LXII
A few weeks after my election to a fourth term I wrote out and gave to the reporters a statement in which I said that I would not be again a candidate for the office of mayor. I had been thinking of my old ambition in letters, and of those novels I had planned to write. Already I had been six years in office and I had not written a novel in all that time. And here I was, just entering upon another term. If ever I were to write those novels I would better be about it, before I grew too old and too tired. The politicians, regarding all such statements as but the professional insincerities of their trade, could not consider my decision seriously of course, or credit its intention. They were somewhat like my friends in the literary world, or like some of them at least, who were unable to understand why I should not continue indefinitely to run for mayor, though the politicians were not so innocent and credulous, since they did not believe that Icould as inevitably continue to be elected. I suppose it was the life of action that appealed to my literary friends or to their literary imaginations; they had the human habit of disparaging their own calling, and, if they did not hold my performance in that field as lightly as the politicians held it, they wondered why I did not prefer politics. The politicians in their harangues spoke of my writings bitterly, as though they were a personal affront to their intelligences, and urged the electorate to rebuke me for spending my time upon such nonsense. If I had not known that they had never read my books, or any books, all this might have been chilling to the literary aspiration, but I knew them to their heart’s core, where there was nothing but contempt for books, and, as I sometimes thought, yielding too much to cynicism and despair, nothing but contempt for any sort of beauty or goodly impulse. Of course, they were not so bad as that; out of politics they were as good as anyone or as anything; we instinctively recognize the vitiating quality of the political atmosphere in our constant use of the phrase “if it could only be taken out of politics,” as with the tariff, the currency, municipal government, etc. But my friends in the political line could join my friends in the literary line in the surprise they felt at my decision to retire at the end of that last term. The politicians did not think I meant what I said, of course; it is quite impossible for a politician to imagine a man’s meaning what he says, since politicians so seldom mean what they say themselves; they considered it merely as bad politics tohave said such a thing at all. “It’ll embarrass you when you run again,” they would warn me in their blandnaïveté. It did not embarrass me, however, because I would not and did not run again, though I had to decline a nomination or two before they were convinced, but their own lack of faith, those who were still Independents, at least, proved an ultimate embarrassment to them, for they neglected to agree upon a candidate to succeed me, and by the next election they had grouped themselves in factions, each with its own candidate. Perhaps this untoward result came to pass as much because the independent movement by that time had become the Independent party, as for any other reason discernible to the mind of man; at least, it was disparaged by the use of that term, which implied its own reproach in Toledo, and its sponsors conducted themselves so much after the historic precedents of faction in political parties, by separating into the inevitable right and left wing, that they managed to get themselves soundly beaten.
Eight years is a long time to serve in any office. My grandfather had given four years to the Civil War, and I had found the mayor’s office as trying, as difficult, and as alien as he had found his martial experience. The truth is, that long before the eight years were over the irritation of constant, persistent, nagging criticism had got on my nerves, and, besides the pain of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, I grew to have a perfect detestation for those manipulations which are the technic of politics. And, then, one cannot be a mayor always,and it were better to retire than to be dismissed.
“But I thought you didn’t mind criticism?” a man said to me one day. “I always supposed that after a while one became callous.”
My dear friend Bishop Williams of Detroit was at the table, and I shall ever be grateful to him for the smile of instant comprehension and sympathy with which he illuminated the reply he made before I had time to speak.
“Yes, callous,” he remarked, “or—raw.”
It was precisely that. There were those who were always saying to me: “I know you don’t mind what they say about you, but I never could stand it; I’m too sensitive.” It was a daily experience, almost as difficult to endure as the visits of those who came to report the latest ill-natured comment; they did it because they were friends and felt that I should know it. But Bishop Williams knows life and understands human nature more completely and more tolerantly than any clergyman I ever knew.
