The Literary Pilgrimage

I HAVE it for truth from a wise and good man that “the author is the most sensitive of all the beasts of the field.” I find, too, by sore experience, that nothing can by any means overpass “the sensitiveness of cities.” When, therefore, your author gets forth on the public road, well beladen with bordereaux, guide-books, compasses, chart, and spyglass; and when, thus ready, your author betakes him not to one but to verymany cities, and afterwards bears record what good or ill he saw there, there is vast and grievous ado. Indeed, I know no other battling at all comparable with this; for, considering how poignant the weapons employed on either hand, and, moreover, considering the exquisite and utterly unpanoplied sensitiveness of whoso gets mixed in the fight, it will scarce happen that either side should come off unhurt.

In the old time it was not so. Herodotus might kodak the Egyptians in prose, and no retaliatory hieroglyphs were set in type for Herodotus, there being no types to set them withal. Neither need good Sir John Maundeville stand target for an Asiatic counterblast: Asia never found him out. Nor indeed was Dr. Samuel Johnson shamefully entreated of the northern islanders; his book cost too much. But given the high-speed press and given the shilling edition, and I promise your pilgrim a time of it. Your Dickenses, your Bourgets, your Brunetières, your Kiplings, and your Steevenses shall pay for their fun. The Hoe press eggs on the combatants, lending illimitable publicity to all that gets uttered, till sad is the havoc. What wonder, then, that the pseudo-Parisian of “America and the Americans ” must cower and hide his name, well knowing the doom meted out against this monstrous literary offense ?

Yet the burnt child loves the fire, and authorship will again and again go a-pilgriming, no matter how perilous the way. An eternal type is this roadster of letters, successively reincarnated and with such singular persistence that thence comes a far from incurious question: to find out what aim bids the sensitive author run hazards so dire. I note many aims, each good in itself, — or if not good, then at least serviceable and worthy of sympathetic consideration. See: they are these, — the love of truth, the love of art, the love of right, the love of men, the love of self. And however glib the scribe’s plea that he serves but one lord, I must answer he serves all five; however distinctly he announce himself as this or that and none other, I nevertheless declare him five fellows at once. He is scientist, poet, preacher, philanthropist, and blatant self-trumpeter.

First, he is a social philosopher, out for facts; and that, you’ll consent, is not bad in itself. Besides, it’s a lark. To see that certain things are so and not otherwise; to discern the ways of men, the courses of trade, the disposal of wealth; to view with eager joy the shop and the smithy; to dangle one’s legs from the edge of the wharf; to toast one’s intellectual toes at the hearth of sweet domesticity; to walk with little children to school; to gossip amongst miniature statesmen at the tapster’s; to sit in church with God’s saints, while the organ peals the hymn; to hobnob with authors, painters, actors, and composers ; to see the world go, and to ask it questions, — honestly now, what is this but to sip Hymettus honey the whole day long and get paid for it ? To him who would find out the heart of his fellows, the clarion verses of Milton are little less than Holy Writ, —

But now, in the joy and the toil of the telling, our scientist turns poet, singing the thing as he saw it, in vivid, pictorial, rhythmic prose. Thus does the pilgrim live his life twice over, and give of himself and his treasure, that all who read may share the delights of the road. This, in the humanest sense, is art for art’s sake, for art is the science of pleasure; and if the pilgrimage lacked other sanction, I should still speak good of it because the record of it affords happiness — to the folk who are not “written up.”

Yet wholly unfitted, indeed a mere blindworm for stupid imperception, is the lover of truth and art who loves not also a clear, brave conscience; and conscience, like murder, will out. No matter how dingy the wayfarer’s linen duster, or how battered his travel-stained portmanteau, I still see him garbed as a priest and in his hand the crucifix. This man is a homilist, and ever must so remain. It is unalterably implicit in his calling. To become, as it were, a mirror of human life; to see, and make other men see, and, seeing, to ponder; to utter without favor or hesitancy the absolute, obvious fact — that is to preach! For whatever is, is wrong: it ought to be better. Thus comes it about that every good pilgrim prepares stout cudgels for ill and leaves of laurel and bay for good. Praise and blame are his to bestow, and bestow them he must, else who heeds? The deepest thing in humanity is the moral sense. Touch that, and the world gives ear; reach it deep down enough, and the presses will groan with enormous editions. This requires courage (not to say impudence), which comes easy when it pays, and the pilgrim takes for his motto “There ’s no money in modesty. ” Yet spare the blame. Nolens volens a public character, he uses his inescapable renown as a rod of authority, — and bides what follows!

