I
_I Start on My Walk_
As some of the readers of this account are aware, I took a walk last
summer from my home town, Springfield, Illinois, across Illinois,
Missouri, and Kansas, up and down Colorado and into New Mexico. One of
the most vivid little episodes of the trip, that came after two months
of walking, I would like to tell at this point. It was in southern
Colorado. It was early morning. Around the cliff, with a boom, a
rattle and a bang, appeared a gypsy wagon. On the front seat was a
Romany, himself dressed inconspicuously, but with his woman more
bedecked than Carmen. She wore the bangles and spangles of her Hindu
progenitors. The woman began to shout at me, I could not distinguish
just what. The two seemed to think this was the gayest morning the sun
ever shone upon. They came faster and faster, then, suddenly, at the
woman's suggestion, pulled up short. And she asked me with a
fraternal, confidential air, "What you sellin', what you sellin',
boy?"
If we had met on the first of June, when I had just started, she would
have pretended to know all about me, she would have asked to tell my
fortune. On the first of June I wore about the same costume I wear on
the streets of Springfield. I was white as paper from two years of
writing poetry indoors. Now, on the first of August I was sunburned a
quarter of an inch deep. My costume, once so respectable, I had
gradually transformed till it looked like that of a show-man. I wore
very yellow corduroys, a fancy sombrero and an oriflamme tie. So Mrs.
Gypsy hailed me as a brother. She eyed my little worn-out oil-cloth
pack. It was a delightful professional mystery to her.
I handed up a sample of what it contained--my _Gospel of Beauty_ (a
little one-page formula for making America lovelier), and my little
booklet, _Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread_.
The impatient horses went charging on. In an instant came more noises.
Four more happy gypsy wagons passed. Each time the interview was
repeated in identical language, and with the same stage business. The
men were so silent and masterful-looking, the girls such brilliant,
inquisitive cats! I never before saw anything so like high-class comic
opera off the stage, and in fancy I still see it all:--those brown,
braceleted arms still waving, and those provocative siren
cries:--"What you sellin', boy? What you sellin'?"
I hope my Gospel did them good. Its essential principle is that one
should not be a gypsy forever. He should return home. Having
returned, he should plant the seeds of Art and of Beauty. He should
tend them till they grow. There is something essentially humorous
about a man walking rapidly away from his home town to tell all men
they should go back to their birthplaces. It is still more humorous
that, when I finally did return home, it was sooner than I intended,
all through a temporary loss of nerve. But once home I have taken my
own advice to heart. I have addressed four mothers' clubs, one
literary club, two missionary societies and one High School Debating
Society upon the Gospel of Beauty. And the end is not yet. No, not by
any means. As John Paul Jones once said, "I have not yet begun to
fight."
I had set certain rules of travel, evolved and proved practicable in
previous expeditions in the East and South. These rules had been
published in various periodicals before my start. The home town
newspapers, my puzzled but faithful friends in good times and in bad,
went the magazines one better and added a rule or so. To promote the
gala character of the occasion, a certain paper announced that I was
to walk in a Roman toga with bare feet encased in sandals. Another
added that I had travelled through most of the countries of Europe in
this manner. It made delightful reading. Scores of mere acquaintances
crossed the street to shake hands with me on the strength of it.
The actual rules were to have nothing to do with cities, railroads,
money, baggage or fellow tramps. I was to begin to ask for dinner
about a quarter of eleven and for supper, lodging and breakfast about
a quarter of five. I was to be neat, truthful, civil and on the
square. I was to preach the Gospel of Beauty. How did these rules work
out?
The cities were easy to let alone. I passed quickly through Hannibal
and Jefferson City. Then, straight West, it was nothing but villages
and farms till the three main cities of Colorado. Then nothing but
desert to central New Mexico. I did not take the train till I reached
central New Mexico, nor did I write to Springfield for money till I
quit the whole game at that point.
Such wages as I made I sent home, starting out broke again, first
spending just enough for one day's recuperation out of each pile, and,
in the first case, rehabilitating my costume considerably. I always
walked penniless. My baggage was practically nil. It was mainly
printed matter, renewed by mail. Sometimes I carried reproductions of
drawings of mine, _The Village Improvement Parade_, a series of
picture-cartoons with many morals.
I pinned this on the farmers' walls, explaining the mottoes on the
banners, and exhorting them to study it at their leisure. My little
pack had a supply of the aforesaid _Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread_.
