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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 The St. Louis Movement 
 
 IN 
 
 Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psychology 
 
 with Chapters of 
 
 Autobiography 
 
 By 
 
 DENTON J. SNIDER 
 
 ST. LOUIS, MO. 
 
 SIGMA PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 210 PINE ST. 
 1920
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Part First (Apprenticeship) 
 
 Chap. I — Dedication ; Beginnings 5 
 
 The Four Elements of St. Louis 15 
 
 The Fifth Element of St. Louis 24 
 
 The Alignment 31 
 
 My Romanic Time in St. Louis 38 
 
 From Romanic to Teutonic 48 
 
 The Great St. Louis Deed 52 
 
 The St. Louis Hero 60 
 
 The Standing Army of St. Louis 65 
 
 Chap. II — Illusion and Disillusion 70 
 
 The Great St. Louis Illusion 76 
 
 The Prophet of the Illusion 82 
 
 Some Effects 94 
 
 The Economic Illusion 102 
 
 The Eads Bridge 107 
 
 The Illusion's Antiseptic 116 
 
 The Great Disillusion 129 
 
 Chap. Ill— The German Era of St. Louis . . 138 
 
 The German Overture 140 
 
 Carl Schurz of St. Louis 150 
 
 Joseph Pulitzer of St. Louis 161 
 
 A Book Writer's Life Lines 174 
 
 The Book Twins Born 188 
 
 The Poetic Element 202 
 
 Life's Central Node 212 
 
 3 

 
 4 CONTENTS 
 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 Part Second (Renascence) 215 
 
 Chap. I — The Classical Renascence 233 
 
 The Classical Itinerary 238 
 
 The St. Louis Literary Classes 254 
 
 The Concord Philosophical School 262 
 
 After School 278 
 
 Back to St. Louis 289 
 
 Back to Concord 302 
 
 The Kindergarten Class 315 
 
 Psychology at Concord 320 
 
 Finale at St. Louis 338 
 
 Finale at Concord 350 
 
 Some Results 361 
 
 A Writer of Books 373 
 
 Chap. II — Renascence Evolved 393 
 
 The New Mythical Setting 410 
 
 The Double Transfer 418 
 
 The Literary Bibles 431 
 
 The Wanderer 443 
 
 Goethe and Dante 459 
 
 The Sigma Publishing Company 479 
 
 Social Chicago 486 
 
 Chicago Literary Schools 519 
 
 Backflow to St. Louis 575 
 
 The Epoch's Crossing 585 
 
 Chap. Ill— The Psychological Renascence. . . 590 
 
 Appendix • 599
 
 $tart Jftrst 
 
 Apprenticeship 
 
 DEDICATORY 
 
 Fifty years and more have passed since the 
 phrase The St. Louis Movement began to be heard 
 in certain limited circles over the country, and occa- 
 sionally to be used in brief printed reports of the 
 Public Press. To most people it only meant some- 
 thing started in St. Louis for the fleeting moment, 
 a little bubble of the time soon to burst into lasting 
 oblivion. Undoubtedly those who initiated it had 
 a vague feeling that they might be doing a germinal 
 deed of permanent and ever-growing significance; 
 but that was just what the future alone could 
 prove. 
 
 Now it so happens that the present writer is the 
 sole survivor of that early group of men for whose
 
 6 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 designation this special locution, The St. Louis 
 Movement, was first coined. And in one way or 
 other to him alone, in his solitary condition, this 
 same designation is not infrequently applied to- 
 day. One inference at least may be made : the name 
 still persists in living, and with it the thing, or 
 conception, doubtless hazy enough in most cases. 
 The subject keeps rising to the surface, asked 
 about, talked about, written about, thought about, 
 often very inaccurately and even mockingly; yet 
 the old idea somehow will not die and get itself well 
 buried for once and for all. Indeed it seems to 
 have a certain weird power of assuming new shapes, 
 of preserving itself through multiform stages of ev- 
 olution, in fine the uncanny gift of re-incarnation. 
 So that spirit, or ghost, or eidolon long ago risen 
 and named The St. Louis Movement, is still among 
 us and at work, even if under forms a good deal 
 changed from its pristine epiphany. 
 
 The scribe now addressing the reader has called 
 himself the present writer with a bit of counterfeit 
 modesty which he may as well henceforth lay aside, 
 and use unblushingly the first personal pronoun 
 without any mask, however transparent. So I shall 
 have the hardihood to say that I was on hand at the 
 primal genetic incident or historic occurrence, then 
 very minute, even if gravid with long life, which 
 can be set down as the first beginning or actual 
 efflorescence of the St. Louis Movement, whereof 
 the present book proposes to be some fragmentary 
 record.
 
 DEDICATORY. 7 
 
 The foregoing event, which may be regarded as 
 the starting-point of the St. Louis Movement, was 
 the birth of the St. Louis Philosophical Society 
 which took place in January, 1866, after due pre- 
 liminaries. About a dozen gentlemen assembled in 
 a down-town law-office, according to agreement; 
 out of this number two men stepped forth as the 
 original founders and first members. One of them, 
 the real originator, was chosen President of the 
 Society — Henry C. Brockmeyer, then a practicing 
 lawyer in the city; the other the active organizer, 
 became its Secretary — William T. Harris, then 
 principal of one of the Public Schools. Each of 
 them spoke briefly his inaugural, emphasizing with 
 enthusiasm the prospects and purposes of the or- 
 ganization ; both failed not to flash some prophetic 
 lightning upon our unlit future. 
 
 These two men were not only the officers, but were 
 in essence the Society, and remained such. They 
 proved themselves the two philosophers of us all; 
 they might be called Philosophy incarnate; it was 
 their breath of life, but likewise their limit, as time 
 revealed. They turned out very different from each 
 other, not only in their lives but even in their philo- 
 sophic gift; and yet, as to persistence they were 
 quite alike, inasmuch as both clung to their favorite 
 discipline and its one master till the light of their 
 days went out. They both died, as it were, with 
 their favorite philosopher's favorite book clutched 
 in the still hand. 
 
 Moreover, from this time forward, I became more
 
 g THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 deeply associated with these two strongly pro- 
 nounced personalities in my practical career as well 
 as in my spiritual evolution, than with any other 
 living men. From the natal hour of this Philosoph- 
 ical Society, they were my friends and fellow-work- 
 ers in the same general cause, which goes under the 
 name of the St. Louis Movement. Each of them 
 wrought in very different fields of external voca- 
 tion; Brockmeyer became Missouri's Lieutenant 
 Governor, and Harris rose to be the Nation's Educa- 
 tional Head; still, the enduring undercurrent of 
 both their natures remained Philosophy to the last, 
 and just the one Philosophy, indeed just the one 
 Book of Philosophy. A single remark I may add 
 here about myself : my life-stream persisted in cut- 
 ting a distinct channel for its flood, though it kept 
 inside the same St. Louis Movement. 
 
 With an affection, which hopes to be eternal, I 
 write the last sentence of this prefatory note to 
 dedicate the present history of our common labors 
 as a monument to the memory of my life-long 
 friends and associates: 
 
 Henry C. Brockmeyer 
 William T. Harris
 
 CHAPTER FIRST 
 
 Beginnings at St. Louis 
 
 Thus the Philosophical Society was born into the 
 world, and proceeded to its work under its two 
 leaders, certainly minds of unusual gift in the line 
 of thought. The formal Society has long since van- 
 ished, having been soon taken up into the larger 
 and more lasting St. Louis Movement which became 
 not merely a doctrine for the few, but a pervasive 
 influence in the community, and had its followers 
 throughout the country. It must be remembered 
 that philosophy brought not revenue, but rather ex- 
 pense. Each of us had to make his living by some 
 special vocation, which gave him bread, but not the 
 bread of life. Two very different callings we had 
 to practice, the economic and the spiritual, and this 
 remained the discipline of a life-time. 
 
 Among the members seated in a little group about 
 the officers, I was seemingly the youngest, having 
 just passed a birth-day which tallied me twenty- 
 five years old, on the preceding ninth of January 
 of said year (1866). There is no doubt that strong 
 pulsations of Hope burst up expressed by the lead- 
 ers, or cowered down unexpressed in the hearts of 
 the rank and file, among whom I took my position 
 in the rear line, but always ready to step forward 
 when the hour struck. 
 
 9
 
 10 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 Such, then, was the open, explicit starting-point 
 of the St. Louis Movement, though evidently it must 
 have had earlier premonitory throbbings. The two 
 officers of the Society before mentioned, Brockmeyer 
 and Harris, took hold of their work as men already 
 experienced. Indeed their first acquaintance dated 
 back to 1858. I had met them informally at a small 
 gathering in North St. Louis the preceding autumn 
 of 1865, when I first heard them plan the Society. 
 Still there had been no organization, probably no 
 very definite purpose beyond the mutual benefit of 
 conversation on favorite topics. 
 
 It may be mentioned here in advance that our 
 two leaders were students and indeed well-disci- 
 plined followers of the German philosopher Hegel, 
 and they naturally turned the rest of us in the same 
 direction, though the Society laid no claim in its 
 Constitution to the propagation of any single philo- 
 sophic system. Thus it was in principle an open 
 tournament for the best jouster. Moreover, Harris 
 was a zealous missionary by nature, as well as a 
 born teacher ; especially in those early years his zeal 
 was aflame for the one he deemed the philosophic 
 master. He had all of Hegel's Works in the orig- 
 inal, and he soon found out those of us who could 
 muster a little German, and he formed the design 
 of putting us into an inner group of pupils who 
 might become agitators and promulgators. The first 
 time I met him at his home in the fall of 1865, some 
 months before the organization of the Society, he 
 slipped into my hand one of Hegel's volumes and
 
 BEGINNINGS AT ST. LOUIS. U 
 
 set me at once to work on a lesson. He would even 
 go around to our rooms and correct our transla- 
 tions. At that time only one volume of Hegel's 
 "Works had been done into English (Sibree's Trans- 
 lation of the Philosophy of History). Thus the 
 first experience of mine was that I had become a 
 pupil in a school for the study of Hegel. That was 
 just what I needed at the moment, so I eagerly fol- 
 lowed the hint of Providence. 
 
 The situation possibly for a year or so took this 
 shape : I, and perhaps half a dozen others, became 
 the free pupils of Harris as instructor, while Brock- 
 meyer remained more in the background as a kind 
 of overlord or higher scholarch. But in the fall of 
 1866, I, wishing to see and hear more of him, en- 
 tered his law office, professedly as a student of 
 jurisprudence, but really as a pupil of the Univer- 
 sity Brockmeyer in person, for he had become to me 
 a personal University whose curriculum I must take 
 at least for a year, before anything else in this 
 world was for me possible. Moreover I bought the 
 entire set of Hegel's eighteen volumes in the orig- 
 inal, and began making explorations in that philo- 
 sophic ocean on my own account and at my own 
 risk. Thus I began my mental circumnavigation, not 
 of the globe only, but of the Universe. 
 
 It soon became manifest that there was one book 
 of Hegel which uprose the lofty center round which 
 all the other works of the philosopher, all our stud- 
 ies, in fact all the thought of the All itself gathered 
 -—that was Hegel's so-called Larger Logic. This
 
 12 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 was very different from Whately's text-book which 
 I had studied at College, indeed it went quite the 
 reverse of the whole line of treatises on Logic from 
 Aristotle down to the present. This Logic was de- 
 clared to be the movement of the pure essences of 
 the world, stripped from their outer illusory vest- 
 ure. Of course I rebounded from it at the start, but 
 I always returned to it as the one fortress of 
 thought to be assaulted and captured for dear life's 
 sake, wherein I was helped often by quick flashes of 
 Brockmeyer's lightning insight. This book has the 
 reputation of being the hardest book in the world, 
 the one least accessible to the ordinary human mind 
 even when academically trained. My wrestle with 
 it was long, intense, and not wholly victorious at 
 the close ; still after years of entanglement I pulled 
 through its magic web of abstractions and obstruc- 
 tions, and left them behind me, not lost but tran- 
 scended. 
 
 Now it so happened that an English translation 
 had been made of this book by Brockmeyer about 
 the year 1860, near the beginning of the Civil War. 
 The volume was handed around in writing, copied, 
 discussed, and to a greater or less extent appropri- 
 ated spiritually. The strange fact is that it was 
 not then printed, and still stays unborn in manu- 
 script after nearly sixty years of waiting. Thus 
 the creative book of the system was never put into 
 English type, and has remained quite inaccessible 
 to the English speaking student. This to my mind 
 has been the chief fatality in the propagation of
 
 BEGINNINGS AT ST. LOUIS. 13 
 
 the work and its doctrines, for it always has had and 
 always will have its distinctive appeal to certain 
 minds and even to certain times. 
 
 Indeed one is inclined to think that this transla- 
 tion of Hegel's Logic has had a peculiar doom hang- 
 ing over it from the moment of its first written 
 line. I have watched it more than half a century, 
 now rising to the surface, then sinking out of sight 
 as if under some curse of the malevolent years. 
 Personally I never used it, never needed it, I had 
 the original and could read it more easily than 
 Brockmeyer's English, which on the whole was 
 very literal — so literal that I often had to turn 
 back to the German, in order to understand the 
 English. Here was supposed to be the first duty 
 of the Philosophical Society : to revise and pay for 
 publishing this central work; still we never seri- 
 ously started. Harris might have printed it in his 
 Journal, but for some reason or other which to this 
 day remains conjectural, he would not. I found 
 Brockmeyer re-translating the original on his re- 
 turn from the Indians in the early nineties. And 
 I saw him thumbing over the manuscript only a few 
 days before his death in 1906. It was his one Su- 
 preme Book, his Bible ; it meant to him more than 
 any other human production, and was probably the 
 source of his great spiritual transformation from 
 social hostility and inner discord and even anarch- 
 ism, to a reconciliation with his government and in- 
 deed with the World-Order, after his two maddened 
 flights from civilization.
 
 X4 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 So our Philosophical Society, and after it the St. 
 Louis Movement, had its weird Book of Fate inter- 
 woven through it from the first yet never fully 
 realized at the last, in print or otherwise. And a 
 similar lot befell our President Brockmeyer him- 
 self, who to my mind represented Genius born but 
 never fully realized in print or otherwise. And 
 must not something of the kind be said of St. Louis 
 herself ? But that man and his sole volume, both of 
 unwon destiny, will often peer out of this narrative 
 for a moment, as the stream flows on toward the 
 outlet. Our Secretary, Harris, had also his life- 
 long wrestle with this same elusive, if not illusive, 
 Book of Fate, which caught and held him in its sub- 
 tle labyrinthine texture of finest-spun metaphysic. 
 
 Undoubtedly we all partook of the character of 
 our communal environment. My stay in St. Louis 
 caused me to share in its innermost life, and had 
 the effect of making me believe that in it lurked a 
 greater possibility than in any other city of the 
 West, if not of the whole United States. This huge 
 dreamy potentiality of civic grandeur we all be- 
 lieved to be quite on the point of pitching over into 
 a colossal reality. Just that was the strongest, most 
 pronounced trait of the town at this time : it clung 
 to an unquestioning faith in its own indefeasible 
 fortune. This was bound to come, and in a hurry ; 
 we did not even need to fight for our greatness, it 
 would be forced upon us. And we did not seriously 
 fight for it, but with calm* resignation awaited the 
 resistless downpour of riches, population, and life's
 
 THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF ST. LOUIS. 15 
 
 other blessings from the fascinated Gods. Such 
 was the divine belief which became a kind of St. 
 Louis religion, and entered deeply into the char- 
 acter of the city, of the individual citizens, not spar- 
 ing the philosophers whose special claim was to 
 pierce to the Pure Essences underneath all lying 
 Appearances. Certainly I was not an exempt. 
 Hence when the prophet came voicing to our ears 
 what lay already in our hearts: Behold, St. Louis 
 the Future Great City of the World, we all accepted 
 it as a divinely sent Gospel, as very Truth denuded 
 of all her illusory drapery. 
 
 In my own case through this long deep partici- 
 pation in our city's most fateful experience, a bond 
 of the spirit was formed which all my absences, de- 
 feats, disillusions have not wholly shattered. Where- 
 of I hope to erect in the present book a little me- 
 morial. 
 
 The Four Elements op St. Louis 
 
 "Tell us without going further," I hear my 
 alert reader demanding, "what, who is this St. 
 Louis of yours ? Analyze her a little for us, that we 
 may catch some notion of the original stuff of which 
 she may be composed. As she too must have a soul, 
 which has become so deeply ingrown with yours, 
 can you not draw a slight sketch of her elemental 
 psychology ? ' ' 
 
 Let it be said at once in reply that I asked a sim-
 
 IQ THE ST. LOVIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 ilar question as I took my early surveys of the city, 
 which finally revealed to my prying vision several 
 heterogenous cleavages or layers in its folk, not 
 simply ethnical but pronouncedly cultural. Various 
 nations were indeed present and active, but more 
 fundamentally various cultures were present and 
 active. Of these I shall first give some reckoning, 
 as I understand them. 
 
 My studies of the city taken as a whole soon led 
 me to see in it four distinct strains, not so much 
 national or racial as spiritual, which have held their 
 way alongside of one another, touching on the 
 edges, intermingling at times, but often secretly or 
 openly colliding. To this inner fundamental 
 separation may be in part ascribed that lack of 
 communal unity and enterprise which has been so 
 many times noted by impartial and even friendly 
 observers. St. Louis has seemed cut not merely in 
 two but in four down to its very soul, which 
 deepest scission has been in part the ground-work 
 of its fate. 
 
 On a number of sides I began to come upon this 
 ultimate fact in the course of my experience. Still 
 I clung to the city and shared its hope. The St. 
 Louis Movement, being of a cultural character, thus 
 fell athwart other and older cultures already inocu- 
 lated and bearing fruit. I have often tried to think 
 that this on the whole was the city's advantage, per- 
 chance its opportunity. For these four diverse and 
 somewhat antagonistic streams of human spirit 
 were mutually limiting and to a degree mutually
 
 THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF ST. LOUIS. 17 
 
 neutralizing, so that the field was open for any new 
 doctrine, which a single dominant belief or estab- 
 lished creed might persecute or undermine or even 
 openly suppress. 
 
 These four cultural elements which I found here 
 distinctly marked off when I arrived, and which 
 remained deeply graven on the communal character 
 for many years, and are still not wholly obliterated, 
 I shall set down as follows : the Roman-Catholics, the 
 New Englanders, the Southerners, the Germans. 
 It will be seen that the division is not strictly racial, 
 not national, not religious, though race and nation 
 and religion played in sometimes with no little in- 
 tensity. But the profounder and more influential 
 distinction I believe to have been cultural, being 
 based upon the deepest spiritual affiliations of the 
 very conglomerate population. Most of the new- 
 comers would easily fall into one of these four 
 classes. For instance I, rather a misfit everywhere, 
 was born in Ohio of Southern parentage, but was 
 educated at Oberlin College which was decidedly of 
 the old Puritanic type. Hence, amid these clashing 
 elements I felt myself at first more closely related 
 to New England, and even let people call me a 
 Yankee, when they were curious about my an- 
 tecedents. Still I felt a certain aloofness from and 
 ignorance of all these forms of St. Louis humanity, 
 yet with an intense desire to know them and even 
 to share in their consciousness. 
 
 I. The Roman Catholics I place at the head, 
 since they were the most numerous, diversified,
 
 18 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 and pervasive element, and at the same time the 
 one with which I experienced my first contact, to 
 my great astonishment. For I did not know that 
 the Christian Brothers were a Catholic Order when 
 I engaged by letter from Cincinnati to teach in 
 their school, and they wrote me never a word about 
 religion. Association with them for over two years 
 in their daily work was a great new experience, 
 producing a decided expansion of my mental hori- 
 zon. Toward me, though not of their confession, 
 they were tolerant, honest, and appreciative, and I 
 tried to requite their goodness, certainly to my 
 moral betterment and intellectual illumination 
 through life. More intimately than ever before or 
 since I beheld the Catholic world-view at work in 
 the human soul, and some of the characteristic re- 
 sults thereof, perhaps not the deepest. Also I ex- 
 perienced with a thrill the Church's world-organi- 
 zation when some Superior of the Order, a monk 
 from Paris or possibly from Rome, came into my 
 Latin class and examined my pupils and myself 
 with friendly approval in broken English. Such 
 was my Catholic epoch, no negligible part of this 
 earthly apprenticeship of mine. It helped to uni- 
 versalize me. 
 
 The mother-church in St. Louis held under her 
 wings many different peoples with their different 
 tongues, histories, prejudices, antagonisms. The 
 old French families of the first settlers were still 
 in evidence, but seemed on the decline. The Irish 
 held ecclesiastical sway from the archbishop down
 
 THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF ST. LOUIS. 19 
 
 the whole hierarchical line; their zeal and energy- 
 won and deserved the prize. G-erman Catholics 
 also were numerous, as well Slavic. All these 
 different and often recalcitrant ethnic elements 
 were fused together by the church in a common 
 faith and in a common education, so that they, in 
 all their diversities, national and otherwise, formed 
 a single cultural element in the city. Outside of 
 this bond, the religious primarily, they were often 
 inclined to fly asunder and showed cleavages, espe- 
 cially political. Thus Catholicism was busied with 
 its peculiar problems in St. Louis. As far as I re- 
 member, it never had a pronounced representative 
 in our Philosophical Society, though Dr. Harris 
 himself, in his later years, showed a tendency to 
 Catholize, as some of us thought, through his sympa- 
 thetic study of Aquinas and the Scholastics, as well 
 as on account of his self-surrendering love of the 
 poet Dante. And perhaps in his universality he 
 could not altogether omit that institution which 
 asserts in its very title the claim to be universal. 
 Here it may be added that two other members of 
 the St. Louis Movement manifested a Catholicizing 
 stage in their evolution, without, however, crossing 
 over and getting inside the Church's boundary. 
 
 II. The New England element I may place next 
 both for the sake of contrast and of similarity. It 
 was the least in numbers, yet the most homogeneous ; 
 its chief cleavage was probably a religious or rather 
 a theological one, for it had brought along to the 
 West its two sorts of theology, the trinitarian and
 
 20 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 unitarian, with their accompanying congregations. 
 But its chief cultural power and influence lay in 
 the field of education ; to its enthusiasm as well as 
 to its ability must be largely ascribed the city's 
 system of Public Schools for the commonalty, as 
 well as "Washington University for the higher dis- 
 ciplines. The majority of the teachers were of the 
 New England mould, though not always of New 
 England birth. Indeed American popular educa- 
 tion had its unflagging propagation as well as its 
 origin, in the land of the Puritans. 
 
 The Public School was the main though not the 
 only seed-field of the St. Louis Movement. This 
 was doubtless owing to the influence of Superin- 
 tendent Harris, a born New Englander. Washing- 
 ton University, decidedly New Englandish, how- 
 ever, held aloof; only one of its Professors, George 
 H. Howison, ever became an active member, and he 
 quit us and the city after a few years' domicile. 
 
 III. The Southern element was well represented 
 in the city, and put its decided impress upon the 
 same, so that St. Louis might well in one sense be 
 called a Southern city. This element showed itself 
 in a pervasive social character, and still more in a 
 superior political ability. A strain of Southern 
 courtesy made itself pretty generally felt, not with- 
 out its streak of arrogance perhaps; but the crea- 
 tive greatness of the South before the War was its 
 gift of leadership, especially in politics — a gift 
 which has shown itself emphatically in the history 
 of St. Louis as well as of the United States. The
 
 THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF ST. LOUIS. 21 
 
 leaders of all parties were for the most part South- 
 erners—of Union and Disunion, of Anti-slavery 
 and Pro-slavery, of the Future and of the Past. 
 Very significant is the fact that the greatest leader 
 the North ever had was a born Southerner — Abra- 
 ham Lincoln. So in this city we may cite the in- 
 stance of Francis P. Blair along with many others. 
 
 But in St. Louis the Southern element became 
 hopelessly divided and crippled by the Civil War. 
 Its leaders gradually failed to keep their political 
 hold on affairs. Indeed the South as a whole seems 
 to have lost in the Nation's strife its former pre- 
 eminent gift of statesmanship, which during the 
 conflict showed itself so strikingly inferior to its 
 soldiership. True political foresight would have 
 kept it out of the. war in the first place, and then 
 after the Union victories of Vicksburg and Gettys- 
 burg, would by a peace have saved its people from 
 untold loss, suffering, and humiliation. And since 
 the war what shall we say to Southern statesman- 
 ship? 
 
 IV. And now we come to speak of the strongest, 
 most emphatic element of all, the German, high in 
 the ascendent on account of its numbers, its aggres- 
 siveness, its general intelligence, and its unity of 
 spirit. Against the German solidarity, based upon 
 education and military training in the Fatherland, 
 and brought along in its very soul to America, the 
 other elements were weaker and internally divided. 
 When I reached the city in 1864, the great War 
 was drawing to a victorious close, and therewith in
 
 22 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 proportion the Germans of St. Louis were rising in 
 authority and also in self-assertion. For it was 
 chiefly through their strength and initiative that 
 the first decisive blow for the Union had been 
 struck at Camp Jackson, with a victory which on 
 the whole never stopped its course for four years 
 till it had rolled down the Mississippi, then wheeled 
 eastward to Chattanooga, to Atlanta, to Savannah, 
 then surged northward through the Carolinas to- 
 ward the border of Virginia for the final struggle, 
 where it was halted by Grant (so he says in his 
 Memoirs). German regiments from St. Louis and 
 from Missouri had been in the thick of the fight all 
 the way, and soon were returning home with a jus- 
 tifiable good opinion of themselves and of their 
 services. Here, accordingly, the Teutonic spirit was 
 mounting upward in lofty self-confidence compared 
 to that of the other elements. 
 
 During the first two years after my arrival in 
 St. Louis, I stuck pretty closely to my Romanic ten- 
 dency which is to be hereafter described, and I re- 
 sisted any deflection into the swirling Teutonic life, 
 though I often brushed its edges and felt its urge on 
 all sides. But in 1866 with my entrance into the 
 philosophic group, and through my intensive study 
 of German Philosophy, and also on account of my 
 deeper contact with the new communal spirit, I 
 began to turn away from my Latin bent and to 
 Teutonize decidedly. Moreover in the same year 
 (1866) I quit the Christian Brothers' College, with 
 its Catholic environment, breathing more or less 
 the spirit of the Latin Church and its Latin culture,
 
 THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF ST. LOUIS. 23 
 
 and I entered upon a discipline very different, that 
 of the University Brockmeyer, as I have elsewhere 
 called it, to celebrate its one tutor. 
 
 Such were the four cultural elements of St. Louis 
 as I found them existent on my arrival and at 
 work with more or less energy. In a way I was 
 sympathetic with them all. They represented the 
 tradition, religious, social, educational, descending 
 down the ages, and coming from abroad to our 
 city in which they were planted afresh, and throve 
 according to their inner vigor. I could not help 
 noting the gradual retreat, if not defeat of French 
 St. Louis some time before the battle of Sedan, with 
 which it seems to have shown a distant parallelism. 
 The old French Market was no longer French but 
 German. In the country, say at Florissant, it was 
 pointed out to me that the Teutonic farmer was 
 slowly getting possession of the Creole's land. 
 Though some of the wealthiest people of St. Louis 
 still bore French names, the mighty inrushing and 
 still rising popular tide was German. 
 
 Strangely, during these same years a similar up- 
 burst of the Teutonic Spirit was taking place on 
 the other side of the earth. I wonder if there might 
 be some connection aerial or subterranean, tele- 
 phonic or telepathic, between child St. Louis and 
 old Fatherland ! Then lay we here, on the banks 
 of the Mississippi, not all by ourselves, self-ab- 
 sorbed in our little local doings, but we were un- 
 conscious participators in a globe-encircling world- 
 movement, which revealed itself in our deeds and
 
 24 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 possibly had begotten the same in some hidden 
 genetic kinship. The year in which I arrived at 
 St. Louis is the date of that peculiar modern start 
 of Prussia toward universal domination which was 
 halted only yesterday, and still lies in the throes of 
 some unfathomable finale. I remember that I felt 
 the first early throb of the awakening Fatherland 
 in the animated conversation of a large German 
 boarding-house on Market street, where I swal- 
 lowed the talk more eagerly and more easily than 
 the potato salad — a dish then wholly new to my 
 taste and to my imagination. 
 
 II 
 
 The Fifth Element op St. Louis 
 
 Alongside these four elements of St. Louis, all 
 of which represent the realm of prescription as 
 handed down from time immemorial, I am going to 
 place the fifth element, also cultural, though very 
 small in size and in voting power. But it was 
 fresh, native to the soil, sprung of the place and 
 the time. This new and renewing element was our 
 St. Louis Movement, which arose on the spot whence 
 it took its name, claiming to be original, autoch- 
 thonous, like only unto itself — unless it, as before 
 intimated, was the product of some influence far 
 deeper and larger than itself, of which it was itself 
 hardly aware. 
 
 There is no doubt that its members proposed to 
 break with tradition, which dominated the intellect
 
 THE FIFTH ELEMENT OF ST. LOUIS. 25 
 
 of the city; they were inclined to challenge the 
 whole realm of prescription derived from Europe 
 and from our own older Atlantic States, Northern 
 and Southern. They did not say so, but they 
 seemed animated with the spirit of the Camp Jack- 
 son deed, which marked a new turning-point, even 
 if very local and minute, in the World's History. 
 A vast hope lay in the time, in the city, and par- 
 ticularly in the Philosophical Society, which pro- 
 posed to reconstruct the whole universe after some 
 model now dimly evolving in St. Louis, and cer- 
 tainly not altogether transmitted from the Past. 
 
 Perhaps the majority of us were by vocation pre- 
 scriptive teachers, but the traditional Higher Edu- 
 cation was to be rounded out, though not sup- 
 planted, by the New University. And some such 
 educative institution soon began to sprout up in 
 the community outside of the regular schools and 
 academic instruction. Let it be said, that this 
 free-born education now in the bud will not perish, 
 but will unfold to flower and fruit, keeping up its 
 life under various forms and appliances down to 
 the present day. For instance, just this month the 
 present writer is still maintaining his classes in the 
 so-called Communal University, which took its 
 primal genesis from the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 In like manner the traditional religion did not 
 satisfy. Few of us went to church, though there 
 was no open rupture with ecclesiastical organiza- 
 tion. Some of the members doubtless kept up their 
 old religious affiliations; but our officers, I know,
 
 26 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 held aloof, yet without antagonism. Still the most 
 distinguished clergyman of St. Louis joined us 
 somewhat later, for the sake of religion, he said. He 
 was right in his statement. In fact, the St. Louis 
 Movement was in the deepest sense religious, not as 
 formal but as universal ; we sought to win a fresh 
 spiritual communion with the Divine Order and its 
 Orderer, and to create for the same a new unworn 
 expression. But to accomplish any such purpose 
 we had to throw aside the old carcass of tradition 
 (as Emerson calls it, perhaps too disparagingly) 
 and to begin over. 
 
 So we deemed ourselves going back to the original 
 underived fountain-head of young inspiration. And 
 we did break loose from the four transmitted cul- 
 tural elements of the city, as already narrated. But 
 what could we do in our emergency? Whom did 
 we grasp for as spiritual guide in the shoreless wel- 
 ter outside of all fixed landmarks of prescription? 
 None other than a philosopher handed down to us 
 from Europe, and the necessary product of Eu- 
 ropean conditions. That is, we took a foreign tra- 
 ditional philosophy to countervail the tradition 
 which had been already imported, planted, and 
 taken root here at home. 
 
 Such was the deep dualism of the St. Louis Move- 
 ment, the dualism which lay in its very birth. Many 
 years will be required before it can be freed of this 
 discordant scission, its prime original sin per- 
 chance, of which it is to work itself clear in a long 
 purgatorial discipline, whereof the record is just
 
 THE FIFTH ELEMENT OF ST. LOUIS. 27 
 
 our present narrative. But it will triumph at last, 
 and that may be taken as the happy end of the 
 drama, at least from this point of vision. 
 
 Accordingly the St. Louis Movement had its 
 start from a philosophic motive, from a system of 
 thought already formulated and organized which 
 we were to master and to apply. Moreover it was 
 a system of idealism, one that put stress upon Idea 
 or Spirit as the primordial creative source of all 
 things. It was a great and necessary discipline 
 which trained us to see underneath the mighty 
 phenomenal occurrences of the passing hour, and 
 to probe to their original starting-point, to their 
 creative essence. 
 
 The time was calling loudly for First Principles. 
 The Civil War had just concluded, in which we all 
 had in some way participated, and we were still 
 overwhelmed, even dazed partially by the grand 
 historic appearance. What does it all mean? was 
 quite the universal question. Of course the answer 
 varied in a thousand shapes ; there was the political, 
 the religious, the social, the economic, even the 
 wholly selfish and sensual answer. Naturally our 
 set sought in philosophy the solution, that is, in 
 Hegel as taught by our leaders. A great world- 
 historical deed had been done with enormous labor 
 and outer panoramic pageantry. What lay in it for 
 us and for the future ? So we began to grope after 
 the everlasting verities, the eternal principles, the 
 pure Essences (reine Wesenheiten) as they are 
 called by our philosophic authority. These trail-
 
 28 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 scendent energies of man and of the world were 
 said to be collected and ordered in one book — 
 Hegel's Logic. So the St. Louis Movement may be 
 called a child of the period, a peculiar infant in- 
 deed, but nevertheless a legitimate birth of the 
 time's spiritual struggle. And this infant seemed 
 to be sent by the time to a world-school for its dis- 
 cipline. 
 
