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Children of the Market Place, a novel by Edgar Lee Masters |
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Chapter 49 |
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_ CHAPTER XLIX The next day I went out to look at the ten acres which Douglas had given for the founding of the University of Chicago. I walked over the ground, came to the lake. I was thinking that if Douglas' life were ending in failure how futile was my own life! I was rich to be sure, but what had I done? I had inherited money. Douglas had started in poverty and accumulated a fortune. I had done nothing but increase my wealth. Douglas' activities had covered many fields, and now if he was to fall! What was American liberty? How could their devotion to a liberty, bring liberty to him? Douglas' wife was dead; Dorothy was an invalid. In a few days I went around to see Abigail. That terrible evening remained a subject that must sometime be discussed between us. Abigail was never more gracious than on this occasion, and seemed to understand that I needed to be lifted out of my reflections. She knew what Dorothy's invalidism meant to me, and she was sympathetic with my devotion to Douglas, in so far as it was an expression of human friendship. She had a point of view about everything, which had been developed and clarified by reading and travel. It came over me that I had been nowhere in Europe, that I had been wandering up and down America. My life in England was by now almost obliterated from my consciousness. We were not long in the talk before she said that a man should have more than one interest, that music or some form of art, or a hobby in literature should be taken up as a relaxation from business. What were politics but the interpretation of business? She showed me some pictures she had been painting. A teacher had opened a studio in Lake Street. Why did I not try my hand? I would find it a diversion from other things. I had always loved etchings. I wished I could do that. Well, this artist taught etching too. She inspired me at once to see him. His name was Stoddard, and she gave me the number. I conceived an enthusiasm for this new activity, thinking that it would take me out of myself and away from the America that was closing around me with such depressing effect. Then Abigail and Aldington in supplement of each other began to recall the names of men then living whom they characterized as light-bearers. "Really," said Abigail, "there are only a few men of real importance in America to-day. These politicians and orators--Seward, Sumner, even the late Webster--amount to very little after all. They are even less than Lowell, whom Margaret Fuller recently characterized as shallow and doomed to oblivion. Longfellow is an adapter, a translator, a simple-hearted man. Whittier--well, all of them have fallen more or less under the moralistic influence of the country." "That is what I like about Douglas," I said. "He is not a humbug. I like his ironical voice against all these silly movements, like liquor laws; these ideas like God in the little affairs of men; all this barbarism which breaks into religious manias; all these half-baked reformations. They carry me with him into an opposition to negro equality--all this stuff of Horace Greeley, Emerson, and in which men like Seward and Sumner, and American writers and poets, big and little, share." "Oh, yes," said Abigail, "but after all you can say Douglas is just a politician. You do not need to grieve about him. He is tough enough to stand anything. He was put down by that mob. But I dare say he was not as much disturbed about it as you were. If he should die to-day what would the world lose? He has no great unfinished books, no half-painted pictures, no musical scores without the final touches. Look over the world, my friend. Do you realize who is living in it to-day? In Russia, Tolstoi and Turgenieff; in Germany, Schopenhauer, Freytag, Liszt, Wagner--Wagner is just Douglas' age too. In France, Hugo, George Sand, Renan, Berlioz, Bizet. In England, Tennyson, Macaulay. These are only a few. What has Douglas written or said that will live? What has he done that will carry an influence to a future day? I want to see you lift yourself out of this. Frankly, you seem to me like a man who has never come to himself. You have lived here in Illinois since you were a boy. You found work to do, and you did it. You wanted to be rich, you have had your wish. But the material you have handled has become you. It has entered the pores of your being, and become assimilated with its flesh. You have gone on oblivious of this greater world. There is another thing, and I have never known this to fail: you were a soldier in the Mexican War, and the causes for which it was fought have burned themselves into your nature. You are like a piece of clay molded and lettered and shoved into the hot oven of war. You came forth with Young America, Expansion burned into you. Douglas, being your close friend, and being for these things, gave interpretations to these words. Your glaze took the reflection of his face; and these words became other words of like import, or imaginatively enlarged by the lights which his winning art cast upon them. Give Douglas wit, humor, and he would carry the whole country. For it runs after greatness of territory, railroads, the equality of man, the superiority of the white race. As dull as the mob is it knows that Douglas does not stand for its morality and its God. If he had wit he could make them laugh and forget the distance that divides him from them. We all understand why he has enemies; why the revolutionaries from Germany, Hungary, Austria, divide in doubt over him. But what has he to carry against them that will be a loss to the world, if he fails?" I felt a little apologetic for my devotion to Douglas as Abigail talked. Had I made a god of a poor piece of clay? No, it was not true. I knew him, I believed in him. He was the clearest voice in all this rising absurdity of American life. But Abigail had given me one idea that I wished to act upon. I went the next day to see Stoddard and started to learn etching. If I could only transfer to the copper plate what I had seen of sand hills, pines, pools of water, the gulls over the lake, the picturesque shacks of early Chicago of 1833 and 1840; the old wooden drawbridge, which was over the river in 1834, with the ships beyond it toward the lake and the lighthouse, and in the forefront canoes on the shore, covered with rushes and sand grass. After a few days I saw Douglas. He came on an evening when I was just about to go to him. I had been thinking of him day by day, but waiting for the effect of his rough experience in front of the North Market to wear away from his thoughts and mine. He was now himself again, his eye keen, his voice melodious, his figure pervaded by animation. I noticed perhaps for the first time how small and graceful were his hands. The greatness and shapeliness of his head could not be overlooked. From beneath shaggy and questioning brows his penetrating eyes looked straight through me. Had his pride been wounded, his spirits dampened? Not at all. He was willing to face any audience anywhere. He had told the South unpleasant truths. He had satirized the groups that went to the making of the Republican party. "I have a creed," he said, "as broad as the continent. I can preach it boldly, and without apology North or South, East or West. I can face Toombs or Davis, if they preach sectional strife, or advocate disunion. I can continue to point out the narrow faith of Sumner and Seward. I shall not abate my contempt for the ragged insurrectionists who are going about the country for lack of better business, scattering dissension. Am I to be President? There is trouble now in Kansas and Nebraska. Can I help that? I have stood for the right of the people there to have slavery or not as they chose. But if any trick is played on either of them, whether in favor of slavery or against it, they will find me on the spot ready to fight for an honest deal." Seeing Douglas in all his strength and self-confidence again I was happy. We talked of the old days and drank from the old bottle. I took him to the door, followed his retreating figure down the street, so short but so massive. Then I went to Dorothy, to find her sleepless and unhappy. _ |
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