A Daughter of the Middle Border. Garland Hamlin
Читать онлайн книгу.
marmot whistles, the conies utter their slender wistful cries.
That trail led me back to the hunter's cabin, to the miner's shack on whose rough-hewn walls the fire-light flickered in a kind of silent music. It set me once again in the atmosphere of daring and filled me with the spirit of pioneer adventure.
In a physical sense I ended my exploration ten days later, but in imagination I continued to ride "The High Country." I had entered a fresh scene—discovered a new enthusiasm.
By this I do not mean to imply that I at once set about the composition of a Wild West novel, but for those who may be interested in the literary side of this chronicle, I will admit that this splendid trip into high Colorado, marks the beginning of my career as a fictionist of the Mountain West.
Thereafter neither the coulee country nor the prairie served exclusively as material for my books. From the plains, which were becoming each year more crowded, more prosaic, I fled in imagination as in fact to the looming silver-and-purple summits of the Continental Divide, while in my mind an ambition to embody, as no one at that time had done, the spirit and the purpose of the Rocky Mountain trailer was vaguely forming in my mind. To my home in Wisconsin I carried back a fragment of rock, whose gray mass, beautifully touched with gold and amber and orange-colored lichens formed a part of the narrow causeway which divides the White River from the Bear. It was a talisman of the land whose rushing waters, majestic forests and exquisite Alpine meadows I desired to hold in memory, and with this stone on my desk I wrote. It aided me in recalling the scenes and the characters I had so keenly admired.
* * * * * *
In calling upon Lorado one afternoon soon after my return to Chicago I was surprised and a little disconcerted to find two strange young ladies making themselves very much at home in his studio. In greeting me he remarked in a mood of sly mischief, "You will not approve of these girls—they are on their way to Paris to study sculpture, but I want you to know them. They are Janet Scudder and my sister Zulime."
Up to this time, notwithstanding our growing friendship, I was not aware that he had a sister, but I greeted Miss Taft with something like fraternal interest. She was a handsome rather pale girl with fine, serious gray-blue eyes, and a composed and graceful manner. Her profile was particularly good and as she was not greatly interested in looking at me I had an excellent chance to study her.
Lorado explained "My sister has been in Kansas visiting mother and father and is now on her way to New York to take a steamer for France. … She intends to remain abroad for two years," he added.
Knowing that I was at that moment in the midst of writing a series of essays on The National Spirit in American Art, he expected this to draw my fire—and it did. "Why go abroad," I demanded bluntly. "Why not stay right here and study modeling with your brother? Paris is no place for an American artist."
With an amused glance at her friend, Miss Scudder, Miss Taft replied in a tone of tolerant contempt for my ignorance, "One doesn't get very far in art without Paris."
Somewhat nettled by her calm inflection and her supercilious glance I hotly retorted, "Nonsense! You can acquire all the technic you require, right here in Chicago. If you are in earnest, and are really in search of instruction you can certainly get it in Boston or New York. Stay in your own country whatever you do. This sending students at their most impressionable age to the Old World to absorb Old World conventions and prejudices is all wrong. It makes of them something which is neither American nor European. Suppose France did that? No nation has an art worth speaking of unless it has a national spirit."
Of course this is only a brief report of my harangue which might just as well have remained unspoken, so far as Miss Taft was concerned, and when her brother came to her aid I retired worsted. The two pilgrims went their way leaving me to hammer Lorado at my leisure.
I wish I could truthfully say that this brief meeting with Zulime Taft filled me with a deep desire to see her again but I cannot do so. On the contrary, my recollection is that I considered her a coldly-haughty young person running away from her native land, not to study art but to have a pleasant time in Paris—while she (no doubt) regarded me as a rude, forth-putting anarch—which I was. At this point our acquaintance and our controversy rested.
As the months and years passed I heard of her only through some incidental remark of her brother. Having no slightest premonition of the part she was to play in my after life, I made no inquiries concerning her. She, however, followed me—as I afterward learned, by means of my essays and stories in the magazines but remained quite uninterested (so far as I know) in the personality of their author.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Footsteps of General Grant
Among the new esthetic and literary enterprises which the Exposition had brought to Chicago was the high-spirited publishing firm of Stone and Kimball, which started out valiantly in the spring of '94. The head of the house, a youth just out of Harvard, was Herbert Stone, son of my friend Melville Stone, manager of the Associated Press. Kimball was Herbert's classmate.
Almost before he had opened his office, Herbert came to me to get a manuscript. "Eugene Field has given us one," he urged, "and we want one from you. We are starting a real publishing house in Chicago and we need your support."
There was no resisting such an appeal. Having cast in my lot with Chicago, it was inevitable that I should ally myself with its newest literary enterprise, a business which expressed something of my faith in the west. Not only did I turn over to Stone the rights to Main Traveled Roads, together with a volume of verse—I promised him a book of essays—and a novel.
These aspiring young collegians were joined in '95 by another Harvard man, a tall, dark, smooth-faced youth named Harrison Rhodes, and when, of an afternoon these three missionaries of culture each in a long frock coat, tightly buttoned, with cane, gloves and shining silk hats, paced side by side down the Lake Shore Drive they had the effect of an esthetic invasion, but their crowning audacity was a printed circular which announced that tea would be served in their office in the Caxton Building on Saturday afternoons! Finally as if to convince the city of their utter madness, this intrepid trio adventured the founding of a literary magazine to be called The Chap Book! Culture on the Middle Border had at last begun to hum!
Despite the smiles of elderly scoffers, the larger number of my esthetic associates felt deeply grateful to these devoted literary pioneers, whose taste, enterprise and humor were all sorely needed "in our midst." If not precisely cosmopolitan they were at least in touch with London.
Early in '94 they brought out a lovely edition of Main Traveled Roads and a new book called Prairie Songs. Neither of these volumes sold—the firm had no special facilities for selling books, but their print and binding delighted me, and in the autumn of the same year I gladly let them publish a collection of essays called Crumbling Idols, a small screed which aroused an astonishing tumult of comment, mostly antagonistic. Walter Page, editor of the Forum, in which one of the key-note chapters appeared, told me that over a thousand editorials were written upon my main thesis.
In truth the attention which this iconoclastic declaration of faith received at the hands of critics was out of all proportion to its size. Its explosive power was amazing. As I read it over now, with the clamor of "Cubism," "Imagism" and "Futurism" in my ears, it seems a harmless and on the whole rather reasonable plea for National Spirit and the freedom of youth, but in those days all of my books had mysterious power for arousing opposition, and most reviews of my work were so savage that I made a point of not reading them for the reason that they either embittered me, or were so lacking in discrimination as to have no value. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I hated contention, therefore I left consideration of these assaults entirely to my publishers. (I learned afterwards that Miss Taft was greatly interested in Crumbling Idols. Perhaps she assumed that I was writing at her.)
Meanwhile in Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, the manuscript of which I had carried about with me on many of my lecturing trips, I was attempting to embody something of Chicago life, a task which I found rather difficult. After nine years of life in Boston, the city by the lake seemed depressingly drab and bleak,