 I may again remark that this pursuit of the 
 Eternal has turned out to have had something 
 eternal in it, at least up to date. The St. Louis 
 Movement retains still a quiet life of its own; it 
 never won an uproarious public existence; it had 
 always to be sought out in its own little nook by 
 those who would know of it and share in its gifts. 
 Just this week for instance (October, 1918,) I have 
 received a letter from an inquirer who wishes to 
 get information about "that original philosophic 
 Club" and its members, mentioning Brockmeyer, 
 Harris, "and yourself." Then he winds up with 
 this expression of opinion: "That is the most re- 
 markable movement known in this country." Not 
 everybody is likely to accede to this view, espe- 
 cially those who have been bred in the home of 
 New England Transcendentalism. But the inquiry, 
 with others of the same sort, may be taken as a 
 sign of a still living interest in the St. Louis Move- 
 ment after more than five decades. 
 
 It was, accordingly, one of the spiritual off- 
 shoots of the Civil War, and belonged, I have to 
 think, peculiarly to the West, of which during
 
 THE FIFTH ELEMENT OF ST. LOUIS. 29 
 
 those years St. Louis was the central and most im- 
 portant, indeed the symptomatic city. For the 
 West did the great positive act of preserving the 
 Union, while the East, valiantly fighting for the 
 same cause, did hardly more than keep its own lime 
 of separation, "the Fatal Line" it has been called, 
 which at last could only mean division and seces- 
 sion. There was, accordingly, felt just in this city 
 the spur to discover and to utter the soul of the 
 Age's Great Deed, for it was peculiarly our own. 
 "Find me the philosophy of that," said the Spirit 
 of the Time to the philosophers now marshaling 
 just on the spot. We took the best help accessible 
 to us from the past, and made it our starting- 
 point. Soon, but not wholly at first, I began to 
 feel the full force of the injunction, and rallied to 
 the work, giving the early unconscious strokes to a 
 task which was not completed till almost half a 
 century later. 
 
 So the fifth element we sought to introduce into 
 the cultural life of St. Louis, and preached our 
 new evangel with no little unction and keen-edged 
 enthusiasm. We claimed to represent the original, 
 indigenous, self-determined soul of the city as dis- 
 tinct from the one brought hither from the outside. 
 We were in a revolt against the four imported ele- 
 ments, from the early French settlers to the last- 
 come German Forty-Eighters, whom our President 
 Brockmeyer, himself a German, branded as nega- 
 tive — hostile to all positive thought and its institu- 
 tions. He was a good hater, altogether too good;
 
 30 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 still there is no doubt that the high-bred Latinists 
 (Lateiner) from the German University were in- 
 clined to scoff at our philosophic master and at our 
 Movement as something long since transcended over 
 yonder in the old country. 
 
 Let that be as it may; still the reader is not to 
 forget the secretly gnawing dualism which lurked 
 in the St. Louis Movement, and which will keep 
 driving it forward beyond itself till it reach a 
 higher reconciling synthesis in a new world-view. 
 This of course lies many years ahead, yet it has its 
 first life-pulse in the present situation. But as I 
 look back at the Movement now, it really lapsed 
 into tradition in assailing tradition ; it became pre- 
 scriptive just in its denial of prescription; it took 
 for granted what it never granted. I must have 
 felt somewhat of this deeper dissonance from the 
 start, for I never could quite bring myself to write 
 and publish anything on philosophy proper. I 
 deemed myself not yet a worthy initiate. Then I 
 was already beginning to grow a peculiar literary 
 conscience ; whenever I took my soul's pen in hand, 
 it was for my highest self-expression ; otherwise I 
 must wait, even if forever. Nevertheless I pursued 
 desperately philosophy as the one present remedy, 
 as the universal science; if its warring contradic- 
 tion cannot in some way be pacified, then the uni- 
 verse is battle and becomes Ragnorok. 
 
 Of course I was at first unconscious of this deep- 
 est undercurrent in our St. Louis Movement, and 
 only came to recognize it, not so much by thinking
 
 THE ALIGNMENT. 31 
 
 it out, as by living it out in my daily activities for 
 decades, till the cycle of discipline might be fin- 
 ished. Meanwhile let it be held fast that this far- 
 down underworld's struggle of the spirit is what 
 gave strength and length of life to our St. Louis 
 Movement. Indeed that antimony of ours between 
 tradition and non-tradition may be deemed the 
 primal originative force or spring of all individual 
 culture, as well as of civilization itself. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Alignment 
 
 A year or two since, on going to a little place to 
 give a little talk, I saw two gentlemen approaching 
 me with pleasant smiles ; and as they drew near, 
 one of them held out toward me a written leaf of 
 paper saying: "Here is something which I thought 
 you might like to see, your name is on it." At a 
 glance the manuscript proved to be a copy of the 
 records of the first Philosophical Society reaching 
 back to 1866, with the signature of the Secretary. 
 The gentleman went on : " That I keep as one of 
 my treasures. But can you not tell us a little 
 about these people here named, who met in your 
 society — what did they become? Tell me, who of 
 you made good?" 
 
 Some such question has been propounded to me 
 several times recently, indeed I have propounded it 
 to myself, and I shall try to write out my answer. 
 Perhaps this entire book bears in itself some re-
 
 32 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 spouse. The fact is most of us were then undis- 
 tinguished and have sturdily remained so. And it 
 must be confessed that the St. Louis Movement 
 never produced a book which, by any reasonable 
 stretch of charity, might be called a literary suc- 
 cess. Therein it strikingly contrasts with the Trans- 
 cendental Movement, which owes its propagation 
 and its permanence largely to the excellence of its 
 Literature. 
 
 As far as I now remember, the Society led not so 
 much an active, practical life as a rather quiet, 
 theoretical existence; chiefly it was the public 
 means to show famous visitors certain formal at- 
 tentions ; for instance, when Mrs. Julia Ward Howe 
 came to town and read a paper on Philosophy, the 
 Society received her, listened to her lecture, and 
 even indulged in some criticisms, to which she re- 
 plied in veiled but sarcastic reproof of our philoso- 
 phic egotism. In like manner it heard Emerson 
 and invited Alcott, the famous Concord philoso- 
 phers, with whom our Secretary, Mr. Harris, kept 
 in friendly touch, for the sake of the future. 
 
 The real work of the St. Louis Movement was 
 done individually, or in little groups and classes. 
 I cannot now recollect that I ever read a paper 
 before the Philosophical Society. The spirit of the 
 Movement, as far as I shared it, I applied to Litera- 
 ture ; Judge "Woerner applied it to Jurisprudence, 
 and it colors his legal work on Probate Law; 
 Brockmeyer turned it into Legislation and Politics ; 
 Harris made best use of it in Education. The St.
 
 THE ALIGNMENT. 33 
 
 Louis Movement, accordingly, took the character of 
 a subtle pervasive influence, rather than an organ- 
 ized propagandism. Its life pulsed in the small 
 coteries which met usually in parlors or private 
 rooms for the study of some special book or sub- 
 ject. In this fact lay its chief worth and its per- 
 sistence. 
 
 It is true that a certain grouping or arrangement 
 of persons and their philosophic doctrines took 
 place, as we gathered to discuss some theme or to 
 listen to some address, or even to read together 
 some book. The situation was something of this 
 kind: 
 
 I. The President or the Secretary, or both, were 
 the central figures, ardent exponents and disciples 
 of Hegel, and led the talk. 
 
 II. Then came the opposition, for usually in the 
 early times we had some straggling dissidents who 
 would object here and there. Of these I remember 
 enough to set down three. 
 
 (1) Thomas Davidson, who usually upheld 
 Aristotle as against Hegel, and even the Greek 
 world against the Christian. A lively and ingenious 
 Scotchman, who never seemed to me to have any 
 particular persistent conviction. At that time he 
 was certainly a jolly drifter and general free 
 fighter, with much effervescence of erudition. 
 
 (2) Adolf E. Kroeger, a Fichtean, and trans- 
 lator of several of Fichte's works and of other Ger- 
 man books ; also an upholder of Kant against Hegel 
 in many warm disputes. He belonged to the
 
 34 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 earlier set. I saw a letter in which Longfellow 
 praised his English translations of early German 
 poetry. 
 
 (3) Louis F. Soldan, later Superintendent of 
 Schools, whose general attitude was neutral, be- 
 longing distinctly to no side or perhaps to all sides. 
 He was a student of Spinoza and Dante, and later 
 had literary classes in Faust. 
 
 III. Finally came what may be called the rank 
 and file, varying a good deal with the years and the 
 topics. Here I properly belonged. But we were 
 eager learners and questioners, being generally 
 sympathetic with the Hegelians, especially with the 
 two leaders, who had really something positive to 
 give, and produced the general atmosphere. Num- 
 bers of good people may be put here, such as Judge 
 Woerner, Judge Jones, Principal Childs ; the ladies, 
 though not regular members, were best represented 
 by Miss Mary Beedy and Miss Anna Brackett, both 
 of the Public Schools. 
 
 This was the situation in the earlier times. Later 
 came a group of excellent, but quite different peo- 
 ple, such as Prof. Cook, Dr. Holland, Miss Blow, 
 Miss Fruchte. And so the leaven kept working 
 through various layers for many years, till at last 
 the active spirit seamed to lapse into a state of 
 quiescence. 
 
 Such is a brief sketch of the first general align- 
 ment of the Philosophical Society, as I recall it 
 after some fifty years and more. All these first 
 members have passed on, though a few out of the
 
 TEE ALIGNMENT. 35 
 
 later groups still survive, no longer in the buoyancy 
 of youth, yet active. I suppose that the interest 
 of such a seemingly fortuitous society is that it 
 unwittingly bears in its bosom something perma- 
 nent, some living seeds destined to grow in the 
 future and bear new fruit. 
 
 How long did the Movement last ? In one sense 
 it is going on still, as already indicated, though in 
 a number of ways much changed. But that first 
 impulse had its own life with rise, culmination and 
 decline. Different participators would naturally 
 chronologize the period differently, according to 
 their experience; but to my vision it ran about 
 twenty years (1865-1885), from my first electric 
 shock at touching the live wire in the house of W. 
 T. Harris one Sunday afternoon till I quit St. 
 Louis on my wanderings, not to return with the 
 spirit's renewal for quite another twenty years. 
 The two leaders, Brockmeyer and Harris, had left 
 the city some years before. The influence lingered 
 still in the Public Schools, but without any decided 
 official hold. Moreover the city itself seemed 
 changed in character; it passed into that peculiar 
 eclipse of hope and ambition, which lasted nearly a 
 generation. It lost its leadership in the "West — its 
 commercial, and still more emphatically its intel- 
 lectual leadership. 
 
 Now this obscuration of St. Louis is undeniable, 
 being fortified by fixed mathematics as well as by 
 floating opinion, and has become the most enig- 
 matic and hence the most interesting fact of its his-
 
 36 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 tory. Like old Rome, St. Louis has had its period 
 of grandeur and decadence, but no Montesquieu or 
 Gibbon has arisen to set forth adequately its re- 
 cord. To be sure the stage is small, and its decline 
 did not involve the world. Still the atom has to-day 
 its special worth, and we are told to see in One, 
 even in the little one, the All. 
 
 This pensive theme, however, will naturally come 
 up later in the present narrative. But here I note 
 the fact that the St. Louis Movement, though a na- 
 tive growth, was chiefly cultivated and propagated 
 by men who were immigrants. I do not now recall 
 a single born St. Louisan in the set, though nearly 
 all of us were born Americans. Still the Move- 
 ment itself was not an immigrant, but indigenous ; 
 that is, as a Movement it originated on the soil of 
 St. Louis, and, it was so regarded by us, since it 
 was begotten of the city's unique spirit of that 
 time. "We claimed to be of the present just while we 
 were taking the past as guidance, and even as 
 creed. 
 
 (Still our deepest faith lay in the destiny of our 
 city, our basic belief was grounded in its coming 
 greatness. This belief was the original drive which 
 kept throbbing back of all our energy, whereby it 
 overflowed into the community, and created a kind 
 of University with its studies of Art, Literature, 
 Education, as well as of Philosophy. We sought to 
 be worthy denizens of what was already forecast 
 as the Future Great City of the World, and to con-
 
 THE ALIGNMENT. 37 
 
 tribute our part toward the fulfilment of its pro- 
 phetic supremacy. 
 
 Thus I had fully entered upon what I may call 
 my distinctively philosophic epoch, which will be 
 my chief spiritual interest for years. But I had 
 an antecedent stage which I left behind, though it 
 remained with me in a sort of subliminal activity 
 through life. My strongest aspiration for the 
 mind's past treasures lay then in the field of Ro- 
 manic culture, which belonged to those peoples of 
 Southern Europe whose language and civilization 
 sprang from the old Roman world. Now this Ro- 
 manic spirit is held to be the antitype of the Ger- 
 manic spirit, which was pushing forward with such 
 volume and intensity in St. Louis, and which had 
 begun to take possession of my training. Some- 
 what of this pre-philosophic phase of my develop- 
 ment must not be left out in this self-construction 
 of mine, since I shall make use of its acquisitions at 
 intervals duringmy entire life. For instance, only 
 yesterday I began to take new and deeper sound- 
 ings in French Literature on account of the granitic 
 endurance and stability of the French character 
 revealed by the present war, inasmuch as I had 
 previously believed, and France herself had seemed 
 to believe, that she was frivolous and flighty and 
 even decadent. 
 
 405576
 
 38 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 IV 
 
 My Romanic Time in St. Louis 
 
 The tendency or mental trend here called Ro- 
 manic (not Romantic, remember), I brought with 
 nne to the city, and I clung to it, as long as. it was 
 of prime worth to me, on account of certain local 
 opportunities. In particular, I wished to catch 
 some remaining shred of the French spirit of this 
 originally French town, with its survivals of 
 French speech and customs. 
 
 Accordingly under the above title I am going to 
 designate a brief cultural stage of my young-man- 
 hood, lasting only between two and three years, but 
 significant in my spirit's discipline, since this sub- 
 strate has continued to rise to the surface with 
 stress at various turns of my later life, and insist 
 upon some utterance. I allude to my cultivation 
 of the Romanic tongues and in a small way their 
 literatures, Spanish, French, Italian, all of them 
 daughters of the Latin, each with her own distinct 
 character, history, and beauty. They imparted to 
 me a phase of my own self-expression, and an- 
 swered a need of my spirit, which I had already 
 felt stirring at College, but without any oppor- 
 tunity of realization. 
 
 In the fall of 1863 while loitering at a second- 
 hand book store in Cincinnati, I became acquainted 
 with Ignaeio Montaldo, a native Spaniard, who was 
 teaching his mother-tongue to students in that city. 
 He invited me to join his best class in Spanish,
 
 MY ROMANIC TIME IN ST. LOUIS. 39 
 
 which met at the home of a lady prominent in 
 literary circles. I accepted the invitation at once, 
 since it gratified a persistent longing within me. 
 The result was I bought a Spanish grammar and 
 dictionary on the spot, took a brief lesson for a 
 starter, then went home and studied the new sub- 
 ject till after midnight. I soon caught the drift 
 of the language, being so closely derived from the 
 Latin, and hence like its two sisters, French and 
 Italian, with both of whom I had a passing ac- 
 quaintance. To learn to read the printed words 
 was easy enough ; but to speak those words in con- 
 versation, I found much harder; then to under- 
 stand them when spoken was for me the most diffi- 
 cult task of all, for an ear-minder I never was 
 easily. Hence I hunted down friendly, talkative 
 Montaldo in all his haunts for practice, since Span- 
 ish had quite suddenly become for me an obsession. 
 Moreover I found the genial Spaniard very in- 
 teresting for another reason : his unique character. 
 He was a red-hot socialist, the first of the kind I 
 had ever known; in his fervent propagandism he 
 would lapse from his Spanish into French or even 
 into broken English, till I would gently recall him 
 to his native dialect, reminding him that I could 
 only take his doctrine in pure Castilian. He had 
 resided long in Paris where he had come under the 
 influence of M. Etienne Cabet, famous French 
 Utopian of that time, and had joined the latter's 
 communistic venture known as Icarie, which had 
 first brought him to America. But the ideal plan
 
 40 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 had suffered shipwreck upon the hard reality over 
 in Iowa somewhere, and had left him stranded and 
 drifting and hungering, till he reached Cincinnati 
 where he could earn some bread through his knowl- 
 edge of the tongues. But he clung to the grand 
 eomimunistie scheme as stoutly as ever, the bitterest 
 rebuffs of experience only hardened his conviction, 
 and made him ready for a new headlong onset. In 
 other words I deemed that I saw before me again 
 the actual Don Quixote, the most modern edition 
 of the Spanish knight-errant, with the living com- 
 mentary on that masterpiece of Cervantes, which 
 I had merely read from the outside hitherto. Thus 
 my good teacher gave me his best lesson without 
 price and even without any design of giving it, for 
 he never could get away from himself. 
 
 "We became boon companions, I followed him 
 everywhere to hear his Quixotic adventures told in 
 lofty laughable Castilian, as well as to enjoy his 
 fantastic ideas, while I would note and then diver- 
 sify his idealism with some of my prose. It seemed 
 that I had quite become his Sancho Panza, the 
 faithful squire, yet mirroring counterpart. After 
 some days he surprised me with an invitation to his 
 modest home, where he whispered me he had a wife 
 and two fine children, girl and boy. That was in- 
 deed a new turn in the adventure, for I had sup- 
 posed him an irreclaimable, unmarriageable rover 
 in pursuit of an ideal world, somewhat like myself 
 at that time. It seems that in his community he 
 had found, loved and wedded an educated French
 
 MY ROMANIC TIME IN ST. LOUIS. 41 
 
 woman, who had also emigrated with M. Cabet to 
 western wilds in search of the new social order. 
 She spoke only rapid musical French, which I un- 
 derstood but imperfectly, still she interpreted her 
 talk very fully with a runnnig comment of gesture, 
 intonation, and expressive grimaces. Evidently 
 she had been disillusioned by the remorseless fact, 
 having now to keep house for two children and 
 husband under no laughing conditions. Icarie she 
 had reason to remember ; her special theme was the 
 tyranny of the autocrat Cabet, which had wrecked 
 a glorious hope of social freedom, and had left her 
 and hers stranded on this unfree America. 
 
 Thus I took lessons in the Spanish tongue and 
 more deeply still in the Spanish character, not to 
 speak of the little dip into Latin socialism; all 
 these kinds of instruction have remained a per- 
 manent possession during life, though I have never 
 done much with my Quixotic acquisition. But after 
 some months of this Castilian revery, I was roused 
 by a fresh sharp thrust of the economic problem, 
 and, breaking from my friend and his dreams, I 
 took flight to St. Louis, where I soon lit on the solid 
 though thorny ground of making my own livelihood. 
 
 Replying from Cincinnati to a newspaper adver- 
 tisement, I received the appointment of instructor 
 in Greek and Latin at the St. Louis College of 
 Christian Brothers ; I was also given a class in Eng- 
 lish Literature. These branches were easy for me, 
 and familiar ; my lessons occupied three hours daily 
 for five days of the week. Thus I had ample time
 
 42 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 for outside study, which enabled me to push on with 
 my Romanic tongues, Spanish, French, and Italian, 
 to which I added considerable practice in my Ger- 
 man, since I found myself rooming in a German 
 household, with an abundance of gossipy neighbors. 
 That was an opportunity which I dared not neg- 
 lect. Spanish began to fall by the way, for I could 
 find no Spaniard like my genial Montaldo ; I often 
 tested my Italian grammar at the fruit-stands kept 
 by Italians, paying for my instruction by the pur- 
 chase of a dime 's worth of apples or peanuts. These 
 people could understand me, but I could not under- 
 stand them, as quite all of them were Genovese and 
 spoke a horrible dialect. At last I found in a wine 
 shop a poor gray-curled Swiss Italian from Canton 
 Ticino, who was a man of some education, and who 
 gladly earned his frank for reading to me an hour 
 a day from an Italian novel which I had picked out 
 of the litter of an old book-stall. 
 
 In my mental history I deem this to have been my 
 epoch of supreme linguistic ambition, which, indeed 
 for a while wholly absorbed my life. If the reader 
 will take the trouble to count them up, he will find 
 that I was employed more or less directly with seven 
 different languages at the same time. In some re- 
 spects it was a useless scattering of energy, yet I 
 got from it a unique experience which served its 
 purpose. Quite unconsciously I was seeking my 
 own self-expression in all these tongues; I was lis- 
 tening to the voices of seven different folk-souls, the 
 best in the world's civilization, as they revealed
 
 MY ROMANIC TIME IN ST. LOUIS. 43 
 
 themselves in speech. And I was under training to 
 find my own right utterance — a supreme object of 
 my life. This was my distinctive polyglottic stage, 
 lasting with fervor between two and three years, 
 yet with recurrences all my days, for I found I 
 could always resurrect these tongues with a little 
 labor, at least as far as I had acquired them. 
 
 Thus for a season I sought an expression of my- 
 self in no less than six foreign languages beside my 
 native English, and kept building in this fashion a 
 good-sized tower of Babel all inside my own brain. 
 But after a time I found this versatile linguistic 
 love of mine getting onore and more interested in 
 one of the languages without wholly neglecting the 
 others. The favorite became now the French. There 
 lingered still something of the old French spirit in 
 St. Louis, at least in those quarters where I ate and 
 lounged and chatted. I snuffed this peculiar atmos- 
 phere the first days of my arrival, and accordingly 
 I took board at a French hotel not far from the old 
 Cathedral, which then might be deemed the center 
 of St. Louis antique, and which still looks down at 
 you with its French inscription written across its 
 forehead. I found, however, that the people there 
 could all talk English, French having become a 
 mere by-play. Still the place remains to me ever 
 memorable, since here I first saw the unique physi- 
 ognomy of Brockmeyer, just fresh from the forest, 
 as he would fleet eagerly into the dining-room, and 
 then saunter out of it leisurely with the rest of us, 
 ever darting the sudden eye-shot of the backwoods'
 
 44 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 hunter, rather than the though ted look of the much- 
 civilized philosopher. 
 
 But my appetite for French was not satisfied 
 there, though the eating was good. On inspecting 
 the wider neighborhood, I found three other French 
 boarding-houses, of which one in the same general 
 locality just fitted my plan, if not my palate. For 
 the proprietor and his wife with servants could 
 hardly say a word of English, and understood none ; 
 so I had to talk French or do without my dinner. 
 Moreover I discovered soon that in the evening the 
 place was the resort of a strange lot of French 
 characters, who gathered there to drink wine or ab- 
 sinthe, sip strong coffee, and play piquet, talking 
 meanwhile French politics with illimitable babble. 
 Most of them were fiery republicans, refugees, revo- 
 lutionists, socialists, anarchists, hot against State 
 and Church. I thought I saw there a living pres- 
 entation of Carlyle's French Revolution, in bloody 
 words and gesticulations, but not in bloody deeds. 
 I recollect, however, that the place contained one 
 hardy Clerical who by his opposition could set a 
 dozen tongues into a furious clatter, which once 
 ended in a brawl. A single Napoleonist had even 
 greater power of irritation, inasmuch as most of 
 these fellows had been forced to flee from the Em- 
 peror's police. Thus I was again taking a double 
 lesson: in the French tongue and in French life, 
 here manifesting one of its famous historic phases. 
 (Remember that Emperor Napoleon III was still 
 on his throne.)
 
 MY ROMANIC TIME IN ST. LOUIS. 45 
 
 Naturally I took to reading French, especially 
 books about the French Revolution, of which I saw 
 a fragment enacted before me every night. There 
 lie now under my eyes on the table my annotations 
 to Lamartine's Les Girondins, which work I bought 
 in the original and read with many an excited re- 
 flection on our own Civil War, in which I had just 
 lived through a deeply sympathetic part theoret- 
 ically and practically. This reading of mine is 
 dated 1865, when the mighty upheavals and re- 
 surgences of French liberty had ended in the sod- 
 den despotism of the third Napoleon. Was our re- 
 public to suffer a like fate ? Some of that company 
 would say so in pretentious pessimistic prophecy, 
 whereupon I would splutter bits of bad French at 
 them, using them as targets for practicing both my 
 patriotism and my grammar. 
 
 I longed to see some representatives of the old 
 French settlers who with their descendants had been 
 on the ground just about a century if we date the 
 founding of St. Louis by Laclede in 1764. But not 
 a Creole, if such be the right name, ever showed 
 his face among ihe Church-defying revolutionaries 
 fortressed across the street from the Cathedral in 
 Combe 's boarding-house, which mad hostelry would 
 have appeared to him an Inferno full of devils. 
 Only once an innocent Canadian, and especially in- 
 nocent of English, strayed into the place, seeing on 
 the sign Pension Frangaise. I noticed him at once 
 and took him in charge, finding him a fresh angelic 
 arrival from the paradise of Quebec, but now fallen
 
 46 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 into this real Dantesque Malebolge, through which 
 I too was traveling as a kind of onlooking Dante. 
 At some horrible blasphemy, I suppose, for the 
 word was not clear to me, but must have been well 
 understood by him, re-echoed as it was with the dia- 
 bolic grins and grimaces of the whole rabblement, 
 he ran out into the dark. I went after him, and 
 asked him where he was going. He said he did not 
 know. I begged him: "Come then with me, and 
 I shall take you to a French priest who lives over 
 yonder at the Cathedral," and after a short walk 
 I pointed toward the imposing structure with its 
 spire, and the clergy-house alongside. I offered to 
 cross the street with him, when the fellow suddenly 
 picked up his heels, and giving three leaps disap- 
 peared within the church door, whither of course I 
 did not try to pursue him. But as he slid inside, 
 he glowered around at me, with a look of having es- 
 caped from the demons. 
 
 Thus the time brought me a vivid personal ex- 
 perience of revolutionary France just here in St. 
 Louis, a living commentary upon her history past 
 and also future. "When some six or seven years 
 later, I read of the doings of the Paris Commune 
 after the Franco-Prussian War, I felt that I had 
 seen and heard them in prophecy already at that 
 French boarding-house. In fact, a few years later 
 during 1870 my interest returned with such inten- 
 sity that I sought my old quarters there, but the 
 spirit had fled. I found, however, a red-republican 
 French Club in the same locality, but it was tame,
 
 MY ROMANIC TIME IN ST. LOUIS. 47 
 
 quite orderly, and all its words and deeds seemed 
 to spell France's humiliation. Still later in 1878 
 .when I was in Paris, I never could find there the 
 anarchic vigor of my old French boarding-house in 
 St. Louis, except once perhaps — that was at a the- 
 atrical representation of the famous anti-clerical 
 play, Moliere's Tartuffe, in the Latin Quarter, 
 when a rather jolly Pandemonium suddenly erupted 
 out of the huge audience, in which a woman (pos- 
 sibly Louise Michel herself) seemed the chief vol- 
 canic spouter, the whole becoming quiet again in a 
 few minutes. 
 
 So I now renew in aged image my young and 
 yare Romanic St. Louis of more than half a cen- 
 tury agone. Only yesterday the love of reminis- 
 cence enticed me to take another stroll before the 
 old Cathedral, and hearken to the call of its French 
 inscription which seems now to speak more deeply 
 out of its heart than ever before. Through the war 
 the Latin peoples, and especially the French, have 
 uprisen from a subsidence and supposed decline to 
 a new birth and grander eminence in the World's 
 History. They have done the supreme historic act, 
 having overmade themselves into the conqueror of 
 their conqueror. But does that old fiend of Terror, 
 whose passing shadow I once saw in Romanic St. 
 Louis, yet lurk in the French soul? Half-sup- 
 ressed voices fitfully fly hitherward over the ocean, 
 reporting that it is still alive and at work to-day 
 underneath Paris. Will it again break up to the 
 surface and have another spell of seismic upheaval 
 as twice before ?
 
 48 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 From Romanic to Teutonic 
 
 So the old, deep dualism of Europe, starting long 
 before the Christian Era, and continued with more 
 or less virulence through all the intervening ages 
 till the present moment — the ever-grinding dualism 
 between Roma and Teutonia — has migrated to 
 America and especially has settled down in our St. 
 Louis, bringing that same world-historical conflict 
 along with itself, political, religious, cultural. I 
 seemed to fall right into the middle of this many- 
 centuried clash, being sensitive to the poignant 
 thrusts from both these mighty opposites of the 
 ages, with their everlasting alternation between rise 
 and fall, victory and defeat, Guilt and Nemesis. 
 Not fifty years ago Ronna, in her representative 
 Latin race, seemed to be drooping toward her last 
 sundown in France; but now in this New Year of 
 1919 military Teutonia appears to have marched 
 valiantly into her own bloody, perchance mortal 
 eclipse. Thus the oscillation has continued, begin- 
 ning historically, if not before at least with that 
 ancient invasion of France by the Teutones who 
 were overwhelmed and destroyed by the Roman 
 general Marius 102 years Before Christ. Then 
 with the centuries came the furious counterstroke, 
 the defeat and capture of Roma herself in person 
 by these Teutonic peoples. And that by no means 
 stopped the ever-recurring world-duel. So the san- 
 guinary see-saw between Europe's two halves has
 
 FROM ROMANIC TO TEUTONIC. 49 
 
 been going on for 2000 years and more, the last gory 
 oscillation being ended to-day, if it really has 
 ended. 
 
 And the case would seem, if we may judge by the 
 past, that Europe of herself is unable to heal this 
 deepest rent of her own soul, as well as of her body, 
 without some foreign mediator, some reconciling 
 third world-people, who can medicine her ever re- 
 opening and fresh-bleeding wound with a new insti- 
 tutional order. Is America to furnish that remedial 
 folk, which may be able to redintegrate unhappy 
 Europe, torn into warring pieces, from her birth? 
 Our army of doctors, first military and now polit- 
 ical, have gone to the seat of trouble, and are still 
 engaged in their task of restoration at this moment. 
 Probably the patient is not curable at once, still the 
 beginning may be tried, with the whole world in 
 anxiety looking on at the bedside. 
 
 But our present interest is to note that this deep- 
 est dualism of Europe — it is not the only one but 
 the deepest — was transmitted to our "Western Con- 
 tienent, and has worked itself out into two Amer- 
 icas, very distinct if not opposite, Latin and Anglo- 
 Saxon, whose reconciliation still belongs to the fu- 
 ture. And particularly our city has shown in its 
 history this same original European cleavage which 
 I felt on my arrival here during the last year of the 
 Civil War. At first I sided culturally with the 
 Latin or Romanic trend, as already indicated, seiz- 
 ing the opportunity, here presented, of appropriat- 
 ing a little first-hand knowledge of one of History's
 
 50 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 greatest achievements, namely, that unique Medi- 
 terranean civilization, mother of our higher spirit- 
 ual disciplines. 
 
 But I gradually developed out of this Romanic 
 stage, which after the Civil "War kept getting paler 
 and weaker both in me and in the community, 
 whereby the latter showed a strange parallelism to 
 what was going on over in Europe. When France, 
 that is, Louis Napoleon's France, was peremptorily 
 ordered to quit Mexico by Seward, the counter- 
 stroke was not unf elt in French St. Louis, as I could 
 hear in the loud conversation over cognac and 
 black coffee at M. Combe 's. The Teutonic spirit was 
 already overwhelming me both in my studies and in 
 my external relations. I was getting deeply ab- 
 sorbed in the philosophic movement, and especially 
 in the all-encompassing system of Hegel, now my 
 mind's grand objective. From the French cuisine 
 wreathed round with multitudinous causerie, I 
 changed to a large German boarding-house of 
 boundless babblement over Bier and Wurst. The 
 classic song of La Belle France seemed to be getting 
 drowned in the roar of Deutschland uber Alles. I 
 joined a German Social Club of young folks where 
 English was unheard, and I took part in music, 
 dance, games, festivals, not refusing the fluids as 
 a part of the new learning. The German theater I 
 cultivated, especially when Goethe and Schiller 
 were on the boards. One Sunday evening I dared 
 think it my duty instead of attending Church, to go 
 to see Faust — my first opportunity to witness the
 
 FROM ROMANIC TO TEUTONIC. 51 
 
 masterpiece of Teutonic Literature. The house was 
 packed with the very folk, the applause uprose 
 uproarious, the general feeling swayed to and fro 
 triumphant, the whole play being interspersed with 
 shouts and German catchwords, most of which I 
 could not understand. But the loudest, most pro- 
 longed, most suggestive acclamation I did under- 
 stand, since it swelled forth at the burst of laugh- 
 ing hell-fire from the mouth of ironic Mephistoph- 
 eles as he ironicises the Church, scoffing out the pas- 
 sage: 
 
 Die Kirche hat einen guten Magen. 
 