And then politics have the dreadful effect of beating all the freshness out of a man; if they do not make him timid, they make him hesitant and cautious, provident of his opinion; he goes about with his finger on his lips, fearful of utterance, and, when he does speak, it is in guarded syllables which conceal his true thought; he cultivates solemnity and the meretricious art of posing; humor is to be avoided, since the crowd is perplexed by humor and so resents it, and will have only the stale rudimentary wit of those stories which men, straining to be funny, match at the banquet board. And when heindulges himself in public speech it is to pour forth a tide of words,
Full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
Full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
I used to be haunted continually by a horrid fear that I should lose the possibility of ever winning the power of utterance, since no such prudence is at all compatible with the practice of any art. For art must, first of all, be utter sincerity, the artist’s business is to think out his thoughts about life to the very end, and to speak them as plainly as the power and the ability to speak them have been given to him; he must not be afraid to offend; indeed, if he succeed at all, he must certainly offend in the beginning. I am quite aware that I may seem inconsistent in this notion, since I have intimated my belief that Jones was an artist; and so he was, in a way, and, if I do not fly to the refuge of trite sayings and allege him as the exception that proves the rule, I am sure that I may say, and, if I have in the least been able to convey any distinct conception of his personality, the reader will agree with me when I say, that he wassui generis. And besides it was not as a politician that he won his success. Had he ventured outside the political jurisdiction of his own city the politicians instantly would have torn him asunder because he had not been “regular.” And, that, I find, when I set it down, is precisely what I am trying to say about the artist; he must not be regular. Every great artist in the world has been irregular, as irregular as Corot, going forth in theearly morning in search of the elusive and ineffable light of dawn as it spread over the earth and stole through the greenwoods at Barbizon, or as Manet, or Monet, or any other man who never knew appreciation in his lifetime. And Jones and all like him are brothers of those incomparable artists; they are not kin in any way to the world’s politicians.
And then so many of the old guard were dead. A strange and tragic fate had pursued us, overtaking, one after another, our very best—Jones, first of all, and then Oren Dunham, E. B. Southard, Dad McCullough, Franklin Macomber, Lyman Wachenheimer, Dr. Donnelly, William H. Maher. These brave, true souls were literally burned out in the fires of that fierce and relentless conflict, and then there came that soft autumn night when seven of our young men in a launch were run down by a freighter on Maumee Bay and drowned, every one of them.
I shall never forget Johnson Thurston as he sat in my office during that last campaign, recalling these men who had been to him as comrades in arms, and, what affected him more sorely, the fact that in our overabundant political success the ideals that had beckoned them on had become blurred in the vision of those who came after them. I detected him in the act of drawing his handkerchief furtively from his pocket, and hastily pressing it to his eyes, as he stammered something in apology for his emotion....
Thus there came the irresistible conviction that the work of the politician was not for me. Therewas other work I wished to do. I doubt whether the politician’s work is ever permanent, though it is too much to say that it lacks real value; I have never been able to think it out. The work of few men, of course, is permanent, sometimes the work of the artist least of any. But, however ephemeral, if the artist’s work is done in sincerity, it is of far greater worth than the work of the politician, if for no other reason, than because, to recall again those words of George Moore which can never lose their charm or their consolation, the traffic of the politician is with the affairs of this world, while the artist is concerned with the dreams, the visions, and the aspirations of a world that is beyond this. I have quoted them before in these pages, I know; they cannot be quoted too often, or too often read by us Americans, if, by pondering them, we may plumb their profound depths. For we all read human history too superficially. Kings and emperors, princes and dukes, prime ministers and generals may fascinate the imagination for a while, but if life is ever to unfold its possibilities to the later consciousness, these become but the phantoms of vanished realms, and there emerge more gracious figures, Phidias and Theocritus; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Correggio; Donatello and Michelangelo; Sidney, Spenser, Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These and the other artists and humanists of their times are veritable personalities in our world, far more than Elizabeth, or the dukes of the Medici, or even Pericles. For from periods such as these their namesmade illustrious, from the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, the Reformation, man emerged as Man, clothed with the beauty and power of an emancipated spirit. In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy free cities of Flanders and Germany—and it discovered America, not the America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind.
And, surely, this America is not always to bear the reproach of having no music, and so little painting and literature of her own. Surely the aspirations of this new land, with the irresistible impulse of the democratic spirit and humanistic culture are to find emotional expression in the terms and forms of enduring beauty. It was this sublime adventure that interested me far more than the trivial and repulsive wrangles of the politicians....
