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