I have called the pilgrim a philanthropist: so he is, and that on broad lines, both generous and patriotic. “One half the nation does n’t know how the other half lives — or why, ” says he; “wherefore to tell the East what the West is like, or the North what the South is like, makes for national solidarity, deepens the social consciousness, runs a square counter to prejudice, faction, sectionalism, and ‘ imperfect sympathies.’” Besides, “ comparisons are odorous, ” and any canton or municipality gets good when it sees itself through the eyes of an alien. The pilgrim’s published narrative yields locally a singular intellectual clarity, — not at first, perhaps, but afterward surely. His thunderbolt clears the air.

Yet very thankless is this our worldkin. Science has ever its Bruno, poetry its Keats, the church its Stephen, philanthropy its Arnold Toynbee, and happy the literary pilgrim who shares in however slight measure their glorious martyrdom. Nay more, he shall scarce miss it. He is Bruno, Keats, Stephen, and Toynbee rolled into one. Hence obloquy— and celebrity. “We are advertised by our loving friends; ” yet slow heralds are they, compared with our enemies. I gravely doubt whether the pilgrim is popular afterwards along the track of his progress, but unquestionably he is famous there. It is even as Kipling foretold. “If you crack a pony over the nose every time you see him, he may not like you,but he will be interested in your movements ever afterward.” Turn literary pilgrim, and you etch your name on the hearts of a people. You are made; and there is no publisher on the face of the known earth who would not give his ears to possess you. No more the rejected manuscript, no more the printed slip ; instead, a list of literary contracts as long as Wordsworth’s Excursion.

Here, then, are reasons stout and good why the literary seven-leaguebooter should take his pilgrim staff in hand. Forth, therefore, he goes, cheered off by his publisher, trundled hither and yon by obliging railroads (booked free in barter for advertising space), followed by frequent missives of editorial suggestion, and charging things to “ the house.” Turn where he may, the big world kotows: governors of states, presidents of vast corporations, leaders of society, rulers of universities, czars, Solons, jurists, soldiers, prelates, and dainty maidens delight to honor him that cometh in the name of the thirtyfive-cent magazine! For him is the whole situation ransacked, X-rayed, Lexowed, and put on show. Amiable burghers will personally conduct him to the crests of wind-blown mountains and the melancholy depths of mines; they will take him to service and pilot him safely through prisons and insane asylums ; they will elucidate with painful prolixity the last turn in politics and the latest imbroglio of high life. Nothing escapes him. Humanity looks to the literary pilgrim like an incommensurable pussy-cat, constantly bringing large quantities of sociological mice and laying them at his feet to be admired.

Aghast at such redundancy of bright opportunity, our pilgrim takes fright. His problem, — to pick apart the real world of brick and mortar, of flesh and blood, of brain and will; to scrutinize every part of it and to tell its relation to every other part; to fit details to fundamentals; and then to re-create a pen, ink, and paper world that shall faithfully body forth objective reality, — this problem, I say, wants guidance. It gets it from social science. Perhaps from old lecture-notes, long left unread; perhaps from lunch-chats with eminent economists, who mingle huge wisdom with their coffee and tobacco-smoke; but more likely from some dry, not to say desiccated, treatise called An Introduction to the Study of Society, the pilgrim makes choice of a modus. Then he seeks out the biggest and valiantest native chief he can think of, and pumps him with untiring assiduity. This chief — if worthy of his rank — thinks panoramas and talks an epic philosophy of society, speaking the natural tongue of the desiccated treatise, but phrasing it humanly. In every such mind facts go captained by principles. Out of all such conversation comes the clear conception of fundamentals. “What are the great, imposing essentials that make up Ohio?” (Answered reflectively in five pregnant words.) “What constitutes Chicago ? ” (Another five words.) And so it goes.

Here, then, is the outline, all limned beyond error. Now for detail. The pilgrim forthwith abandons himself to a life of pleasure. Nothing can exceed the passionate zest with which he pursues the living witnesses to every phase of human existence within those borders. Snob he is none, nor ever can be; waitresses, bishops, bar-tenders, poets, cabmen, scholars, constables, saints, rogues, and the gilded youth,— he loves them one and all, and one and all they bear record of whatsoever they have proudly or humbly been, and seen, and done. This is fullness of life, keen fun, a wholesome, wholesale reveling in sweet, vivid, palpitant reality. It lasts for weeks or months, till finally dawns the sad gray day of the twicetold tale. Then the end is begun. Thenceforward remain languid repetition, the tarnishing of impressions, and a lamentable augmentation of hotel bills.