Our opponents had never known how wholly right they were in their reiterated charge that I was but a dreamer; incorrigible dreamer indeed, and nothing more!
But in these years I had given my city the best there was in me, little as that was, and when the legislature made provision for the constitutional convention, which met at Columbus, and, after months of deliberation, submitted a long list of amendmentsto the fundamental law of the state, among them that one which granted home rule to cities, I felt, for it was an emotion deeper than thought, that if the people could only be induced to approve that amendment the long anticipated and happy release was at hand. We had been engaged on an impossible task; we had been trying to regenerate the city by means of electing to office persons who in themselves would reflect the communal aspiration, but this could not be continued indefinitely; the cities could achieve no genuine reform until they were autonomous. With home rule democracy would have the means of development, and the people the opportunity of self-expression; they would have to depend on themselves; they could no longer, with an Oriental fatalism, neglect their own destiny and then lay the blame for the inevitable catastrophe on the mayor, or the political boss, or the country members of the legislature.
There were, if I remember well, about fifty of these amendments, among them provisions for the initiative and referendum, woman suffrage, and many other progressive and radical doctrines, in addition to our beloved home rule for cities, and, when the campaign opened in behalf of their adoption, Newton Baker, who a year before had been elected mayor of Cleveland, proposed that he and I make a tour of the state in a motor car and speak for the home rule amendment, since all the others had their devoted proponents.
Nothing more delightful than a campaign tour in company with Newton Baker could be imagined, andI had visions of our little caravan, out on the country roads of Ohio, going from town to town, and of our standing up in the car and speaking to the crowds of farmers who had come into the town to hear us, or having come for their Saturday marketing, would pause while we told them of the needs of cities. I had always believed that if the farmers could only be brought to understand the cities they would not be so obdurate with us, but would enlarge our opportunities of self-expression and self-government. I could fancy myself standing up and leaning over the side of the car and talking to them, while they stood there in their drab garments, their faces drawn in mental concentration, looking at us out of eyes around which were little wrinkles of suspicion, wondering what designs we had upon them; at first they would stand afar off, perhaps on the other side of the street, as they used to do when we went out to speak to them in the judicial campaigns; but then presently they would draw a little closer, until at last they crowded about the car, staying on to the end, and then perhaps even vouchsafing us the conservative approval of scattered applause. Or I would dramatize Baker as speaking, while I sat there utterly charmed with his manner, his clear and polished expression, and envied him his ability to speak with such surprising fluency, such ease and grace, as if the fact of putting words together so that they would form clear, logical and related sentences were nothing at all, and wondering why it was that everyone that heard was not instantly converted to his plan, whatever itwas.... And then, between times, Baker would not be talking politics at all; he would not be indulging in politician’s low gossip, slandering every one he knew—the ineradicable and, I suppose, inevitable habit of politicians, because in public they are obliged to be so suave in utterance and so smiling and ingratiating in manner. Baker was not like them at all; he knew a vast deal of literature and could talk about books with comprehension; if you mentioned a passage from John Eglinton, or a scene from Tourgenieff, or a poem of Yeats or Masefield, he would know what you were talking about; he is not one of those who, by the little deceit of a thin, factitious smile of appreciation, pretend an acquaintance they have never enjoyed. Baker has been able to keep the habit of reading, even in politics, a singular achievement. Only he would not read novels that were in the somber or tragic manner; I used to tell him that this was a sign he was growing old, since only the buoyancy of youth can risk its spirit in such darkened paths. For instance, he would never read my novel about prisons, “The Turn of the Balance”; he said he knew it was too terrible. But I did not reproach or blame him. I no longer like to read terrible books myself, since life is....
But that pretty scheme fell through, our tour was abandoned, and we went separate ways, though we did have the joy of speaking together on several occasions, once here in Toledo, where we opened the campaign in old Memorial Hall, and again in a town down the state, and at last in two great meetings in Cleveland, where they got out the old tent Johnsonhad used in his campaigns, and the audiences its canvas walls sheltered, there under the flaring torches, were inspired by his spirit as once they had been by his presence, and with the enthusiasm of them fresh in my heart I set out from Cleveland that last week of the campaign for the long drive to Columbus, where the campaign was to close.
