Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the
Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came
to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement
in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times.
It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a
Democratic member of the State Senate, who said:
“Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.”
It was the time of year when one was meeting the next governor of
Illinois in most of the hotel corridors, or men who were trying to look
like potential governors of Illinois, so that such a remark was not to
be taken too literally; but I went, and after ascending to an upper
floor of a narrow little building in Adams Street, we entered a suite
of law offices, and there in a very much crowded, a very much littered
and a rather dingy little private room, at an odd little walnut desk,
sat John P. Altgeld.
The figure was not prepossessing; he wore his hair close-clipped in
ultimate surrender to an obstinate cowlick; his beard was closely
trimmed, too, and altogether the countenance was one made for the hands
of the cartoonists, who in the brutal fury that was so soon to blaze
upon him and to continue to blaze until it had consumed him quite,
could easily contort the features to the various purposes of an ugly
partizanship; they gave it a peculiarly sinister quality, and it is one
of the countless ironies of life that a face, sad with all the utter
woe of humanity, should have become for a season, and in some minds
remained forever, the type and symbol of all that is most abhorrent.
There was a peculiar pallor in the countenance, and the face was such
a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been for the
high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed
many as altogether lacking in expression. Certainly it seldom or never
expressed enthusiasm, or joy, or humor, though he had humor of a
certain mordant kind, as many a political opponent was to know.
He had been a judge of the Circuit Court, and was known by his
occasional addresses, his interviews and articles, as a publicist of
radical and humanitarian tendencies. He was known especially to the
laboring classes and to the poor, who, by that acute sympathy they
possess, divined in him a friend, and in the circles of sociological
workers and students, then so small and obscure as to make their views
esoteric, he was recognized as one who understood and sympathized with
their tendencies and ideals. He was accounted in those days a wealthy
man,--he was just then building one of those tall and ugly structures
of steel called “sky-scrapers,”--and now that he was spoken of for
governor this fact made him seem “available” to the politicians. Also
he had a German name, another asset in Illinois just then, when Germans
all over the state felt themselves outraged by legislation concerning
the “little red school-house,” which the Republicans had enacted when
they were in full power in the state.
But my paper did not share this enthusiasm about him; it happened to
be owned by John R. Walsh, and between Walsh and Altgeld there was a
feud, a feud that cost Altgeld his fortune, and lasted until the day
that death found him poor and crushed by all the tragedy which a closer
observer, one with a keener prescience of destiny than I, might have
read in his face from the first.
The feeling of the paper, if one may so personalize a corporation as
to endow it with emotion, was not corrected by his nomination, and
_The Herald_ had little to say of him, and what it did say was given
out in the perfunctory tone of a party organ. But as the summer wore
on, and I was able to report to my editors that all the signs pointed
to Altgeld’s election, I was permitted to write an article in which
I tried to describe his personality and to give some impression of
the able campaign he was making. Horace Taylor drew some pictures to
illustrate it, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that it gave
Altgeld pleasure, while at the same time to me at least it revealed for
an instant the humanness of the man.
He sent for me--he was then in offices in his new sky-scraper--and
asked if I could procure for him Horace Taylor’s pictures; he hesitated
a moment, and then, as though it were a weakness his Spartan nature was
reluctant to reveal, he told me that he intended to have my article
republished in a newspaper in Mansfield, Ohio, the town whence he had
come, where he had taught school, and where he had met the gracious
lady who was his wife. He talked for a while that afternoon about his
youth, about his poverty and his struggles, and then suddenly lapsed
into a silence, with his eyes fastened on me. I wondered what he was
looking at; his gaze was disconcerting, and it made me self-conscious
and uneasy, till he said:
“Where could one get a cravat like the one you have on?”
It was, I remember--because of the odd incident--an English scarf of
blue, quite new. I had tried to knot it as Ben Cable of the Democratic
National Committee knotted his, and it seemed that such a little
thing should not be wanting to the happiness of a man who, by all the
outward standards, had so much to gratify him as Altgeld had, and I
said--with some embarrassment, and some doubt as to the taste I was
exhibiting--“Why, you may have this one.”
In a moment his face changed, the mask fell, and he shook his head and
said: “No, it would not look like that on me.”
After his election it was suggested to me that I might become
his secretary, but I declined; in my travels over the state as a
political correspondent I was always meeting aged men, seemingly quite
respectable and worthy and entirely well meaning, who were introduced
not so much by name as such and such a former governor’s private
secretary; though like the moor which Browning crossed, they had
... names of their own,
And a certain use in the world, no doubt.
But I did take a position in the office of the secretary of state that
offered the opportunity I had been longing for; I wished to finish
my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was
nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious,
an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be
accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning
newspaper.
It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which
came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to
escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter
it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a
sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there
was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big
libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the
state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace
fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.
Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing
through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar
from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration
which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his
contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the
executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. Whenever
I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for
luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of
books.
We were all reading George Meredith in those days, and Meredith’s
greater contemporary, Thomas Hardy. “Tess” had just appeared, and
it would be about that time that “Jude” was running as a serial in
_Harper’s Magazine_, though with many elisions and under its tentative
titles of “The Simpleton” and “Hearts Insurgent”; and we all fell
completely under a fascination which has never failed of its weird
and mysterious charm, so that I have read all his works, down to his
latest poems, over and over again. Hardy is, perhaps, the greatest
intelligence on our planet now that Tolstoy, from whom he so vastly
differed, is gone, and Altgeld’s whole career might have served him,
had he ever chosen to write of those experiences that are less implicit
in human nature, and more explicit in the superficial aspects of public
careers, as an example of his own pagan theory of the contrariety of
human affairs and the spite of the Ironic Spirits.
I was reading, too, the novels of Mr. William Dean Howells, as I always
have been whenever there was a moment to spare, and it was with a shock
of peculiar delight and a sense of corroboration almost authoritative
that I learned that Mr. Howells also had given voice to those very same
profound and troubling convictions which Charlie R---- had set me on
the track of two years before.