biographers, but we may infer how insignificant these same men would be
twenty centuries later. I do not think Brutus or Mark Antony would cut
much of a figure in the Rome I saw. Still, I have a sort of sympathy
for Mussolini, not with him. A modern politician giving himself
the airs of a Roman tribune. Who knows but he may be the whelp of
atavism? Grant him a Plutarch for a biographer and he might shine for
centuries to come as a great man. After a while, it all depends on your
biographer whether you live in the memories of men or are forgotten
along with the rest of us.
The people I knew in those days stalked through the Scriptures, or they
had been poets and gifted men, according to their biographers.
I was not conscious of being different from others of my own age; but
I must have been, now that I consider what substance my mind was made
of, what scenes my imagination dwelt upon--creation, the slow-traveling
patriarch of the Scriptures. I was not allowed to read fiction, but I
read a translation of the tragedies by Sophocles. To this day I still
have a clearer memory of one scene in the ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ than of
anything I have ever seen acted upon the stage. Œdipus, eyes cut out
with Jocasta’s golden buckle, with bloody cheeks and beard, standing
above her dead body, and the halls of the palace filled with wailing
women and woe-stricken men.
This is terrible stuff to be laid away in the mind of a young girl.
Later I added ‘Prometheus Bound.’ And after so long a time, out of the
memory of such scenes, I found out what tragedy is if you write it--an
act of fate which we perform unwillingly or without knowing what we do.
Terribly simple, in a bleak place, or in a place of great splendor like
a palace; all in the scene, not to be told in many words.
Along with this I read Dean Swift, Sut Lovingood and Byron’s poetry.
Mother was no great reader. I doubt if she knew of some of the lands
through which Gulliver traveled, and my impression is that she thought
all poetry was virtuous.
I must have acquired a certain boldness of mind from these various
sources in an age when the maiden mind was actually tainted with
modesty. In reading a Latin fable I was the only girl in the class
who would translate the word ‘_asinus_’ into the little English
word it means. I remember this instance on account of the blushing
embarrassment of my companions. I was not aware of the almost universal
existence of the vulgar.
XI
THE TEACHER I HAD
I am passing briefly through the educational period of my life. It
was relatively unimportant. Textbooks may furnish a good setting-up
exercise for the strengthening of the mind; but if one takes them
seriously, or imagines they furnish him with the things he should know
along the way he must go, they are injurious. It is a fearful thing to
be stitched up and certified in a common-school education and later
sold out of a university into the markets for what you are worth or
not worth to the world. You have really no wisdom of your own. Your
mind is a short or long pattern of other men’s thoughts, theories, and
convictions. You aren’t anything but an addled egg of information, or a
good one that must be hatched later into a mind of your own.
I am not opposed to education, you understand, but to the way we get
it. The best ones in my opinion are obtained as a man makes his own
living, by work and experience. I would rather learn from a great man
or woman traveling a wind-swept road than to study all the textbooks in
a school taught by a little fellow who knows the whole course. This is
my objection to schools, all the way from the primary grades through
the universities. The teachers may be scholars, but they are rarely
great men. They have nothing of themselves to impart that is worth
emulating. If so they do not impart it. Teaching is a business, not a
process of inspiration.
The teachers I had must have been amazingly patient with me, but never
in the way of discipline. I reeked with learning in those days; I was
at the puppy-leg stage of my intellectual development, not steady in my
mental wobblings, but ravenous for the bones of other men’s thoughts
and too much absorbed to practice the pranks of the average young
person in school.