It was a hot day in early September; the clouds were piled high in the west as we started, and the air was suffocating in its dense humidity; plainly it was to be a day of thunder and lightning and tropical showers. My friend, Henry W. Ashley, who understands democracy to the fundamentals (his father was the friend of Lincoln and wrote the Fifteenth Amendment), was with us, for he was ever an interested spectator of our politics. We went by the way of Oberlin because Ashley wished to see the college campus and indulge some sentimental reflections in a scene that had been so vitally associated with the old struggle of the abolitionists. The storm which had been so ominously threatening all the morning broke upon us as we slowly made our way through the country south of Oberlin, as desolate a tract as one could find, and we were charged as heavily with depression as were the clouds with rain as we thought of the futility of attempting to convince the inhabitants of such a land that they had any responsibility for the problems that were vexing the people in the cities of the state. I remember a village through which we passed; it was about noon, according to our watches, though, since in thecountry the people reject Standard time and regulate their leisurely affairs by “God’s time,” noon was half an hour gone, and, after their dinners, they were seeking the relaxation they did not seem to need. The rain had ceased, and on the village green under the clearing sky the old men had come out to pitch horseshoes. Among them was a patriarch whose long white beard, stained with the juice of the tobacco he resolutely chewed, swept the belt of his slack trousers; he was in bare feet. The human foot after it has trod this earth for three score years and ten is not a thing of beauty, and Ashley joked me, as we labored in the mud of those deplorable roads, for my temerity in hoping that we could convert that antediluvian to our way of thinking.
Had the task been wholly mine I should not have undertaken it, and, of course, in that instance I did not attempt it; the old barefoot quoit player stood to us a symbol of the implicit and stubborn conservatism of the rural districts. But there were others in the field, an army of them, indeed; Herbert Bigelow, the radical preacher of Cincinnati, who had been president of the constitutional convention; Henry T. Hunt, Cincinnati’s young mayor; and, most influential of all of them perhaps, James M. Cox, destined that autumn to be elected governor of Ohio. And, besides all these, there was the spirit of the times, penetrating at last with its inspiring ideas even the conservatism of the country people. I was confident that the old man could be counted upon to vote for the initiative and referendum at any rate, since one so free and democratic in costume and manner must be of the democratic spirit as well, though I had my doubts of him in that moment when he should put on his spectacles and examine the amendments abolishing capital punishment, and granting home rule to cities.
But the sun came out again as we climbed the hills that overlook Mansfield, to command a lovely scene, broad fertile valleys all renewed by the rain and flooded with sunshine, and I remembered that Altgeld had once lived there, and beheld this same landscape, that he had taught school in that town and from there had gone away with a regiment to fight in the Civil War. The chauffeur got out and took the chains off the tires, while we sat silent under the influences of the beauty of those little Ohio hills. And then, as we started on, the clouds returned, the scene darkened, and it began to rain again, and, before we knew, the car skidded and we were in the ditch. The wife of the farmer whose garden fence we had broken in our accident revealed all the old rural dislike of the urbanite; she said she was glad of our fate, since motorists were forever racing by and killing her chickens, and with this difficulty I left Ashley to deal, since he had been president of a railroad and was experienced in adjusting claims, and, after he had parleyed a while, I saw him take out his pocketbook, and then the chauffeur got the car out of the ditch and we were on our way again.
The scenes and the experiences of that journey remain with me in a distinctness that is keen in my senses still; because I suppose I felt that in the race with time we were then engaged upon, if we were toreach Columbus that evening for the meeting which was to close the campaign, I was in a symbolic manner racing with my own fate; that campaign a success and I should be free. I should have liked to linger a while in Delaware, where I had spent a portion of my boyhood when my father was a pastor there, and where in the University my uncle William F. Whitlock had been a professor of Latin and literature for half a century, dean of the faculty, and, for a while, president. As we passed by the chapel in the shade of the old elms on the campus I felt that I could still hear the solemn strains of the noble hymn they sang at his funeral, the lusty young voices of a thousand students, united with the quivering trebles of some old clergymen, in “Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still.”
