The Kentucky Warbler

by James Lane Allen

"His first years in the New World were more disastrous than any in Scotland, for always now he had the loneliness and dejection of a man who has rejected his own country and does not know that any other country will accept him. A fellow Scot, in Philadelphia, tried him at copper-plate printing. He quickly dropped this and went back to the old dreadful work of weaving—he became an American weaver and went wandering through the forests of New Jersey as a peddler: at least peddling left him free to roam the forests. Next he tried teaching but he himself had been taken from school at the age of eleven and must prepare himself as one of his own beginners. He did not like this teaching experiment in New Jersey and migrated to Virginia. Virginia did not please him and he remigrated to Pennsylvania. There he tried one school after another in various places and finally settled on the outskirts of Philadelphia: here was his last school, for here was the turning point of his life.

"I wish I had time to describe for you the school-house with its surroundings, for the place is to us now a picture in the early American life of a great man—all such historic pictures are invaluable. Catch one glimpse of it: a neat stone school-house on a sloping green; with grey old white oaks growing around and rows of stripling poplars and scattered cedar trees. A road ran near and not far away was a little yellow-faced cottage where he lived. The yard was walled off from the road and there were seats within and rosebushes and plum trees and hop-vines. On one side hung a signboard waving before a little roadside inn; on the other a blacksmith shop with its hammering. Not far off stood the edge of the great forest 'resounding with the songs of warblers.' In the depths of it was a favourite spot—a secret retreat for him in Nature.

"There then you see him: no longer a youth but still young; every road he had tried closed to him in America as in Scotland: not a doctor, not a minister, not a good poet, not a good flutist, not a good violinist, not a copper-plate engraver, not a willing weaver, not a willing peddler, not a willing school-teacher—none of these. No idea yet in him that he could ever be anything. A homeless self-exile, playing at lonely twilights on flute and violin the loved airs of rejected Scotland.

"Now it happened that near his school was a botanical garden owned by an American naturalist. The American, seeing the stranger cast down by his aimless life, offered him his portfolio of drawings and suggested that he try to draw a landscape, draw the human figure. The Scotch weaver, the American school-teacher, tried and disastrously failed. As a final chance the American suggested that he try to draw a bird. He did try: he drew a bird. He drew again. He drew again and again. He kept on drawing. Nothing could keep him from drawing. And there at last the miracle of power and genius, so long restless in him and driving him aimlessly from one wrong thing to another wrong thing, disclosed itself as dwelling within his eyes and hands. His drawings were so true to life, that there could be no doubt: the road lay straight before him and ran clear through coming time toward eternal fame.

"All the experience which he had been unconsciously storing as a peddler in Scotland now came back to him as guiding knowledge. The marvelous memory of his eye furnished its discipline: from early boyhood through sheer love he had unconsciously been studying birds in nature, and thus during all these wretched years had been laying up as a youth the foundation of his life-work as a man.

"Genius builds with lavish magnificence and inconceivable swiftness; and hardly had he succeeded with his first drawings before he had wrought out a monumental plan: to turn himself free as soon as possible into the vast, untravelled forest of the North American continent and draw and paint its birds. Other men, he said, would have to found the cities of the New World and open up its country. His study was to be the lineaments of the owl and the plumage of the lark: he had cast in his lot with Nature's green magnificence untouched by man."

The lecturer paused, as a traveller instinctively stops to look around him at a pleasant turn of his road. It had, in truth, been a hard, crooked human road along which he had been leading his young listeners—a career choked at every step by inward and outward pressures. He had not failed to notice the change in every countenance, the brightening of every eye, as soon as his audience discovered that they were listening to a story, not of mere weaknesses and failures, but of the misfortunes and mistakes of a man, who at last stood out as truly great. This hapless weaver, this aimless wanderer through the forests of two worlds, after all had success in him, strength in him, genius in him, fame in him! He was a hero. Henceforth they were alive with curiosity for the rest of the story which would bring the distant hero to Kentucky, to their Lexington.

The lecturer realised all this. But he had for some time been even more acutely aware that something wholly personal and extraordinary was taking place: one of the pupils of the high school was listening with an attention so absorbed and noticeable as to set him apart from all the rest. Just at what point this intense attention had been so aroused, had not been observed; but when once observed, there was no forgetting it: it filled the room, the other listeners were merely grouped around it as accessories and helped to make its breathless picture.

The particularly interested pupil sat rather far back in the school-room, near a window—as though from a vain wish to jump out and be free. The morning light thus fell across his face: it was possible to watch its expression, its responsive change of light at each turn of the story. He seemed to hold some kind of leadership in the school: other pupils occasionally turned their faces to glance at him, to keep in touch with him: he did not return their glances—being their leader; or he had forgotten them for the story he was hearing.