Chapter II: Part 2

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.

We never shall know how many great men were created by their 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