My eyes could pierce the walls of the chapel, closed and silent that afternoon for the autumn term had not opened, and I could see myself sitting there in the pew with our family, and looking at the portrait in oil of my uncle on the wall, among the portraits of the other presidents of the University, faintly adumbrating on his great smoothly shaven face the smile of quizzical humor which he wears in my memory. I sat there,
by these tears a little boy again,
and thought of those days so long before when at evening he would come to our house and stand spreading his hands before the fire for a while; he generally brought under his arm a book for my father to read. I remembered that he used to carrypapers in his high hat, and that his coat stood away from his neck, round which he wore a low standing collar, with a black cravat. He seemed to carry in the pocket of his waistcoat an endless succession of eyeglasses; he would use a pair, take them down from his high nose, lay them on the table, forget them, and, when he wished to read again, draw another pair from his waistcoat pocket. And I went on thinking of him as he looked over his glasses on that evening when I had gone late into his study and found him bent over his desk with the “Satires” of Juvenal before him, studying his lesson for the morrow, he said. I thought he knew all the Latin there was left in this world, but, “Oh, no,” he said, and added: “If you would sometimes study at this hour of the night perhaps——” He did not finish his sentence, since it finished itself.... “I don’t exactly know how to render that passage, Professor,” a student, blundering through an unmastered lesson, said in conciliatory accents one morning. “Ah, that has been evident for some time,” my uncle replied.... And now there he lay in his coffin, on the spot in that dim chapel where he had so often stood up to address the students; he was gone with all those others whose portraits hung on the wall, men who had stood to me in my boyhood as the great figures of the world. I should see him walking under those trees no more, his tall form stooped in habitual meditation.... They were all big, those Whitlock forbears of mine, six feet tall every one of them, grim Puritans, I think, when they first came to this country three centuries ago.... And I hada vision of my uncle as walking that afternoon in other groves with all these dark ministerial figures that towered over my boyhood. They were all Puritans, too, strong and rugged men, inflexible, obdurate, much enduring, stern pioneers whose like is known no more. And I, who could join in the lofty strains of that old hymn, as a memorial to my uncle, could find unavailing regret in my reverence.... But all changes, and it was a time of change, one of those periods which make up the whelming tragedy of this life. And, as they had gone, so all the old combinations had disappeared with them, resolved into the elements that make up that shadowy vale we call the past.... But we were driving on, racing away from that past as fast as we could go, on by the cemetery where my uncle lies in his grave, on by the rocky ledges of the Olentangy, the little stream where we boys used to swim, and, just as darkness was falling, besmattered with mud, we drove into Columbus, and along High Street, hideous in the crazy decorations that were hung out in honor of the State Fair, and up to the Neil House—and across the street on the steps of the old state house four or five thousand people already gathered for the meeting at which I was to be the only speaker. A bath and a bite of supper, and then across the street to the meeting, and I was standing there before that vast crowd, and over us the shadowy mass of the old capitol, in which my grandfather had made the first motion that was ever put in it as a member of the senate half a century before; he told me thathis two sons danced all night at the ball with which its opening was celebrated....
And so, on that brilliant Sunday morning in September, as we entered the motor car in Columbus, with the impressions of the great meeting of that Saturday night still fresh and vivid in the mind, I could settle myself for the long drive back to Toledo over the white pikes that wound northward between the fair fields of our beautiful Ohio, and say to myself, over and over, with the delicious sensations of a secret, that the relief had almost come at last, and that now I could do the thing I loved to do—if only the people would approve the constitutional amendments at the election on Tuesday. There were the happiest of auguries in the sky; it was without a cloud to fleck its blue expanse, and the sun blazed and its light sparkled in the fresh air, and as we rode the fields swept by, the pastures still green, the ripening corn tall in maturity, nodding its heavy tassels and waving its broad leaves of dark green, the mown fields yellow with their stubble, and the wide land, somnolent and heavy with fecundity, already rich with the gold of autumn.
And the people did approve, with vast majorities, and among all the principles of democracy they wrote in their fundamental law that day was that of municipal home rule, so that all those cities, undreamed of when the old constitution had been written, and all those little towns, silent and sleepy in the drowse of that Sunday afternoon, might own and operate their public utilities, might draft their own charters, have what form of government theypleased, in short, become free. And so the great dream of Johnson and of Jones came true at last.