But bless you, good sirs, our pilgrim has ever an eye to his art! He is no mere statistician or social scientist, plotting a document — which other statisticians or social scientists (who already know as much as he) may coldly scrutinize. Instead he will put before the popular mind an illuminative and fascinating picture, radiant with local color, glowing with humor, faithful in atmosphere, — engaging, pleasing, human! And hence the log-book.

“Repetition,” say some, “is the law of memory.” Believe them not. The sole successful device to keep the dew and the undimmed glamour on the first forceful impression is to clap it down in a log-book. There is nothing so incurably flitterwinged as common fact. In a day the thing becomes commonplace; the pilgrim is then a part of all he has seen ; he sees it no longer. He is nimble therefore with pencil or fountain pen ; dialect, slang, local idiosyncrasies, street scenes, odd customs, anecdotes, jests, — he jots them all down. I predict he ’ll eventually toss the most away ; but he seizes them now with insatiable, indiscriminate greediness, for so the rainbow-gleam is caught in the spider’s web, — the one a treasure, the other a dross.

Thus laden, the pilgrim wends his homeward way. To write ? Not for many days. Instead to read and to ponder. That city or hamlet or commonwealth — whence came it ? What call tugged irresistibly at the hearts of men that they migrated thither? What brand of soul responds, like troopers to bugles, to that particular forth-beckoning ? And when spirits thus “ selected, ” nature-fashion, out of countless thousands, got segregated in just such a community, what initial discipline had God prepared for the hardening and exalting of them? Indeed, did they ever “let themselves be lessoned so, ” and patiently mould out an enduring city, or did they, like the brilliant, passionate, laughter-loving folk of the Rockies, run home again to be replaced by others, so that their land was ever a land of strangers ? Moreover, what befell in their day and place to test their temper and timber and show what stuff was in them ? These and like questions will the pilgrim pursue with many big volumes laid open before him, the while his midnight lamp burns bright.

Just here lurks potential undoing. An ounce of ignorance spells a hundredweight of misconception. Kipling, tapping at a nation’s postern gate and taking a continent hind-side before (historically as well as geographically), writes American Notes, than which none sillier ever dripped from a boyish quill. The dusty tome, the midnight candle, — these would have caught the blunder and surely estopped it. Had Rudyard Kipling but known the West a transplanted East, he would never have painted San Francisco as “a mad city, inhabited by absolutely insane people.” Insight is always historical. Beautiful San Francisco, — gold-born, fever-bred, schooled in adventure, saved by the Pan-Saxon sanity that runs in the blood, — how shall the pilgrim know San Francisco who reads not the first and last lisp of the story of it?

And I do assure you, sirs, there was never more jubilant reading. They tell how a certain journalist once dispatched his reporters to question a group of celebrities as to which event in history each one would think himself luckiest to have witnessed. The first said, “The burning of Rome; ” the second, “The battle of Waterloo; ” the third, “The destruction of Pompeii, ” and so on with numberless variations till they came at last to the most sumptuous egotist in the whole world. That gentleman said quietly, “The Creation.” Now the literary pilgrim, searching the history of a people whose salt he has eaten but yesterday, feels as if he beheld the Day of Creation, — a splendid, populous, wealthy, and powerful commonwealth is made out of nothing as he turns those luminous pages. The trivial becomes romantic, heroic ; no slightest observation but swells with big significance. His slender notes fill inconceivable volumes. What seemed a mere transcript from ephemeral phases of human existence assumes the proportions of a philosophy of society. For, as every community is representative, this man has hit on great principles of social evolution. Whereas a fortnight ago he knew This and That, to-day he knows How and Why.