I read more Latin than now is required in a college course, but it
was only a way I had of making the ancient dust fly through Virgil,
Horace, and the rest of those orators and poets who lay so safely
buried centuries deep in their fame. I doubt if I dealt honestly with
the moods and tenses of their verbs. There was some mystery about the
dative case which I never tried to fathom. If I derived any benefit
from these remarkably free translations, it was the practice I had
in the valiant and unscrupulous use of words for translating my own
thoughts later on. However it may be for others, this has been for me
more difficult than translating the most obtuse Latin sentence. Horace
was dead and could not protest; but being alive and exacting, I fared
worse at my own hands. To find the right words for an idea that ought
to have wings and tail feathers is an art I have never mastered. But
if by chance one such thought does rise living and winged, I have an
inkling of how the Lord must have felt when the first lark He made rose
upon its wings with a song in its throat.
No human has the right to feel so gratified with his own performance,
but our real feelings are rarely governed so strictly by modesty as
we pretend they are when another man praises us. Modesty is often the
hand we throw up to ward off his smashing blow if he should suspect how
conceited we are. What I mean is that thoughts really are miracles, and
it gives you a secret sensation of amazement and joy to get one of the
things out of the far reaches of wisdom, disentangled from your past
and your hereafter and set down in a few simple words which bequeath it
to mankind.
I have done a lot of presumptuous thinking along this line, sneaking
around the outer edges of creation, trying to stretch up to sensations
not really lawful to know. Sometimes, taking a look above and abroad in
a star-blossoming night, I miss the prideful humility of David when he
exclaimed, ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou
art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him?’ What I
am tempted to wonder is how the Almighty feels when a brand-new star
slips out into his infinities and swings obedient forever to the first
sun that draws it. And how does He take it when one of these stars He
has ordained wobbles in its orbit and shoots off into space until it is
dissolved like a dust ball?
I do not suppose it makes much difference. The thing is not wasted,
only a trifle more dust to be gathered in passing by the other planets.
Some time has elapsed since we have had a certified measurement of the
circumference of the earth. Apt as not it is a much larger heavenly
body than it used to be, or smaller, packed tighter from revolving
so fast for so many million years. We cannot rise far enough above
it or scratch deep enough into it to find out much about it, and our
thoughts remain as far from His thoughts as the East is from the West,
and God still is the name of what we do not know, but must believe to
live. Still, I have this hankering after the streaming glories of His
mind. I do not care a thing about being a little lower than the angels
and crowned with glory. These are competitive values. What I want is
the power to think myself into the order and majesty of His peace, so
filled with energy and what we call love, which undoubtedly must be the
law of the whole thing.
Prophets always look ahead when they prophesy. No man can look behind
him and tell what might have happened, because what did happen has
obscured the view. I have no idea what kind of mind and life I might
have had if I had enjoyed the same religious freedom in my youth that I
had in choosing the texts I studied. My guess now is that I should have
been a very different person, and not nearly so legible morally. Still,
if I had had more religious liberty during these formative years, I
might have escaped that tightening of the conscience into a sense of
guilt from which I have suffered most of my life.
XII
THE ‘REBEL’S’ CHILD
My memory is eclectic, so to speak, and would never retain what was
repugnant to me, especially in the way of education. I have forgotten
most of the multiplication table. The algebraic figure of speech,
_×_, is still an unknown quantity to me, though I remember passing
creditable examinations in this study. There must have been something
wrong with the teachers I had.
Ridpath’s ‘History of the United States’ was the first book I ever
read. Vanity was the inspiration of this undertaking. I had been
brought up on glorious family legends and I expected to find the
volume thickly populated with my ancestors. But it was not. This is
characteristic of historians; they omit many men famous in their
own families. I think it accounts for the growth and development of
the Colonial Dames and the various orders of Daughters. You may set
out your family tree in any one of these organizations and enjoy
the distinction of being somebody in spite of the negligence of the
historians.
After all, I was destined never to finish reading Ridpath’s history.
I was halted at the Battle of Gettysburg on account of a terrible and
unexpected censorship.
Father had been such a good soldier that he was never obliged to boast
of his war record until he was a very old man and was compelled to
fan up his past glories to confound the current generation of his
posterity who fought in gas masks from dugouts during the World War.
