she has a distinguishable waistline
or not, long after the tragedy queen has lost her beauty and has been
obliged to retire, probably in straitened circumstances on account of
the extravagant habits she acquired during her affluent period in the
theatrical profession. Authors rarely are successful enough to develop
their spendthrift talents.
X
WHAT I READ
I was in and out of school until my seventeenth year. Toward the last
I must have had queer teachers, or I may have been a trifle out of
drawing myself, for I was permitted to choose the books I studied from
father’s library. This was an old and honorable one, collected by two
generations of leisure-loving men with reading minds. I recited lessons
from Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ and Paley’s ‘Moral Philosophy.’ Poor old Paley!
It turns out that he was entirely wrong about morals. I doubt now if
it makes much difference whose philosophy you study on this subject.
Morals change like rules for pronunciation, and are more confusing to
learn than a foreign language. When you know the language you know how
to speak it, but one never gets a working knowledge of morals until he
learns how to compromise them with a good conscience and an upright
mind. It is an obtuse subject and requires much experience in honorable
living to master it.
Another book I studied was Tasso’s ‘Jerusalem Delivered.’ Why I chose
this poem I cannot imagine, but it has left a trail of flaming angels
at war, memories of many flashing colors, and a sort of golden cadence
in my mind, although I cannot recall a single line. What I do recall,
with that mischievous retrospect we sometimes cast back upon our
earliest follies, is the way the good little lady teacher used to look
when I switched forward to read from this book. She used to turn her
head sidewise with that weary air polite people have when they must
listen to a bore. I always let her have as many pages of the stuff as
she would bear.
I have spent a good deal of my life beyond the bounds of the times in
which we now live. Most people do who read and think without adding
the experience as a fact to their consciousness. If life is brief, I
shall never know it. I am not really old in years, but it seems to me
that I have been living for ages. Much of my youth was passed a long
way back in the centuries. I had a widely assorted companionship then,
reaching all the way back to Genesis. Besides the first and closest
relation I acquired with Nature, there were the prophets from the Old
Testament; pagans of one sort and another from histories of the Greeks
and Romans; heroes chosen from poetry and mythology; ghosts, angels of
the covenant, Jesus Christ, with a sort of secret hankering for many of
the Catholic saints, whose lives had drawn me to them.
These people were amazingly real to me, because I did not know any
living people so intimately. The topography of my mind must have been
a curious map of ancient lands. Years later, when at last I saw Rome,
really it was a disappointment to me; the shattered shell of a great
civilization left half buried in the dust of centuries, a frailer,
unsubstantial city built into these ruins and filled with little men.
No gods on Mount Olympus. I am a Christian, but I did miss the altars
and oracles of those fine old deities in Rome! The sunken place where
the Forum had been, but no signs of Lycurgus or of Cæsar.