 The actor who spoke the lines did his infernal 
 best, for he became the Devil then and there in 
 speech and in look. And that audience after him 
 seemed to undergo a similar diabolic transforma- 
 tion, which lasted some minutes. Thus I caught a 
 glimpse of one phase of Teutonia's soul that night, 
 which has never quit me, but which has come back 
 to me more vividly than ever during these past 
 four years, along with their prodigious problems 
 interrogating me: Is Germany then Mephistoph- 
 eles? Has the greatest German poet, embodying 
 the greatest German legend, simply drawn the por- 
 trait of his own people in their final catastrophe? 
 For we may well recall now the tragic end of Meph- 
 istopheles, making the poet's Faust a Teutonic 
 world-tragedy. 
 
 But let us return to our retrospect. In my zeal 
 I quit the center of the city and went to live in the
 
 52 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. . 
 
 residence quarter where I might experience Ger- 
 man domestic life, which had such a beautiful and 
 naive expression of itself in poetry and music. The 
 outcome could not be avoided: I wound up this 
 part of my Germanization by a German marriage 
 and started on a new phase of my career. 
 
 Thus I made the complete transition from the 
 Romanic to the Teutonic in my life's discipline. 
 And I must not fail to add that this transition was 
 not merely mine, but the city's, the time's, aye the 
 world's even; for was not all civilization German- 
 izing quite down to the fate-year of 1914 ? And all 
 education from the little Kindergarden up to the 
 great University — was it not largely based upon 
 German pedagogy ? So I look back and behold my 
 wee self pre-enacting as a St. Louis atom a stage 
 of the World's History. 
 
 VI 
 
 The Great St. Louis Deed 
 
 During these years a larger hope took hold of 
 St. Louis, a greater civic pride, a more colossal ur- 
 ban egotism than she has ever known since. Can 
 we trace this consciousness of her own importance 
 to its source? She seems to have felt at this time 
 a world-historical destiny, and claimed a lofty na- 
 tional if not a supra-national mission. Had she 
 really done anything which might serve as a ground 
 or even as a pretext for this far-reaching aspira- 
 tion? So we ask now in retrospect with some in-
 
 THE GREAT ST. L0UI8 DEED. 53 
 
 sistent importunity. Such a deed of hers can be 
 pointed out and studied which was not merely a 
 local or temporary incident, but an exploit of uni- 
 versal significance. 
 
 I am aware that I shall call up strong protest and 
 perhaps ridicule at the meaning which I give to the 
 affair of Camp Jackson. But as I view the matter, 
 it was a great pivotal event whose purport time has 
 not only confirmed, but has continued to deepen. 
 To-day I think to note our microscopic Camp Jack- 
 son enlarged over the sea into Europe which is fight- 
 ing its hitherto separative tendency toward some 
 kind of federated Union. 
 
 A little less than three years after the taking of 
 Camp Jackson, I sprang out of a railroad train 
 which had brought me from Cincinnati, and push- 
 ing to the banks of the Mississippi near-by, I caught 
 my first view of St. Louis as she lay wrapped in 
 her flowing sable headdress of smoke. Not very at- 
 tractive in outer look did she appear to me from 
 that distance; still even then she, like the veiled 
 Egyptian image at Sais, was secretly propounding 
 to me the problem of my earthly existence, which I 
 am working at still to-day under her cloudy coif 
 after more than half a century. 
 
 As I crossed the river on the ferry-boat, and first 
 trudged the wharf toward the streets, I asked my- 
 self : "What is the event, which most deeply and 
 persistently lurks in your memory concerning this 
 spot of earth? Is there any significant deed here
 
 54 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 done in the past, whose presence haunts and colors 
 all your eager sight-seeing ? ' ' 
 
 My answer was, "Yes, this for me is the city of 
 Camp Jackson." 
 
 In order that I may impart to my reader as viv- 
 idly as I can the reason for this peculiar mental 
 state of mine, let me put briefly together the chief 
 national events of that time : 
 
 (1) The Union had been broken to pieces under 
 Buchanan by the secession of the Southern tier of 
 Slave States. 
 
 (2) Lincoln, the new President, had affirmed as 
 the essential point of his Inaugural (March 4th, 
 1861) the Primacy of the Union. 
 
 (3) South Carolina had maintained not only in 
 word but also in deed the Primacy of the Single 
 State by the capture of Fort Sumter (April 14th). 
 
 (4) Lincoln had answered her with his resolve in 
 his call for 75,000 volunteers, to put down the re- 
 bellion (April 15th). 
 
 (5) Camp Jackson, taken (May 10th, 1861) in 
 less than a month after the fall of Sumter, was the 
 Great Deed, the earliest victorious response of the 
 Nation affirming by its action the Primacy of the 
 Union, and thus sealing Lincoln's first call with its 
 first real achievement. 
 
 All these steps of the resistless onstriding crisis 
 of the time I had followed with the intense inner 
 reaction of a young fellow of twenty at College. On 
 the whole the stream of events dashed madly to- 
 ward disunion in spite of the attempts to stay its
 
 THE GREAT ST. LOUIS DEED. 55 
 
 furious energy. Soul-crushing had been my dis- 
 may, and that of the North generally at the spec- 
 tacle of the huge falling edifice of our country. But 
 when I woke one fine May morning and in my Ohio 
 home read the newspaper head-lines about the cap- 
 ture of Camp Jackson at St. Louis, I felt that the 
 first decisive counterstroke had been given to the 
 advance of the rebellion. In a slave State, in the 
 South 's largest city, by the act of its own people 
 secession had been arrested and whelmed back in 
 a stunning defeat. I felt this already in my little 
 town to be the overture to the Union's victory, and 
 it swept away the cloud of despair which had hung 
 over the North since the fall of Fort Sumter. And 
 that has remained the place of Camp Jackson in 
 the movement of the whole Civil War — the primal 
 'counterstroke of successful resistance to the hith- 
 erto quite unimpeded sweep of the South 's triumph. 
 And the saving act took place at the center of the 
 Great Valley and of its River, as it were in the 
 heart of the Nation, which was now really tapped 
 to its core, henceforth to gush out lavishly in de- 
 fense of its existence. 
 
 Thus I first trod the streets of St. Louis with no 
 little reminiscence and patriotic elation, probably 
 not so very far from Laclede's first cabin built 
 here about one hundred years before my arrival. 
 But that atomic event, though pregnant with a 
 great future, I hardly knew and could not then 
 think much about. St. Louis at the moment was 
 still in the poignant pulsations of the conflict,
 
 56 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 though it was no longer the immediate prize of 
 combat. The fact is this city had made more and 
 greater history during the earlier stages of the 
 "War than any other city of the country, not except- 
 ing Washington. Really St. Louis was more impor- 
 tant then than it has ever been since. It had for a 
 while more than a local, more than a national, yea 
 a world-historical eminence. That first testful fight 
 for Federal Union not merely of the American 
 States but (as we just now are beginning to see) of 
 the World took place on this spot, a typical deed 
 hereafter to be repeated thousandfold in our his- 
 tory, and it has hardly yet begun repeating itself 
 around the globe. The Great River too was to be 
 freed as well as its Valley, which crowning feat' 
 was accomplished by gunboats constructed and sent 
 from this point. Such was then our sovereign lead 
 in the West, perchance in the Nation ; will it spur' 
 us to renewed activity to keep our inning, or para- 
 lyze us with the great illusion of our irreversible' 
 supremacy? In this success lurks the danger in- 
 herent in all victory. 
 
 Utterly contradictory and long-continued has 
 been the disputation concerning Camp Jackson. 
 Opinions about it locked horns at the time, and 
 have remained locked up to date. A few years ago, 
 its semi-centennial took place, and the whole sub-, 
 ject was thrashed over in the newspapers with 
 pretty much the same diversity of judgment as in. 
 its beginning. The deed can be shown to be both 
 legal and illegal on both sides, according as the law!
 
 THE GREAT ST. LOUIS DEED. 57 
 
 of the Union or the law of the Single-State is 
 deemed paramount. In fact that problem was just 
 what the law could not solve, so that some power or 
 energy seems intervening above the fighting dual- 
 ism of the two legalities. What is that higher 
 Power? Or the argument often drops the legal as- 
 pect, and dwells on the policy or the expediency of 
 the deed. But again each side shows with equal 
 force that its part in the Camp Jackson affair was 
 very expedient, but very inexpedient was the other 
 side's part. Thus some greater might seems to be 
 using both the expedient and the inexpedient for 
 its own purpose. Can I in any manner see or get 
 hold of that supernal energy which sways above all 
 contradictions; especially the one called up by 
 Camp Jackson? For here are seen grappling a 
 right which is illegal and a wrong which is legal — 
 which side can the honest but perplexed path-seek- 
 ing citizen take? 
 
 Apart from the disunionists, I found the union- 
 ists still deeply divided about the justification of 
 Camp Jackson. The thing puzzled me. I needed 
 but to blow off the ashes with a word, when I could 
 not only see but feel the first fires of the contro- 
 versy still glowing hot in the hearts of the two op- 
 posing sides, after three years of cooling off. I lis- 
 tened to both parties with eagerness, yea with sym- 
 pathy, and finally came to the conclusion that the 
 supreme upper purpose of Camp Jackson was just 
 this division into the two different sorts of union- 
 ists, the conditional and the unconditional (so they
 
 58 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 were often named at the time), as the grand pre- 
 liminary discipline not only for saving but for re- 
 generating the Union. 
 
 I had been before this experience boisterously 
 but one-sidedly interested in the deed of Camp 
 Jackson at a distance, as if it trumpeted the first 
 preluding note of triumph over the Nation's disso- 
 lution. But the discords of the two clashing parts 
 which lurked in the victory, I now heard on the 
 spot of their origin, and their historic collision 
 rose seething murkily within me. "Where, how can 
 I get the light? This was one of the spiritual 
 troubles that drove me later to interrogate more 
 profoundly that hitherto enigmatic oracle called 
 Philosophy. 
 
 But if Camp Jackson was to me a kind of un- 
 sung Iliad with heroic deed, I soon came to ask, 
 Who was the hero f I had not far to look, in fact 
 he rose in evidence everywhere, the visible presence 
 in each part or phase of the one great action. And 
 whatever salient turn I might look at, there stood 
 the one heroic individual, the spirit's sovereign 
 permeating and directing each particle of the total 
 event. 
 
 Here it is worth while to contrast the deeds of 
 Port Sumter and Camp Jackson, less than a month 
 apart at the beginning of the Civil War, and prefig- 
 uring its two tendencies. The Fort is assaulted 
 and taken by the Secessionists; thus they succeed 
 so far in disrupting the Union, and the United 
 States troops withdraw to the North. A foreshow
 
 THE GREAT ST. LOUIS DEED. 59 
 
 is this of what takes place in the East during the 
 whole war. Northern troops on Southern soil get 
 whipped, but they in turn overcome the South if it 
 invades the North. 
 
 Now behold the West. Here the Union seizes 
 the offensive on the moment, and practically keeps 
 it from the very start to the finish. This start is 
 Camp Jackson, which is the first really positive re- 
 sponse to the President's call, hence the import of 
 it and the thrill. The "West saw its ideal and its 
 hope at stake in both deeds, being enormously de- 
 pressed by Fort Sumter but proportionately up- 
 lifted by Camp Jackson, which was our true initia- 
 tive, the War's prophetic challenge. 
 
 The greatest man in the nation then was Francis 
 Preston Blair, if not in the world ; he stood and di- 
 rected for some days a world-historical act ; Univer- 
 sal History pivoted for a moment on St. Louis and 
 on him. He possessed the supernal power at that 
 moment; his will coincided with the World-Spirit's 
 will — and thus he became its historic executor, its 
 Hero. Will he ever be able to repeat that one su- 
 premacy? If so, he is the coming man of the Na- 
 tion's supreme crisis. Or is he only a single-deed 
 Great Man, mighty for the once, and then declining 
 toward sunset? Let us scan him more closely to 
 read his lesson.
 
 60 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 VII 
 
 The St. Louis Hero 
 
 Quite a little spell after the Camp Jackson event, 
 say some nine or ten years, which permitted us the 
 calm to survey it not merely in its political but 
 also in its literary aspect, I remember discussing 
 with my friend Judge Woerner this problem: 
 Which is the best artistic vehicle for expressing the 
 deed of Camp Jackson, the Novel or the Epic? Sev- 
 eral hours we kept turning the matter over while he 
 interjected many vivid personal recollections from 
 his experience, for he was under arms that day on 
 the Union side, if I recall his statement aright. 
 Moreover he was a born novel-reader, which I was 
 not ; hence he seized and described the whole action 
 from the novelistic point of view. I, however, fresh 
 from the study of Homer, and taking my choice 
 probably in accord with some natural tendency, 
 preferred the form of the Epic, with its sway of the 
 Upper Powers in one shape or other, as the most 
 adequate literary expression of the Great Deed, 
 and capable of being made superior to any purely 
 historic record of the same. So I reeled him off a 
 little rhapsody of the St. Louis Iliad as I called it, 
 with its central hero Achilles not sulking, but di- 
 vinely acting under the guidance of Pallas Athena 
 in person. 
 
 The excellent Judge shot back at me his decision : 
 ' ' That may do for old Troy and the Homeric age in 
 which you live too intently ; but it will not answer
 
 THE ST. LOUIS HERO. 61 
 
 for St. Louis and our piesent time, whose art-form 
 I tell you, is the Novel and not your antiquated 
 Epic. Better quit your poetizing any how, it is left 
 behind in our new world." So my friend was in- 
 clined to challenge not only my opinion but my 
 right of poetic utterance, and he was not alone in 
 his view. Whereupon I replied: "My God-sent 
 office calls for my true self-expression in whatever 
 form of it the spirit imposes upon my tongue ; you 
 may not like it, nor anybody else ; still I must and 
 shall fulfil my soul's prime vocation." 
 
 So much for an old personal problem pertaining 
 to the limits of my writing-gift, a problem still pro- 
 voked afresh and still unriddled. With this very 
 modern episode ended, let us turn back to our St. 
 Louis Iliad, and consider its hero at his highest 
 moment. 
 
 As I look yonder at him through all the inter- 
 vening decades, Blair appears before me now as a 
 great heroic personality standing at a supreme 
 turning-point of the World's History, and direct- 
 ing its coming destiny. What was the ultimate 
 stake of his preternational activity, doubtless un- 
 conscious to himself ? Just here in St. Louis at that 
 moment the problem had come up in all its far- 
 reaching intensity : Shall this city, this State, this 
 Valley, and therewith this Nation advance to a new 
 and stronger and freer Federal Union or lapse back- 
 ward into the separated and everrasping States of 
 Europe, which have still this problem to settle in 
 the future? (They are trying with many sour
 
 62 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST 
 
 faces and painful contortions to settle it just now). 
 Or was the soldier Lyon the foremost man of des- 
 tiny? It seems to me that anybody who carefully 
 reads the fate-burdened events of those overflowing 
 hours will soon see that the military man was 
 merely the smiting weapon in the hands of Blair, 
 who really first forged it and then directed it to the 
 supreme end. 
 
 So I can vision Francis Preston Blair on this 
 spot seizing hold of the rudder of the World's His- 
 tory and giving to the same a quick significant 
 whirl at a grand turn in the stream of time. That 
 was his sudden call and inspiration, more visible 
 at the present moment than ever before. I do not 
 claim that I beheld his lofty historic position then, 
 as I walked up Olive street to the site of Camp 
 Jackson, but I did feel the original demonic power 
 of the man in that occurrence, the cosmical energy, 
 if you wish to call it such, which took possession 
 of him and made him perform things which appear 
 to ordinary life superhuman, and which to the eye 
 of the old Greek poet are the deeds of the Hero in- 
 spired by the Olympian Gods. Hence to me Camp 
 Jackson has unfolded in time an epical character, 
 modern though it be. 
 
 But I have to add that Blair owned this peculiar 
 power but the once, and then for a short time ; he 
 lost the gift largely if not entirely in later days ; he 
 was chosen just the one time by the Spirit of the 
 Age to execute its supernal behest. After the one 
 grand culminant effort, his career droops, though
 
 THE ST. LOUIS HERO. 63 
 
 not uneventful. As the greatest man at that time 
 in St. Louis, as a kind of epical hero in a supreme 
 national deed, I followed him and listened to his 
 spoken word, though he was, when I heard him, in 
 comparative eclipse. 
 
 Blair was the man who saw distinctly, and acted 
 upon the insight, that the fight between the two sec- 
 tional antagonisms must be made ; he had thus read 
 the decree of the time, or if you will, the behest of 
 the World-Spirit. "Give us always the man who 
 can do that," is the cry of every crisis. Blair had 
 been preparing the instrumentality for some years. 
 In a slave state he organized an emancipation party 
 — the natives and the foreigners, the latter being 
 Germans chiefly — first as political clubs, the so- 
 called Wide- A wakes, throughout the city. But the 
 other side began to do likewise and rallied their 
 Minute Men, for the open original secessionists in- 
 tended disunion, and the secret ones too. 
 
 But Blair knew his advantages ; his people were 
 largely trained soldiers of Europe and supplied 
 with officers; he realized that we had a standing 
 army in our midst, ready to be mobilized on notice. 
 These men he immediately offered to Lincoln in 
 response to the President's first call, and they were 
 at once mustered in by Lyon. But after Camp 
 Jackson he somehow could not control his own 
 forces, could no longer direct the power which he 
 had evoked. Accordingly he brought Fremont, 
 who would utilize this same power, and who, having 
 got it, kept it away from Blair, and then lost it in
 
 64 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 his turn. Thus Fremont failed utterly, and so it 
 came that the Germans were without any adequate 
 American leader. Then they practically took pos- 
 session of the City and the State in their own right. 
 So the matter stood when I arrived in 1864. 
 
 Blair was a friend of Brockmeyer, to whom he 
 did a great service in rescuing the latter from the 
 clutches of arbitrary military power, which had 
 thrust him in jail. But a great disservice it was, 
 in my opinion, when Blair persuaded him to enter 
 Missouri politics. That was the philosopher's aber- 
 ration from the path of his true destiny as I fore- 
 cast him; his genius at its best was not political. 
 Thus Blair, though never a member, had an indi- 
 rect influence upon the St. Louis Movement, indeed 
 he fated it, and Brockmeyer with it, though far 
 from purposing any such result. 
 
 I have stated above that Blair trained and used 
 Lyon as his deft military instrument, quite indis- 
 pensable ; but the general must have soldiers disci- 
 plined, enthusiastic, ready to leap to the battle-line 
 at the word of command. Now the curious fact 
 springs up that Blair in a time of peace had found 
 a standing army already drilled and officered, 
 though scattered, which he brought together and 
 organized, putting it under the authority of Lyon 
 along with himself. This far-reaching, little recog- 
 nized, but prolific fact must be set forth, not in its 
 historic fullness, but so far as it had a bearing upon 
 our St. Louis Movement and the members thereof, 
 not omitting of course my little autobiographic self.
 
 THE STANDING ARMY OF ST. LOUIS. 65 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Standing Army of St. Louis 
 
 The significance of this Camp Jackson army along 
 with its deed and its hero cannot be left out of the 
 St. Louis Movement, which never could have arisen 
 unless through such an antecedent condition. And 
 St. Louis certainly would have become a different 
 city without this deeply determining experience. 
 And Missouri probably would have followed Vir- 
 ginia and met a similar fate, had it not been for 
 Blair and his Germans, who at once enforced by 
 means of Camp Jackson the unconditional line be- 
 tween Union and Disunion. The conflict could not 
 be compromised any longer, even here in the birth- 
 state of the old Compromise of 1820. Sterling Price, 
 Virginia-born, best represents the conditional com- 
 promising Unionist who must be now fully union- 
 ized or disunionized, or, as we can see and say to- 
 day, must be Americanized or Europeanized, for 
 the hour has struck. Blair, also of Virginia de- 
 scent by way of Kentucky, is Price's antitype and 
 the right destroyer of his idea. Thus here in Mis- 
 souri, Mother Virginia out of the creative depths 
 of her dual nature has brought forth two sets of 
 desperately conflicting sons and their antagonistic 
 principles in the Nation represented by Abraham 
 Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, both also of Southern 
 descent through Kentucky. 
 
 Let us now look at the other element, unknown 
 to Virginia — the German — but the prime physical
 
 QQ THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 condition of victory, Thor's hammer swung on high 
 in triumph. There was a time when St. Louis 
 might well be called a German city — a period of 
 some dozen or fifteen years, as I reckon its dura- 
 tion. Germany seemed to have migrated hither in 
 person, and to have settled down in St. Louis and 
 the surrounding country on both sides of the Mis- 
 sissippi. Thousands upon thousands they came 
 flocking not only with their laborious bodies, but 
 with their whole intellectual outfit, from the man 
 trained at the university down to the common- 
 schooled peasant. It was the second great migra- 
 tion of Teutonia to the United States, the first be- 
 ing that earlier hegira chiefly to Pennsylvania, 
 which took place in the English colonial times. The 
 start of this second vast swarming of the Teutonic 
 folk over the ocean has been dated in 1818 by na- 
 tive historians; the European political troubles 
 gave to it increased momentum in the early Thir- 
 ties, and especially in 1848. Thus a little German 
 world arose here in the "West with St. Louis at its 
 heart. 
 
 But the point which I wish now to emphasize 
 once more in this connection is that nearly all these 
 Germans were trained soldiers of the old Father- 
 land, and could at once step from the plow into the 
 disciplined order of battle. And what is more 
 strange, they had here their own officers already 
 schooled in the best military institutes of Europe. 
 That is, without knowing it the city had in its 
 midst a standing army ready for immediate service.
 
 THE STANDING ARMY OF ST. LOUIS. 67 
 
 An instance reported to me by the son of one of 
 these German officers will illustrate. ' ' My father, ' ' 
 says this son, "was an educated military engineer 
 in Germany, but fled to America, since he had par- 
 ticipated in the revolution of 1848. He was build- 
 ing a large structure in North St. Louis under a 
 contract with a hundred men or more in charge, 
 when on an April day of 1861 appeared before him 
 his old friend and fellow-officer, Franz Sigel, then 
 only a little school-teacher in the city, who said to 
 him 'Come, we must enlist.' 'What do you mean?' 
 Sigel replied, 'Lincoln has called for troops, we 
 must take up our old profession. ' ' But what am I 
 to do with this building and these men?' 'Your 
 house will not at present be needed; but who are 
 these workmen?' 'Germans — laborers, artisans, 
 foremen.' 'Soldiers, I see,' said Sigel ; 'bring them 
 along.' So at once a German-drilled army sprang 
 into ranks with its complete organization, and the 
 next day was getting in line for duty. ' ' 
 
 Now Blair had already seen this hidden weapon, 
 and was utilizing it for his purpose. He had begun 
 to employ it in 1858, when he was elected Republi- 
 can representative, the only one from a Slave State, 
 chiefly through German votes. But in 1860 he had 
 organized the before-mentioned Lincoln Wide- 
 Awakes into semi-military companies as political 
 clubs, upon which he still kept his hand after the 
 election. For Blair had already foreseen the ap- 
 proaching Civil War, and knew that it could not 
 longer be shirked or compromised away. Upon
 
 68 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 this conviction he acted, and so he kept getting his 
 standing-army in order, waiting for the fateful min- 
 ute to strike. Such was his timely foresight, which 
 spurred him to his military preparation, and made 
 him the doer of the time's Great Deed. 
 
 One might think, many did think, that the mili- 
 tary leader of the coming War had appeared in this 
 Camp Jackson exploit. No, that was Blair's one 
 supreme exploit, as already said; from that mo- 
 ment began his star's obscuration. Though he was 
 still active, the Genius of the Time refused to stamp 
 his work with its sovereign seal. And after him no 
 great general receives at once the baptism of vic- 
 tory ; all who are tried do not stand the test. But 
 when years have passed, two leaders rise winning 
 the crown of triumph — Grant and Sherman, both 
 of whom were present in St. Louis as citizens and 
 spectators on Camp Jackson day. One queries why 
 were not they in the midst of this opening fight? 
 Both have given reasons in their Memoirs; rather 
 hipshot appears each excuse to me. The fact seems 
 to be that they were still terribly in doubt, both 
 had Southern connections, though both were born 
 in the North. Let me dare supply their new inner 
 resolution as they meditatively turned homeward 
 from the scene: "Yes, Camp Jackson here under 
 my eyes has stirred my blood as Fort Sumter off 
 yonder never did. I must go and enlist as soon as 
 I can find my place." Within a few months both 
 of them, having gotten out of St. Louis, were made 
 Colonels in the Union Army, one of volunteers, the
 
 THE STANDING ARMY OF ST. LOUIS. (59 
 
 other of regulars. After the same manner Camp 
 Jackson compelled thousands to resolve for one side 
 or the other. 
 
 So much for the great Americans of our city at 
 this time. There is no doubt, however, that St. 
 Louis during those years took a deeper and longer 
 dip into the German folk-soul, than any other city 
 in the United States, or any perhaps outside of 
 Germany itself. There was a general tendency to 
 fall into Teutonic life, to adopt its arts, customs, 
 and ways of thinking. To be sure there were those 
 who held aloof, especially after the Civil War. But 
 I with the majority received baptism in this Ger- 
 man ocean, which then overflowed our city, leaving 
 an ever memorable impress upon it and me and 
 especially upon our St. Louis Movement.
 
 CHAPTER SECOND 
 
 Illusion and Disillusion 
 
 Strangely parallel with these same years rises 
 what I shall call the Great Illusion of St. Louis, 
 which runs its course till the counterstroke of Dis- 
 illusion falls upon us with a stunning blastment of 
 hope. Thus we went through an historical experi- 
 ence of the deepest import, giving us a discipline 
 which is world-wide at this moment. Have not the 
 nations of the Earth just been witnessing the great 
 Teutonic Illusion of universal domination through 
 war, followed now by what promises to be a much 
 greater and longer Disillusion ? St. Louis dreaming 
 itself the world's coming metropolis to be won in 
 peace, experienced a somewhat similar dispensation, 
 passing from the Illusion of her sovereignty in 
 wealth, power and population to complete Disillu- 
 sion through the pitiless antagonism of the fact. 
 
 In the preceding Chapter I nave sought to give 
 some notion of the time's doings at St. Louis, espe- 
 cially as connected with the St. Louis Movement 
 and with myself, this little atom of autobiography. 
 Remarkable energy, a unique cultural outburst, 
 unbounded aspiration of individuals along with 
 grandiose civic ambition were felt throbbing up- 
 wards throughout the community. At least such 
 was my ever-bubbling hope responsive, as I remem- 
 
 70
 
 ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION. 71 
 
 ber well, to that of the city. And now we are to 
 catch the deeper undertone of these occurrences, 
 the ironic play in them raid trough them which 
 weaves in its illusory web the whole population, 
 the common folk as well as the philosophers. We 
 are lured to believe, by the magic of our own im- 
 aginations, a persistent phantasmal lie — the lie of 
 material glory and supremacy. The time for us 
 becomes one huge mendacity to which St. Louis 
 surrenders herself soul and body till she quite he- 
 comes that which she believes, when, undeceived 
 by a sudden blow of fate, she ente/s upon a long 
 purgatorial penance. Such is my construction of 
 the cardinal epoch in our city's history, through 
 which I myself passed, and of which I was a part 
 — not a large yet an organic constituent. 
 
 Can I now reeonstrue the phenomenon, as I look 
 back at it with sharpened interest (by the events 
 of to-day), and with revivified memory? The irony 
 of all existence was lurking in us, building our fan- 
 tastic Babylon. Our faith in what we were going 
 to get divinely gratis had no bounds, its rainbow 
 treachery was enticing us blindly on to be present 
 at the approaching triumph of the Future Great 
 City of the World — which designation of us be- 
 came axiomatic in every mouth on every street cor- 
 ner. But the Gods intended something very dif- 
 ferent for us, in fulfilment of their own ends— we 
 being necessarily but a part of their total cosmos- 
 drama. Me personally the time was driving to 
 master all appearance, which had indeed over-
 
 72 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 wrought and possessed my world-view just by- 
 dangling before me its false hopes, whose Illusion 
 I was to pierce and undo by that system of thought 
 whose purpose aimed to reach true being just 
 through the self-negation of the lie. This was the 
 chief merit of Hegel, and herein our Philosophical 
 Society had its call from the time. 
 
 The grand problem of the World's Illusion was 
 then strongly exemplified in St. Louis, and in me, 
 and apparently in everybody else about us. It was 
 a situation well known and characterized by the 
 Great Books of all ages, the Bibles of the Race. 
 Old Homer has shown it very strikingly in the lying 
 dream of the Greek Leader Agamemnon, sent from 
 above by the supreme Olympian God Zeus upon the 
 mortal below, who "on that very day thought to 
 take the city of Priam." So St, Louis and all its 
 people dreamed of capturing the American Troy 
 of untold riches and numbers; we kept for years, 
 like fatuous Agamemnon, "musing on things that 
 never were to be." And the bitter exclamation of 
 the poet when he stresses the divine irony would 
 apply to us: "Fool! who little knew what Zeus 
 designed ! ' ' 
 
 A personal memento I may be permitted to add 
 at this point. In 1880 while the Illusion was still 
 upon us, I was teaching classes in the Iliad, and 
 unfolded to my little St. Louis constitutency the 
 foregoing view of Agamemnon's lying dream, with 
 illustrations from life and history. But I did not 
 then know that we there, all of us, teacher and
 
 ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION. 73 
 
 pupils, as well as the entire community, were like- 
 wise the victims of an Illusion similar to that of 
 the Greek Leader, over whose comedy we were in- 
 clined to have some genteel merriment. But really 
 we were laughing at ourselves, and did not know it, 
 though our Disillusion was already on its way and 
 would soon arrive, in fact did arrive later during 
 that same year. In the words of the old poet we 
 too were "fools who little knew what Zeus de- 
 signed," all of us being unconsciously then and 
 there a living contemporary illustration of Hom- 
 er's picture limned some 2500 years ago. And 
 thus we are still realizing our old poet-prophet, 
 wherein is found his best commentary. 
 
 So much for the antique Greek Bible, with a 
 modern application to modern St. Louis, though 
 the book be not of the usually accepted biblical 
 canon. But there is the other Scripture, the au- 
 thorized, which also grapples with the same prob- 
 lem. For it is Hebrew St. Paul who declares: 
 "God shall send them strong delusion that they 
 should believe a lie" — a theology not so very un- 
 like that of Greek Agamemnon's lying dream sent 
 of Zeus. The apostle states also the purpose of 
 this divine missive: "That they all might be 
 damned who believed not," this unbelief or wrong 
 belief being the sin which calls forth the penalty. 
 
 Thus we, even in our literary classes, were led 
 to grapple with the testful problem of human Illu- 
 sion, as manifested not only in individuals but also 
 in cities and nations. It had become the prime
 
 74 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 psychologic fact of the St. Louis soul-world, and I 
 believe that we were sympathetically drawn by our 
 communal instinct to these deeper studies of Litera- 
 ture, whose secret push must have lain in the time. 
 Hence it belongs to the history of our St. Louis 
 Movement that it give some account of this peculiar 
 phenomenon, which affected us all, and helped to 
 give tendency and even character to our future 
 achievement. 
 
 Yet I must not fail to mention the fact that in 
 the very might of our Illusion lurked the back- 
 stroke of its unreality, of its falsity. A lie can 
 hardly help giving some dim intimation of itself, 
 even in the innocent soul who may believe it. So I 
 now construe that uncanny feeling which gripped 
 us all at the mere mention of the name of Chicago, 
 which had already become not only our rival, but 
 our secret antipathy, nay, our ever-increasing ter- 
 ror. Somehow our people forefelt it the coming 
 spell-breaker, the remorseless smasher of our Great 
 Illusion, and we tingled with a spasm of jealousy 
 which doubtless varied much with individuals. Of 
 our own set, Brockmeyer could on small provoca- 
 tion fall into profane if not obscene anti-Chicago 
 paroxysms. Harris did not care much, for I doubt 
 if he ever intended to stay in our St. Louis; he 
 planned from the beginning to return to his ideal 
 Yankeeland, which was more like and of Chicago 
 than St. Louis. As for myself I was pretty badly 
 poisoned at first, but I grew better when I began 
 fully to recognize the will of the Gods. This
 
 ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION. 75 
 
 recognition advanced very slowly at the start, and 
 with frequent backslidings, till Illusion was wiped 
 out in my brain by the one grand stroke of Dis- 
 illusion. Complete restoration from interurban an- 
 tipathy took place later through my long residence 
 in Chicago, though I never got over my early at- 
 tachment for even illusive St. Louis; I have re- 
 mained ingrown with its Movement, and am now 
 devoting a good shred of my senescence to writing 
 its story. 
 
 The common epithet applied by our good people 
 here was "bad town ;" even our saintly newspapers 
 would cry out in horror, "wicked Chicago!" A 
 searching test of our hearts was offered by the 
 great Chicago fire of 1870. Of course we with 
 some public display sent money for the homeless 
 and provisions for the hungry, and even resolutions 
 of sympathy for the unfortunate city — all of which 
 was of right appearance ; but privately everywhere 
 could be heard without unhappy tears the pious 
 scriptural ejaculation: "Again the fire of heaven 
 has fallen upon Sodom and Gomorrah ; may it com- 
 plete its divinely appointed work ! ' ' 
 
 Still such was not to be Chicago's fate, as we all 
 see now. On the other hand, St. Louis in this way 
 was proclaiming her own unconscious Illusion of 
 supremacy to be under supernal protection, which, 
 if need be, would help her out by arson. Let us 
 now give a little study to that Illusion which deeply 
 insinuated itself into the St. Louis Movement as 
 well as into every wee urban molecule, not except- 
 ing me.
 