And now to the arduous task of composition, — arduous and all but perfunctory. Poor, toiling pilgrim, — you shall see him laughterlessly recording the merriest jokes, coldly transferring from palette to canvas the loveliest colors, listlessly seeking “that perfect word, which is hard to hit as a squirrel,” and even inditing moral thunderbolts without blinking! Alas how limp and dull it seems, as “spirit, fire, and dew” turn to black and white! Your ardent adventurer sits on a tall stool, keeping books, — the clerk of yesterday. A manuscript ? What pray is that but, as Lacordaire said, “dried leaves ” ? Indeed, the languid author recalls, not without anguish, the verses of Whitcomb Riley, —

Ah, but dis aliter visum! That magic alchemy called publication will out of dried leaves make firebrands. No sooner has the thirty-five-cent magazine got itself distributed along the pilgrim’s track than all the dogs of war are set baying at once. Zounds, what a monstrous to-do ! He who beheld the thing with his own eyes, he who with infinite toil discerned the sense of it, he who spared no pain to set it down truthfully, he who in all did but follow the light of a good conscience and the sound purposings of a generous heart, — how fares he now ? A hundred delirious editors revile him. Priests of I know not what sects or denominations anathematize him from the pulpit. His name is a hissing and byword on street corners. Schoolma’ams belabor him with poems. Even bedridden invalids rise up on their pillows to pen imprecations. Irate letters of remonstrance rain in upon him and upon his publishers, — insulting letters, which assail his personal character, his literary style, and his methods of inquiry. And had he not already moved to some fairer region of the earth’s surface, it is plain he might now be wearing that plumage which sticketh closer than a creditor!

It seems for a bit that our pilgrim’s reputation is, beyond chance of remedy, to be done away. Then he finds himself helmed like Navarre, — a battalion at his back; and the battalion is won from the foe. For no pilgrim ever wrote aught of any remotest place, but partisans sprang forth in that very place and fought for him mightily. And presently you behold the sensitive city rent with internal dissensions, faction warring against faction about nothing else but their recent visitant, though they that be for him are fewer than they that be against him.

From this there arises a psychological problem of very genuine interest (considering the fidelity and, on the whole, the geniality of that which was written), to tell the precise nature of the offense. “The sensitiveness of cities,” — that is not reason enough. Why so sensitive, why so maddened by the mere publication of matters the burghers themselves have most willingly told to the pilgrim ? Why so goaded and dirked through the ribs when authorship throws on the screen of national apprehension a picture patent enough to any wight who should turn his steps thither ? I have pondered these questions so long (for this profession of literary pilgriming is one with which I have, from time to time, myself meddled a little) that it would not be strange if I had caught some glimmerings of an answer.

Now I find, the more I examine it, that cities don’t like the plain truth about themselves. As regards the sentiment for localities and communities, there are chiefly two sorts of folk alive, — optimists, thinking no evil, and pessimists, thinking no good. Tell the story frankly and fearlessly, — tell the one side as fervently as the other, — and you can’t miss enraging both parties. As for any who follow the waving plume of that gallant Navarre helmet (and God save those merry gentlemen!), they beyond doubt are the rare souls who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They have ethical discernment and an intellectual temper so finely balanced as to deserve the white ermine of the judiciary! So, at least at the hour, thinks the pilgrim.

I perceive, too, that sensitive cities exquisitely enjoy criticism, though they don’t know it. If there is any invective in the air, they will come hundreds of miles to fly into it. Jeer a city without calling it by name, and forty boroughs will claim the opprobrium. They love to. This applies also to the citizen. There is nothing so detestable as oblivion (when you can’t get rid of it), and to see one’s self published, even by the vaguest implication, is to know that at last one is heard of. Yet again, whether on charge of error or of mischief, the author’s temporary discomfiture fills the community with a delicious sense of reciprocity, — also with a soul-satisfying conviction of its own superiority, both moral and intellectual, above any writer under heaven. Not long ago a studious social scientist was peering down through his sociological microscope upon many animalculæ; now the animalculæ are observing that same author through that same microscope, and when the direction of vision is thus reversed, it ’s funny how small he looks!

Small you would scarce think him by the monstrous logical and illogical enginery they bring to demolish him, or by the enormous tumulus of penned and printed vituperation beneath which they seek to bury him. And this process of “curse and counterblast” is itself interesting, and not unworthy of critical analysis.

Either the author who wrote the impartial description of the city had lived in that city, or he had come there from elsewhere, or he had never been there at all. In any case the natives are primed for him. If he was never there, that seals it; he is mercifully and promptly torpedoed by frank exposure. If he has lived in his city, they hiss him for treason and short is his shrift. But if he came to that city from somewhere else, Heaven help him ! He shall then be well garroted with the argumentum ad hominem.