I was therefore a disciple of Ridpath without sectional animus. I was
ignorant of the opprobrious reputation the word ‘rebel’ had in the
South. The probability is that I had never heard it spoken, as bad
language is not used in the best society.
One night we were at the supper table. I was still sitting on the
dictionary in the bottom of my chair in order to be sufficiently
elevated for the proper use of my knife and fork. But I had been
reading Ridpath that day and suddenly showed forth with some childish
remark about what had been done to the rebel army at Gettysburg.
It was as if I had cast a bomb in the midst of this peaceful scene.
Mother turned pale and stared at me as if she felt a serpent in her
bosom.
‘Rebel?’ shouted father.
I died beneath his gaze, but kept my eyes open, fascinated by the noble
rage that seemed to transform him. He stood up, cast his chair from
him, ground his teeth, swept a gesture that made the candle flicker,
folded his arms and strode back and forth, lashing the tail of his fury.
He called upon God to witness his sorrow that a man should live to hear
his own child call him a rebel!
I keened my nose and wept, still wondering why rebel should be a bad
name.
Father laid his hand upon my head and forgave me with a sob. After all,
he said, it was not my fault that an honest man who had suffered,
bled and died twice for his country, should be set down in history as
a rebel. His unfortunate child was the victim of a partisan historian.
Where was that book?
I slid hastily from my seat and ran to fetch the iniquitous volume.
Mother had purchased it from a book agent without suspecting how the
author had branded her husband and all brave men of the South.
Father opened it, stared at the printed pages, wrinkled his nose,
snarled his lip as if he literally smelled the meanness of ignoble
truth, gripped it in his two hands, tore it asunder and tossed
it through the open window behind him, the pages still tittering
maliciously as they fluttered down.
Followed the first and only address I ever heard on the Lost Cause,
impassioned, and, I still believe, veracious. He let me have the
facts--state sovereignty, slavery, secession--his own part in the
struggle. He opened his wounds and bled afresh. Did I see his
feet--halting before me and standing at attention upon these members.
He had marched without shoes through the snows of Virginia and left his
tracks there written in blood! He had slept in this snow without so
much as a shawl to cover him. He had fought all day and all night when
he was sick from hunger. And he’d never been shot in the back! Only to
be besmirched with the title of ‘rebel’!
Socrates about to die had nothing on him in the way of eloquence,
though he may have surpassed father in the logic of his defense. But
watch the world; it is ever more easily stirred and convinced by
oratory than by logic.
Sitting with my hands clasped in an ecstasy of all emotions attendant
upon such a ministry, I was born again and confirmed in the doctrines
of my own people. I have let it all go long since. I have praised
Lincoln and Grant--not Sherman, of course, though he may deserve it
from another point of view--but it has been, you may say, in the way of
good sportsmanship. The fact that the South was wrong will never make
the methods of the North seem right to me. I doubt now if any means
used which result in war can be right. It comes to me now that the men
of the North and the men of the South never were enemies. They fought
like growing brothers during the Civil War, leaving no malice behind.
It was the ethics practiced by the carpetbaggers that estranged the two
sections.
XIII
NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH
I can look back through the whole of my life at incidents like this
hour with my father which bent the twig of my mind and determined the
very nature of my thinking even after I outgrew my prejudices. Thus
to this day it impresses me as a queer coincidence that altruism, of
all things, flared up about that time in New England. Very few of us
realize the fact, but it is a sort of instinct to cover the deepest
transgression with a canopy of high-mindedness. If you are a man, it
is safer and more veracious not to speak too nobly of your own nature,
nor to spread the wing of your soul too far. The weather changes and
you come down in a bad place. Here in the South we are not good; but
that is the point--we do not pretend to be. Instead of hiding behind
altruism, we have permitted the world to capitalize our faults. This
has been good for us. We have fewer faults than if we had lived
according to a self-deceiving pose.
Time has proved us.