And it contained the following Gospel of Beauty:
_THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY_
_Being the new "creed of a beggar" by that vain and foolish
mendicant Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, printed for his personal
friends in his home village--Springfield, Illinois. It is his
intention to carry this gospel across the country beginning
June, 1912, returning in due time._
_I_
_I come to you penniless and afoot, to bring a message. I am
starting a new religious idea. The idea does not say "no" to
any creed that you have heard.... After this, let the
denomination to which you now belong be called in your heart
"the church of beauty" or "the church of the open sky." ...
The church of beauty has two sides: the love of beauty and
the love of God._
_II_
_THE NEW LOCALISM_
_The things most worth while are one's own hearth and
neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood
the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in
the world. The children now growing up should become devout
gardeners or architects or park architects or teachers of
dancing in the Greek spirit or musicians or novelists or
poets or story-writers or craftsmen or wood-carvers or
dramatists or actors or singers. They should find their
talent and nurse it industriously. They should believe in
every possible application to art-theory of the thoughts of
the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address. They should, if led by the spirit, wander over the
whole nation in search of the secret of democratic beauty
with their hearts at the same time filled to overflowing
with the righteousness of God. Then they should come back to
their own hearth and neighborhood and gather a little circle
of their own sort of workers about them and strive to make
the neighborhood and home more beautiful and democratic and
holy with their special art.... They should labor in their
little circle expecting neither reward nor honors.... In
their darkest hours they should be made strong by the vision
of a completely beautiful neighborhood and the passion for a
completely democratic art. Their reason for living should be
that joy in beauty which no wounds can take away, and that
joy in the love of God which no crucifixion can end._
The kindly reader at this point clutches his brow and asks, "But why
carry this paper around? Why, in Heaven's name, do it as a beggar? Why
do it at all?"
Let me make haste to say that there has been as yet no accredited,
accepted way for establishing Beauty in the heart of the average
American. _Until such a way has been determined upon by a competent
committee_, I must be pardoned for taking my own course and trying any
experiment I please.
But I hope to justify the space occupied by this narrative, not by the
essential seriousness of my intentions, nor the essential solemnity of
my motley cloak, nor by the final failure or success of the trip, but
by the things I unexpectedly ran into, as curious to me as to the
gentle and sheltered reader. Of all that I saw the State of Kansas
impressed me most, and the letters home I have chosen cover, for the
most part, adventures there.
Kansas, the Ideal American Community! Kansas, nearer than any other to
the kind of a land our fathers took for granted! Kansas, practically
free from cities and industrialism, the real last refuge of the
constitution, since it maintains the type of agricultural
civilization the constitution had in mind! Kansas, State of tremendous
crops and hardy, devout, natural men! Kansas of the historic Santa Fé
Trail and the classic village of Emporia and the immortal editor of
Emporia! Kansas, laid out in roads a mile apart, criss-crossing to
make a great checker-board, roads that go on and on past endless rich
farms and big farm-houses, though there is not a village or railroad
for miles! Kansas, the land of the real country gentlemen, Americans
who work the soil and own the soil they work; State where the shabby
tenant-dwelling scarce appears as yet! Kansas of the Chautauqua and
the college student and the devout school-teacher! The dry State, the
automobile State, the insurgent State! Kansas, that is ruled by the
cross-roads church, and the church type of civilization! The Newest
New England! State of more promise of permanent spiritual glory than
Massachusetts in her brilliant youth!
Travellers who go through in cars with roofs know little of this
State. Kansas is not Kansas till we march day after day, away from the
sunrise, under the blistering noon sky, on, on over a straight
west-going road toward the sunset. Then we begin to have our spirits
stirred by the sight of the tremendous clouds looming over the most
interminable plain that ever expanded and made glorious the heart of
Man.
I have walked in eastern Kansas where the hedged fields and the
orchards and gardens reminded one of the picturesque sections of
Indiana, of antique and settled Ohio. Later I have mounted a little
hill on what was otherwise a level and seemingly uninhabited universe,
and traced, away to the left, the creeping Arkansas, its course marked
by the cottonwoods, that became like tufts of grass on its far
borders. All the rest of the world was treeless and riverless, yet
green from the rain of yesterday, and patterned like a carpet with the
shadows of the clouds. I have walked on and on across this unbroken
prairie-sod where half-wild cattle grazed. Later I have marched
between alfalfa fields where hovered the lavender haze of the fragrant
blossom, and have heard the busy music of the gorging bumblebees.
