This great man had established himself years before, in this place called East Aurora, near Buffalo, and there had erected what I always imagined were extensive factories or studios, or mere rooms for the manufacture and storage and sale of all the many products of art on which he put the stamp of his approval. Here were printed all those rare and wonderful books in limp leather and handstitched silk linings and a host of artistic blank flyleaves, which always sickened me a little when I looked at them. Here were sawed and planed and hand polished, no doubt, all the perfect woods that went into his Roycroft furniture. Here were hammered and polished and carefully shaped the various metals that went into his objects of art. I always felt that really it must be a remarkable institution, though I cared no whit for the books or furniture or objects of art. They were too fixy.
In all his writings he was the preacher of the severe, the simple, the durable—that stern beauty that has its birth in necessity, its continuance in use. With all such products, as he himself was forever indicating, art was a by-product,—a natural outcome of the perfection impulse of the life principle. Somewhere in all nature was something which wanted and sought beauty, the clear, strong, natural beauty of strength and necessity. Who shaped the tiger? Who gave perfection to the lion? Behold the tree. See the hill. Were they not beautiful, and did they not conform to the laws of necessity and conditional use? Verily, verily.
Whenever I looked at any of his books or objects of art or furniture, while they had that massiveness or durability or solidity which should be in anything built for wear and severe use, they had something else which did not seem to suggest these needs at all. There was a luxuriousness of polish and ornamentation and inutile excrescence about them which irritated me greatly. “Here is a struggle,” I said to myself, “to mix together two things which can never mix—oil and water,—luxury and extreme, rugged durability.” It was as if one took Abraham Lincoln and dressed him in the drawingroom clothes of a fop, curling his hair, perfuming his beard, encasing his feet in patent leather shoes, and then said, “Gentlemen, behold the perfect man.”
Well, behold him!
And so it was with this furniture and these art objects. They were log cabin necessities decked out in all the gimcrackery of the Petit Trianon. They weren’t log-cabin necessities any more, and they certainly bore no close relationship to the perfection of a Heppelwhite or a Sheraton, or the convincing charms of the great periods. They were just a combination of country and city, as their inventor understood them, without having the real merit of either, and to me they seemed to groan of their unhappy union. It was as if a man had taken all the worst and best in American life and fastened them together without really fusing them. It was a false idea. The author of them was an artistic clown.
But when it came to the possibility of seeing his place I was interested enough. Only a few weeks before the country had been ringing with the news of his death and the tragedy of it. Long, appreciative editorials had appeared in all our American papers (on what subjects will not the American papers write long, appreciative editorials!). So I was interested, as was Franklin. He suggested going to East Aurora[Aurora], and I was pleased to note that if we went there we would have to go through Warsaw, New York. That settled it. I agreed at once.
Another thing that we discussed at Avoca was that if we took the best road from there and followed it to Portageville, we would be in the immediate vicinity of the Falls of the Geneseo, “and they’re as fine as anything I ever see in America,” was the way one countryman put it. “I’ve seen Niagara and them falls down there on the Big Kanawha in West Virginia, but I never expect to see anything finer than these.” It was the village blacksmith and garage owner of Avoca who was talking. And Portageville was right on the road to Warsaw and East Aurora.
We were off in a trice—ham sandwiches in hand.
It was while we were speeding out of Arkport and on our way to Canaseraga and the Falls of the Geneseo that I had my first taste of what might be called an automobile flirtation. It was just after leaving Arkport and while we were headed for a town called Canaseraga that we caught up with and passed three maids in a machine somewhat larger than our own, who were being piloted at a very swift pace by a young chauffeur. It is a rule of the road and a state law in most states that unless a machine wishes to keep the lead by driving at the permitted speed it must turn to the right to permit any machine approaching from the rear and signaling to pass.
Most chauffeurs and all passengers I am sure resent doing this. It is a cruel thing to have to admit that any machine can go faster than yours or that you are in the mood to take the dust of anyone. Still if a machine is trailing you and making a great row for you to give way, what can you do, unless you seek open conflict and possibly disaster—a wreck—for chauffeurs and owners are occasionally choleric souls and like to pay out stubborn, greedy “road hogs,” even if in paying them out you come to grief yourself. Franklin had just finished a legal argument of this kind some few weeks before, he told us, in which some man who would not give the road and had been “sideswiped” by his car (Franklin being absent and his chauffeur who was out riding choleric) had been threatening to bring suit for physical as well as material injury. It was this threat to sue for physical injuries which brought about a compromise in Franklin’s favor, for it is against the law to threaten anyone, particularly by mail, as in this instance; and so Franklin, by threatening in return, was able to escape.