Personally, I prefer to have descended from those Virginia colonists
who came to this country of their own free will, like hardy
swashbuckling adventurers. They appear to me to have had more ease
of mind, better manners, and finer qualities than fighting over
doctrines ever imparts. But the Pilgrims, who came to escape religious
persecution, were very good people. They were a bit wasp-waisted in
their pieties, but they had a sublime courage for enduring hardship.
They were the raw-boned element of Protestantism, essential to the
life of a new nation in a new hemisphere, and if it had not been for
persecution in England they would not have come. This country might
have been settled as it is now being gorged by the overflow populations
of Europe. Such people never make a civilization. Their instinct is
to destroy it. So we must be thankful that enough of the hardiest and
bravest Protestants were driven out to start life decently here, thus
giving us two hundred years in which to mold and harden a civilization
needed now to withstand the disasters of Europe.
But these people were encompassed about by the will of God. They were
obliged by the everlasting order of things to survive their faults
and to acquire the right virtues, as we all must do or perish. So the
New England colonists stopped hanging witches and modified their blue
laws. And the Virginia blades settled down and went to work. But they
must have suffered cruelly for the harshness of their beliefs. History
proves that the effects of theology differ dangerously from those of
religion upon the characters of men. One reduces religion to formulas,
doctrines, and creeds; the other lifts men by some simple wisdom of the
heart to a sort of nobler goodness, kin to God.
We may perform one of those acts of impromptu justice called a
lynching, which is reprehensible, but not so bad as the torturing and
slaying of forty innocent men by mob violence, crimes that are more
and more frequently committed in other sections. Many a time men and
women of New England have felt obliged to tell me that they would not
dare to live in the lawless South, no doubt with the best altruistic
intentions of bringing home to me the realization of the dangerous
conditions we have produced down here. Now it turns out that the South
is the safest place to live in this country. It is the wisest place
to build factories and start industries, because it is easier to
obtain labor and control labor here. We are about to be swamped and
capitalized by money and immigrants from the North. It is a terrible
situation, because there is no way of limiting the quota, say from New
England, as the national Government limits those from desperate Europe.
Personally, I prefer the peace and poverty we now enjoy to the thrift,
energy, and wealth these people insure. Presently we shall have here
the same disorders and problems that greed and altruism have bred in
the North, East, and West. Time changes the condition of people, but
not their nature or their disposition. The people of the North, whether
they are Christians, capitalists, or the sons of carpetbaggers, have a
talent for meddling with the social, intellectual, and commercial life
of the South, and the nobler they are the more they meddle. It is one
of the characteristics of greatness of soul. This provincial state of
mind is bound to affect the quality of their piety.
They have more sense than we have, but they are pathetically deficient
in that deeper wit of understanding. They understand nothing but
their own minds and their own wills. They are artlessly hypocritical
in their relations to us. Having failed to uplift their own masses
spiritually or morally, they are on a religious trek constantly toward
this section. Their world is not our world; their God is not our God.
We are a warmer, kinder, more spiritually minded people, therefore more
patient with their chastening efforts in our behalf than, say, the West
would be.
The awful thing always characteristic of them is their desire and
determination to govern and take all the credit for everything
accomplished. I do not think a union between the Northern and Southern
Methodist Church would be any more successful, except in a financial
way, than any other government set up by a foreign people who had the
balance of power. And religion consists in no such circumstance. I
have my very grave doubts as to whether the great body of Methodists
in the South favor this contemplated corporation of the two churches.
The thing is being engineered by the politicians and princes of these
respective organizations.
XIV
CERTAIN LIES
According to my way of thinking, one of the most engaging charms I
had as a child was the simplicity with which I lied. I was totally
deficient in the arts of deceit, but the slightest moral pressure
from mother sent me flying to cover behind a perfectly transparent
falsehood. I have known many a man to practice prevarication in his
pacifying relations to a woman. They choose this method of childish
fiction in dealing with women through some simplicity of their own
psychology. And it is the secret which nearly every woman keeps that
her experience with her youngest child and her husband are very similar
in this matter. But no such thing is characteristic of the pussyfooting
feminine mind. We are much smarter in merely twisting the truth than
in lying. Maybe I was too young then to have developed the gender of
my faculties. My peculiarity was that once I had committed myself to
a falsehood I would not confess the truth, nor any part of the truth.