This man by his scrip and staff and spyglass is confessed a wayfarer, and what, pray, shall he of the sleeping-car and the village inn, he of the hotel piazza and the tally-ho coach, he of the dusty lane and the lonely moor, write (or indeed know) of a free people ? Listen, you merry roadster, and you ’ll hear something to your disadvantage. On mine honor as a vagabond I declare that though you spend a whole month in your progress (through Iowa, let us say), though you continually buttonhole every Hawkeye from Davenport to Sioux City and fill twenty - eight notebooks with expert testimony, and though you pass yet another month delving in histories, census returns, cyclopaedias, atlases, newspaper files, and the musty bound volumes of magazines, you shall still furnish food for flames, till indeed there is naught left of you but clinkers. “Iowa from a Car Window, ” — that’s what they ’ll call your treatise!

Nay more, quite beyond and beside the charge of haste and superficiality lies the plausible charge of incapacity: “Only the native knows his native land.” To which I reply, no native knows his native land, — nor ever can ; he knows it too well to know it at all, — that is, for literary purposes. The truth is best told by him who has only just pinioned it; and the more amazed the youthful enthusiasm with which he first came on it, the more deliciously readable his report of it. They tell a good story of Charles A. Dana, — how Dana once summoned a boy reporter and said, —

“ To-morrow you write up the yacht race.”

“But,” said the lad, “I don’t know how. I’m a Nebraskan. I only came here last night, sir, and I haven’t so much as seen New York harbor yet. As for yachts, — why, I never saw a yacht in my life! ”

“Just the reason I sent for you, my boy! You ’ll write a story that people can read; you ’ll picture the thing; you ’ll write with enthusiasm because it’s all new to you.”

Sane logic! The poetry of the sea has always been written by landsmen; it always will be. The barrack-room ballads are best sung by a gentle civilian. The inside of anything is clearest seen by an erstwhile outsider. Mr. Bryce, not Mr. Lodge, writes The American Commonwealth. Emerson, not Carlyle, writes English Traits. It is, in fact, a general principle, taking its root in the nature of the human mind itself, that the guest sees more than the host. But this, you will discern, an angered native is emotionally unfitted to realize.

Again, the local press berates the departed visitant for “ seeing things out of proportion.” And now, by rejoinder, I ask, “Are those rampant and militant editors such accomplished past masters of social science? Have they half the equipment of a well-furnished pilgrim ? Have they by their travels attained equal footing for broad comparisons and accurate generalization? ” The case is this: the editor must fell the pilgrim, whether or no, and he addresses an audience so hysterical, for the nonce, that any sort of sophistry gets relished and approved, if only the pilgrim appears the under dog.

No, it is far more conceivable, I take it, that the utter stranger — so grant he be but patient enough — should see justly and without prejudice, or narrow limitation, or force of mental habit, rather than any native. And that — subliminally — the native suspects; hence this mace-brandishing malediction and merciless vituperation, violence making up for want of rationality. The consciously ill-versed preacher pounds the pulpit cushions; the man of puny resources swears loudest; and the faithfully reported community, seeing itself overborne by a social science beyond its power to reply to, becomes truculent and abusive, forgets all the praise, remembers all the blame, and turns with keen venom of soul upon its tormentor.

“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, ” says the sensitive city; “ and, as all literature is a confession, the pilgrim’s printed narrative bespeaks an evil heart.” The world is forthwith combed for corroborative evidence, and wherever the pilgrim has been in former days they look for dark tales of him. Was he once a clergyman? They call him “ex-parson,” “heretic,” “renegade.” Did he ever work any good ? They brand him as “reformer.” Is he young? They picture him “an irresponsible enfant terrible, ” — a smart upstart eager to make a sensation. Old? He is verging toward “second childishness and mere oblivion. ” Is he single ? A heartless clod. Married? Presumably henpecked. Is he college-bred ? An intellectual snob. A non-university man ? Incompetent to handle so serious a matter. Has he published books ? They tatter them to rags. If he stood for high office or sat in the glare of “that fierce light which beats upon a throne, ” he would not be more pitilessly exposed to contumely and public slander. The upshot is this : a vicious man with a malicious motive has entered the innocent city, taken the municipal skeleton out of its closet, and dangled it for hire before the world, — whereas God knows there is no such skeleton! “ Liar, ” “ traducer, ” “ spy, ” “enemy of society,” — these dainty epithets look well in the headlines. The columns thus captioned get clipped and reprinted all over the country.