 76 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 The Great St. Louis Illusion 
 
 St. Louis has a soul of her own, and has had from 
 the time when I began to get acquainted with her 
 — a unique civic Psyche, amenable only to the laws 
 of Psychology. Toward me she stands in the rela- 
 tion of a Person who has gone through many 
 changes since I have known her, that is, during 
 more than fifty years. Her life is associated with 
 mine in a greater or less intimacy, and has often 
 determined it to a new turn of its labyrinthine 
 errantry. 
 
 Hence the biography of Dame St. Louis will in- 
 terweave itself into the present account at numer- 
 ous points, and some picture or presentment of her 
 character, at least as I construe it from my own 
 considerable experience, will rise out of the fre- 
 quent pencillings along these pages. Justly do we 
 call our theme the St. Louis Movement, for this 
 could not have taken place anywhere else in Amer- 
 ica, perhaps not anywhere on the globe, save in that 
 peculiar communal conglomerate named St. Louis. 
 Moreover even here the foregoing event could not 
 have happened except at a given time, at the right 
 psychological moment, into which the Fates of Life 
 plunged me, without my knowing why or my having 
 ever found out — which news of my original self I 
 may expect when I step across. 
 
 So much by way of preface to a cardinal state- 
 ment : this city-soul, as I may call it, was getting to
 
 THE GREAT ST. LOUIS ILLUSION. 77 
 
 have one all-dominating psychical trait when I first 
 breathed of its atmosphere, which trait I soon 
 caught, and then it caught me. I quickly found the 
 one faith universal, that St. Louis could not help 
 becoming the largest, richest, most influential city 
 in the land, with all the gain and glory and domin- 
 ion resulting from such pre-eminence. In religion, 
 politics, and love its multiracial polyglottic people 
 might differ, but in one creed they were united, or 
 rather fused to a kind of fanaticism: the doctrine 
 of the future supremacy of St. Louis. 
 
 Of course I soon found myself a convert, and a 
 very zealous one, if not quite purblind, and ready 
 to do battle for my new conviction. Still further, 
 I became warmly attached to the community un- 
 der whose banner I had enlisted as a fighter, and 
 with whose changes of fortune I rose and fell in 
 my deepest heart-throbs. To this time and its test- 
 ful experience I attribute my life-long underlying 
 predilection for St. Louis in spite of many hurtful 
 counter-strokes. If she slapped me out of her pres- 
 ence, I would in the course of years sneak back at 
 least for a look. Take this example : after many an 
 angry separation, here I am once more in her lap 
 writing the present book on the St. Louis Move- 
 ment, which writ I believe, after all the deductions 
 which I with my frankest pen intend to make, man- 
 ifold and searching, will be found to her credit. 
 
 Looking backward through the long trial of the 
 years we can see that such a prediction or antici- 
 pation of her all-overtopping pre-eminence has
 
 78 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 never been fulfilled, that it was in fact a huge mi- 
 rage floating before the vision of a great population 
 across the empty desert of the future. So the inter- 
 esting question in folk-psychology pushes up with 
 no little importunity in the mind : What pre-dis- 
 posed the St. Louis soul to such a phantasm ? Even 
 more vehement is the interrogation with me at 
 least: What were the effects of this prolonged 
 communal self-deception upon the city itself and 
 especially upon the St. Louis Movement? For we 
 all lay under that spell of enchantment for years, 
 veritably a kind of civic megalomania, from which 
 the levelest heads were not exempt — not even the 
 solidest mind in the city, and the greatest mechan- 
 ical genius of the country, if not of the world — I 
 mean the river-spanning bridge-builder James B. 
 Eads. On the opposite side of the mental scale we 
 philosophers, supposed to be addicted to topsy- 
 turvy idealism by nature and by training, and oth- 
 erwise deemed not well-balanced of brain, took up 
 with the glorious phantasmagory of our town's 
 coming greatness, and philosophized it into a vast 
 city ruled by philosophers, somewhat after the 
 model of that ancient Neo-Platonic polity called 
 Platonopolis. Our President Brockmeyer, whose 
 easy-soaring imagination with a little goading 
 could outstrip his philosophy, gave us many a far- 
 flashing display of his fancy's fireworks, which we 
 tyros believed to be the very truth of the new reve- 
 lation, our modern Apocalypse of St. Louis. If a 
 doubter from some Eastern State or from Chicago
 
 THE GREAT ST. LOUIS ILLUSION. 79 
 
 should wag his tongue or even shake his head in 
 question, there would at once burst up a violent 
 eruption which would not only blaze white-hot but 
 smell sulphurous with wrathful energy. 
 
 Such was to me the grand psychical phenomenon 
 of St. Louis, pervasive, all-coercing, allowing no 
 interrogation of its validity, certainly not when at 
 its highest overflow. I remember my own discus- 
 sions of the subject with skeptical outsiders ; noth- 
 ing could make me flare up internally sooner than 
 the scoffing word of the belittler or even the quiet 
 argument of the opposer. I shared completely, I 
 may say devoutly, in this faith of the city's own 
 soul as it went on dreaming of its multifarious 
 grandeurs never to be realized. 
 
 Hence with some emphasis I jot down here in my 
 life 's narrative The Great St. Louis Illusion, which 
 spell-bound me and the city, as I remember the mat- 
 ter, in a sort of dream-world for a goodly number 
 of years. To be sure on all other affairs we were 
 sane enough, but on the one topic we would fly off 
 into a lying dream. How many years did it last? 
 As I recall the time and its craze of caprices, the 
 Illusion began to show itself shortly after the close 
 of the Civil War, and must have maintained its 
 tyranny for some twelve or fifteen years. Un- 
 doubtedly it started to wane after its first full efful- 
 gence, but the spell was not completely broken till 
 the census of 1880 smote the somnolescent city with 
 the awakening thunder-words: population of St. 
 Louis 350,000 ; of Chicago, 503,000.
 
 80 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 I can still see the old lady jump up from her 
 sleep at the bodeful figures, and challenge the cor- 
 rectness of the Washington enumeration, with no 
 little wrath, though with an undershiver of anxiety. 
 Not so easily would she renounce her long sweet 
 Illusion; so she resolved to take her own census. 
 The best mathematician of her University was 
 called upon to oversee accurately the arithmetic of 
 the thing, and to insert all the omitted names, of 
 which a number had been dug up in the slums and 
 elsewhere. The result, however, was a practical 
 confirmation of the first dream-destroying figures. 
 Then followed a corresponding overflow of Disillu- 
 sion and of general dismay, at first running toward 
 despair. The outside world and Chicago especially 
 failed not to enjoy what they regarded as the de- 
 noument of a great civic comedy, funning and be- 
 mocking the disenchantment of the badly fooled 
 victim at the end of the play. 
 
 As for me, the original charm had been shaken 
 by my absence from its direct influence when I took 
 my trip abroad in 1877. In fact, I had already 
 started unconsciously to question the Illusion be- 
 fore my departure, and felt quite willing to leave 
 it behind for awhile. By 1880 I had indeed re- 
 turned to St. Louis, but had won meantime a great 
 new experience which had brought its inner and 
 outer changes. I was now sufficiently aloof to be a 
 spectator as well as a participant when the city- 
 soul with no little tossing of itself had to undergo 
 its grand Disillusion. I sympathized, but I laughed
 
 THE GREAT ST. LOUIS ILLUSION. 81 
 
 too at the rather sudden dissipation of that dream- 
 life of the past which had been also mine own. 
 
 In its humiliated mood the town began to look 
 backward and to trace the source of deception. 
 Those tell-tale figures of the census showed that it 
 had been outstripped for years in the grand race 
 for the urban primacy of the West. The confes- 
 sion had to be made : Yes, already in 1870 our 
 rival Chicago must have surpassed us in popula- 
 tion, though the census of that year had made St. 
 Louis the larger by some 15,000. But can it be 
 possible ? Where is this thing going to end ? The 
 newspapers start quickly on the scent with a pro- 
 digious outcry all over the country: a national 
 fraud has been committed ; the Great St. Louis Illu- 
 sion has had the power somehow to transform the 
 United States Census Bureau into the image of 
 itself, turning the same to the Great Illusion of a 
 Census, the whole of which begins to look insub- 
 stantial. But in 1880 the trick is uncovered, and 
 there follows a long penitential era with heart's 
 sorrow and confession, and with an access of de- 
 spairful lethargy. One estimate now before me 
 places these illusory inhabitants of St. Louis in 
 1870 at not less than 100,000, a ghostly multitude 
 who were duly counted for our city but had never 
 lived here or anywhere else. Such we may deem 
 the supreme tricksy act of the Great St. Louis Illu- 
 sion: it threatens to transform the nation, if not 
 the whole world into a phantasm like unto itself. 
 But mark the fateful consequence! Thus the city
 
 82 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 is lured to believe its own lie, manufactured by 
 itself and imposed upon itself, and the Great Illu- 
 sion wins ten years more of life, till the next Census. 
 Dare we here try to conceive for a moment what 
 might otherwise have happened, in the interest of 
 eternal verity? If our community had only ac- 
 cepted the truth of itself, whose oracle was not 
 hard to find just across the River, and if it had set 
 its house in order and had lived according to its own 
 reality it might have been a different St. Louis 
 with its city-soul still here in full energy at the 
 center of a continent. But can the leopard change 
 his spots ? So in a kind of defiant megalomania our 
 urban folk is destined to gorge itself a decade 
 longer upon the very vanity of existence, upon its 
 own self-made Illusion. 
 
 II 
 
 The Prophet of the Illusion 
 
 As usual, this peculiar public consciousness had 
 its most prominent individual representative and 
 expositor, who was not only a fervent believer but 
 a genuine apostle, offering himself a living sacrifice 
 to the cause. He was the embodiment of that St. 
 Louis Epoch, and made himself the voice of the 
 whole community's highest faith and aspiration. I 
 can still see him hobbling, puffing, indoctrinating 
 whomsoever he could get to listen, while mopping 
 the ever gushing perspiration from his brow with 
 a soppy bandanna which had already gone through
 
 THE PROPHET OF THE ILLUSION. 83 
 
 many a similar campaign. I shall have to confess 
 that I, looking back through the long avenue of the 
 years, behold him now rising up before me as the 
 typical urban character of that time, its truest rep- 
 resentative even in his distortions, physical and 
 mental. After no little contemplation of his career, 
 of his writings, and of his intellectual outfit, he has 
 grown upon me more and more as the best visible 
 incarnation of the St. Louis city-soul during this 
 era of the Great Illusion. 
 
 Hence I am going to celebrate him to the extent 
 of my talent in a brief biography, for which I find 
 the printed materials to be very scanty, though I 
 have made some search for them in the place where 
 they ought to be found. During these years he 
 was the most prominent and best-known figure on 
 the streets of St. Louis, though I deem it now my 
 ill-luck that I formed no intimate personal ac- 
 quaintance with the man and did not get to know 
 him and see him directly in his work. For I do not 
 deny that this my present review of his life with its 
 adversities has roused in me a deep, strong fellow- 
 feeling; in his career I can trace not a few lines 
 similar to mine ; his fate I gaze upon with sympa- 
 thy and catch a strange reflection of mine own, 
 though there were between us considerable differ- 
 ences. To take an example of the latter, his writ 
 had an infinite publicity compared to anything I 
 ever sent forth. He vanished first from our street- 
 corners and then from the world some thirty years 
 ago; his unique personality has passed into the
 
 84 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 tomb of forgetfulness, and his books seem also 
 marching rapidly thitherward. But I have not yet 
 told his name. Old citizens, rubbing the dust off 
 their memories, may still recall, probably with a 
 titter of contempt, the form and fame of Logan 
 Uriah Reavis. 
 
 I designated him the prophet of the Great St. 
 Louis Illusion, because he had one presaging 
 thought in his life, in his books, and even in his 
 looks; this thought he formulated in the locution: 
 St. Louis the Future Great City of the World. 
 That was his preaching and writing text, the main 
 title of his various works, his soul's inmost faith, 
 uttered with the fervor and conviction of old 
 prophecy. Alas ! after his unwearied self-imposed 
 apostolate of some fifteen years, he had to live 
 through the pitiless disenchantment of the census 
 of 1880, which seems to have struck him dumb (as 
 it did many another St. Louisan), for his prophetic 
 vocation became silent under that awful stroke, 
 though he is said in secret to have still clung to his 
 old faith. 
 
 Reavis was born 1831 in the Sangamon Bottom, 
 not far from the famous Lincoln localities of Illi- 
 nois. For a time he was a newspaper man at little 
 Beardstown, but in 1866 he pushed on to great St. 
 Louis, with his prophetic Illusion now in posses- 
 sion of him, or let it be called an obsession. He 
 started his gospel in 1867 with a pamphlet entitled 
 The New Republic, which is already attuned to 
 grandiose prediction. But in 1869 he published
 
 THE PROPHET OF THE ILLUSION. 85 
 
 his Removal of the Capital, which he forecast was 
 to be transferred from Washington to St. Louis. 
 This book, in which he advocated the removal of 
 the seat of the National Government, was composed 
 in the topmost effervescence of the Great Illusion, 
 and met with no small response in the city, but with 
 jeers and cat-calls from all along the Atlantic 
 Coast, and of course from Chicago. Still the work 
 won for Reavis his Herculean title throughout the 
 nation as the colossal Capital-mover, and he be- 
 came one of our chief celebrities. 
 
 Let it here be noted by way of connection with 
 our present work, that Reavis with his prophetic 
 idea appeared among us quite co-eval with the 
 birth of the Philosophical Society already re- 
 counted. Only a few months apart in the same 
 year of 1866 came the two rather noiseless, but 
 ominous arrivals. Were they in some secret way 
 related — both being perchance the offspring of the 
 same hidden demonic Power now at work in the 
 city-soul of St. Louis? Reavis was not a member 
 of the philosophic set, I never saw him at any of 
 our meetings, though I have heard that he did once 
 attend a lecture by Harris on the Immortality of 
 the Soul, which I read afterwards, and for me it 
 was just the abstrusest prelection I ever tried to 
 fathom on that abstruse subject. I wonder what 
 Reavis got out of it. From his writings I infer 
 that he had no irrepressible hankering after Phi- 
 losophy, especially after that of Hegel. 
 
 Skeptically to-day we are inclined to query : Did
 
 86 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 the solid business-heads of our town really support 
 this fantastic scheme of the Capital's removal? A 
 committee of leading citizens headed by James B. 
 Eads, our practical master-mind, gave their un- 
 stinted approval in writing. The County Court 
 voted a handsome appropriation for the free distri- 
 bution of his pamphlet of 1870, which was printed 
 both in English and German. Reavis claims that 
 150,000 copies of his various books passed into cir- 
 culation. There is little doubt that he voiced the 
 city's illusive mania at that time better than any 
 other man. Edition after edition was called for; 
 he says that he printed no less than five different 
 pamphlets on the one all-absorbing text between 
 1867 and 1870. That whole text was written, as he 
 declares "to show the glory and greatness of St. 
 Louis, and of the Mississippi basin ' ' ; here was des- 
 tined to be not merely the national but "the conti- 
 nental Capital," "the great city of the Future/' 
 verily the center of the world's wealth and power 
 and population. 
 
 The chief argument of Reavis stressed the geo- 
 graphical locality, round which were clustered the 
 abounding resources of the Great Valley, and these 
 he paraded with much statistical lore. Figures too 
 shared in the Great Illusion, and proved again 
 that the deft magician of numbers can turn even 
 sour mathematics to sweetest dreams. The main 
 appeal of Reavis was to the material side of man, 
 with its resistless oncoming in triumph. He guaged 
 his time and his audience correctly.
 
 THE PROPHET OF THE ILLUSION. 87 
 
 He tells pathetically of his advent: "a stranger 
 without friends and without means." Privation 
 he had endured: "I have walked these streets in 
 poverty and hunger." Ridicule too he has had to 
 face, but he has been sustained by his inner faith : 
 "I have the promise from of old that my works 
 shall live after me." Possibly Harris' lecture on 
 immortality gave him this deathless comfort. Here- 
 in we see the enthusiastic prophet who believes in 
 his call. But thus he shows himself as the Very in- 
 carnation of his own Great Illusion. 
 
 Still to the St. Louis people, whose deepest aspi- 
 ration he embodied and indeed voiced, Reavis was 
 on the whole a comic character. His Falstaffian ap- 
 pearance was already a challenge to mirth for the 
 street ragmuffins. His long scraggy red beard, and 
 the furrowed canals in his face never failed to 
 catch and treasure their due proportion of St. Louis 
 soot. He had a great predilection for himself when 
 unkempt and unwashed, not unlike Dame St. Louis 
 herself. Then step-mother Nature had left him 
 somewhat hunchbacked and hipshot, for which he 
 was surely not to blame, though he became thereby 
 a walking laugh. But chiefly whenever he dared 
 take a step there would protrude out from behind an 
 enormous haunch on which, the ribald scoffers of 
 Chicago and New York said, he proposed to heave 
 the Capitol from its foundations at Washington 
 and trundle it away to the West, swimming with it 
 across the Mississippi. St. Louis too laughed at 
 him, but therein laughed at itself as beholding the
 
 gg THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 living body of its own Great Illusion in its visible 
 deformity. So the old Athenian demos took its 
 pleasure in jeering at its own grotesque image held 
 up before itself by that prince of time's mimics, the 
 comedian Aristophanes. 
 
 Now let it be understood that I was present at 
 this comedy of the Great Illusion, and was one of 
 the loudest laughers at its unconscious buffoonery 
 and at my own latent folly; but my merriment, 
 while shaking my sides, never shook my faith. 
 When I now glance back at myself, I see me and 
 the whole town as unwittingly comic as honest 
 Reavis himself, who was more apostolic and disin- 
 terested than any of us. Still we were all pursu- 
 ing an end absurd, nugatory, self-annulling, hence 
 the right theme of a Cervantean world-comedy, of 
 which the Don Quixote was the enthusiastic but fan- 
 tastical idealist L. U. Reavis. 
 
 As for me, I was drinking down to intoxication 
 the great experience of Illusion and its significance 
 in human lfie. The foe I was sent to conquer had 
 completely conquered me, but I did not know it, 
 and great was my happiness. Personally I was 
 stimulated to the most strenuous stretch of my 
 gift, and won my highest and most enduring values 
 in pursuit of a golden bubble soon to burst into 
 nothingness. It was a lesson which I never after- 
 wards forgot — a divinely planned course given me 
 in the world's school by the supreme pedagogue 
 trouncing into me the knowledge of what is illusory 
 and ephemeral, and driving me to find the Eternal
 
 WHENCE. 89 
 
 in the Passing and the Past. Unto that end I be- 
 came a writer of books, starting to do then what I 
 am doing just now. 
 
 Even at this late moment in reminiscence I 3n- 
 joy the high-hearted hope of that time, and would 
 gladly recover a little pinch of it for present use. 
 Fortune we dreamed pursuing us like a passionate 
 wooer, the Future's full cornucopia was already 
 pouring into our lap, verily St. Louis had a cinch 
 on civilization, and could not help it if she would. 
 In this mood we listened to our prophet with the 
 laugh of faith, and drank down his books, slaking 
 with delight our thirst at his ever-welling fountain 
 of bombastic printer's ink. Really we were help- 
 ing to make our own comedy, and we played our- 
 selves a comic part even in our merriment over our 
 unconsciously humorous spokesman, our grand 
 hierophant of Illusion. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Whence 
 
 The spectator of life's drama, now myself peer- 
 ing down at mine own drama through the long gal- 
 lery of the revealing years, cannot help wondering 
 and interrogating: What could be the source, the 
 antecedent development of the Great Illusion in the 
 folk-soul of our dear St. Louis ? For it must have 
 been begotten, born, and reared on this spot, among 
 these people — they furnished the inner pre-concep-
 
 90 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 tion or spiritual potentiality, which was fed to its 
 outer huge reality by the environing world. 
 
 When I first came into contact with the city's 
 living peculiar self, I marked its exceeding belief 
 in its own good-luck. The communal heart wor- 
 shiped at the shrine of the old Roman goddess For- 
 tuna with a deeper sincerity, aye sanctity, than at 
 the altar of any other divinity, heathen or chris- 
 tian. Undoubtedly the formal religion of the va- 
 rious creeds was duly attended to as it ought to 
 be ; but the informal religion, having no church or 
 priest (except Reavis), the deeper well-head of all 
 speech and action was its world-overarching faith 
 in its own triumphant destiny. And it believed 
 that it did not need seriously to bestir itself; the 
 boon would rain from the skies, the pure gift of the 
 Gods to their chosen people. But the confession has 
 to be made that to-day quite the opposite character- 
 istic dominates the city — a deep perilous unfaith 
 in itself, which may be heard in the ever-repeated 
 question : "What is the matter with St. Louis ? So 
 every citizen now turns doctor and is diagnosing the 
 grand communal malady, which somehow refuses 
 to be medicined to pristine health and hope. 
 
 This problem, not merely a civic but also a psy- 
 chologic one, must be laid over at present, and we 
 shall return to our first inquiry. There is no doubt 
 that time's lottery once threw many precious gifts 
 into the lap of St. Louis without any special effort 
 of her own. She grew up the spoilt child of geo- 
 graphic locality. The sudden increase in her trad«
 
 WHENCE. 91 
 
 and population, and her central importance be- 
 tween 1850 and 1860, the natural overflow of the 
 surging Western migration, caused her to outstrip 
 her only rival in the Great Valley, Cincinnati. The 
 Kansas struggle which rose to be the chief national 
 occupation in the later fifties, made St. Louis the 
 cynosure of the whole country, located as she was 
 between East and "West, centered in the heart of the 
 land, and halving by her site the Great River in the 
 middle. This fortunate geographical position 
 smote every imagination, but by its very excellence 
 became probably for St. Louis a fateful asset. Still 
 more emphatically, at the beginning of the Civil 
 War she made herself the central city of the Union, 
 having done the first great positive deed against 
 Secession, and having furnished the first real mili- 
 tary hero of the coming crisis, as already recounted. 
 The city lay between North and South, and seemed 
 the destined spot on which the Nation's reconcilia- 
 tion was to take place, the Union 's best uniter phys- 
 ically and spiritually. 
 
 Surely Fortune has been blindly partial to St. 
 Louis during these years; but will the shifty 
 Goddess continue her smiles, being notoriously 
 fickle and even of treacherous Godhood ? Then the 
 problem comes: Has she pampered her favorite 
 child, hamstringing activity by her over-indul- 
 gence, so that the town gets to thinking that For- 
 tune will always take care of it without its co-oper- 
 ation ? As I remember the urban psychology about 
 1870, in which I profoundly shared, St. Louis was
 
 92 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 inclined to think that its greatness could not be 
 halted by anything short of the universal cata- 
 clysm, that it had a hold on civilization itself, which 
 Providence would not, or could not break. I do 
 not say that such a view was openly proclaimed, 
 but I can affirm that I have never since seen so 
 much self-satisfaction at the approach of the ever- 
 cloudy, ever-tetering future, never been deluged in 
 such a Niagara of optimism, civic and individual. 
 Life became one long intoxication, as we banqueted 
 on the wine of the Great Illusion. 
 
 To be sure, there were ominous signs in the hori- 
 zon plain enough to any eye except that of down- 
 right fatuity. Chicago had been already selected 
 by our jealousy as our menacing challenger, very 
 boastful but also very deedful. Still in those first 
 years St. Louis was as contemptuous of Chicago as 
 Chicago now is contemptuous of St. Louis. But al- 
 ready in 1870 the great line of migration had de- 
 flected to and through Chicago away from St. 
 Louis. The vast North-West was filling up with 
 Chicago's dependencies, while brigandage held 
 sway in helpless Missouri, and drove the mover's 
 wagon beyond the State's boundaries, far into the 
 farther West. The railroad, the new bearer of civ- 
 ilization, showed a decided preference for the more 
 Northern city, evidently for good reasons. But 
 mark this fact: you could already hear every im- 
 partial observer emphasize the difference in the 
 spirit of the two places. The census of 1870 showed 
 a slightly greater population in St. Louis, but ac-
 
 WHENCE. 93 
 
 cording to other tests she was lagging. Still as 
 already indicated, she had the magic power of turn- 
 ing the Census itself into a stupendous deception, 
 into the very picture of her own Great Illusion. 
 The curse of that fraud was that it took a decade 
 longer to break the spell of her enchantment. 
 
 It has been my experience to watch many indi- 
 vidual illusions rise, nourish, and break to nought 
 in myself and in other persons. Crowds, too, I have 
 seen driven devilward under the goad of some sud- 
 den phantasm, and more than once I have gone 
 along. But three Great Illusions in which large 
 communities, in fact whole peoples have been the 
 victims, are deeply carved on the memorial tablets 
 of this stubborn brain of mine. The case of St. 
 Louis was the smallest in extent and in importance 
 generally, but for me altogether the most impres- 
 sive and immediately influential. But the second 
 Great Illusion of my time I lived through with 
 heart and head and will, deeply engaged in combat- 
 ing its challenge : this was the long and desperate 
 Illusion of the Southern people when they sought 
 and fought the Civil War. I only speak the word 
 of some of the best Southerners who, once partici- 
 pating in that conflict, with perfect honesty, at 
 present call it an Illusion. But it has passed on, 
 and I and you are now witnessing the third Great 
 Illusion of my life's period, the greatest Illusion of 
 all History, veritably earth-defying in its minatory 
 rage. This is the Teutonic Illusion of world-domi- 
 nation territorially and spiritually, which I am old
 
 94 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 enough to have seen rise, grow to a globe-girdling 
 magnitude during half a century, and then burst to 
 fragments but yesterday — November, 1918. This 
 Teutonic Illusion is deeply connected, I hold, with 
 a kindred strand in the make-up of St. Louis, 
 whereof something later. 
 
 Hence just now comes to me and to you the soul- 
 burdening interrogation: What is the function of 
 Illusion not merely in my individual history and 
 yours, but in the "World's History? Can we catch 
 it, and put it under law and thus control it so that 
 it will not the next time wipe out our personal ca- 
 reer and possibly the whole Earth's hope? To-day 
 the Great Illusion is not an isolated phenomenon of 
 individual, of city, of State, of Nation, it seems to 
 be involving in its spell the whole globe, and pos- 
 sibly the Cosmos, which is so subtly finding its ap- 
 peal these days. 
 
 IV 
 
 Some Effects 
 
 Causes are dimmer, remoter, and hence more 
 doubtful ; while the effects we may often see in our 
 presence, in ourselves, plain and fairly describable. 
 The prime psychical result of the Great Illusion 
 was Hope, limitless, and enormously stimulating; 
 I was filled with the love and power of work, and 
 saw the shut future open in a mirage of triumph. 
 Given my mental germ, the Illusion drove me to 
 pierce to the center of all this vast environment of
 
 SOME EFFECTS. 95 
 
 occurrences and appearances; beneath them I 
 would penetrate to the Pure Essences and by their 
 aid organize, that is, re-create the Universe, at least 
 for my own self-expression. 
 
 It so came about that I in this searchful condition 
 obtained a book whose supreme object was to im- 
 part me just the thing I wanted. My guardian 
 spirit, I may suppose, caused to be put into my hand 
 at the opportune moment Hegel's Logic, which 
 showed me all creation stripped bare of its superflu- 
 ous clothing; the naked prototypal Thought, as it 
 were, before Space and Time, putting on its spatial 
 and temporal vestments ; the original genetic Demi- 
 urge in his primordial act of world-creating. Thus 
 I, while whelmed overhead into the Great Illusion 
 of my environment, was secretly seeking to pene- 
 trate to its universal generative source, so as to 
 know it and perchance to master it at its birth- 
 point. The two threads persisted in running along 
 together through my present life : I acted the Illu- 
 sion or in it, but I thought, or was trying to think, 
 the Reality. I could not have done this alone, I 
 would have given up the quest, unless I had been 
 upheld and fed by the St. Louis Movement, now 
 buoyed by its first blooming Hope. 
 
 So I believe this city gave birth to the Philosoph- 
 ical Society as a kind of twin counterpart or neces- 
 sary antithesis to its Great Illusion. As already 
 stated, the two appeared at about the same time, 
 seemingly the products of the same peculiar ulti- 
 mate energy. Nature is at her last turn sanative of 
 
 I
 
 96 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 her own disease ; to her maddest fever she has the 
 tendency to beget the antidote; if I may speak in 
 my own self-communing lingo, often bitterly neg- 
 ative she keeps meanwhile more deeply negating her 
 own negative. Thus for me at least Philosophy 
 had sprouted forth as secretly remedial of the gen- 
 eral Illusion, in which I too was living like every- 
 body else, even the philosophers. 
 
 I may note some instances of the mighty drive of 
 these years which probably manifested itself most 
 strongly in Harris, who now entered upon his high- 
 est creative period, say betwen 1865 and 1880. He 
 founded in 1866 the Journal of Speculative Philos- 
 ophy, as the vehicle of the St. Louis Movement. In 
 the same year he became Superintendent of the 
 Public Schools, and by his annual reports as well 
 as by his addresses he made an epoch in education, 
 not only locally but throughout the Nation. Thus 
 he wrought with equal power on both theoretical 
 and practical lines. Moreover he roused and kept 
 active the community's interest in his work, which 
 embraced the entire St. Louis Movement, including 
 not only Philosophy, but also Literature and Art. 
 He had private classes in Hegel and Kant, and also 
 in Goethe and Dante. He interpreted the Sistine 
 Madonna as well as the Venus of Milo. He poured 
 forth a copious stream of articles, lectures, trans- 
 lations. His correspondence was extensive in vari- 
 ous directions. In all this activity he was spurred 
 by the great civic Hope, to which he responded by 
 an equal ambition, till he too after many years saw
 
 SOME EFFECTS. 97 
 
 through the Great Illusion, and fled back to his na- 
 tive New England rocks. 
 
 With Harris I was closely associated all this time, 
 and had my first and only personal experience of 
 the colossal working-power resident in one mere 
 man. I estimate that he had at his disposal three 
 times the labor-fund that I owned, and he was able 
 to summon it all in an emergency. Physically I 
 seemed a weakling beside him ; a dumb-bell which I 
 could hardly lift, he could thrust out straight from 
 his chest. I heard a palmist, who was testing his 
 hand, once say to him: "You ought to enter the 
 prize-ring; I would wager that with a month's 
 training you could knock out Mike McCoole," an 
 eminent Irish pugilist of those days. Still he then 
 kept his pale cadaverous look, though he afterwards 
 grew corpulent, and a thin reddish layer of hair 
 covered his entire scalp, which soon became bare ex- 
 cept a short white fringe curtaining monk-like his 
 neck. 
 
 It is my opinion, however, that this unremitting 
 and extravagant outlay of power during these fif- 
 teen years had practically exhausted his creative 
 reserve ; he had spent his originality, when perhaps 
 he ought to have been at his meridian. It seemed 
 to me that after leaving St. Louis in 1880, he always 
 repeated what he had gained at St. Louis, of course 
 with new turns and applications. He never recov- 
 ered his St. Louis creativity either in pedagogy or 
 philosophy, though he spoke and wrote not a lit- 
 tle, and his literary style became less technical, or
 
 98 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 at least less bristling with Hegelian categories. 
 Hence Harris had essentially delivered his message 
 between his thirtieth and forty-fifth years, which 
 stretch of time covers the duration of the Great St. 
 Louis Illusion, under whose stress, or in whose 
 shadow he seems to have achieved his best. After 
 he quit his position of Superintendent, I often 
 heard him complain of a feeling of lethargy which 
 paralyzed his once so easy and buoyant energy ; he 
 attributed it to " a dumb ague, ' ' which he had con- 
 tracted in the malaria of St. Louis. But I think it 
 was simply the reaction from his long overtaxed 
 mind and body. His way of working would have 
 killed me in a year, if not sooner. If he was to de- 
 liver a lecture, he would keep deferring it till the 
 evening before it was due, when he tasked himself 
 to sit up all night to write it out, staying awake and 
 nerved tensely to composition by copious draughts 
 of tea. For the same amount of literary work, I 
 would require two weeks at least, slowly putting it 
 together out of pages written at a dozen or more 
 sittings of two or three hours each. So it came that 
 usually in his productions there was a gradual let- 
 ting-down in the last half till the close — just the 
 reverse of what ought to be. Hence too a frequent 
 unevenness in his work, owing to haste and lack of 
 due revision. 
 
 I speak of these matters because I am often asked 
 why Harris has left so little that can be read or 
 even found to-day. He pumped out his thought in 
 great lumps not well digested, really in the first un-
 
 SOME EFFECTS. 99 
 
 finished stage of composition ; then he would throw 
 them aside or often print them without subjecting 
 them to a second or even a third redaction, which 
 they often sorely needed for clarifying and for or- 
 ganizing their disjointed fragments. I often begged 
 him, when at Concord he seemed to have leisure, to 
 take in hand his multitudinous and far-scattered 
 productions — articles, essays, lectures, reports of 
 all sorts — squeeze out of them all the too frequent 
 repetitions and superfluities, mend the style in many 
 a dark and even torn spot, and then after such 
 careful revisions print one or even two volumes of 
 his Miscellanies. "Yes, yes," he would answer, "I 
 am going to do that this very winter when I am 
 buried in the deep snow here at Concord"; but he 
 never did it, seemingly could not do it. Why? 
 That is a question not to be answered till the finish. 
 But the result is, we must be satisfied with the long 
 list of his writings printed by the United States 
 Bureau of Education; if we wish for anything of 
 his, we have to dig it out of the vast cemetery of 
 dead periodicals, entombing forty years of his best 
 literary activity. And even that list, I observe, is 
 not complete. 
 
