I
Across a hill-slope that knew my childhood, a bugle’s grieving melody used to float often through the summer twilight. A highway lay hidden in the little vale below, and beyond it the unknown musician was quite concealed, and was never visible to the world I knew. Those trumpetings have lingered always in my memory, and color my recollections of all that was near and dear in those days. Men who had left camp and field for the soberer routine of civil life were not yet fully domesticated. My bugler was merely solacing himself for lost joys by recurring to the vocabulary of the trumpet. I am confident that he enjoyed himself; and I am equally sure that his trumpetings peopled the dusk for me with great captains and mighty armies, and touched with a certain militancy all my youthful dreaming.
No American boy born during or immediately after the Civil War can have escaped in those years the vivid impressions derived from the sight and speech of men who had fought its battles, or women who had known its terror and grief. Chief among my playthings on that peaceful hillside was the sword my father had borne at Shiloh and on to the sea; and I remember, too, his uniform coat and sash and epaulets and the tattered guidon of his battery, that, falling to my lot as toys, yet imparted to my childish consciousness a sense of what war had been. The young imagination was kindled in those days by many and great names. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman were among the first lispings of Northern children of my generation; and in the little town where I was born lived men who had spoken with them face to face. I did not know, until I sought them later for myself, the fairy-tales that are every child’s birthright; and I imagine that children of my generation heard less of
“old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,”—
and more of the men and incidents of contemporaneous history. Great spirits still on earth were sojourning. I saw several times, in his last years, the iron-willed Hoosier War Governor, Oliver P. Morton. By the time I was ten, a broader field of observation opening through my parents’ removal to the state capital, I had myself beheld Grant and Sherman; and every day I passed in the street men who had been partners with them in the great, heroic, sad, splendid struggle. These things I set down as a background for the observations that follow,—less as text than as point of departure; yet I believe that bugler, sounding “charge” and “retreat” and “taps” in the dusk, and those trappings of war beneath whose weight I strutted upon that hillside, did much toward establishing in me a certain habit of mind. From that hillside I have since ineluctably viewed my country and my countrymen and the larger world.
Emerson records Thoreau’s belief that “the flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of America,—most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane’s ‘Arctic Voyage’ to a friend of whom he had borrowed it, with the remark that most of the phenomena noted might be observed in Concord.”
The complacency of the provincial mind is due less, I believe, to stupidity and ignorance, than to the fact that every American county is in a sense complete, a political and social unit, in which the sovereign rights of a free people are expressed by the court-house and town hall, spiritual freedom by the village church-spire, and hope and aspiration in the school-house. Every reader of American fiction, particularly in the realm of the short story, must have observed the great variety of quaint and racy characters disclosed. These are the dramatis personæ of that great American novel which some one has said is being written in installments. Writers of fiction hear constantly of characters who would be well worth their study. In reading two recent novels that penetrate to the heart of provincial life, Mr. White’s “A Certain Rich Man” and Mrs. Watts’s “Nathan Burke,” I felt that the characters depicted might, with unimportant exceptions, have been found almost anywhere in those American States that shared the common history of Kansas and Ohio. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his admirable novels of New England, has shown how closely the purely local is allied to the universal.
When “David Harum” appeared, characters similar to the hero of that novel were reported in every part of the country. I rarely visit a town that has not its cracker-barrel philosopher, or a poet who would shine but for the callous heart of the magazine editor, or an artist of supreme though unrecognized talent, or a forensic orator of wonderful powers, or a mechanical genius whose inventions are bound to revolutionize the industrial world. In Maine, in the back room of a shop whose windows looked down upon a tidal river, I have listened to tariff discussions in the dialect of Hosea Biglow; and a few weeks later have heard farmers along the un-salt Wabash debating the same questions from a point of view that revealed no masted ships or pine woods, with a new sense of the fine tolerance and sanity and reasonableness of our American people. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, one of our shrewdest students of provincial character, introduced me one day to a friend of his in a village near Indianapolis who bore a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and who had something of Lincoln’s gift for humorous narration. This man kept a country store, and his attitude toward his customers, and “trade” in general, was delicious in its drollery. Men said to be “like Lincoln” have not been rare in the Mississippi Valley, and politicians have been known to encourage belief in the resemblance.
Colonel Higginson once said that in the Cambridge of his youth any member of the Harvard faculty could answer any question within the range of human knowledge; whereas in these days of specialization some man can answer the question, but it may take a week’s investigation to find him. In “our town”—“a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own!”—I dare say it was possible in that post-bellum era to find men competent to deal with almost any problem. These were mainly men of humble beginnings and all essentially the product of our American provinces. I should like to set down briefly the ineffaceable impression some of these characters left upon me. I am precluded by a variety of considerations from extending this recital. The rich field of education I ignore altogether; and I may mention only those who have gone. As it is beside my purpose to prove that mine own people are other than typical of those of most American communities, I check my exuberance. Sad, indeed, the offending if I should protest too much!