To find one’s self the centre of so much uproar and confusion is, well — interesting. As a first experience, I don’t recommend it. Indeed, having never been blown up by nitro-glycerine, or crushed by a falling meteorite, or cut up into little pieces with dull scissors, I know nothing more hideous than a general, concerted attack by the press. It has only one good point. For three solid weeks the pilgrim neither eats nor sleeps, and he saves a pretty penny on room rent and board bills. Think! His fair name is filched away ; when people want to frighten little children, they tell them that he will get them; he cannot go back to the place of his wayfaring; and menacing letters threaten him with physical violence until he fears some delegated assassin or band of assassins may knife him in the night-time. Assailed by so overwhelming a mass of counter testimony, he doubts his own eyes, his own reason. He has published an insane document; the padded cell awaits him! Besides, confronted by such poignant charges of moral obtuseness, he grows morbid, self-flagellatory. He gets “conviction of sin; ” and should the patrol wagon pull up at his door, he would crawl into it without help!

Then come reaction and relief. The pilgrim gains the Stoic mood. Sleep returns. So does appetite. And then ’s the time to reopen with untrembling fingers the long yellow envelopes sent by the clipping bureau, to carefully reread the miles of slanderous cuttings, and to paste them all in a huge, fat scrap-book. “There,” says the pilgrim, “is food for thought.” It certainly is, and a little reflection develops conclusions worth gaining. In the first place, he finds scarce a line but is written in anger; and that, you agree, argues on his side of the case, — it is only the truth that wounds. In the next place he detects frequent evidences of plain insincerity, — editors writing, not what they believed, but what they believed the people believed they ought to believe. Furthermore he runs on much trace of editorial penury of mind, perceiving that he was eagerly welcomed as “material, there being little other at hand. Yet again, he discerns everywhere a woeful lack of facts, — sophistry, falsehood, abuse, but small serious attempt at rational rebuttal. But what startles him most is to see how few people do the world’s thinking. Out of a hundred and fifty editorials only eight are original. The rest are “rewrites,” — penned without exception by gentlemen who have denied themselves the exhilaration of reading the pilgrim’s narrative !

And now the emotional convalescent reads once again the “ letters to the editors ” and the “communications,” in which such valiant communicants as “Constant Reader,” “Justice,” and “Old Resident,” together with many more who sign their full and true names, do him ill. Beside them he arranges the pretty missives the postie has brought. Taken all in all, they are the most amazing collection conceivable. Every one of them comes, or purports to come, from the place of the pilgrimage ; no two tell the same tale ! “ You ’ve said just what I always thought, only you’ve understated it.” “You’re a liar from the beginning, and the truth is not in you.” “You were never here in your life, as I can plainly see by your damnable, conceited, malicious screed. ” “ There are individuals in this town who recognize themselves in your article, and I ’d advise you not to come back here.”

Then loud laughs the pilgrim. The personal letters don’t count (save just a few that come from persons of great distinction), and neither do the manifestoes of communicants ! “ Ask yourself, ” says he, — “ ask yourself if you, a sane mortal, would sit down and write to an author. Ask yourself also if, by the wildest stretch of fancy, you could imagine yourself penning a communication to the local paper.” It is the silent element in every controversy that really means something.

If, now, the gentle roadster’s published account savored of malice or prejudice or any other sort of knavishness, it is, I think, likely to be detected in many parts of the land. Ask a Bostonian what he thought of the essay that smote Nebraska like any ten of its own tornadoes ; ask a Philadelphian how he judged the article Chicago was so frenzied by: both Bostonian and Philadelphian will declare the wayfarer’s narration a sweet-spirited little document that no man in his senses need shudder at, and they ’ll add, “Come and write about Boston and Philadelphia. ” And wait, — wait a year or two, and you shall see the pilgrim meeting Nebraskans and Chicagoans who look him frankly between the eyes and say, “You told the truth.” Then let him go back on his track, and the once indignant townsmen will tender him the freedom of their cities.