 Harris made himself the voice of the St. Louis 
 Movement, through his Journal of Speculative Phi- 
 losophy, and many essays, addresses, articles, all 
 of them doubly reinforced by his winning person- 
 ality. But it must be confessed by his friends, that 
 voice of his never rose to the possession of a dis- 
 tinctive literary quality, never won a permanent
 
 100 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 place through beautiful or original utterance. The 
 Trenscendental Movement still lives in the writ of 
 Emerson, who took exceeding care to give perma- 
 nent form to his central compositions, the Essays. 
 Harris went to Concord with the purpose of becom- 
 ing Emerson's successor, so at least I have always 
 construed his act; but after ten years' endeavor he 
 fell back into his old pedagogy, lapsed into the 
 National Bureau of Education and almost quit phi- 
 losophy. Another perplexing omission of his, as I 
 look back at him and try to catch his spiritual vi- 
 gnette, is his neglect, indeed his refusal to publish 
 in his Journal, when he had space and means, the 
 original source and first inspiration of the St. Louis 
 Philosophical Society, namely Brockmeyer's trans- 
 lation of Hegel's Logic, the Book of Fate, destined 
 to stay unborn in the unprinted underworld during 
 the whole life of the St. Louis Movement up to 
 date. Thus Harris, though philosopher, was deeply 
 and essentially the journalist, not the organizer; 
 his spiritual unit was the magazine article, not the 
 organic book, which is or ought to be something 
 generically other than a mere collection of period- 
 ical writings. 
 
 But what about our President, the primal Titanic 
 demiurge of our Movement, Brockmeyer? At first 
 he intended to write out in books his world-making 
 Promethean thoughts and experiences ; but he grad- 
 ually became neglectful of his first-born child, that 
 fated Logic, and turned away from philosophy to 
 politics, in which he had already begun to dabble
 
 SOME EFFECTS. 101 
 
 while living in his "Warren County cabin. More- 
 over it was on this political side that the Great Illu- 
 son entered him, and for a long stay. In 1870 he 
 was elected State Senator, which naturally made 
 him dream of being United States Senator. This 
 ambition required him to win not merely St. Louis 
 but all Missouri, and the deed by which he was to 
 capture the first place of statesmanship was the 
 making of a new Constitution for the State. The 
 old Drake Constitution was unpopular from the 
 start, even with its own party ; indeed there was a 
 question if it had ever been honestly adopted. Dur- 
 ing several years I found him always thinking and 
 reading on Political Philosophy, and ready to dis- 
 cuss its problems, especially in regard to the Mis- 
 souri situation, which still labored under its war 
 burdens. He won his first point: Brockmeyer 
 more than any other one man may be called the 
 father of the present Missouri Constitution, though 
 it too is now showing signs of age. Then came for 
 him a new promotion: he was elected Lieutenant 
 Governor of the State, a rather neutral office, but 
 it gave him the opportunity to be often chief Execu- 
 tive, owing to the ill health of the aged Governor, 
 Phelps. As much as any other man, perhaps more 
 than any other man of his party, he had helped to 
 induct the Democratic Party into power, by admit- 
 ting to suffrage the disfranchised Confederates. 
 Now he was ready to take the next step : the na- 
 tional Senatorship. But it was grasped by a re- 
 turned Confederate, and Brockmeyer, deeply dis-
 
 102 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 illusioned, quit political life, and fled from civiliza- 
 tion back to the Redmen of the forest, where he 
 stayed long and formed a little philosophical Soci- 
 ety. Once at Muscogee in the Indian Territory I 
 heard him explaining the deeper philosophy of 
 deer-stalking in a pow-wow with some Creek In- 
 dians. They all seemed to hail him as one of them- 
 selves: "Big Indian, good Indian." And he looked 
 it — the massive grimace, the coppery tint, the wild 
 eye of him. 
 
 Here we may ponder the significant episode that 
 both these men, our leaders, took flight from the 
 city and from us about the same time (1880), the 
 one turning eastward, the other westward. Each 
 of them in his way felt the stroke of the Great Dis- 
 illusion, and gave his own characteristic response. 
 Our Philosophical Society never elected other offi- 
 cers ; indeed it had not met for years, as far as I 
 now recollect. But the St. Louis Movement con- 
 tinued to live, and to make for itself new channels 
 of activity. Not long before this time I ran off to 
 Europe, but had returned, and began a fresh epoch 
 of my own distinctive work. But this belongs to a 
 later chapter. 
 
 V 
 
 The Economic Illusion 
 
 Naturally Mammon played his diabolic part in 
 the Great St. Louis Illusion; visions of untold 
 wealth rose and danced seductively before the 
 minds of the whole population; the entire Earth's
 
 THE ECONOMIC ILLUSION. 103 
 
 treasures, especially material prosperity had been 
 decreed her by the Gods, and she could not alter 
 such a supernal decree if she would. In particular 
 her Real Estate was to become the most valuable 
 speck of dirt on this terrene globe. Prophetic 
 Reavis had proved the fact in his multitudinous 
 processions of figures, which like George "Washing- 
 ton could not tell a lie. 
 
 Accordingly in the year 1868-9 I, being only a 
 poor schoolmaster with a growing family on my 
 conscience, resolved to have my share of this com- 
 ing distribution of wealth, which the city was cer- 
 tain would be showered like rain out of the skies 
 above, and which everybody, the wholesale mer- 
 chant as well as the hod-carrier, knew would soon 
 begin to descend. I had been looking about and 
 listening a good deal, and I found the judgment of 
 experts nearly unanimous that any land investment 
 anywhere in St. Louis city or county could not miss 
 the approaching windfall, as it lay right in the 
 path of the irresistible cyclone of prophetic pros- 
 perity. Accordingly I purchased a considerable 
 piece of unimproved property in what was then a 
 suburb, near the old Pair Grounds. The tract lay 
 on and near Grand Avenue, the great future thor- 
 oughfare of the world's metropolis. Alongside of 
 it was soon to be erected what at that time was de- 
 clared to be the finest architectural monument of 
 the city, namely a lofty Corinthian column set in 
 the middle of the road and known as the water- 
 tower, since it also served the utilitarian purpose of
 
 104 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 being aqueduct for the people. Thus I indulged in 
 a promising vision of myself as a rich man — which 
 promise is not yet fulfilled. 
 
 Another detail of the situation I may add as it 
 belongs to the Illusion. In the center of the tract, 
 surrounded by high ground fit for building pur- 
 poses lay a large deep mud-hole which was always 
 covered with a supply of water since it had an 
 ever-flowing spring in the bottom, so that it bred 
 some little minnows and furnished a small crop of 
 ice in winter. I often stood on the banks of that 
 little lake with its wavelets rippling in the wind, 
 and dreamed of the palaces which would rise over 
 its depths when filled up with the city 's ashes, brick- 
 bats, tincans, and other rubbish — and I would live 
 in one of those palaces, collecting the rents of the 
 other tenants. All this magnificence would be 
 then in the very heart of the Capital of the Nation, 
 perchance of the World. 
 
 But there was delay year after year in the ar- 
 rival of this urban greatness ; the mudhole persisted 
 in staying just what it was, a mudhole, with its 
 sluggish waters merely laughing in my face, if I 
 filliped into it a solitary pebble. What shall I do 
 with it? Once as I paddled around its sedgy mar- 
 gent, there struck me for the moment a desperate 
 idea : I would build a hut on these banks, and, like 
 Thoreau at Walden Pond, I would quit the Great 
 Illusion with its civilization, and go a-fishing, mar- 
 rying perchance philosophy to pisciculture. 
 
 Of course such a scheme vanished as soon as I
 
 THE ECONOMIC ILLUSION. 105 
 
 turned my face the other way, and saw the same 
 Great Illusion still wrapping the spires and chim- 
 neys and all the city in its grandly magnifying mi- 
 rage of future splendors. The venture might have 
 been worse, for if I never gained, I never lost. I 
 had some cash to start with, sufficient to meet the 
 first payment. Then I saved with desperate clutch 
 from my spare earnings till at last after some 
 seven years all the obligations were liquidated, and 
 I was again a free man, free from debt, after a 
 septennial servitude far worse than that of old 
 Jacob, who at least won his Rachel. But I had got- 
 ten on my hands an elephant, white they call it, but 
 mine was blue, which was destined to stay with me 
 quite forty years, in spite of many wrenching 
 struggles to get rid of it without its leaving me a 
 beggar in my old-age. 
 
 Such was my great economic Illusion, the direct 
 offspring of the universal Illusion of the time, with 
 which I had become twinned in blood-kinship. But 
 that was my first and last venture in the treacher- 
 ous quicksands of Real Estate. Land itself be- 
 came for me the most unstable footing on this globe 
 through the Great Illusion. It was Brockmeyer 
 who sold me this property, but I never blamed him, 
 for I knew that he was under the same illusive 
 spell, as well as myself, and everybody else in town 
 for that matter. So I took my own discipline, for 
 it was a trouncing of the Gods not only upon my 
 back, but also upon that of Dame St. Louis for our 
 sins — truly a purgatorial discipline unto our per- 
 fection.
 
 106 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 I had indeed won my freedom from the galling 
 economic slavery of debt, after so many years in 
 the galleys — for debt was my hell, not war. Still 
 I was not yet fully liberated; I continued to own 
 the blue elephant stuck fast in the mudhole, but I 
 could not dispose of him at any price, and I had to 
 furnish him food in the shape of taxes. Once I 
 thought I had sold him, but the buyer went crazy 
 and was put into a madhouse, and the huge animal 
 grew more voracious than ever of cash nutriment 
 in the form of special levies for roads, sewers, pav- 
 ing, and fraud (the latter being in one case the 
 largest item). 
 
 I tell of this economic Illusion, for its conse- 
 quences bore decisively upon me at many an impor- 
 tant turn during some four decades of the most 
 active part of my life. Being within the limits of 
 the Great Future City, that soggy piece of Real 
 Estate lay on my economies heavy, helpless, piti- 
 less, refusing to give back any value in money or 
 even in hope, so that I had to adjust all my mind's 
 fruits, as well as my board and lodging to its reme- 
 diless poverty. Then it always kept threatening 
 me with some fresh taxation, till I would wish it to 
 sink down still deeper in its mire, to very Hades. 
 At last it became to my sight and to my soul a 
 kind of Dead Sea which I never liked to visit, since 
 it would bring on me a spell of melancholy till I ran 
 home out of its dismal swampy view. After my 
 almost life-long schooling in disappointment, I was 
 allowed one day by the Powers to graduate with
 
 THE EAD8 BRIDGE. 107 
 
 cheque in hand. The behavior of that Real Estate 
 seemed to be typical of the city, which also was un- 
 able to recover in later years from its Great Illu- 
 sion, but weltered in a sort of sunken lethargic 
 mudhole for many a year. 
 
 Thus my land speculation in the city of Illusion 
 found a strange yoke fellow in my philosophic spec- 
 ulation ; indeed the latter was for me something far 
 more solid and more remunerative than St. Louis 
 Real Estate. Harris had in an inspired moment 
 named his periodical the Journal of Speculative 
 Philosophy, a daring venture which, however, had 
 its subtle adaptation to the time and the environ- 
 ment, since a number of the philosophers were in- 
 clined to speculate both financially and philosoph- 
 ically, in materiality as well as in immateriality. 
 Brockmeyer was again our heroic protagonist in 
 both directions, our limit-transcending speculator 
 in the soil and also in the spirit. Houses, lots, 
 mines he seized and owned, as well as ideas, pure 
 essences, and the Absolute itself. 
 
 VI 
 
 The Eads Bridge 
 
 By way of counterpart to the Great Illusion of 
 St. Louis during this time, I wish to emphasize the 
 one Great Reality which came into existence just 
 alongside or rather inside the city's phantasmal 
 spell at its uttermost. This Reality, quite the 
 greatest ever enacted at St. Louis in my opinion
 
 108 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 except Camp Jackson, was the Eads Bridge, rightly 
 named after its builder, or rather its creator. For 
 me it was the solidest, purest, truest fact of the 
 time, to which fact I clung almost as if it were an 
 anchor in an ocean of froth on which I somehow 
 was floating. When I saw those caissons, piers, 
 arches rise up from old turbid Mississippi, not only 
 from his bed but from the rocks many feet below 
 his mud, saw them take shape and span the angry 
 flood, I said to myself: There! behold now God's 
 Thought creating the world, even embodied in one 
 little man ; see your gossamer abstractions turning 
 concrete and practical; and just watch your He- 
 gel 's Logic with its intricate fine-spun web of Pure 
 Essences realizing itself in yonder structure with 
 all its turns, nodes, iron rods and braces. So I went 
 to school to the Eads Bridge the whole time of its 
 erection, some seven years, from 1867 till 1874. 
 During these same years I was teacher of various 
 branches, including Philosophy, in the St. Louis 
 High School. Let me add that I did not attend the 
 Eads Bridge to learn engineering, or mathematics, 
 or the nature of materials, though such sciences of 
 course made their necessary contribution to the 
 great work. I sought to penetrate it as an expres- 
 sion of the time and of myself uttered by a mas- 
 ter mind, by a supreme artificer who could catch 
 the Genius of the Age and turn it into a bridge. 
 Let me speak after my own extravagance which no- 
 body need imitate : James B. Eads communed with 
 the Great Creator of the Universe, persuaded Him
 
 THE EADS BRIDGE. 109 
 
 to drop down to St. Louis, and step across the 
 River, then to make that one great divine step 
 eternal in stone and iron, symbol and help of mil- 
 lions of little human steps like mine over the 
 stream. 
 
 Now I came to understand why the old Romans, 
 of whom I as a College Freshman, had read in 
 Livy, made their bridge-builder (Pontifex) a di- 
 vine person or High Priest communing with the 
 Supreme God Jupiter for a structure to cross over 
 even little Tiber. And their chief one in this busi- 
 ness was called the Supreme Pontiff (Pontifex 
 maximus). This office with its name descended 
 into the Christian Church, whose highest function- 
 ary, as God's own vicegerent and bridge-maker 
 from Earth to Heaven for men, bore the title of 
 Supreme Pontiff, who is still held in veneration by 
 many peoples, great and small, on our globe. So 
 for me Engineer Eads has become the Supreme 
 Pontiff of the Mississippi Valley, having bridged 
 its huge dividing stream, and having furnished the 
 creative germ or model of thousands of other 
 bridges still to be born. 
 
 Every Sunday worshipful, week after week, and 
 sometimes oftener, I would saunter down to the 
 Bridge and contemplate it in a sort of adoration 
 and with a soul-renewing wonder and sympathy. 
 Everywhere else in the city I could hear and see 
 only the Great Illusion, which the Bridge with its 
 fresh, hope-inspiring outlook on the future might 
 in its way seem to confirm, if not propagate. In
 
 HO THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 fact, the whole town was building that structure, 
 and took the same up into its life. Chicago ridi- 
 culed the work and denied its feasibility; a rival 
 engineer tried to supplant it with his own scheme ; 
 financiers questioned its ability to pay and steam- 
 boatmen were made to think it destructive of their 
 craft and future interests on the river. Still the 
 master builder pushed ahead through all obstacles, 
 and completed the most monumental arch of 
 triumph in the land, whereby he revealed the 
 greatest mechanical genius of his time, verily the 
 modern Archimedes. 
 
 James B. Eads was born at Lawrenceburg, In- 
 diana, in 1820, on the banks of an affluent of the 
 Mississippi, with which he stood in some deep in- 
 tuitive intimacy, as his great deeds were in one 
 way or other connected with the Great River, show- 
 ing an insight into and a mastery over the very 
 soul of the Father of "Waters. Eads as a boy had 
 strayed to St. Louis in 1833, and began at the bot- 
 tom, starting as an apple-peddler; he rose to be 
 steamboat clerk, and then became steamboat- 
 builder in 1842, self-taught in mechanics, not a 
 learned mathematician himself, but the controller 
 of mathematicians and engineers, through his com- 
 manding creative power. The war found him en- 
 gaged in removing obstructions from the Missis- 
 sippi, and gave to him his first supreme task; this 
 was to relieve the Great River of the naval obstruc- 
 tion sprung of the Southern rebellion, which he 
 accomplished with prime success through his gun-
 
 THE EADS BRIDGE. m 
 
 boats. Thus he first applied to navigation the 
 famous dictum of Lincoln : our Mississippi shall not 
 remain half-slave, half-free. 
 
 After the war, he proceeded to overcome the sec- 
 ond and greater separation — that caused by the 
 stream itself in its own Great Valley, cutting a line 
 of division through the same quite from Canada to 
 the Gulf, and making the long rift between East 
 and West, now to be surmounted. The result was 
 the Bridge already mentioned, in whose construc- 
 tion the communal spirit of St. Louis took part, 
 winning what may be called a pontifical conscious- 
 ness, perchance like that of hoary Rome of the eld- 
 est kings. At any rate Captain Eads held some 
 original kinship with the spirit of the stream; it 
 would appear that the Pontiff knew the mighty 
 River-God personally in his deepest ultimate char- 
 acter as well as in all his petty caprices and sinu- 
 osities, his little eddies as well as his vast over- 
 flows. 
 
 Thus Eads built us the chief reality of that other- 
 wise phantasmal epoch, though he too shared in the 
 city's dream of future transcendency, inasmuch as 
 his name stands highest on the list of sponsors pub- 
 lished by prophetic Reavis to float the latter 's 
 dream-book. Perhaps Eads also needed the Great 
 Illusion to spur him on to his deed. I was not one 
 of his personal intimates, though I often saw him, 
 and once talked with him somewhat; he had lofty 
 imagination, his best expression, however, was not 
 by word but by grand construction. He made
 
 112 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 speeches clad with imagery, but more deeply 
 poetic was always his grandiose conception, and 
 then his monumental execution. Through his 
 works he rose up before me as a kind of demiurge 
 or world-builder; yet his look, his manner, his 
 voice, even his dress seemed to me that of a sleek 
 unctuous minister, with countenance reverent and 
 reverend, seamed with drooping lines of humility. 
 I wondered at his sacerdotal face, whether or not it 
 sprang from his calling; perhaps it resulted from 
 his being High Priest of the River God, a veritable 
 Supreme Pontiff elected by Nature herself. 
 
 One more duty after building the Bridge he had 
 to perform for the Mississippi: the removal of the 
 obstruction at its mouth which was silted up by the 
 deposits of mud. This work is known as his sys- 
 tem of Jetties. Thus he completes the liberation of 
 the Great River, devoting to it the three supreme 
 actions of his life, each of which may be deemed a 
 step in the process of freeing it of its physical un- 
 freedoms. So he may well be pedestaled one of our 
 Liberators. 
 
 After this fashion I went to school to the Eads 
 Bridge, starting my course of instruction at the 
 age of twenty-six, and continuing it with no little 
 assiduity for seven years. I saw the huge body 
 grow from member to member like a living thing 
 before my eyes, and from this experience I date 
 my deeper interest in construction, which has re- 
 mained a permanent factor active through all my 
 work. I was no practical builder, indeed the im-
 
 THE EADS BRIDGE. 113 
 
 mediate manipulation and carpentry of building 
 never attracted me specially, and I never indulged 
 in it for pastime, as I have seen many people do. 
 For instance, Harris was a busy tinkerer around 
 the house, and had a knack in making ingenious 
 contrivances for his own amusement and that of 
 his friends. He invented a new kind of skiff or 
 row-boat to plow the Concord River, the most 
 unique craft probably ever seen on that stream. 
 It was made up of water-tight sections, which 
 could be taken apart and brought home. An ever- 
 menacing thing, shaky at the joints which often 
 seemed on the point of breaking loose and letting 
 the members sail off by themselves, it wibble-wob- 
 bled about as if preparing to duck us under, but 
 never did. ' ' Can you swim ? ' ' asked Harris when 
 I first jumped into the boat with him for a ride; 
 the question presaged me that he had his doubts. I 
 assured him that it would be only fun for me to 
 make the shore, and then after a little swim to dry 
 myself in the hot summer-sun. "Pull out, I want 
 to see you in your new role of navigation," so I 
 cheered him on. The passing Concordites, paddling 
 their old-fashioned traditional shells, laughed at 
 us with a sneer of this sort, as I understood it: 
 "Those St. Louis philosophers are trying to Hegel- 
 ize our dear old Musketaquid. " 
 
 Returning to my education imparted by the 
 Eads Bridge, I have reason to trace to it several of 
 my lasting tendencies. It impressed upon me not 
 only its own outer structure, but also the inner one
 
 114 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 everywhere and in all things, especially in my own 
 mind-world. It was a mighty lesson in universal 
 architechtonic, which I began to apply to all my 
 knowledge. In a play of Shakespeare, which sub- 
 ject I was then teaching at the High School, I could 
 not rest till I had found the principle and drawn 
 the outline of its construction. Indeed I then 
 dreamed of re-building all of Shakespeare's works 
 into one vast dramatic palace, which, however, lay 
 beyond any visible representation on the stage. 
 Moreover the Bridge became to me a kind of sing- 
 ing poem, day by day, as it rose melodious over 
 the waters. It was not merely a calculated mathe- 
 matic mechanism, but it had a spontaneous, crea- 
 tive, quite incalculable music in its erection, as if 
 it were something original at the first gush of 
 genius. I feigned me to hear its symphony, as well 
 as that of Beethoven, both being at last one har- 
 mony along with Shakespeare's. 
 
 The community also receives a unique spiritual 
 training, whenever it beholds a noble structure, be 
 it Cathedral, Capitol, Temple, or also the sky- 
 scraper, unfolding and uprearing in its midst. 
 "What a perennial school of the people is the 
 presence of such an edifice as the Parthenon, 
 looked up at continually from below by that most 
 impressionable Athenian folk-soul? Still today we 
 race across a Hemisphere to see it for a little while. 
 The Medieval Gothic Cathedral was itself an ever- 
 living priest lifting his look heavenward in prayer, 
 whom all were to see and to hearken and to wor-
 
 THE EADS BRIDGE. H5 
 
 ship with. When I beheld in the distance the 
 Dome of St. Peter's at Rome, I felt I saw the Pope 
 seated on his throne, and calling his world-flock 
 under his shelter there for an universal orison. My 
 real education in architecture began when I com- 
 muned with the Eads Bridge during its entire con- 
 struction, and continued when I could look upon 
 the great original edifices of Europe, whose spirit 
 I found and could still trace in the little Kinder- 
 garten with its little building-blocks for little chil- 
 dren. Still I never did build or could build with 
 my hands, but only with my mind; architecture 
 was psychological with me from the beginning, and 
 remained so till I had ejected it out of my mind into 
 a book. 
 
 And now I am to pass to that other far deeper 
 and greater, and really more massive construction 
 not merely of some outer sense-edifice, but of the 
 Spirit's inner structure itself — mine own as well as 
 Nature's, and our Creator's also. The central and 
 all-absorbing study during these years was Hegel's 
 System of Thought, in its genesis as well as in its 
 manifold applications and embodiments : which of 
 itself was a vast construction truly more spacious 
 than any Egyptian Luxor and Carnac, being the 
 universal philosopher's architectomic of the Uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Still I would not forget that the Eads Bridge be- 
 came to me a real physical Logic as counterpart and 
 visible confirmation of the ideal metaphysical Logic 
 of Hegel. Or I may call this Bridge a little echo or
 
 116 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 prototype of the original Logos or Creative "Word 
 in the Beginning, whose science, unfolded and or- 
 ganized, is or ought to be just the aforesaid Logic 
 or Doctrine of the Logos, wherein is often supposed 
 to lie the remedial religion of this our illusory mun- 
 dane existence. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Illusion's Antiseptic 
 
 Philosophy was the spiritual antidote, or to use 
 our modern more specific term, antiseptic, discov- 
 ered and prescribed by old Greece for the World's 
 Illusion. The form of this prescription varied 
 much according to the time and the doctor ; still it 
 always sought to lead the errant mind from the de- 
 ceptive mazes of the outside show of things to the 
 truth lurking in all appearances. The Greek 
 philosopher had before him the grand dualism be- 
 tween Illusion and Reality, or between the 
 Ephemeral and the Eternal. There is little doubt 
 that Philosophy meant more to those antique times 
 than it ever has since, for with cultivated people it 
 had to take the place of religion, especially in the 
 later years of the Greco-Roman period, when the 
 old heathen faiths had lapsed. 
 
 Philosophy, however, did not die with classical 
 antiquity ; there were still minds born who needed 
 it, and to whom it alone could give healing and 
 hope. So the philosophic line has continued from 
 oldest Thales to modernest Bergson, always seeking 
 to medicate the same trouble, which belongs to man-
 
 THE ILLUSION'S ANTISEPTIC. H7 
 
 kind indeed, but which has hitherto been specially- 
 prevalent in Europe and its civilization. So it 
 comes that Philosophy is distinctively and crea- 
 tively European, hardly Oriental, in spite of nu- 
 merous Oriental Philosophies of which we read in 
 many a book. The Orient is fundamentally and 
 genetically religious ; hence its original contribution 
 to the world's spiritual treasure has taken the form 
 of religion. The question rises here: Is our 
 America, this third continent, also to have its grand 
 continental discipline of the Spirit, like Europe 
 and the Orient ? I may whisper now a thought of 
 mine, which will be developed later, that our Ameri- 
 can science universal is not Philosophy, whose ulti- 
 mate viewpoint we have already transcended prac- 
 tically, if not yet theoretically. Some of our Ameri- 
 can Universities and their Professors have tried 
 and still are trying to philosophize originally, but 
 how pale seem their efforts! At best we hear in 
 their theories some faint echoes of Europe and its 
 supreme world-discipline. 
 
 Still Philosophy has won its educative place in 
 the grand human training-school, and is going to 
 remain as the true corrective, or as we have labeled 
 it above, the antiseptic of the World's Illusion, 
 preparatory to the complete positive recovery of the 
 mind's wholeness. Such at least was its place in 
 my own education. 
 
 Thus our Philosophical Society had its origin and 
 function in the existent circumstances. For it so 
 happened that we, in the midst of the St. Louis
 
 118 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 form of the World's Illusion, took to the study of 
 Philosophy by a kind of instinct, by a feeling of 
 our deepest spiritual need ; we grasped for this dis- 
 cipline as remedial of the time and specially of the 
 city's malady, with which we also were deeply in- 
 fected, for we in some way by means of it were 
 made to "believe a lie," if I dare employ the 
 Scripture's pitiless tongue of truth. 
 
 The philosopher whom we chose as guide, or 
 rather, who was chosen for us by Brockmeyer, the 
 only capable chooser among us all, was the German 
 Hegel, really the last entire philosopher of the 
 Great Entirety, inasmuch as the philosophers since 
 Hegel are but piecemeals in comparison with his 
 wholeness. "We cannot except even Herbert Spen- 
 cer, in spite of his pile of books, for his system 
 leaves many wide and deep gaps in the philosophic 
 Universe ; indeed does he not abandon the Universe 
 itself as unphilosophical ? Spencer, accordingly, 
 we could not follow as spiritual leader; really he 
 hardly believes in spirit, certainly not all the time. 
 The first essay of his own I ever heard Harris read 
 was a refutation of the philosophy of Herbert 
 Spencer, whose works were then in the process of 
 publication and discussion over the country. Thus 
 it may be said that Spencer gave the primal im- 
 pact which pushed into print the St. Louis Journal 
 of Speculative Philosophy by way of opposition. 
 
 So I began my long desperate grapple with Hegel 
 whose eighteen volumes in the original I ordered 
 from their old homeland (two or three unimportant
 
 THE ILLUSION'S ANTISEPTIC. 119 
 
 volumes, being out of print, I never succeeded in 
 getting, but Harris owned them, having combed 
 the antiquarian bookstores of all Germany to catch 
 them). I confess that I alone could not have done 
 the work; I would not have persisted in it unless 
 aided by our associated group who were wrestling 
 with the same task. Particularly I had to be re- 
 inforced and underpropped by Brockmeyer's 
 philosophical genius, equal to that of Hegel and 
 more poetical; but he lacked Hegel's industry and 
 organizing power, which Brockmeyer's wild and 
 wayward but very inspiring effervescences 
 spurned. And so it comes that he has left little or 
 nothing finished and ordered for the future reader. 
 Hence the final complete self-realization of his mas- 
 ter he did not, perhaps could not, attain. 
 
 Thus I had my distinctive, I may say, my ex- 
 clusive Hegelian era, when my whole intellectual 
 effort was concentrated upon acquiring the philos- 
 ophy of the master and working it over into my 
 own mentality, and even into my own vocabulary. 
 This absorbing study lasted some five or six years 
 (1865-1871) when I not only thought Hegel, but 
 lived Hegel, was Hegel. All that I had ever known 
 or done I Hegelized with a sort of desperation. Un- 
 doubtedly I was obliged to look after other things 
 in the meantime, among them to make a living for 
 my family. Then Philosophy required me to be 
 nerved up to my top stretch, else she would not 
 impart any gift worthy of herself. Hence it was 
 necessary to sift my unworn hours from the wear
 
 120 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 and tear of practical life and to win, as far as pos- 
 sible, their creative treasures. Desire of knowledge 
 I felt undoubtedly, still that was an old feeling; 
 but why just this new form of knowledge here and 
 now ? Let us turn back a leaf or two of life. 
 
 At College I had studied Mental Philosophy 
 (good theological Havens gave name to the text- 
 book) in the usual routine which made this subject 
 a sort of curiosity or metaphysical gimcrack. Its 
 superficiality I dimly saw through, and resolved to 
 take a deeper dip, and so I procured Sir William 
 Hamilton's big books on Logic and Metaphysics, 
 which, recently published, were then deemed the 
 sovereign word of philosophic speculation. Their 
 learning, their ingenuity, and their infallible dog- 
 matism captivated me, even lulled me to a sense of 
 their finality. But on a day I cited them to Brock- 
 meyer, who with one lightning flash of his consum- 
 ing dialectic (as he called it) shriveled for me 
 Hamilton to a cinder, and started me to building my 
 own world over again. Then too I caught in the 
 flash a bare glimpse of that subtle sport of the 
 Negative of which we all were captives held fast 
 in our city's Great Illusion, Brockmeyer included. 
 I may here add, however, that since then slow- 
 burning Time has taken many years to do to Ham- 
 ilton what Brockmeyer did in a minute. 
 
 Hence I kept clutching at Hegel for dear life. 
 Can I impart to my readers a brief outline of my 
 task? In the first place, I explored in detail those 
 eighteen volumes which showed Hegel creating the
 
 THE ILLUSION'S ANTISEPTIC. 121 
 
 Universe and projecting it into his categories of 
 thought. Secondly, there was one work of these 
 volumes, which was the originative center of all the 
 rest — that was the Logic or generating Organon 
 not only of Hegel, but of all philosophies, as well 
 as of all sciences. Hence this Logic has been called 
 God Himself thinking the Universe in the pure 
 forms of thought, or the science of the Divine 
 Logos. Thirdly, I had to re-think the philosopher 
 building his system from its innermost creative 
 center to its outermost created circumference — the 
 mightiest mental architectomic ever yet conceived 
 and executed by a human brain. 
 
 I have already alluded to this Logic as the heart 
 of our philosophical enterprise, and on the other 
 hand as our unique Book of Fate seemingly hang- 
 ing over us from then till now, ever unrealized. 
 What all this means cannot be explained here, but 
 is thrown out as a kind of keynote often to be 
 struck hereafter, till the whole tune be composed to 
 its finale. At present, however, I may tell some- 
 what of my early grapple with the brain-confound- 
 ing labyrinthine book. It flung me right at the 
 start into the most abstract swirl of human thought : 
 Being, Nothing, Becoming. These conceptions 
 would run into one another, then out of one an- 
 other, then make a ring around together, like a 
 vast Hegelian vortex in which I was dizzily whirled, 
 till I feared me I would never get out of that spirit- 
 ual maelstrom. I would flee from my narrow rotat- 
 ing room into the steady open air, still my mind
 
 122 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 could not escape from the whizzing wheel of Ixion, 
 on which I seemed pinioned, and which kept 
 careening around through its ever-repeating vor- 
 tical triplicity : to be, not to be, to become. Hamlet 
 stands fixed from start to finish in the dualism of 
 his famous soliloquy : to be or not to be. That was 
 his question, he declares, but it was only a part of 
 mine, for I had also to become, and so my cyclonic 
 brainstorm continued revolving through innumer- 
 able triads, largest and least, from the Universe 
 down to the microscopic cell. 
 