Neither prayers nor punishment could move me. My own notion is that
this was due to some kind of misdirected self-respect. To this day I
have a well-bred horror of confessing.
But mother believed that it was innate depravity and took measures
accordingly. One day when I had told a fib and stuck to it, much
evidence to the contrary, she took the Bible and read from it that
passage which says, ‘All liars have their portion in hell.’
I was not the same after that. I had a conscience which humbled me, and
a very real fear of the place lurid with flames where the worm dieth
not and liars inherit a certain portion. I was the wicked. My sins
accompanied me like a still, small tune. I began the hectic life of
indulging in sprees of goodness. I would be very industrious or very
thoughtful for a day, but I never could hold any high moral note in
living. To this day I hate objective righteousness as every true artist
hates drudgery. I am not denying that faith without works is dead;
but good deeds, even the very virtues by which you are recognized and
praised, frequently adorn a Pharisee.
I have often wondered if all children pass through a period of joyfully
achieving innocence. They are not good, but what freedom there must
be in not being able to think evil! Maybe Shakespeare was right:
‘’Tis thinking makes it so.’ Certainly it is written of children in
the Scriptures, ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ Which suggests an
idea of Heaven I have never seen advanced by a theologian--that it is
a place of infinite relief where one may be as unscrupulously busy as
a child without doing anything wrong. But we could not risk living
in this present world with a generation of such Kingdom-of-Heaven
saints. A man with that much innocence in him would be an outlaw.
So it may have been all for the best, the mill and anguish I passed
through getting my mind and virtues to fit me and that sum of human
heinousness so essential to surviving here.
Guilt must be the parent of the moral sense. We are not born with
it. We are born innocent and very dangerous. Then slowly, or quite
unexpectedly, we receive that first spiritual perception of ourselves;
a guilty feeling that weighs us down, never again to be so free, never
again to be the same assured heir of all the stars and half brothers to
the angels of God. We call it the voice of conscience, but I am telling
you it is the sense of guilt, a ticker in your breast warning you of
the change in the value of your virtues, recording the loss of one.
It is a good thing, but very painful. I think most of the activities
we engage in are due to the effort to escape it. One of the salvation
promises is that we shall be delivered from it in the world to come.
I do not know about that. I have prayed so often to be delivered from
my sins and trespasses, it is inconceivable to me that I could develop
very virtuously anywhere without them to brace me morally. I believe in
eternal life, but I should feel queer, finished and laid aside, without
my temptations to worry me onward and upward from within.
Far be it from me to question the goodness of God because evil
is present with us! We should never have the honor of choosing
righteousness for ourselves without it. Who would be charitable if
no one was in need of charity? Who would know how to practice mercy,
forgiveness, and long-suffering if there were no faults or weakness in
others to forgive? And how in heaven shall we be able to use all these
virtues so hardly acquired here if there is no occasion to exercise
them in heaven? How can we possibly enjoy ourselves where all the other
saints are as good as we are and no distinctions made?
We derive more satisfaction than we realize from successful competition
with our fellow men in righteousness. I offer no solution; I merely ask
these questions of those people who look forward with joy to eternal
life without one single familiar thing in prospect to occupy their
minds during this infinite stretch of time. As for me, I trust the Lord
to make my everlasting life even more interesting than this short one,
which has certainly been a feverishly exciting experience. I cannot
help hoping there will be a few of the dearer sinners in heaven upon
whom one may practice a little encouragement. And I hope there will be
tremendous saints also whose attainments far outshine mine, so that
I may have the honor of associating with them, as we are proud to be
recognized here by great men who have surpassed us in the victories and
laurels they have won.
XV
REPUTATION