But as a personal experience, as a chapter in that journal intime called the life of the spirit, “the best is yet to be, ” for he of the scrip and staff has in a sense obeyed Ben Ezra’s dictum. “Grow old along with me,” said the venerable Rabbi, and, by weeks and months of torture, the pilgrim has, as it were, attained to “years that bring the philosophic mind.” Boy he was; man he is. See! That sensitive nature has fled quite away; and that youthful, fawnlike timidity has likewise vanished. What cares he now for the jeers of the multitude ? What for the roaring thunder of a thousand editorial maledictions ? Earth holds no horrors more monstrously Gorgon-headed than those already braved.

a man is no use in the world until he has lost his respectability. Till then his every word and posture says timorously, “ Ladies and gentlemen, with your kind permission I will endeavor to give you a correct imitation of a human being leading a life.” It is all a pose. Not so our pilgrim’s attitude to-day. Neither craving applause nor dreading opprobrium, he will guide his steps as the blessed Lord hath given him light to guide them, regardless of consequence.

Another pilgrim journey ? Yes, gladly! For truth’s sake, for art’s sake, for humanity’s sake, — but not for self’s sake! It is only the soul founded on a rock of devout conviction that will a second time take up the roadster’s staff and get him forth on the trail that is always new. There’s no fun in publicity, when you’ve got it. There’s nothing so annoying as reputation — to a man grown. And yet, show him once again the path of thorns — he ’ll seek it. And perchance he will so continue, spending his days a-pilgriming, though this I much doubt.

The life is the life of the vagrant. For a thousand friends, you have not one intimate. In a hundred cities men shout at you cheerily, “Why, man alive! where ever did you drop from ? ” — and then suggest birds and bottles, yes and pay for them; but the old friends, — the tried,faithful, time-tested, long-loved comrades and yoke-fellows, — these the literary seven-leaguebooter does n’t have and can’t get. Nobody calls him by his first name. There are no babies named for him, and if he wanted to borrow fifty dollars, I don’t know whose door he ’d knock at.

And the life is not wholesome. You are a spiritual hobo, a moral tramp, registering from Vagabondia, citizen of nowhere. “Free lance,” says the pilgrim, “with headquarters in the saddle, ” — but I know that somewhere inside that brave heart of his there ’s ever an unstilled yearning for a pretty, roseclambered cottage with drooping elms to shade it, — a place to call his own, — a quiet life. He recalls with pathetic frequency that stinging couplet of Peter Newell’s: —

It is even so. His universe is one big, bleak, unhomely hostelry, and he passes to and fro in it with a perpetual sense of world-strangeness.

Yet in time even the world-strangeness wears dull. Town after town flitting by in rapid succession, state after state passing in splendid pageant or panorama — oh the bliss! — till change becomes changeless, and novelty, dimmed by experience, drifts into routine, and that perfunctory. Then, believe me, these traveling days are done. The plate has lost its sensitiveness and must be sensitized anew; and he who has learned naught but roving must, for a season and perhaps forever, unlearn it. “ It is the test of a good institution, ” said Henry Ward Beecher, “that it digs its own grave,” and if there was any merit or virtue in the wayfarer’s art, be sure that the end must come by a natural reaction. One day he will take on his lips the melancholy words of the Preacher, That which was shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun. Then is his pilgrim staff broken beyond hope of prompt mending.

And now he asks calmly, “What, pray, is the due reward or guerdon I ’ve won by so toilsome journeying in the world and so grievous fighting with them that gave blow for blow ? ” I think a very rich and sweet reward. Fame ? Yes, here and there ; but that’s not the point. Wealth? Why, bless you, he spends as he goes, like all vagabond roadsters! Power ? By no means the concentrated, calculable, dirigible power that ’s his who takes root and stays put. Not by the most frivolous vagaries of destiny shall the pilgrim get voted into the commonest of Common Councils. Ah, but think! He knows his native land, — knows it and loves it. Henceforward for him there is neither East nor West, North nor South, highland nor lowland, but of each and all he is equally a citizen. Mere gossip from any humblest dog-hole of the realm, no matter how distant or how obscure, becomes personal and significant. There was he on a certain day; there he is now in reminiscent fancy. Hence even the daily paper glows with high romance, — the erstwhile wanderer has epics with his breakfast coffee, and whole race dramas enact themselves as he sips his post-prandial demi-tasse. In insight, in historic feeling, in sympathies, he is — an American !

“ But best of all, ” says he, “ I have fought a good joust, said my say, tried with what grace there was in me to interpret the world movement, and so to accelerate it. ” And when the din of the fray is stilled forever, and the last weapons laid down, and the troopers themselves put to rest and he with them, there will yet remain his testimony of whatever he saw and heard in the world, — a record of which history will one day make use; for he in his time did portray with candid, fearless truth the life men lived, the thoughts they thought, and the works they laid hand to.

Rollin Lynde Hartt.