 The fact came out, in this unique experience, 
 that I was really becoming, being born over in the 
 painful process of spiritual parturition. I would 
 wander astray through the streets for miles, seek- 
 ing to walk off that logical vertigo, till sleep might 
 put it to rest; but even in dreamland my brain's 
 Flying Dutchman would start to whirl around, 
 driving ahead under less control than when awake. 
 So I would resolve to have nothing more to do with 
 that infernal Logic, it was a devil 's dance anyhow, 
 a juggle to steal my time, or perchance to rob me 
 of reason. I threw the book aside, hid it from my 
 sight, would never open it again to let out its 
 demonic brood ; I even thought of burning it, fling- 
 ing it into its own torturing Hades. But the next 
 Sunday afternoon I would speed to the philos- 
 ophers* Academe located then in Salisbury street, 
 and listen to their discussions and translations of 
 the master ; again I noticed the all-coercive univer- 
 sal training which our two leaders manifested
 
 THE ILLUSION'S ANTISEPTIC. 123 
 
 through the influence of that one writ, although 
 each preserved his own individuality in their com- 
 mon doctrine. Harris was more formal and peda- 
 gogical ; Brockmeyer never failed to break over de- 
 fined limits, and to revel in some startling ebullience 
 of thought and fancy. He could make all the fet- 
 tered nomenclature of Hegel's Philosophy dance 
 freely in its heaviest chains — an astounding feat of 
 mental prestidigitation in seeming, and still at the 
 same time most real. How did he do it? Logic. 
 Again I would hurry home and take from its hid- 
 ing the same fatal book ; again the brain-swirl would 
 begin but less tyrannic. So I kept on battling for 
 weeks, months, years; finally came a certain mas- 
 tery, or at least disentanglement from that vortical 
 labyrinth of ever-spinning and interlacing triplets 
 of categories ; that is, I could now spin them better 
 than they could spin me. Thus I had become, and my 
 microcosm could at once start to handle the macro- 
 cosm, having won the tools and learnt the trade. 
 
 Then from the central genetic book I would pass 
 to its children, that is, to its elaborations in Hegel's 
 other works, such as Aesthetic, History, State, to- 
 gether with Nature and her sciences. But of these 
 prolonged but easier studies, though of great in- 
 fluence upon my future career, I need now give 
 no account. It was a time of pure acquisition; I 
 appropriated tradition in its universal form, the 
 philosophical; I was still repeating, not creating, 
 though possibly getting ready for the latter. But 
 I had solved inwardly the Illusion, even if out-
 
 124 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 wardly I remained caught in its toils ; theoretically 
 I had found the time 's antiseptic, while practically 
 I was still its victim, till there, fell on us all the 
 awakening blow of Disillusion. 
 
 Having told my own experience with this central 
 book of our St. Louis Movement, I may here give a 
 brief indication how it has affected some typical 
 intellects, which in one way or other have come 
 under my observation. Premising the mental out- 
 fit, Hegel's Logic works upon people even 
 philosophically minded, in quite opposite ways, 
 from utter disgust and rejection to a devoted loyal 
 acceptance. All these various attitudes I have wit- 
 nessed and heard, and to some extent shared. 
 
 1. Thomas Davidson, the Scotch wandering 
 scholar, when he strayed into St. Louis about 1867, 
 and began to take part in our Movement, soon fell 
 upon this fore-fronting book, had his tussle with it, 
 and got badly thrown. I saw him begin it, and 
 watched his reactions. The result was a kind of 
 fury against it, a fixed mania at hearing even the 
 name of Hegel, over which he could easily fall into 
 a convulsion of damnation. Something of this 
 rancour he imparted to his soul's special comrade, 
 Professor William James. The psychology of his 
 case I construe thus: Davidson was a born con- 
 tradiction; if he could not contradict he was not 
 only unhappy, but a zero, which he would not al- 
 low himself to be. Now one of Hegel's emphatic 
 points is the mediation of all contradiction; or let 
 us call it contradiction's own inner self -undoing —
 
 THE ILLUSION'S ANTISEPTIC. 125 
 
 a theorem which simply undid Davidson himself at 
 the very bottom. This he felt, though he probably 
 never reasoned the matter out. Hence Hegel he 
 deemed the devil, the arch destroyer of himself and 
 specially of his kind of intelligence. Still David- 
 son obtained his chief philosophic training through 
 the St. Louis Movement during his eight years' 
 stay ; it was his second University, altogether more 
 universal for him than his first Scotch University' 
 of Aberdeen. 
 
 2. Emerson also had his strong objections to 
 Hegel, for distinctively Emersonian reasons. Espe- 
 cially the Logic he looked upon with a kind of hor- 
 ror, as a hideous array of skeletons of once living 
 thought, a kind of death's dance of osseous cate- 
 gories in which he could hear the dry bones un- 
 cannily rattle. He shrank from such an osteology 
 of the spirit. The splendid literary stylist, for 
 such he is, wished his philosophy always to be cov- 
 ered over with beautifully tinted metaphorical 
 flesh, like an Emersonian essay for instance. In 
 some such manner I heard him express his cour- 
 teous disapprobation which he has also frequently 
 set down in writ. . He probably obtained his knowl- 
 edge from Sterling's Secret of Hegel, which work 
 he had read with some care at the first stirring of 
 the St. Louis Movement, in which he had become 
 interested through Harris, who told me the fore- 
 going fact. Then I conceive he felt another repul- 
 sion; for the close organic texture of Hegel's writ- 
 ings was not Emerson's, even if he longed for some
 
 126 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 system in his work, as we see by his recently pub- 
 lished Journals. It was a later day when Emerson 
 must have been exposed to a good deal of chaffing 
 about Hegel at the Concord School of Philosophy, 
 especially when the St. Louis Hegelians, headed by 
 Harris, were there in the philosophic saddle, and 
 failed not to ride with some exuberance, and per- 
 chance at times with a look of triumph. 
 
 3. Professor William James, whom I listened to 
 at Concord, has printed his somewhat vehement re- 
 jection of Hegel's Philosophy which, he declares, 
 "mingles mountain loads of corruption with its 
 scanty merits." And so forth very often. What 
 is the trouble with Professor James? Without go- 
 ing into his long list of exceptions, we may find his 
 mental attitude condensed in the following pass- 
 age: "The sense of a universal mirage, of a 
 ghostly unreality steals over us, which is the very 
 moonlit atmosphere of Hegelism itself." (See 
 essay On some Hegelisms reprinted in his Will to 
 Believe). This doubtless expresses the psychologi- 
 cal condition of James after trying, or being tried 
 by, Hegel's Logic. And it is one of the stages, 
 genuine, I know by experience, through which the 
 student passes toward the mastery of Hegel. But 
 it is a stage to be transcended, which James never 
 did, possibly he could not. Thus the book for him, 
 instead of piercing and dissipating the given world 
 of Illusions, creates a new one and really a worse 
 one, made up of a procession of ghostly unrealities, 
 which he cannot get rid of except by flight. So the
 
 THE ILLUSION'S ANTISEPTIC. 127 
 
 Professor, in unconscious self-criticism, proclaims 
 that he did not, and possibly could not, work 
 through the second or apparitional stage of the 
 grand Hegelian world-discipline. 
 
 4. The Hegelians proper, agreeing about the 
 philosophical mastery of all mundane Illusions, and 
 stressing the eternal verities of thought against the 
 fleeting appearances of sense, differed not a little 
 among themselves. Our two leaders construed 
 Hegel diversely, in accord with their spiritual needs 
 and their distinctive mentalities. Harris clung nat- 
 urally to the fixed insight, or the separate aperqu 
 (as he was fond of calling it), while Brockmeyer's 
 native force was the swift ever-flashing dialectic 
 (as he designated it after Hegel and the Greeks). 
 Still to both these friends the master's Logic was 
 the one book of the Universe, their real Bible, to 
 which they always came back for recovery after 
 any divagation. 
 
 I can truly say that this book never became to 
 me what it was to them — the book of Life and 
 Death, of Time and Eternity. Still I had to work 
 through it with them and by their help, and then 
 to work out of it, quite by myself, into another 
 world-view. But without my knowing it, that 
 Logic, backed up by the St. Louis Movement and 
 its philosophizing, was my rescue from the 
 mightiest negative force of the age, since it demol- 
 ished for me Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 
 which was deeply fermenting in the philosophic 
 spirit of the time, and undermining its belief in all
 
 128 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 intelligence. Germany, however, went back to 
 Kant, denying that man has or can know truth, and 
 she practically realized the Kantian negation in 
 the recent war, with what destructive consequences 
 to herself and to the world we have barely begun 
 to glimpse. 
 
 Such was my five years' siege of the most in- 
 expugnable fortress of writing that ever arose from 
 the mind of man, challenging the best human brain 
 to daring mental escalade. Veritably it is a world 
 book of Philosophy, the most difficult book of the 
 most difficult science ; it may well be designated as 
 one of the great Philosophical Bibles of the Race, 
 the last one so far, and the final summation of them 
 all, several other great ones being strown down the 
 ages like the Literary Bibles hereafter to be con- 
 sidered. I have already called it our Book of Fate, 
 particularly in relation to our Philosophical So- 
 ciety and our two leaders, whom it fates, and who 
 in turn fate it for us, as the outcome of our 
 philosophical drama must show, when this gets 
 played to the end. 
 
 But at last I felt that I had fought myself free 
 of it by intense persistent struggle, and that it lay 
 behind me a conquered, or anyhow a transcended 
 domain, from which I was destined to push my way 
 to a new cultural province in my life's journey. 
 Whereof later. At present I may repeat that 
 Hegel had emancipated me philosophically from 
 my inner world of Illusion, but not from the outer, 
 upon which the blow now suddenly descends.
 
 THE GREAT DISILLUSION. 129 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Great Disillusion 
 
 Already attention has been called to the par- 
 ticular stroke of time and of fortune whereby St. 
 Louis was quite suddenly whisked out of her long 
 deep Illusion into a longer and deeper Disillusion. 
 That morning when the first report of the census 
 of 1880 fell from the newspaper skies down into 
 the city, there rose and rolled through it a huge 
 wave or rather a seismic convulsion of dismay, a 
 tidal deluge of mortal disappointment overpower- 
 ing us somewhence from the dismal chaos of the 
 Beyond. It spared nobody, not even those who 
 knew of its coming, or those who like myself did 
 not know, but had forefelt something of the sort in 
 the dice-throw of the time. It was a panic which 
 seizes the disciplined soldier, and carries him away 
 in its flood, as well as the raw militiaman. A gloom 
 then settled down into our very souls as if we were 
 listening to the crack of doom. Some or perhaps 
 many people here never felt this pulverizing ex- 
 perience of the mighty hammer-stroke of Disillu- 
 sion, but the city did, and she shows today the last- 
 ing impress or scarification from it upon the urban 
 character. Indeed the stronger statement may be 
 made, that St. Louis still carries not only the 
 cicatrice, but the running wound from that fate- 
 ful blow of Disillusion, with fresh regurgitations 
 after the hoped-for healing of years nearly two-
 
 130 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 score. For is she not calling out in a kind of self- 
 trituration this very morn: What is the matter 
 with me, O Doctor ? 
 
 The city was in love with its Illusions, which it 
 kept dancing before itself with a hypnotized 
 fatuity; or more sternly may run the indictment 
 that it was infatuated with its own lies, which it 
 persisted in telling to itself, or in encouraging 
 others, like the prophet Reavis, by applause and 
 money, to repeat for its delectation. Can one help 
 thinking again of that scriptural example which 
 warns of when there is sent from above upon men, 
 communities, nations, "a strong delusion," so that 
 they are "made to believe a lie," just their own 
 lie, whereupon follows divine judgment. And 
 there was no Savonarola or even Peter Cartright to 
 thunder to us the Lord's warning. 
 
 But turning aside from biblical interpretation, 
 which is not my field, I hope to become more mod- 
 ern and explicit, by confessing myself to four fas- 
 cinating shapes of Illusion, which I delighted to 
 hug; or, if you prefer the undraped word, four 
 lies common to myself and my fellow-citizens, fab- 
 ricated by ourselves but religiously believed, and 
 even propagated with a kind of fanatical zeal — 
 four instances of our fatuous self-mendacity. 
 
 1. Always must be first set down our Illusion of 
 unbounded wealth, of commercial supremacy, of a 
 vast population. Material prosperity was held up 
 as the grand goal of the city's life and ambition. 
 The kingdom of Heaven here became a world-em-
 
 THE GREAT DISILLUSION. 131 
 
 pire of Dollardom, often declared to be the great 
 American ideal (but I do not believe it, par- 
 ticularly now after the recent war). The news- 
 papers, as was natural, put stress upon the imme- 
 diate, sensuous, worldly St. Louis, advertising all 
 its wonderful saleabilities. Meanwhile the prophet 
 Reavis, who wrote books or at least pamphlets, 
 piled up its statistical advantages in columns of 
 figures which he had the alchemy to transmute into 
 solid gold right before our believing eyes. And 
 the yellow Mississippi, bearing dissolved mud- 
 mountains in its shaggy breast, seemed with its 
 whole mass of yellowness to turn auriferous the 
 moment it touched the St. Louis wharf, and to re- 
 new the old story of the shining sands of river 
 Pactolus. Of course these falsehoods never could 
 be realized, but it required heavy-fisted Disillusion 
 to smite them into truth, that is, into what they 
 actually were out of the appearance. 
 
 2. The second piece of jugglery, fabricated for 
 us indeed, but accepted by us in all faith, was the 
 fraudulent census of 1870. Who got it up ? Prac- 
 tically we demanded it, prayed for it, and it was 
 furnished by the devil, for just that is his business. 
 But in any view of the case, this fraud was the 
 direct act of making us believe our own lie. "Well, 
 who made us do that? Look again into the old 
 Book of Books and ponder its view of the problem. 
 So much, however, may be now said : the Great 
 Disillusion, as a possible remedial medicine, was 
 put off a decade, and our prophet could keep on re-
 
 132 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 cording grandiose predictions to the faithful under 
 the shelter of a colossal deception, promulgated and 
 vouched for as true by the United States Govern- 
 ment. As late as 1876 Reavis issued his largest 
 book, gilt-edged, morocco-bound, as a worthy me- 
 morial of the Centenary of our national independ- 
 ence, with title-page still wafting to us his old 
 prophetic mirage : St. Louis, the Future Great City 
 of the World. And he cited just that lying census 
 as part of his proof. 
 
 3. In company with all St. Louis, I was made 
 to believe the fiery falsehood, truly infernal, which 
 seemed to be proclaimed to us from above by the 
 great Chicago conflagration of 1871. On a royal 
 October afternoon of that year I was descending 
 the High School steps with a mind toward home, 
 when Principal Morgan approached me holding a 
 newspaper in his hand and pointing to some mas- 
 sive head-lines themselves aflame : ' ' Chicago burn- 
 ing up." Morgan, who with the peculiar strabis- 
 mic twist of his eyes, and the nasal snarl in his 
 voice, re-inforced by the vitriolic burn in his words, 
 could take-on the leer and the sneer of Mephis- 
 topheles, when he had the right provocation, 
 showed me somewhat startingly one phase of our 
 reception of the rival's grand fatality. I hurried 
 down town for further information, and passed be- 
 fore a newspaper office where hundreds were read- 
 ing the bulletins. The crowd was not boisterous, 
 but wore the silent smile of self-gratulation ; I 
 thought it felt a secret awe at the providential
 
 THE ORE AT DISILLUSION. 133 
 
 catastrophe, yet not without an exultant hope. 
 Reavis was there, streaming, puffing, limping 
 through the mass, and slapping his sloppy ban- 
 danna against the little Artesian wells which kept 
 bubbling up along his front and running down his 
 cheeks in the quite vain attempt to wash his face 
 of St. Louis soot. In fact, Reavis always had to 
 me a sooty appearance, not that of old Nick, for he 
 was fanatical honesty itself, but he looked as if in 
 his love he had appropriated the very garb of his 
 darling, the coal-smoky head-dress of his dearest 
 Future Great City of the World. I did not hear 
 him speak one word, though he was often chal- 
 lenged ; he was too kind-hearted to exult openly in 
 the misfortune even of his enemy; still when the 
 other man would crack a hideous joke over Chi- 
 cago's new business triumph as a crematory, he 
 could not help wheezing out one of his huge- 
 chested guffaws which would wind up in a pro- 
 longed laughing cough unique of its kind and per- 
 chance symbolical. Still he was the central figure 
 of the crowd, whose eyes would wander after him, 
 though with a comic smile ; but I in body followed 
 him, as the prophet of the time, till at last I heard 
 drop from his lips one brief passage : "I told you 
 so; the Lord is on the side of St. Louis." 
 
 So I had listened to both the scoffer and the 
 prophet upon the burning text of the moment. As 
 I sauntered meditatively away, I said to myself: 
 "Now I must consult the final and greatest oracle, 
 the philosopher himself, since his response to life's
 
 134 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 enigma has always in it for me more sunrise than 
 that of any other human luminary. ' ' 
 
 Accordingly in the evening I went to Brock- 
 meyer's unpretentious dwelling, which, nestled in 
 a somewhat obscure street, was for many years my 
 shining Delphic temple of Apollo more light-giving 
 than any other edifice to which I ever pilgrimed. I 
 found the philosopher at home ; we took our seats 
 on the small verandah of the second story looking 
 to the North-East, when I interrogated him per- 
 haps somewhat oracularly: "Do you see that de- 
 vouring illumination over yonder behind the river's 
 bluff, some three hundred miles distant along the 
 lakeside ? Tell me, what does it signify to us, and 
 to itself, and to the future?" 
 
 The philosopher never looked up but lit his aged 
 pipe, took his seat upon his easy tripod, and 
 wrapped himself and me, who did not smoke, in the 
 dreamy philosophic clouds of nicotine, out of which 
 issued the paternally toned voice: "My son, it is 
 the most striking practical instance of our oft-dis- 
 cussed, little-understood, self-undoing Dialectic. 
 Chicago was the completely negative city of our 
 West and indeed of our time, and now she has car- 
 ried out her principle of negation to its final uni- 
 versal consequence; she has simply negated her- 
 self. ' ' The tobacco clouds reacted certainly on my 
 brain, and probably on my vocal chords, and made 
 me hiccough out in spite of myself a kind of oppo- 
 sition : "Yes, I see, I see ; but then the negation of 
 the negative usually brings forth a positive result
 
 THE GREAT DISILLUSION. 135 
 
 stronger than ever. Even in Mathematics the minus 
 of minus gives plus ; and there may be a big plus 
 under all this minusing of the minus in yonder con- 
 flagration ' '. But the St. Louis philosopher replied, 
 radiating some heat, with a scorching streak in his 
 tongue against what he deemed in me a sort of 
 treason: "By no means, not at all; the positive 
 result of that negative is bound to arrive, as you 
 say, but not over there in the same place again, but 
 here, here in our St. Louis." "I believe it," I 
 cried; "yes, so it must be." Therewith he passed 
 to a subject which was getting to cuddle next to his 
 heart, namely, the making of a new Constitution for 
 the State of Missouri ; which deed if by him highly 
 performed, might land him in the Senate of the 
 United States. He did not whisper me any ambi- 
 tion of the kind, and I then did not divine it, but 
 somehow the future always persists in being 
 secretly pregnant. 
 
 Thus we clung loyally, aye pathetically to our 
 city's Great Illusion, even after the fraud of 1870, 
 which our Philosophy, if it had been equal to its 
 opportunity, ought to have detected or at least sus- 
 pected, for which suspicion there appeared many 
 bodeful signs hanging out of the horizon every- 
 where around us. Indeed the newspapers flagged 
 them forth from all directions in the distance. But 
 the Great Illusion had the power of making the 
 philosophers pervert and even deny their own Phi- 
 losophy, as seen in the above instance; practically 
 we too were spell-bound by the lie, even while we
 
 136 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 held to the truth of our doctrine. The charm of 
 self-mendacity required the quick gigantic sledge- 
 stroke of the Great Disillusion to knock us out of 
 our lying dream into the possibility of living awake 
 in the world once again. 
 
 4. Already has been recounted the diz2ying false- 
 hood of Fortuna, the Goddess whom we came to be- 
 lieve in more than any other divinity, heathen or 
 christian. Our irresistible Good-luck, whatever be 
 our folly or neglect, rose to be the prime article of 
 our faith. How such a creed saps human energy 
 needs no illustration, not even that of St. Louis. 
 And how utterly faithless to her most faithful wor- 
 shipers Fortuna turns at a caprice, has been cele- 
 brated by historians and poets old and new ; we all 
 recollect what ugly irrepeatable nicknames our 
 Shakespeare has heaped upon her, satirizing her 
 female fickleness and infidelity. To this belief was 
 joined the cognate one, which maintained the fate- 
 like fascination of our city's personality. At least 
 I heard it spoken to others as well as to myself : 
 You cannot quit us ; if you go away, you will have 
 to come back ; our spell is upon you. ' ' Flies buzz 
 where the honey is," said one beautiful St. Louis 
 lady to me, with a conscious smile not only of her 
 city's but also of her own magic power. The pre- 
 diction turned out true in one case only, that was 
 my own; the other philosophic fugitives never re- 
 sumed their former residence. 
 
 Some years later, when I too had been compelled 
 to take flight to Chicago, and was at work there, the
 
 THE GREAT DISILLUSION. 137 
 
 attitude of St. Louis toward the Great Fire had 
 not been forgotten or even forgiven. More than 
 sometimes I was challenged to the purgation with a 
 spice of humorous resentment. Once especially a 
 zealous member of one of my classes, a prominent 
 lady, recalled with deeper flushes of wrath growing 
 aflame how she, returning from Europe at that 
 time, was insulted on shipboard by a group of noisy 
 St. Louisians celebrating the glorious extinction of 
 Chicago. Somehow thus my answer used to run: 
 "The census of 1880 has amply avenged you, 
 Chicagoans, without your punishing me. You can 
 afford to be merciful ; you have more than magni- 
 fied into solid reality the ancient legend of the 
 Arabian Phoenix, which rose from its ashes once 
 in five hundred years, whereas you in five have 
 accomplished a much grander palingenesis from the 
 mightiest urban conflagration that ever took place 
 on our earthball, with the possible exception of 
 fiddling Nero's back in old Rome. Look at mc, now 
 a miserable fugitive from our St. Louis fire slowly 
 but surely edacious of all vanity, out of whose 
 ashes I can see at present no sign of resurrection to 
 former glory. Yes, the Phoenix has become a Chi- 
 cago bird, perched alongside the American eagle."
 
 CHAPTER THIRD 
 
 The German Era op St. Louis 
 
 Several times in the course of the preceding nar- 
 rative it has been intimated that St. Louis had its 
 pronounced period of Germanization, when it be- 
 came in many of its most decisive characteristics a 
 German city. On the whole this time parallels the 
 Great Illusion, which we have just considered, and 
 the two occurrences are connected together in a far 
 deeper sense than in their mere synchronism, which 
 might be almost if not altogether an accident. 
 
 It has already been noticed that the Philosophi- 
 cal Society drew its main doctrine out of the work 
 of a German master, and had a German founder. 
 From this point of view it was a manifestation of 
 the place and the time; nowhere else and nowhen 
 else could it have had quite the same significance. 
 And the St. Louis Movement, regarded in its full 
 sweep from then till now, has its distinctive Teu- 
 tonic epoch of discipline and achievement, which 
 it passed through and beyond, but which has re- 
 mained ingrown with its character and work. 
 
 Personally I flung myself into this fresh outpour 
 of the German spirit in St. Louis, and took it all up 
 into my thought and action to the extent of my 
 ability. The greatest products of Teutonic genius 
 were the almost exclusive objects of my study dur- 
 138
 
 THE GERMAN ERA OF ST. L0VI8. 139 
 
 ing these years. In our modern world Germany 
 has won and has held three grand spiritual su- 
 premacies, the poetical, the musical, and the philo- 
 sophical. Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel were the sov- 
 ereign creative souls whose works I sought to know, 
 to live, and also to impart. Let it always be under- 
 stood that I was not alone in this tendency, for it 
 was shared and propelled by our circle and to a 
 large degree by the community. My opinoin is that 
 just during this German Era St. Louis gained and 
 maintained the cultural primacy of the West, and 
 showed a higher intellectual aspiration than ever 
 since. This was at least the case within my hori- 
 zon, which of course had its limits. St. Louis for 
 me possessed a soul with its definite character and 
 psychology, which I am going to construe as dis- 
 tinctly as I can, through all its stages of develop- 
 ment, as far as they have come into my experience. 
 It may be further observed that this German Era 
 culminated in its Great Men, pre-eminent German- 
 Americans we may doubly hyphenate them without 
 offense, who were born in the old Fatherland, but 
 migrated to America and came to their supreme 
 bloom in St. Louis, the Germanized city, during 
 these years. No similar strong towering individ- 
 ualities of German origin has our city produced 
 since; indeed such a phenomenon could occur but 
 the one time at the favoring conjuncture. These 
 Great Men of Teutonic blood, I saw rise here, flour- 
 ish in their season, and then quit the city. Their 
 time was paralleled by our St. Louis Movement,
 
 140 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 which along with them sprang, as I probe it, from 
 the same far-down underlying cause. 
 
 In fact, this German Era of our city, though it 
 may appear single and accidental on the surface, 
 was not merely the outcropping of local conditions, 
 but was a manifestation of a far larger energy; it 
 belonged to a great world-drama of Illusion and 
 Disillusion which has just completed its last act. 
 "When I read the works of General Bernhardi and 
 other German militarists blazoning their concep- 
 tion of Germany's universal domination, I am led 
 to couple them with Beavis exploiting his grand il- 
 lusive dream of St. Louis the Future Great City of 
 the "World. Of course this conjunction I could not 
 have made till today when History is recording the 
 deed and the destiny of Germany overseas, where 
 the era of the mightiest Illusion and Disillusion of 
 civilized time has just now spent itself with ap- 
 palling energy, carnage and suffering. So much 
 we all have to say, however we may apportion the 
 blame, or take sides. 
 
 The German Overture 
 
 I have already indicated that when I reached St. 
 Louis in 1864, I came upon the German possession 
 of the city — political and to a degree economic pos- 
 session it could be designated. In fact, the Camp 
 Jackson surrender from this angle of survey might 
 be called a German victory, and the prize was the
 
 THE GERMAN OVERTURE. 141 
 
 city's control, material and spiritual. The con- 
 querors were not only soldiers but voters, and could 
 select their own leaders, even those of highest rank, 
 who at the start had been Americans. Already a 
 rupture between the two nationalities had taken 
 place; Blair, the hero of Camp Jackson, had been 
 completely discredited ; Lyon had fallen at the bat- 
 tle of Wilson's Creek; Fremont had been removed 
 as both incompetent and insubordinate. The cleft 
 between the Union men of native birth and of for- 
 eign origin was already gaping wide and deep 
 when I took my first glance down into it on my 
 arrival, and pondered upon it with a throb of 
 anxiety. To be sure, some American leaders still 
 tarried with the German or radical side, like Mayor 
 Thomas and Representative Blow ; and on the other 
 hand some Germans began to protest against too 
 much Germany, from which they had once fled, and 
 which they did not wish to see reproduced so fully 
 on free American soil. Of the latter the intellectual 
 head was doubtless Colonel Brockmeyer. Still the 
 German party was the stronger, and kept increas- 
 ing in strength and aggressiveness. 
 
 At the close of the war the German soldiers came 
 home with a right exalted sense of their part in the 
 great national victory, as well as of their political 
 power in their own locality. Many civil offices were 
 naturally and easily taken by former military offi- 
 cers as the just reward of their patriotic and peril- 
 ous services. Soon the city council could muster 
 only two or three American or Irish names ; a Ber-
 
 142 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 lin House of Delegates or the Reichstag could 
 hardly be more Teutonically labeled. The Consti- 
 tution-makers of the State in 1864-5 chose a Ger- 
 man as their President, giving an uncanny shock to 
 the older autochthonous lawyers chiefly of South- 
 ern extraction. The German language was intro- 
 duced into the Public Schools, and a bilingual citi- 
 zenship was stoutly advocated with a possible out- 
 look upon compulsion, which, however, did not 
 reach fruition. For a while the political and so- 
 cial prizes were busily gathered at home; but the 
 Capitol at Washington was bound to be captured in 
 time, which triumph dawned in its highest glory 
 when Schurz was chosen United States Senator, 
 and Finkelnburg national Representative. Such 
 was the topmost height and overflow of the German 
 movement or rather renascence on the soil of Mis- 
 souri. Moreover it rose up a unique phenomenon 
 in the nation, if not in the world. I may say, an 
 early view of it in the distance was what first 
 started me for St. Louis. 
 
 This upburst and domination of Germanism in 
 an American city had its budding, bloom, and de- 
 cline like other sublunary happenings. I followed 
 it not from the outside but from the inside; I not 
 only studied it as an object, but felt it and appro- 
 priated it till it became a part of myself. And 
 there were many natives here like me — many who 
 experienced it as the uplift of a new strange spirit 
 not elsewhere to be found, as the revelation of the 
 peculiar racial consciousness of old Teutonia well-
 
 THE GERMAN OVERTURE. 143 
 
 ing forth just now on the banks of the Mississippi, 
 after having swam like fabled Arethusa underneath 
 ocean and continent from the other side of the 
 earth. A great opportunity sprang forth for me, 
 furnished by the time and flung down before me 
 simply to be picked up : so I then saw it and still 
 see it. If I had traveled to Germany and studied 
 there in a University for years, I could never have 
 seen and become the Teutonic folk-soul, such as I 
 now saw and became. 
 
 The duration of this German Era of St. Louis, as 
 I observed, felt, and shared it, can be put at about 
 twelve or fifteen years, without exacting too sharp 
 time-limits, which may well be deemed somewhat 
 elastic according to varying viewpoint. This dis- 
 tinctively racial energy at its dominance may be 
 bounded as lying between the Camp Jackson deed 
 (1861) and the retirement of Schurz from the 
 United States Senate (1875). To be sure, there 
 was a before and an after to this Era, a germinal 
 preparation there and a transition into a new 
 phasis here. But dropping these remoter outlooks, 
 let us concentrate upon the one fact just set forth. 
 
 That which now we seek to emphasize is that the 
 St. Louis Movement corresponds with the greater 
 European Teutonic Movement, paralleling the same 
 in time, in energy, and to a degree in character. 
 Let us compare. In 1864 Prussia started the dis- 
 tinctively modern sweep of Germany toward unity 
 by the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1866 fol- 
 lowed the overwhelming defeat of Austria with the
 
 144 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 formation of the first German Confederacy. In 
 1870 came the Franco-Prussian War winding up in 
 the forcible annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and the 
 renewal of the German Empire. In the short space 
 of six years, or even four, the work was done with 
 a sudden cataract of elemental strength which 
 shook the Earth. I recollect how we sensed sympa- 
 thetically the quake in St. Louis, and watched the 
 rapid gigantic upspring of ancient Teutonia, who, 
 it was felt by her sons far off in this little corner, 
 was revealing herself here by a rise to power and 
 greatness somewhat similar to that which we saw 
 in the Eastern Hemisphere, even if much smaller. 
 Still further may the analogy be carried. St. Louis 
 just during these same dozen years was passing 
 through her Great Illusion, that strange psychical 
 malady of imagined future grandeur, the civic 
 megalomania of her history, when Reavis was her 
 real spokesman, even if frequently ridiculed and 
 disowned. This was the time, then, in which the 
 Teuton held sway in St. Louis, not by external con- 
 quest, but by honest superiority of voting strength 
 at least here in the city, even if disfranchisement 
 was more fully resorted to elsewhere in the State. 
 The whole community was borne along in the flood- 
 tide of German spirit. The majority of the inhab- 
 itants was composed of Germans, German-Ameri- 
 cans and Germanizers, of which last class I was a 
 right specimen. Many native flowers of German 
 life could be seen and plucked in the suburban 
 beer-gardens which enwreathed the whole city
 
 THE GERMAN OVERTURE. 145 
 
 round about in a blooming circle. As to public 
 manners and amusements the people turned Ger- 
 man ; I joined a German club in which English was 
 tabooed and in some cases unknown. The beer- 
 house was then in its glory as a popular resort, 
 especially Tony Niederwieser's Valhalla, and 
 George Wolbreeht's Tivoli. In the latter Gam- 
 brinus effloresced or rather effervesced with the 
 highest overflow of his divine frothiness, melodious- 
 ly attuned to the notes of the largest and best or- 
 chestra in town. What a music-drinking folk, one 
 had to exclaim, for the rather bitter liquid would 
 not go down unless mingled with sweet sounds. 
 Here I saw the real Teutonic people in its heart's 
 attunement to life's ills and joys. There was a tri- 
 umphant swing in the crowd, a consciousness that 
 it was on the time's top just here in St. Louis as 
 well as on the other side of the globe. Very different 
 is the present urban feeling, as I construe it, rather 
 that of being the under dog. At any rate we now 
 hear nothing of the Future Great City of the 
 World. 
 
