The author assumes not a rôle literary—has herein no aspirations, literary. His impulse to write is not fame; it is sentiment, a love-sentiment for a woman whom all the world loves and whose “life gives expression to the sympathy and tenderness of all the hearts of all the women of the world.” His motive in writing is to point a moral in “a passion for service”; to limn scenes, vivid, along “paths of charity over roadways of ashes”; to depict for the lesson it teaches a career, a career the memory of which must remain a rich heritage to the American people.
In life’s drama, wherein Clara Barton played the leading rôle, there appear faces to inspire, faces to instruct, but also the faces of intrigue. In the closing incidents of a life-heroic time’s detectives disclose the plotters, and the motive in their plot to destroy—
Like a led victim to my death I’ll go,
And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow.
Except now and then in dim outline, the faces of intrigue in the tragic scene do not appear. These faces are un-American—inhuman—and would mar humanity’s picture.
The Divine Humanitarian forgave His enemies, but the picture of the crucified on the cross ever suggests the Pontius Pilate and the executioners. Clara Barton also forgave her enemies, and yet some day a literary artist may portray the Judasette Iscariot, or possibly the plotting Antony and Cleopatra, to make a Clara Barton picture historically and tragically complete.
In biography is the world’s history. If, in human logic, the silencing of truth in biography be an imperative virtue, then literature should be relegated to the ash-heap of forgotten lore. As “in a valley centuries ago grew a fern leaf green and slender,” leaving its impress on what have become the rocks of the centuries, so truth leaves its impress imperishable on what become the tablets of history. Truth crushed to earth again and again will appear; and, when Clara Barton’s Gethsemane appears with all its delineations in a picture complete, there will be none so poor to do reverence to Clara Barton’s character assassins, nor to the Clara Barton ghouls who desecrate her tomb and use the United States mails to traduce the dead.
Sentiment is the soul of action. The highest tribute to mortal is the angel-sentiment—the tribute to self-sacrificing woman that blazes her “path where highways never ran.”
Ever the blind world
Knows not its angels of deliverance