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 he indulges himself in public speech it is to pour forth a tide of words,
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 was sui 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 the early 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.