 Was there some deep undercurrent of connection 
 between German St. Louis and the old or rather 
 the new Fatherland in Europe ? I now believe that 
 there was a spiritual transformation going on dur- 
 ing these years, an inner change common to both. 
 Through its massive display of victorious energy, 
 the German spirit all over the world began to deem 
 its blood-kin the superior race, which was destined 
 to rule other peoples, to possess the wealth and even
 
 146 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 to mold the mind of the rest of mankind after its 
 pattern. Such was the Great German Illusion which 
 then arose in Europe and is just now (end of 1918) 
 breaking to pieces in one vast cataclysm of Disillu- 
 sion. It was natural that we here in St. Louis 
 should get some echo of the mighty world-historical 
 upburst of our racial congeners across the ocean. 
 Every year hundreds, yea thousands of the more 
 educated and wealthy class of Germans went over 
 to the re-born Fatherland, and drank of the new 
 spirit at head-waters, bringing copious potations to 
 be dispensed on this side. Every such traveler was 
 a sort of missionary of the new Teutonic gospel, and 
 formed a link in a vast chain of unconscious propo- 
 gandism. I wished to start as a pilgrim to the Ger- 
 man Holy Land across the seas in spite of my nearly 
 empty treasury, but I got caught and held in an- 
 other kind of web ; then I consoled myself : What 
 is the use of going over yonder to find Teutonia, 
 when you see her naked soul before your eyes just 
 here in St. Louis every day on the streets ? You may 
 well doubt if you will be able to observe her in her 
 old covered home so completely at first hand, as 
 you can right now, while she hovers about our cen- 
 tral Court House in hundredfold forms of self- 
 revelation. 
 
 Another chief vehicle of Inter-Teutonism at that 
 time was the surprising circulation of German Lit- 
 erature here in the West, both periodical and per- 
 manent. No less than three considerable German 
 book-stores, well-stocked and doing good business,
 
 THE GERMAN OVERTURE. 147 
 
 were in the city at the close of the War, not to 
 speak of many lesser shops ever ready to send 
 orders to Leipzig and Berlin for old and new vol- 
 umes. All these places were manned with a trained 
 German book-seller, known over the entire globe as 
 the unparalleled of his kind, and as the main pillar 
 of the vast German book-trade, being found in 
 Asiatic Tiflis and African Timbuctoo as well as in 
 our Western cowboy town of Hardscrabble. But 
 alas ! in St. Louis now, after fifty years, when it has 
 perhaps four times as many inhabitants for readers, 
 I wander in melancholy reminiscence amid his old 
 haunts and find him not ; only one pale ancient sur- 
 vivor off to one side I may trace, and he discloses 
 me his business to be more English than German. 
 Nor is that all. No sooner had I taken my first 
 sleep in St. Louis, than I, as insatiable book fiend, 
 crawled out of bed and swallowed a bite, then drew 
 or was drawn to the English-speaking book-stores, 
 of which I found three good ones, independent and 
 self -sufficing, all of them prominently located on the 
 main thoroughfares. Of these three not even a 
 ghost is left to hint of previous existence. To such 
 a vanished non-entity has red-blooded Literature 
 been here reduced by envious old Time wreaking 
 for some guilt his intellectual vengeance on St. 
 Louis, whose supreme literary utterance is now re- 
 duced to our newspaper, confessedly the ephemeral 
 record of the Ephemeral. 
 
 The once unique and powerful individuality of 
 the city had then the charm to attract many men of
 
 148 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 talent who saw here their future in glowing even if 
 in illusive magnitude. Afterward our town became 
 noted for putting to flight its ablest and most emin- 
 ent characters under the maddening strokes of the 
 Great Disillusion. But at the time I speak of, when 
 we were propelled by the demonic energy of the 
 Great Illusion, the city seemingly turned to a vast 
 magnet which compelled to its bosom all the floating 
 genius of the land, in every stage of reason and un- 
 reason, moneyed and much oftener moneyless. So 
 each little piece of human ambition came flying as 
 it were through the air to the center of attraction, 
 where it might drink its fill of the strange power 
 which seemed here bubbling up from the very cob- 
 ble-stones of the wharf. This living stream of 
 choice spirits has by no means quit us wholly, still 
 its mass has turned away, we all know whither and 
 for what reason. 
 
 Predominantly this was the German Era of 
 mighty effervescence quite belting the globe. The 
 result was Teutonic St. Louis drew unto itself by its 
 own native energy during this epoch, besides many 
 lesser luminaries, the two most gifted and distin- 
 guished German-speaking men that ever landed in 
 the United States, as time has shown. Both of them, 
 laying their foundation in our city, were destined 
 to build for themselves wonderful life-structures 
 which may be said to have overarched our whole 
 country. Pulitzer in heavy-soled army brogans trod 
 our paving stones first in 1866, the birth-date of 
 the Philosophical Society; Schurz came to us a
 
 THE GERMAN OVERTURE. I49 
 
 year later — both of them in the upswell of the 
 Great Illusion, and doubtless borne by it skyward 
 to loftiest outlook on futurity, whose highest favors 
 they afterwards clutched. 
 
 I am aware that my selection of one of these men 
 will be sharply challenged, especially by many good 
 Germans of St. Louis, who differ among themselves 
 about their greatest American representatives. I 
 may say, however, that I, though living in the same 
 city, was wholly detached from both these persons, 
 owing them nothing, no special love or hate, but 
 only a right human appreciation. For years I 
 watched them both with interest, but at arm's 
 length, in their local as well as in their national 
 careers, to which each of them rose under the fierce 
 search-light of political fame. Neither of them was 
 directly connected with the St. Louis Movement, 
 though they and it were offshoots of the same Teu- 
 tonic Igdrasil or earth-tree which was then sending 
 forth so many vigorous sprouts over land and sea 
 around the globe. To me each of them had an edu- 
 cative value, which I believe is significant still to- 
 day. They are our greatest foreign-born, not only 
 as German but as European ; and each of them de- 
 veloped a strain in American life seemingly impos- 
 sible to a native. 
 
 Accordingly of the German Era of St. Louis, and 
 I may add, of myself also, I select these two emi- 
 nent personages as the most distinctive and best- 
 known representatives. I was here when they came 
 and when they left, thus my presence at least
 
 150 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 spanned their St. Louis careers, of which I knew 
 the public acts, and I heard privately some of the 
 secret ones in my unobserved corner of observa- 
 tion. 
 
 II 
 
 Carl Schurz of St. Louis 
 
 Can we strike the keynote of his character at the 
 start, even if it rises and falls through many start- 
 ling variations ? Let it now be said that Schurz was 
 more critical than constructive; a much greater 
 moralist than institutionalist. In his booklet on 
 Lincoln, often called his masterpiece, he reveals 
 himself even more fully than his hero ; he sees and 
 stresses Lincoln's moral and emotional nobility, but 
 has little insight into the institutional achievement 
 of the Union's Savior. From what has been al- 
 ready said, such a preacher, however eloquent and 
 personally worthy, could have had not much Gos- 
 pel for the St. Louis Movement. About Philosophy 
 Schurz seems to have known little and cared less; 
 I find in his Reminiscences only a few shots of 
 derision at this great world-discipline. And I re- 
 member one contemptuous broadside against Hegel, 
 probably second-hand. Still he, as a German could 
 hardly help imbibing somewhat of the philosophic 
 spirit of his land and time ; wherein he appears to 
 me to have appropriated more of the Kantian de- 
 struction than of the Hegelian reconstruction. I 
 can recall no career that becomes so completely the
 
 CARL SCHURZ OF ST. LOUIS. 151 
 
 incarnation of Kant's Categorical Imperative with 
 its triumph ever bringing on its complementary de- 
 feat. In fact Schurz's whole life might be con- 
 densed into this everlasting jolt between his own 
 self's opposites. 
 
 Still let it be emphasized that just such a man 
 with just such limits drawn tyrannically upon him 
 along with his unique oratorical gift, was the tonic 
 then most needed in American political life. I first 
 heard Schurz in 1858 while I was an undergraduate 
 of Oberlin College, where I was going to school 
 openly to the ancient classics, but far more deeply 
 to my own times, in which Conscience and the Con- 
 stitution or the Moral and the Institutional had 
 gripped each other by the throat. Both principles 
 were fighting inside me, a boy of seventeen, as well 
 as outside me, in the whole country ; and both sides, 
 the country and myself, were getting ready to ap- 
 peal the dispute to the last tribunal, which renders 
 its decision through fire-arms. Schurz then made 
 a more vivid appeal to me than ever afterwards ; I 
 heard him often a dozen years later in St. Louis, 
 but there had been a change, possibly in him, cer- 
 tainly in me. He was still under thirty when he 
 delivered that first speech at Oberlin, and his Eng- 
 lish language was hardly five years old, for he had 
 come to America in 1852 at the age of twenty-three, 
 whereupon he naively jots down in his Reminis- 
 cences : ' ' My first task was to learn English. ' ' He 
 had found the most congenial field of his life in the 
 seething anti-slavery agitation of which little Ober-
 
 152 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 iin was rather the most violent maelstrom in that 
 time's turbulent ocean. I read his speeches in 
 translation with responsive thrills, and obtained his 
 German ones, whose meaning I tried at the time to 
 dig out by aid of grammar and dictionary. Espe- 
 cially his critique of Squatter Sovereignty ecstasied 
 the boy-politician, who never could get to be so 
 political again in all his life. 
 
 It was therefore an interesting fact for me when 
 Schurz came floating into St. Louis some three years 
 after my arrival, probably in response to the same 
 strong undercurrent of the time which was draw- 
 ing both the little and big fishes to the one whirling 
 center of population, now lashed to the height of 
 strenuosity by the Great Illusion. Undoubtedly 
 the German element of the city had prepared the 
 way for him, inasmuch as he at once became a chief 
 editor of the Westliche Post, then probably the 
 most influential German newspaper of the country, 
 since it voiced the largest purely German con- 
 stituency in America, which also had its own life 
 and goal. This step however was only preparatory 
 to the greater ambition, namely the Missouri Sen- 
 atorship, which was foreseen to lie in the hands of 
 the Germans, could they but find the proper man. 
 After the Civil "War Schurz seemed to be drifting, 
 and was ready to hear and follow his people's call 
 to St. Louis. 
 
 He was elected Senator by the Missouri Legisla- 
 ture in 1869, and his sexennial term was the high- 
 est fulfilment of himself as well as of the German
 
 CARL SCHVRZ OF ST. LOUIS. 153 
 
 Era of St. Louis. He was then forty years old, at 
 his best physically and intellectually. He never 
 quite got rid of a German accent in his English 
 speech, though he improved much; at Oberlin I 
 recollect he would still Teutonize strongly certain 
 words like poobleek, almost to an indistinguishable 
 sound-jumble. The prize he won of being the na- 
 tional spokesman of his German folk, especially in 
 the field of newspaperdom and stump-speaking, for 
 he hardly rose into the higher region of Literature. 
 His English ran correct and fluent enough, though 
 not fully idiomatic and easily limpid except when 
 he broke into denunciation. In the use of negative 
 speech such as satire, irony, sarcastic retort, he 
 could tap the original well-head of English; but 
 when it came to the more subtle figures of poetry, 
 he could not command them from their first gush- 
 ing sources. Even when he employed them, which 
 was not often, they were something second-hand, 
 though elevated and appropriate. So it comes that 
 his eloquence has no enduring literary note. 
 
 Still I am inclined to think that the most wonder- 
 ful and lasting part of his career was Schurz the 
 orator. "We must recollect that he learned his Eng- 
 lish after he was fully grown, and that he ranked 
 with the best American campaign speakers in their 
 own tongue, and at the same time he was supreme 
 in his native German. And he always gave a gen- 
 uine moral uplift, not very congenial with prac- 
 tical politics, even if in his own career he turned 
 now and then a surprising political somersault. For
 
 154 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 with all his moralism he could round a sharp corner 
 at a pinch. But nobody ever justly thought him 
 corrupt or only a time-server, even when he 
 served time a little. Still his unique feat and ever 
 memorable was the linguistic, though keen peda- 
 gogues might think they could detect in his word- 
 gift that his English was not his mother-lisp, and 
 that they could hear the German accent not only 
 on his tongue but in his style. Something of 
 the kind about himself he implies once at least in 
 his Reminiscences. 
 
 Even before the War educators propounded the 
 question to Schurz: How did you acquire your 
 mastery of oratorical English? His answer went 
 the rounds : chiefly from the study and appropria- 
 tion of the Letters of Junius. I remember hearing 
 that statement at College, and bought at once the 
 book, reading it with diligence and committing the 
 thunderous invectives to memory. Now I hold it 
 deeply characteristic of Schurz that he chose as his 
 stylistic model the damnatory Junius, not the con- 
 ciliatory Burke nor the institutional "Webster, the 
 two greatest English-speaking orators, both of whom 
 had the gift to elevate their temporary political ut- 
 terance into lasting literature. Junius is indeed 
 the English classic of invective and malediction, 
 with which Schurz had but too much psychical 
 affinity. Junius only intensified in Schurz a men- 
 tal quality of which nature had already given him 
 more than enough. He was an innate fault-finder ; 
 he confesses to a natural love of contention (so we
 
 CARL SCHURZ OF ST. LOUIS. 155 
 
 may translate his somewhat veiled Latin phrase 
 about himself, gaudium certaminnis) . In Missouri 
 his was the hand that shivered into fragments his 
 own party which had elected him Senator, and so 
 completely did it droop asunder that it could not 
 pull itself together again for a generation, with 
 force enough to win a victory in the State. He was 
 right in opposing disfranchisement, which ought 
 never to have been enacted, certainly not in the 
 way it was. Missouri had shown herself overwhelm- 
 ingly loyal to the Union from the start without dis- 
 franchisement, which thus could have no true mean- 
 ing outside of hate and corruption. 
 
 Accordingly Schurz, the German interloper as 
 he was often called, soon fell out with the old lead- 
 ers who had sustained the battle of emancipation 
 and of the Union, such men as Governor Brown, 
 General Blair the hero of Camp Jackson, and espe- 
 cially his fellow-senator Charles D. Drake. "Well 
 might the returned Confederates erect to Schurz a 
 monument, for through him chiefly they, a decided 
 minority, won what they never could win on the 
 battlefield, the political control of the State, and 
 kept it for decades. To be sure he cut his own 
 throat in the process, a feat which he succeeded in 
 performing more than once; and he witnessed his 
 own triumphant self-negation when he was suc- 
 ceeded in 1875 by Cockerill, a former Confederate 
 General. 
 
 Still I hold that Schurz was the greatest Sen- 
 ator Missouri has had in this her nearly finished
 
 156 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 century of Statehood, with the exception of Ben- 
 ton. He performed the very highest service of the 
 time to the country, courageous and almost single- 
 handed, in his criticism of President Grant and the 
 militaristic party, assailing corruption, nepotism, 
 and all sorts of insolent extravagance. Schurz 's 
 term coincided with the Reconstruction period, in 
 some respects a deeper menace than the Civil War 
 itself. I know that I was more discouraged at the 
 political outlook then than ever in Lincoln r s day. 
 The voice of Schurz seemed almost the only hope, 
 even if it was chiefly critical and negative, hardly 
 constructive and positive. But has bold incisive 
 surgical laceration was just what was needed for 
 the time's cancer. Our native Sumner, his chief 
 Senatorial yoke-fellow, though vitriolic in his de- 
 nunciation of abuses, was not equal to the crisis, 
 since he was fatally wrong in his attitude toward 
 the Southern problem. Thus to my view for a 
 while Senator Schurz towered up the greatest Pub- 
 lic Man in the United States. Blair, once our 
 heroic figure of St. Louis, then seated in the Na- 
 tional Senate beside Schurz, appeared diminuitive 
 in comparison, though he too was hostile to the Ad- 
 ministration 's misdeeds. 
 
 Schurz felt the ephemerality of his newspaperism 
 and of his stumpification ; hence he wished to write 
 a work of permanent worth. He favored the field 
 of History, and chose one of its American phases. 
 But the book could not get itself done, since the 
 immediate conflict of the moment had too great
 
 CARL SCHURZ OF ST. LOUIS. 157 
 
 charm for him and catered to his innate delight in 
 controversy — a temperament not well fitted for 
 sedate impartial History. Then Schurz was in- 
 tensely a man of the present, not of the past. His 
 work on Sumner also refused to finish itself, prob- 
 ably for a good reason. He did complete a life of 
 Henry Clay, for which he received a good deal of 
 praise and some money ; but I do not like to think 
 of Schurz writing such a book for pay or fame ; he 
 never lived the life of Clay, never believed in Clay's 
 main doctrines, and hence could not exalt his own 
 work into an expression of his deepest selfhood. 
 Perhaps, however, just his love of opposition, his 
 professed gaudium certaminis made him write such 
 a book. 
 
 Dare I now look back and try to choose for 
 Schurz his grandest theme for an immortal work? 
 It is evident from his Reminiscences that he longed 
 to leave behind himself some lasting contribution 
 to American Letters. My selection for him might 
 be titled: "Six Years' View in the Senate of the 
 United States," recalling Benton's famous and en- 
 during book. The subject would be in essence : the 
 dangers produced by the military mind when put 
 in charge of our or any civil government. Such 
 was the underlying thought of Schurz 's entire Sen- 
 atorial term; he poured into its utterance all his 
 powers of argument and invective ; he reached 
 therein his own highest point not merely of elo- 
 quence but of self-realization. He lived his theme 
 with all his might, and I believe the best part of
 
 158 THE ST. LOVIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 the nation, not excluding his political opponents, 
 lived it with him. On his seventieth birthday 
 (1899) when he was toasted with so many flatteries 
 let him resolve to himself : ' ' My immortal task is 
 yet to be done; in my coming seventies I shall pass 
 in review what I did in my Senatorial forties, soft- 
 ening the personal asperities, but preserving the 
 original energy of conviction." 
 
 But he did not, perhaps could not, do it. His 
 theme was essentially militarism as our national 
 problem. We have the same word and thing today 
 with an enormous widening of significance, verily 
 earth-embracing. Indeed it threatens just now to 
 rise with increased might in the United States. You 
 and I would be reading Schurz at present, if he 
 had written such a work, and it could have been 
 made a world-book, for all times and for all lands. 
 Truly his conflict with Grant (whom we all honor 
 and admire for his great military services) has be- 
 come universal — the right theme for a great writ. 
 Doubtless, Schurz had his petty personal griev- 
 ances against the President, who took away his 
 Senatorial patronage and otherwise stung him to 
 resentment; still he had the sense to keep to him- 
 self his private chagrins, but stabbed all the more 
 savagely the public abuses of the Administration, 
 whereby the people received the benefit. 
 
 No, he did not write it — the work of all his 
 works, and so he falls rearward of Benton, to whom, 
 however, he stands next. He stops short even in his
 
 CARL SCHURZ OF ST. LOUTS. 159 
 
 Reminiscences with Grant's political appearance, 
 after three big volumes of interesting, but often in- 
 significant details, so that his book shows us again 
 a kind of Hamlet un-Hamleted. He gives his ex- 
 cuse, but it accuses him the more. That greatest 
 deed of his he should have seized and recorded first 
 of all, then he might celebrate his youth's valorous 
 adventures with Kinkel, in all the delight of old- 
 age's reminiscence. I have to ask : why did the vet- 
 eran Schurz, still active on the battle-line, show 
 the white feather at the ghost of Grant, when he 
 had once bearded so courageously the living reality 
 right in the Presidential chair? Several answers 
 possible, but let them pass. 
 
 Still I like to recall Schurz riding on his highest 
 wave of influence, making himself for a while the 
 personal pivot of his whole adopted country. This 
 concentrated itself to one deed in the Liberal-Re- 
 publican Convention at Cincinnati in 1872; as a 
 born alien he could not become President, but he 
 could make Presidents. Hence the scoffers dubbed 
 him our American "Warwick, the King-maker of old 
 English History, kept famous by the stage of 
 Shakespeare. But Schurz, the fault-finding mor- 
 alist, could not control the political forces which he 
 had set to storming; his own convention became a 
 wild runaway even with him holding in hand its 
 reins, and tumbled him over headforemost into nom- 
 inations which utterly disgusted him, but which he 
 had to stomach as his own bitter medicine. Later 
 he continued to show some signs of the President-
 
 160 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 maker, but he never again had the same pre-emi- 
 nen in that field. 
 
 Sehurz was often the lofty stimulating moralist, 
 but he could drop back into the platitudinous mor- 
 alizer, especially when hard pushed for a stop-gap 
 to fill out some vacancy in his oratory. From this 
 side of him came his sympathy with New England, 
 mental and even physical, for to me Sehurz looked 
 more like a Yankee than a typical German, being 
 meager-fleshed, thin-faced, with a glance of Puri- 
 tanic severity almost cutting from behind those 
 blue-eyed spectacles of his. He was always fea- 
 tured to me with an overcast of critical melancholy, 
 which never failed to throw down into my face a 
 glance of condemnation from his tall rather skele- 
 toned stature. This feeling may have been my own 
 reaction of a bad conscience. Certainly Sehurz 
 never appeared to me the burly Teuton, still less 
 the jolly Rhinelander given over to infinite gusta- 
 tion and imbibition, though Sehurz was from the 
 Rhine, and could brighten up in praise of its Johan- 
 nisberger and its other appetitive delicacies. 
 
 Thus the German Era of St. Louis attracted and 
 evolved to his highest self-realization our greatest 
 German fellow-citizen. But the other Teutonic 
 genius of our city, my special friend, could never 
 extricate himself from his own handicaps, and so re- 
 mained unrealized in the best of him till his evan- 
 ishment. Brockmeyer and Sehurz knew each other 
 and even brushed against each other at the afore- 
 said Cincinnati Convention, but they were mutually
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOUIS. \Q\ 
 
 repellent in their deepest. So I try to compare 
 them: Brockmeyer's ultimate command was the 
 enacted Law of associated Man, Schurz's ultimate 
 command was the categorical Imperative of the 
 moral Man. Brockmeyer ignored or rather defied 
 too much the moral element of his own spirit, while 
 Schurz was weak in the institutional element of 
 human progress — another reason why he could not 
 have written a great history. 
 
 But already has been darting before my imagina- 
 tion another representative of the German Era of 
 St. Louis. Let him appear. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Joseph Pulitzer op St. Louis 
 
 As I set my pencil on paper to jot down my 
 views under this caption, I can hear protests 
 against them from friends and foes of Pulitizer, 
 for he had a sufficiency of both. My first proposi- 
 tion about him will rouse a bitter denial and prob- 
 ably some profanity, though my words may not be 
 worth a curse when I say : Pulitzer was the great- 
 est master of Journalism that has yet arisen in 
 these United States. He saw its meaning and real- 
 ized its power and place in American life more 
 fully than any other man of his guild; indeed if 
 America has produced the greatest newspapers in 
 the world, as is sometimes declared, Joseph Pulitzer 
 must be acclaimed the world's greatest journalist.
 
 162 THE ST - LOms MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 His, then, is a world-historical position, and de- 
 mands our best consideration in its own right. 
 
 Still I would have no call to mention him here, 
 if he had not been in his way connected with the 
 St. Louis Movement and with its chief sponsors, 
 and indirectly with myself, though for him person- 
 ally I never won any intimacy. Moreover he was 
 a familiar figure on our streets during many years, 
 in fact during the whole period of the Great Illu- 
 sion, in which he deeply shared, blowing gaudy 
 journalistic bubbles of the Future Great City of 
 the "World. His spectacled look and his aggressive 
 swing, along with his unique olfactory develop- 
 ment would single him out among hundreds as a 
 striking individual phenomenon. Reavis alone 
 might rival him in power of producing personal 
 publicity through his very appearance, both also 
 being originally newspaper reporters, as well as 
 Nature's own self-reporters. 
 
 Pulitzer, it may be averred, was professionally 
 born in St. Louis, serving here his earliest appren- 
 ticeship, and rising gradually to mastership, which 
 he bore with him to New York. Thus he too along 
 with many others fled from the Great Disillusion, 
 when he had found it out, to try for a new reality 
 under other skies. And it must be confessed that 
 he more fully realized himself than any other St. 
 Louis man within my horizon, except possibly the 
 great bridge-builder Eads, who was rightly the 
 Supreme Pontiff of our river city.
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOUIS. 163 
 
 I first roundly observed Pulitzer in 1868, and had 
 a brief dialogue with him, when he came as smooth- 
 faced reporter to the old Central High School, 
 where I was a teacher. It was commencement time 
 for us, and he wished to drum up an item for the 
 German Westliche Post. He stepped into my class- 
 room unheralded, which was his right, as the door 
 stood open and the public was invited. One of the 
 girl-pupils was inclined to giggle, as she saw that 
 tall somewhat grotesque figure with large goggle 
 eyes staring through big-rimmed spectacles at us 
 rather quizzically ; then he whipped out his note- 
 book, clutched his pencil, and somewhat brokenly 
 asked me, who had taken my seat beside him: 
 "What study is this?" "Mental Philosophy," I 
 answered. ' ' Philosophy, eh ! " Then began a sur- 
 prising drama of his features playing on his face's 
 stage for a moment his whole reactive subjectivity. 
 Serio-comic was the interlude as I gazed at it, for 
 it had as its most prominent and most versatile 
 actor a huge demonic nose gifted with a language 
 all its own, yet smitingly universal. He gave a 
 strange Mephistophelean scowl, and grunted out in 
 contempt, I thought: "What good can you get 
 from that?" "Some knowledge of the human 
 mind, we hope to have gained," I replied; "come, 
 examine us, and perhaps you will be kind enough 
 to show us a sample of your own mind." From 
 wide-open eyes through huge glasses he flung a 
 stare which made us all wince a little. Then he put 
 up his note-book, and started for the door. I fol-
 
 164 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 lowed, saying : ' ' Glad to know you. ' ' His curious 
 reply was : "I know you already. ' ' 
 
 What did he mean? I certainly was both small 
 and obscure in the city, and could have had no pub- 
 lic standing. So I am led to theorize now, looking 
 backwards: Pulitzer was already making himself 
 acquainted with every little current in town and 
 with those who took part in it; even the private 
 conduct of the citizen was to be brought under his 
 inspection. He was getting ready for his new Jour- 
 nalism, which is to know, and if occasion arise, is to 
 expose the inner life, yea the under life, and espe- 
 cially the double life of each public man, however 
 minute, even that of the ordinary schoolmaster: in 
 which function his newspaper gave me the shock of 
 my life by its exposure of our High School Prin- 
 cipal though I knew not a little before. 
 
 I have ranked Pulitzer as German, though he was 
 born in Hungary of a Jewish father and a Chris- 
 tian mother, according to his biographer. What 
 was the earliest speech lisped by the child — Hunga- 
 rian, German, or possibly Iddish ? Not told, as far 
 as I know, but his native dialect was probably Ger- 
 man, which was also the language in which he re- 
 ceived his youthful education. In St. Louis he 
 started as a German reporter; and during his last 
 hours, as narrated by his biographer, Mr. Ireland, 
 he called for a reading in German, which seems to 
 have been his final as well as first native utterance. 
 In the main he hired his English written for him; 
 his newspaper's opinion and policy he ruled auto-
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOUIS. 165 
 
 cratically, but its expression he bought in the mar- 
 ket; in fact he selected and purchased the literary- 
 style he wanted ; then he ordered to be put into it 
 what content he chose. To such a servitude Jour- 
 nalism is reducing Literature as the once indepen- 
 dent self-expression of the human soul. Herein, 
 however, Pultizer showed himself the coming man 
 of Great Newspaperdom in its triumphant evolu- 
 tion ; its task is to subject to its own autocracy in- 
 dependent Literature, of which, I may here auto- 
 biographically interject, I have persisted an irre- 
 ducible atom, defiant of the time's behest, and hence 
 wholly negligible. Still even thuswise I have dared 
 live my own life. 
 
 But we have not come to that time yet in his ca- 
 reer, he is still the young reporter barely of age. 
 Note him as he marches out of my room ; his stride is 
 strikingly aggressive, he knows just what he is go- 
 ing for and how to get it with some hurry. In every 
 motion he pushes out as a man of prime initiative, 
 giving a kind of ideal knock-down to any obstacle. 
 His stay was brief and his information rather 
 short ; but like a good reporter, he can make up the 
 rest of the article. Probably he needed only that 
 one word Philosophy as a kind of cocoon for infi- 
 nite repertorial spinning. 
 
 One of Pulitzer's attractions for me was his re- 
 semblance, both physical and spiritual to our Brock- 
 meyer of the Philosophical Society. The same sort 
 of body, lithe but heavy-muscled and strong-boned ;
 
 166 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 both loomed large but lissom at least in their 
 younger days, yet with this emphatic difference: 
 Pulitzer seemed always on the spring, ready to 
 pounce, while Brockmeyer would settle back at 
 ease in his chair, cock up his heels, and keep wab- 
 bling his pipe around in his mouth from corner to 
 corner in a perpetual lazy smoke. But their most 
 striking visible similarity lay in their weird mobile 
 physiognomy, with its dramatic play ranging from 
 uncouth grotesquery to perfervid tragedy. And 
 right at the heart of their features throbbed and 
 lifted and sported the towering organ of Cyrano de 
 Bergerac. 
 
 But their deeper kinship I deemed to lie in that 
 secret elemental power often called Demonic, but 
 also Angelic or even Satanic, namely the downflow 
 of upper energy which takes hold of the man for 
 a while and makes him greater than himself as 
 mere individual man. Both possessed, I believe 
 this unique gift of genius, each in his own way. 
 But just here rose up a great difference : Brock- 
 meyer never trained his genius to do its work but 
 let it run wild, and to waste, and hence he has left 
 little or no sign of his gift ; Pulitzer, however, har- 
 nessed his genius in the first place to his pie-cart, 
 and tasked it to the topmost so that he left behind 
 himself a vast fortune as well as a great work done ; 
 thus he realized himself at his highest. So here 
 again in comparison, Brockmeyer stands forth as 
 the Great Unrealized — a colossal potentiality, a 
 kind of Illusion somewhat like his own dear city of
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOUIS. 167 
 
 St. Louis; while Pulitzer is by contrast the self- 
 achieved soul, the man made actual. 
 
 Did these two men, kinned deeply in a common 
 genius, ever find each other, and recognize their 
 joint affinity of spirit ? The fact is, the first appre- 
 ciation of Pulitzer I ever heard was thundered from 
 the lips of Brockmeyer, who on a time suddenly 
 erupted in one of his Vesuvian outbursts. "That 
 young fellow cinches the future: they think be- 
 cause he trundles about with himself a big cob-nose, 
 a whopper jaw, and bull-frog eyes that he has no 
 sense ; but I tell you, he possesses greater dialectical 
 ability than all of them put together — I know it for 
 I have felt it; mark me, he is now engaged in the 
 making of a greater man than editor Danzer, or 
 editor Pretorius, or even Schurz." So fulmined 
 once Brockmeyer in vivid ejaculation, meanwhile 
 rising to his feet and emphasizing with a gesture 
 that unusual locution dialectical ability, laden by 
 him with a still more unusual meaning. Evidently 
 this was his wording of Pulitzer's peculiar nascent 
 gift, which he had detected, doubtless by his own 
 cognate endowment. To understand the foregoing 
 we must remember that Pulitzer never could win 
 the respect of those high-toned German editors who 
 made fun of him while exploiting his talent, till he 
 set up for himself in an English newspaper. Nay, 
 English-speaking St. Louis never would accept 
 Pulitzer, though it bought his journal. For that 
 matter, it never accepted Brockmeyer, nor me, nor 
 the St. Louis Movement, and still the world moves,
 
 168 THE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 and St. Louis — let the reader finish the sentence 
 with a hopeful benediction. 
 
 On the other hand, I happened once to catch a 
 whiff of Pulitzer's laudatory exuberance over 
 Brockmeyer's work in the Missouri Constitutional 
 Convention of 1875. I was walking with Judge 
 Woerner on a hot day ; we turned in to take a cool 
 sip of philosophic Germany's beverage at Tony 
 Faust's, when Pulitzer came up to us somewhenee 
 out of the beer-fragrance of that worshipful temple 
 of Gambrinus, and he began quite an oration be- 
 fore us, whom he knew to be sworn friends of 
 Brockmeyer. Of course the speech was intended 
 for Woerner, who was a great man and a first citi- 
 zen, but I got the benefit, too. I recognized at once 
 a number of Brockmeyer's political thoughts as well 
 as some of his thunderous words and drastic illus- 
 trations. And the profanity was not wholly omit- 
 ted. But just behold! Brockmeyer's look and 
 stature ! his grimaces and Rabelaisian grotesquery, 
 followed by serious long-faced statements of pro- 
 found constitutional principles! Then his smiling 
 urbanity toward everybody, and especially a chiv- 
 alrous courtesy for the Southern members of the 
 Convention. In short, Pulitzer became Brockmeyer 
 then and there, and rehearsed the whole lesson 
 which he had gotten from the Convention, for of it 
 he too was a member. He, like me, though in a 
 wholly different department of lore, had gone to 
 school to Brockmeyer and had learned somewhat, 
 even down to (or rather up to) his peculiar scream-
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOUIS. 169 
 
 like vociferation, when becoming a little eruptive. 
 That was at least my view on hearing his discourse, 
 though he might not have thought so himself. 
 
 Thus Pulitzer, in spite of himself, took up into 
 his composition a strain of the St. Louis Movement, 
 of whose training he was probably unconscious. But 
 that secret subtle demiurge Brockmeyer laid his 
 spell upon the young receptive genius — there being 
 some twenty years of life-experience between their 
 ages. Pulitzer quit his own political party and 
 finally joined that of Brockmeyer, where he stayed 
 for the rest of his life. I heard Brockmeyer claim 
 (I know nothing of the matter myself) that through 
 his influence Pulitzer was appointed Police Com- 
 missioner, by which office the latter won power, 
 knowledge, and money, wherewith he could start his 
 independent newspaper career. 
 