Later I have marched for days and days with wheat waving round me,
yellow as the sun. Many's the night I have slept in the barn-lofts of
Kansas with the wide loft-door rolled open and the inconsequential
golden moon for my friend.
These selections from letters home tell how I came into Kansas and how
I adventured there. The letters were written avowedly as a sort of
diary of the trip, but their contents turned out to be something less
than that, something more than that, and something rather different.
THURSDAY, MAY 30, 1912. In the blue grass by the side of the road.
Somewhere west of Jacksonville, Illinois. Hot sun. Cool wind. Rabbits
in the distance. Bumblebees near.
At five last evening I sighted my lodging for the night. It was the
other side of a high worm fence. It was down in the hollow of a grove.
It was the box of an old box-car, brought there somehow, without its
wheels. It was far from a railroad. I said in my heart "Here is the
appointed shelter." I was not mistaken.
As was subsequently revealed, it belonged to the old gentleman I spied
through the window stemming gooseberries and singing: "John Brown's
body." He puts the car top on wagon wheels and hauls it from grove to
grove between Jacksonville and the east bank of the Mississippi. He
carries a saw mill equipment along. He is clearing this wood for the
owner, of all but its walnut trees. He lives in the box with his son
and two assistants. He is cook, washerwoman and saw-mill boss. His
wife died many years ago.
The old gentleman let me in with alacrity. He allowed me to stem
gooseberries while he made a great supper for the boys. They soon came
in. I was meanwhile assured that my name was going into the pot. My
host looked like his old general, McClellan. He was eloquent on the
sins of preachers, dry voters and pension reformers. He was full of
reminiscences of the string band at Sherman's headquarters, in which
he learned to perfect himself on his wonderful fiddle. He said, "I
can't play slow music. I've got to play dance tunes or die." He did
not die. His son took a banjo from an old trunk and the two of them
gave us every worth while tune on earth: _Money Musk_, _Hell's Broke
Loose in Georgia_, _The Year of Jubilee_, _Sailor's Hornpipe_, _Baby
on the Block_, _Lady on the Lake_, and _The Irish Washerwoman_, while
I stemmed gooseberries, which they protested I did not need to do.
Then I read my own unworthy verses to the romantic and violin-stirred
company. And there was room for all of us to sleep in that one
repentant and converted box-car.
FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1912. Half an hour after a dinner of crackers, cheese
and raisins, provided at my solicitation by the grocer in the general
store and post-office, Valley City, Illinois.
I have thought of a new way of stating my economic position. I belong
to one of the leisure classes, that of the rhymers. In order to belong
to any leisure class, one must be a thief or a beggar. On the whole I
prefer to be a beggar, and, before each meal, receive from toiling man
new permission to extend my holiday. The great business of that world
that looms above the workshop and the furrow is to take things from
people by some sort of taxation or tariff or special privilege. But I
want to exercise my covetousness only in a retail way, open and above
board, and when I take bread from a man's table I want to ask him for
that particular piece of bread, as politely as I can.
But this does not absolutely fit my life. For yesterday I ate several
things without permission, for instance, in mid-morning I devoured all
the cherries a man can hold. They were hanging from heavy, breaking
branches that came way over the stone wall into the road.
Another adventure. Early in the afternoon I found a brick farm-house.
It had a noble porch. There were marks of old-fashioned distinction in
the trimmed hedges and flower-beds, and in the summer-houses. The
side-yard and barn-lot were the cluckingest, buzzingest kind of
places. There was not a human being in sight. I knocked and knocked on
the doors. I wandered through all the sheds. I could look in through
the unlocked screens and see every sign of present occupation. If I
had chosen to enter I could have stolen the wash bowl or the
baby-buggy or the baby's doll. The creamery was more tempting, with
milk and butter and eggs, and freshly pulled taffy cut in squares. I
took a little taffy. That is all I took, though the chickens were very
social and I could have eloped with several of them. The roses and
peonies and geraniums were entrancing, and there was not a watch dog
anywhere. Everything seemed to say "_Enter in and possess_!"
I saw inside the last door where I knocked a crisp, sweet, simple
dress on a chair. Ah, a sleeping beauty somewhere about!