 Pulitzer, however, never showed any turn, as far 
 as I am aware, for Brockmeyer 's other supreme en- 
 dowment: Philosophy, which was the passion of 
 Harris and of the rest of us. The immediate sense- 
 world of politics and city-life was his chosen ele- 
 ment, being the prime material for journalism, in 
 which he must have already felt his great career 
 throbbing towards fulfilment. In 1883 he quit St. 
 Louis for New York, after a stay of some seven- 
 teen years. He chafed against his journalistic lim- 
 its on this ever-narrowing spot, and longed to get 
 away from his past, so as to start over again. 
 
 Can we delve to the ground of his unsurpassed 
 achievement, genuine I hold, and so far still endur-
 
 170 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 ing ? He picked up at once that orphaned bankrupt 
 sheet, The New York World, and tossed it to the 
 front of all newspaperdom, keeping the lead as long 
 as he lived, even when blind. How did he do it? 
 Barring the advertisements which are but an echo 
 of its circulation, Pulitzer's World represented and 
 exposed in the most glaring form the inherent dual- 
 isim which exists at its deepest in New York City, 
 and in the Democratic Party, but is found also in 
 American life everywhere. The editorial page fa- 
 vored all good things, attacked corruption of every 
 sort, and preached the ethics of public and private 
 conduct with an unction which smelt of sanctity — 
 and I believe the man was honest. But now look on 
 the other page, the repertorial — there is a drop 
 from Heaven to Hell. All devildom is there set 
 forth in huge black head-lines, propped on columns 
 of lurid details in smaller type — murders, rapes, 
 lynchings, frauds, seductions — Pandemonium broke 
 loose in print and served up for breakfast. So the 
 World dualized humanity to the very bottom in 
 every issue, compounding Dante's Inferno and 
 Paradiso in one all-embracing dose, giving each 
 half of Human Nature and of God's Universe its 
 due representation in a single budget every day. 
 
 Thus Pulitzer reflected in his dual newspaper the 
 Creation's own dualism into good and evil, and 
 therein hit off an image of the dual personality of 
 the folk and its democracy. "Horribly ugly pic- 
 ture, and two-faced ' ' says the folk looking at itself, 
 ' ' but on the whole it is true ; yes, it is I myself and
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOUIS. 171 
 
 none other, and I '11 buy it. " So we witness a Klon- 
 dike stream of gold pouring suddenly into the hith- 
 erto empty treasury of a dying newspaper. Most 
 wonderful feat of hoary magic alchemy turned to 
 literal present fact ! The magician seized that lit- 
 tle old moribund World and recreated it out of two 
 new living Worlds, namely the Overworld and the 
 Underworld of Human Existence. He clapped the 
 halves of life together into a new visible work of 
 art, and made them appear one vast bi-lateral or- 
 ganism, full of young energy. Call it the earth's 
 new-born monster if you will, perchance it is the 
 old Egyptian Sphinx, half man half animal, pro- 
 pounding still its riddle, rejuvenated as the mod- 
 ern Newspaper, half human half bestial. Is that to 
 be our last huge Literary Megatherium, which is 
 actually now swallowing all other Literary Forms 
 of prose and poetry, as being inadequate, worn-out, 
 and indeed quite exanimate? Let the question 
 stand, for it comes up again and again in the course 
 of this petty narrative of ours, as well as in Uni- 
 versal History. 
 
 On account of such newspaper duality, or if you 
 please, duplicity, many people and not a few of his 
 fellow-guildsmen have maintained that Pulitzer 
 was unprincipled, Machiavellian, in fine a down- 
 right hypocrite. I do not construe him thus; he 
 was honest, bitterly honest just in his dualism, and 
 because of its depth and mightiness in his soul. He 
 carried it out in his deed to the last consequence, 
 and he could not have done that without its being
 
 172 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 his deepest character and conviction. In fact Pul- 
 itzer was himself the journalistic dualism incarnate 
 and he possessed the genius to fling it out of him- 
 self into his World, whose very name turns double 
 in meaning through his presence. His internal life 
 ran two-fold probably (for we have not his auto- 
 biography) ; his outer life also seems cut in two-, 
 the first part was his long St. Louis apprentice- 
 ship, the formative experience sprung of the Great 
 Illusion, which he at last pricked and fled from; 
 the second part was his New York time, that of 
 realization, lasting more than a quarter of a cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Pulitzer himself thought that his repertorial 
 page, the bestial body of his Sphinx, needed de- 
 fence, or at least some explanation. Biographer 
 Ireland broaches the topic repeatedly, giving opin- 
 ions from headquarters. He also intimates that 
 Pulitzer at times entertained the idea of writing 
 his autobiography, possibly incited by the example 
 of Schurz. That would have been, if open-heart- 
 edly confessed, a very significant American docu- 
 ment. But Pulitzer had his secrets and kept them, 
 nay he could fabricate and play off his mystifica- 
 tions when he needed them. Would he throw open 
 to daylight his hidden St. Louis career? But Pul- 
 itzer really did not care to write an eternal book, 
 as did Schurz. He felt, I think, rather a contempt 
 for Literature as such ; he had bought too much of 
 it for his own ephemeral ends to esteem highly or 
 to believe profoundly in the eternal record of the
 
 JOSEPH PULITZER OF ST. LOVIS. 173 
 
 Eternal. Writ could only be a purchasable jour- 
 nalistic means with him, not an end for its own 
 sake in human self-expression. So there is no auto- 
 biography of his, at least up to date. 
 
 Again St. Louis lost in him a great man, who 
 had the insight and the power to seize and to ex- 
 ploit more fully than ever before the possibilities 
 of the mighty social weapon, the Newspaper. In- 
 deed his success called up in many minds the an- 
 xious query : Is this possible monster, now nobly 
 named by itself the Freedom of the Press, to be 
 subject to no law except its own impersonal un- 
 conscienced conscience, or perchance except the 
 weak statute of libel, which Pulitzer openly boasted 
 he had the means of turning against the person 
 who might invoke it against him in a court of jus- 
 tice? Are the great Pulitzers of Journalism to re- 
 main autocratic and irresponsible, while all man- 
 kind is subjecting Emperors, Kings, Presidents, 
 Governors, and Mayors to the rule of a self-deter- 
 mined institutional order? The problem is rising. 
 
 But after such troubled premonitions, we always 
 come back to appreciate the marvelous achievement, 
 despite Fate's furious envy, of the man with his 
 dual personality realized so colossally in a deed. 
 And quite at his greatest he wrought during twen- 
 ty-four years of blindness ! Is he then our modern 
 sightless Milton or Homer, the new sort of blind 
 maker or poet of the new Iliad? Pulitzer must 
 have known how to select the human instruments 
 for his definite ends better than any other seeing
 
 174 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 newspaper Napoleon. And still after his death, his 
 constructive power runs on in his work with a 
 sort of perpetuity. That which is most ephemeral 
 on this earth (the newspaper) he makes eternal 
 just in its ephemerality. Has he not kept his soul 
 immortal and active even after his physical evan- 
 ishment? It looks as if he has created a new and 
 lasting body for his departed spirit, as we may 
 call it tentatively as yet. But as for me, after all 
 his drawbacks, I like best to contemplate his best, 
 which is to my mind that he keeps on proving 
 through time the immortality of his own soul. 
 
 And finally I have to repeat to myself that here 
 is a man who has realized himself more completely 
 than any other striver within my speaking or read- 
 ing knowledge, in spite of Nature's most heinous 
 handicaps, with one possible supreme exception. 
 Let my reader guess, Who 1 Only let him not take 
 himself as this exception, nor myself. 
 
 IV 
 
 A Book Writer's Life Lines 
 
 The German Era of St. Louis graved upon me 
 certain life-lines, which have continued to run 
 through my whole career down to the present. I 
 then found out with some distinctness what I was 
 to do in this earthly sojourn of mine, and how I 
 was to do it, and I made the beginning. Still more 
 decisively I discovered what I was not to do, and 
 marked with clearness the limits of what I had to
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 175 
 
 escape, if I was ever to get anything done. This 
 negative task, that of avoiding dissipation of energy- 
 was for me one of the hardest, as I loved exceed- 
 ingly to wander at mind's random through the 
 Elysian Fields of omniscience, and to spread me 
 out over them to a vanishing thinness. Nature's 
 indolence found in the periodicalism of the time the 
 supreme temptation to a dissolved, that is, disso- 
 lute mental existence. What strength I had, hardly 
 more than that of a half-man, I kept me under 
 strict training to concentrate and to organize. After 
 many lapses and relapses I would gather up the 
 pieces of myself, and penitently start again to 
 build life's tabernacle. 
 
 Can I give some vague notion concerning this 
 German Era of St. Louis which took part in my 
 very self-hood and its coming evolution ? I sought 
 to know and to feel the beat of the old Fatherland's 
 folk-soul which I then deemed quite the Earth- 
 soul, everywhere around me, to share its thoughts, 
 its amusements, its speech, even its prejudices. But 
 all this effort was hardly for its own sake, even if I 
 wildly enjoyed the novel experience; I was more 
 or less conscious of another and higher end: I 
 sought to know and to commune with the Genius 
 of the Age which had at its best embodied itself in 
 a trinity of great Teutonic souls — the philosopher 
 Hegel, the poet Goethe, the musician Beethoven. 
 There was the time's consensus that the nineteenth 
 Century, yea all the Centuries at least since Shakes- 
 peare, had found their highest cultural expression
 
 176 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 in the works of these three Germans, and my pre- 
 sent call was to make mine this sovereign discipline 
 of the period. So I became a student in the Uni- 
 versity of Civilization, highest of all Universities. 
 In other words I was now to get acquainted with 
 the World-Spirit, the supernal Power over History, 
 in its three latest grandest incarnations manifest- 
 ing and voicing its message to us earth-dwellers 
 here below. So during these years I especially 
 studied Hegel, Goethe, Beethoven, separately and 
 together, all of them being at last one mighty co- 
 temporaneous utterance of the Age's Genius, who 
 then spoke German. Thus the German Era of St. 
 Louis gave me my flood-tidal opportunity, furnish- 
 ing incentive and harmonious environment, as well 
 as the native speech of the soul universal of the Cen- 
 tury. How otherwise just now ! 
 
 Then let it be confessed that I was whirled along 
 on top of the surge, and I jubilated to the height 
 of my mood, echoing the new hope, which especially 
 attuned itself to music. My house became a little 
 center of melodies instrumental and vocal, in which 
 I took practical part, and I reached the point of 
 playing a flute in the city orchestra — an experience 
 which inducted me into the sound-painted temple 
 of the Tone-God, where I could hear all the finest 
 concordances of the Earth. From this harmonious 
 time a musical accompaniment has kept singing un- 
 derneath all my unmusical days, often breaking up 
 to the surface in some form of poetic expression. 
 The Marsellaise refused to hymn me any longer,
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 177 
 
 while heavy-throated the Wacht am Rhein rose in 
 exultant sound-waves over the city. 
 
 Still I had now and then a pulsation of doubt. I 
 recollect that I questioned especially the annexa- 
 tion of Alsace-Lorraine, the fatuous act of the 
 Franco-Prussian War (1870). I had read enough 
 of history to feel the nemesis of such a deed, in 
 whose sweep nationality, seeking to assert itself, 
 was really contradicting itself, to its own self-un- 
 doing. Such an old claim, if carried out univer- 
 sally, would tear Europe to pieces. In a company 
 of friendly Germans I once expressed this view, 
 when they turned on me with angry reproaches, 
 and almost mobbed me. The time's Illusion in 
 them I did not then perceive, though it gave me a 
 smart tweak of the nose in secret irony. 
 
 Through my devotion to these three spiritual 
 sovereigns of the age and their similars, my work 
 broke into two life-lines ; in other words I had two 
 vocations, the first of which nourished my body, 
 the second my spirit. That is, I earned my bread 
 by my professional business, school-teaching; but 
 my labor of self-development and self-expression 
 had to be its own reward. Thus two vocational 
 strands arose and intertwined themselves through 
 all my years, the remunerative and the unremuner- 
 ative; my highest work brought no pay, only ex- 
 pense ; indeed I became unwilling and unable to 
 sell my best self for a price. It is true that I tried 
 to make these higher studies react favorably upon 
 the daily routine of the humble instructor ; in fact,
 
 178 THE ST - L0UIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 my theory was and still is that the deadly me- 
 chanics of the school-room can only thus be raised 
 into living reality; that the teacher, to be at his 
 best, must have his own private universal dis- 
 cipline perpetually overflowing into the particular 
 official task of the day. So there was developed in 
 my life what I may call my Super-vocation distinct 
 from yet inter-wound with my vocation proper, 
 which also had its distinctive training. 
 
 I was not yet a writer of books except in a very 
 small tentative way. But already some such goal 
 of my endeavor seemed to be looming up dimly in 
 the distance. More or less consciously I began to 
 throw off all encumbrances to such a pursuit. Ex- 
 perience was first to give me her lesson as to what 
 might favor or hinder ; then I was to act if I had 
 the will power. During these years I was brought 
 face to face with several questions of future des- 
 tiny, to which I had to give decisive practical an- 
 swers. I had to make choice of my life-lines, going 
 this way, shunning that; in other words the time 
 had come upon me when I was to select not only 
 my vocation but my Super-vocation, as I now bap- 
 tize it, the most difficult move in life, often never 
 taken and often never even known. 
 
 1. One of my first renunciations was that of 
 professional promotion. All of us teachers were 
 supposed to be in line of advancement whose high- 
 est goal was the official headship of the whole school 
 system. One day a bolt of lightning fell at my feet 
 in the shape of an offer to be Assistant Superin-
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 179 
 
 tendant, a position next to the highest. I did not 
 try to pick it up, but declined the for me dangerous 
 task; I knew it would be the end of my Super- 
 vocation which had become already my upper, and 
 perchance my saving life-line. I was close enough 
 to Superintendent Harris to see and partly to share 
 the vexations of his high position ; perhaps I may 
 have caused him one or two myself. Administra- 
 tion, in return for its pile of gold, would demand 
 the sacrifice of my creative power; and I was de- 
 termined not to commit that sin of simony against 
 my Holy Ghost. 
 
 So I resolved to forego all administrative work, 
 and I have pushed that resolution ahead of me 
 through half a century. But in such a purpose I 
 had to relinquish the prizes of the world, which are 
 all, or nearly all, given to the administrator — the 
 glittering prizes of money, fame, power. I de- 
 serve no pitying commiseration, since I made my 
 choice consciously, and have persevered in it with 
 eyes open. For along with the glories I escaped 
 the horrors of Administration, to pursue and to 
 realize by peaceful development my Super-vocation 
 in the company of Chum Poverty who has always 
 kindly, though sparingly allotted me food, raiment 
 and shelter. 
 
 2. An unimportant paragraph I may here de- 
 vote to a brief interlude of this time, during which 
 I saw somewhat — not much — of that peculiar time- 
 killing bauble known as general and even genteel 
 society. A few prominent college men came to-
 
 180 THE ST. LOUTS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 gether and formed an organization which was bap- 
 tized under the name of the University Club. I 
 happened to be present at the first meeting, and we 
 all pledged our best assistance to the enterprise, 
 which was successful in bringing together a con- 
 siderable number of the educated people of the 
 city, lawyers, doctors, ministers, teachers, business 
 men. Thomas Allen, an eminent and wealthy citi- 
 zen, head of the Iron Mountain Railroad, we chose 
 as our first President, who plumped into our lucky 
 treasury a thousand dollars for a start. Social en- 
 tertainments were frequent, lecture courses were 
 given, receptions for distinguished visitors were 
 held, eating and drinking were not neglected. 
 
 During two years or so I was an active club-mem- 
 ber, for the first and last time in my life. I saw a 
 good deal of certain high-placed urban characters, 
 and heard them speak out in conversation as well 
 as in oration. On the whole it was a new kind of 
 humanity in my experience, and I drew much en- 
 joyment, and I think profit, from the intercourse. 
 Our two chief philosophers, Brockmeyer and Har- 
 ris, were not members, still there was a little sprink- 
 ling of us in the Club, and a subtle streak of Hegel- 
 ism would occasionally flash out to the bewilder- 
 ment of the Philistines, who were the large ma- 
 jority. I even started little talks off in a cosy cor- 
 ner on Shakespeare, with whose excellence I was 
 at that time overflowing verbally if not mentally. 
 I begged Harris to join us — Brockmeyer was im- 
 possible^ — and we would start a hot campaign, for
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 181 
 
 which I thought there was a unique opportunity- 
 But he would not, giving some poor open excuses, 
 and hiding his real decisive reasons as he often did. 
 His heart he never wore upon his sleeve for daws 
 (like me) to peck at. 
 
 At last in 1874, the blow of fate smote me with 
 a great domestic loss, which simply snuffed out all 
 pleasure in pleasure, and wilted to sorrow life's 
 ambitions. I gradually withdrew from the Univer- 
 sity Club and never re-joined. Twice afterwards, 
 once in New York and once in Chicago, I took a 
 little nip of Club-life, but soon flung away the 
 cup as alien to my work and to my character. So 
 I lost my gift of comradery — I could never have 
 had much ; but for this little while at the Univer- 
 sity 'Club I was fairly sociable, never again. This 
 must be accounted one of life's drawbacks, from 
 which, however, I gathered, as I believe, a consid- 
 erable blessing for my Super-vocation. 
 
 3. Every teacher thinks of changing his voca- 
 tion, or at least he used to think so in my time. The 
 prizes were on the whole smaller than in other pro- 
 fessions; the social prestige was the least. Hence 
 teaching was accepted as a kind of half-way house 
 on the road to something higher. In my early peda- 
 gogical environment, the better half of the more 
 ambitious young men were studying law for the 
 future. We had a class in Blackstone made up of 
 teachers. Since then the professional spirit of the 
 teaching masses has doubtless improved; but the
 
 182 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 chance of escape, when once in the mill, has be- 
 come less. 
 
 I was one of those who began to teach school till 
 I could move out of such an intermediate condition 
 into the legal profession. The temptation still 
 hung over me when I entered the High School. 
 Judge Woerner, then a practising attorney, of his 
 own friendly accord once offered me a starter's 
 position in his office with a small salary. At home 
 the household queen urged me boldly to accept, and 
 offered herself as a living or rather starving sacri- 
 fice to a diminished income, already small enough. 
 Then beside her lay a babe in the cradle, whose 
 smile became my very enigmatic oracle. For many a 
 month I stood at the crossroads staring at the two 
 sign-boards which pointed in such different direc- 
 tions, and I tarried will-lessly interrogating the 
 Future. At last the Future suddenly turned and 
 interrogated me sternly : ' ' Are you willing to give 
 up your Super-vocation, which now runs along 
 peacefully with, yet above your vocation?" No, 
 was the answer, and that upper life-line of mine 
 has sped on its way unswerving till now, while I 
 have remained militant pedagogue in the battle 
 against the fates of physical existence. 
 
 4. Another phenomenon peculiar to this time 
 was the large number of magazines which sprang 
 up mushroom-like, throughout the city. How many, 
 I cannot tell ; but in my immediate vicinage I may 
 count four with which the St. Louis Movement had 
 some connection. The ground for this frantic but
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 183 
 
 evanescent growth of periodicalism, as I look back 
 at it, lay in the intoxicating draught of the Great 
 Illusion, whereof we all were guzzling to the last 
 drop. I reveled in the drunken dream, and so did 
 everybody else in town, that ours was to be the 
 Future Great City of the World, and hence there 
 must arise just here the Future Great Magazine of 
 the World. Thus took place a kind of rush to be 
 first in the new field, like the flood of eager settlers 
 racing to pre-empt some vacant rich territory. An- 
 other Illusion by the way. 
 
 Perhaps the best sample of this fresh outbreak 
 of illusory St. Louis was The Inland Magazine, 
 edited by Charlotte Smith, though people gener- 
 ally supposed that Reavis and his Idea were the 
 secret mainspring of the enterprise. Certainly he 
 wrote for it, and now we had an organ of the Gos- 
 pel according to St. Louis (the American Saint 
 not the French), which was to be propagated over 
 the earth from its right center through the words 
 of the prophet himself. Moreover Reavis was be- 
 ginning to look to a new field of activity, for he 
 says in one of his final prefaces, "this pamphlet is 
 to be the last which I shall prepare and publish 
 upon the material interest of the country and St. 
 Louis. ' ' What can he mean ? Is he getting a first 
 stroke or glimpse of the coming Disillusion? He 
 gives us a glimmer of his fresh task, "wherein the 
 great problems of the world are to be solved and 
 man's highest life on earth is to be attained." Is 
 Reavis then going to turn philosopher, and join
 
 184 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 the St. Louis Movement ? He never did, as far as 
 I know, even if he once asked Harris to lecture for 
 him on immortality. His object is now, as he says, 
 "moral and intellectual development," seemingly 
 quite distinct from his former glorification of "ma- 
 terial St. Louis," for which he had coined a sort 
 of universal cognomen "The Future Great" — this 
 short cut becoming for a while our city's abbrevia- 
 tion at home and abroad. At any rate The Inland 
 had a perceptible tincture of Reavisism, and so did 
 our newspapers as well as ourselves. Still it con- 
 tained something else, whereof I can recall one 
 rememberable instance : this magazine first showed 
 me to myself poetically in St. Louis type, having 
 printed in its columns my youthful drama Clar- 
 ence, which Reavis had heard of and asked for 
 through Harris. Thus it started my little cataract 
 of printer's ink, which even in book-quenching St. 
 Louis, has continued its downpour into this year, 
 and into this book. 
 
 Of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, found- 
 ed by Harris during this same Era, I have already 
 spoken. I contributed first to it some translations 
 from the German, and then my early Shakespeare 
 articles. At the start it had the unique character 
 of being the only magazine of the kind published 
 in the English language. I desired to help Harris 
 in his daring enterprise, and so I kept on writing 
 and printing my Shakespearian essays till a book 
 had evolved, and pathetically begged me for pub- 
 lication. I took pity on its distressed fragmentary
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 185 
 
 condition and yielded. The Journal was continued 
 for many years and won a name. Harris clung to 
 it through life, or nearly so, and it must be deemed 
 his means or form of self-expression. It remains 
 his monumental work; he spent a good deal of the 
 best energy of his best days upon its exacting re- 
 quirements. I could never be reconciled to giving 
 my creative moments for such a result; thus our 
 life-lines ran different. As this Journal was more 
 or less interwoven with the St. Louis Movement to 
 its last number, it will be mentioned repeatedly in 
 our narrative. I may call this, together with his 
 other philosophical work, the Super-vocation of 
 Harris, kept up at a great unpaid and unpayable 
 outlay of money and mind, alongside of his bread- 
 winning vocation, which, however, it deeply in- 
 fluenced. 
 
 A school periodical called The American Journal 
 of Education, edited by Major Merwin, was an- 
 other journalistic offshoot of this Era, which had 
 its link of connection with the St. Louis Movement 
 through Harris and other local educators and writ- 
 ers. I do not remember furnishing to it any direct 
 contribution, though it reviewed sympathetically 
 a number of my productions. 
 
 But the magazine with which I stood in most in- 
 timate personal relation, and out of which I drew 
 a hot living experience of periodicalism was The 
 Western, which, starting as pedagogical, rose to be 
 mainly literary. On the whole it had a very shift- 
 ing and at times shiftless history through its many
 
 18$ THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 tetering ups and downs. My chief part I have not 
 forgotten: I took a pledge to furnish an article 
 for every number, and at the same time to pay 
 five or possibly ten dollars into the magazine's ever- 
 gaping treasury for my own article. An ambitious 
 literary lady once asked me how much I received 
 for my contribution, and she intimated that she 
 had something of the sort for sale, if she could 
 get a better price for it here than in the East. My 
 rejoinder must have run somehow thus: "We 
 writers here in St. Louis are far ahead of all others 
 known to the World 's History in ability, for we are 
 not only able to write articles, but also to pay a 
 good price for them when written. Such are the 
 terms, if you wish to join our guild." She de- 
 clined becoming a member, with the modest state- 
 ment: "I own no such ability as that." 
 
 During this stage of The Western (for it had 
 several other stages), lasting possibly a year, we 
 the contributors, also courteously called stockhold- 
 ers, were likewise the editors in a kind of common 
 parley, which settled the affairs of the publication. 
 Thus I came to experience somewhat of the nature 
 of Magazinism and its rewards, which I slowly 
 made up my mind to forego in this life. There 
 certainly was need of unity in the conduct of the 
 business, and finally I was chosen editor. I de- 
 clined the honor with becoming modesty, I thought, 
 when an attempt was made to foist the office upon 
 me anyhow. But I stamped No with decision, and 
 the editorship went elsewhere, and at the same time
 
 A BOOK WRITER'S LIFE LINES. 187 
 
 my direct connection not only with the Western, 
 but also with the vast and ever-growing magazine- 
 world closed for good. I never afterwards took 
 part in periodical literature, though I have occa- 
 sionally sent articles and a little cash in response to 
 the editorial cry of pain such as I used to hear in 
 the sanctum of The Western: "More copy, more 
 money. ' ' 
 
 Thus during this German Era and through its 
 peculiar opportunities I developed my two most 
 strongly marked and permanent life-lines — the up- 
 per and the lower, the ideal and the real, the 
 moneyless and the moneyed, and so on through a 
 long string of dualisms. The name for the first I 
 have already minted as my Super-vocation, self-re- 
 warding, self-contained, self-sufficing, whose chief 
 function was to bring me into some closer contact 
 or clearer vision of my supernal acquaintance, who 
 to my mind bears the lofty title of World-Spirit. 
 
 And I may add that this for me exalted com- 
 munion began, during the present Era, to insist 
 upon some kind of utterance in my native speech. 
 What I had gained I was driven to express for my- 
 self, and then to give away to others. Thus a 
 secret impulse started in me toward becoming a 
 Writer of Books, the goal and the fulfilment of my 
 Super-vocation.
 
 188 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 The Book Twins Born 
 
 Two conceptions started about the same time in 
 the early seventies, and began to push into ink 
 through scattered penstrokes, which then would 
 cohere and form articles, whose collection and ar- 
 rangement finally made two volumes, twinned in 
 origin yet quite different in character. So I recall 
 their synchronous birth to memory. Their names 
 have quite a disparate sound — the one being titled 
 The American State, and the other Shakespeare. 
 What can they have in common? They sprang 
 from the same brain on the same general birthday, 
 doubtless from the same general cause. I had writ- 
 ten a good deal before this, but at random; these 
 present writings, however, were products of the St. 
 Louis Movement now working in me and through 
 me for a new self-expression. 
 
 The deepest and most distinctive thing in them, 
 as I now review their purport, was my persistent 
 effort to grasp the World-Spirit, which I may 
 designate also as one form of divine manifestation 
 to the human mind, or even of God Himself. 
 Philosophically I had wrestled with the pure Idea 
 of it for years, all the way from Plato down to 
 Hegel, but the time had come for me to see it in 
 the living present, of which I was a small but active 
 part every day, and to unfold it as the ultimate 
 vital factor in our American political system. Still
 
 THE BOOK TWINS BORN. 189 
 
 further, at the same psychological moment, as I 
 may construe it, was born the imperative push to 
 trace this elusive but super-eminent World-Spirit, 
 the presiding Genius of History, in Great Litera- 
 ture, especially in Greatest Shakespeare, who must 
 have the highest if he be the highest. 
 
 1. The American State. .This was originally a 
 series of essays written about 1871-2, when the na- 
 tional excitement over the so-called Reconstruction 
 of the Southern States which had been in rebellion, 
 was at its topmost. For me personally it was a 
 time of intense mental upheaval, inasmuch as I had 
 to reverse my life-long attachment to a political 
 party whose guidance I had followed in peace and 
 in war. Could I make the bitter change to which 
 more and more my conviction was driving me? I 
 had hitherto accepted without much serious chal- 
 lenge the policies of the Republican organization, 
 whose principles and professions I had inherited 
 from my father, re-inforced by my College associa- 
 tions, and by the Civil War. It is true that after 
 the death of Lincoln I was deeply dissatisfied with 
 the party's leadership, still I waited in hope. But 
 as the second nomination of President Grant drew 
 near, I fell into open revolt, in spite of old affec- 
 tions and comraderies. Thus I was brought to 
 break with my political tradition along with my 
 other traditions. I think this gave me the hardest 
 wrench of them all. For I had been a Union sol- 
 dier, and an enthusiastic supporter of Lincoln, and 
 I had already taken a very sympathetic even if boy-
 
 190 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 ish part in the Fremont campaign of 1856, and also 
 in the Oberlin battle of 1858. 
 
 Now what was it that caused such a furious com- 
 motion within me? I think I can best sum it up 
 after the language of today in the word militarism. 
 The military spirit at the head of our civil affairs 
 was disregarding, if not jeopardizing the freedom 
 of our government. I am not of those who believe 
 that General Grant purposed the overthrow of our 
 institutions, but he had and he had to have for suc- 
 cess in war the soldier's absolute will to command 
 and to obey, according to which he could not help 
 acting unconsciously in political matters. Lincoln 
 saw with anxiety this tendency in the soldier, saw 
 it in Grant and once at least sent him a sharp warn- 
 ing on this very point. The feeling of some such 
 peril was what caused the split of 1872 in the Re- 
 publican ranks, and gave to Senator Schurz the 
 theme of his life. 
 
 Thus the conflict over the political reconstruction 
 of the South drove me to a political reconstruction 
 of myself and of all my former transmitted pre- 
 conceptions of party. Of the philosophical set two 
 members, Brockmeyer and Woerner, were practi- 
 cally engaged in the politics of the time; both, 
 though original supporters of Lincoln, were now in 
 strong reaction against the existent Republican 
 party. "We often discussed the impending prob- 
 lems, which necessarily involved the fundamental 
 nature of the State. We studied famous writers on
 
 THE BOOK TWINS BORN. 191 
 
 the subject reaching back to old Plato's Republic 
 and Aristotle's Politics; but especially we poured 
 over Hegel 's Philosophy of the State and freely dis- 
 cussed its worth and its weakness. Above all doc- 
 uments of the past we delved into the Constitution 
 of the United States, upon which Brockmeyer once 
 planned a great philosophic book, but it remained 
 like his other works and like himself, and some- 
 what like his city, unrealized and perhaps unreal- 
 izable. Still we were struck by his lightning, and 
 charged with his personal electricity, which made 
 our brains sparkle and whiz with new activity. 
 
 Thus the St. Louis Movement had its political 
 strain which grew out of the time's circumstances. 
 Well do I remember the informal meetings which 
 usually took place Sunday afternoons at my house 
 in Targee street, or rather alley, where stood what 
 some people called the Philosophers' Row, one of 
 whose dwellings Harris also occupied for several 
 years. The drift of the discussion was in general 
 concerning the relation of the Federal Government 
 to the Single-States which composed it, and the 
 means to prevent each side from devouring the 
 other, to which act both sides had shown a violent 
 appetite within less than a single decade. We all 
 had witnessed and most of us had fought the at- 
 tempt of the Single-State to destroy the Union, and 
 we had rejoiced in the latter 's victory. But now a 
 few years' turn had brought to us just the oppo- 
 site danger: the victorious Union, grown insolent 
 in its triumph, was threatening to undo the Single-
 
 192 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 State, by which deed, if successful, it would simply 
 undo itself. 
 
 It was truly an anxious time for our patriotism, 
 and we invoked to our help especially our philos- 
 ophy, which meant to us not merely a soothing 
 consolation in life's pain, but the very instrument 
 of our salvation. Prominent men used to come and 
 take a part, not many indeed, but all of them 
 marked characters. Brockmeyer and Harris, the 
 two Judges Woerner and Jones, Principal Morgan 
 and myself, made the core of the group. Only one 
 member, as far as I know, had been in the Con- 
 federate army, Dr. J. H. "Watters, then a Profes- 
 sor in McDowell's Medical College. 
 
 But the curious coincidence emerges at the pres- 
 ent moment, almost fifty years later, that then our 
 little coterie of a half dozen or so, wrought over 
 and wrestled with practically the same problem 
 which now is challenging the whole civilized earth 
 with even greater intensity than ever before. Our 
 thought was concerning the true federation of our 
 relatively small States ; today the world 's thought 
 is concerning the true federation of the Nations of 
 the globe. The political theme of the St. Louis 
 Movement has thus become universalized by time. 
 Our little microcosmic discussion in a little par- 
 lor ran surprisingly similar to the great macro- 
 cosmic discussion lately held at Paris and round 
 the globe pertaining to the universal League ; the 
 one wee atom has grown to be the one world-Or- 
 ganism. I do not mean to say that our St. Louis
 
 the book twins born. 193 
 
 Movement brought all this about of itself; it sim- 
 ply saw and grappled with what was already the 
 deepest trend of the age, in which we also shared. 
 Really the Government of the United States has 
 risen to be the earth 's political model ; History it- 
 self seems now to be moving toward or along the 
 lines of American History, of which, however, there 
 is needed a complete re-writing and spiritual re- 
 creation, for all our chief American historians are 
 still colonial in locality and in consciousness. 
 
 The result of these discussions upon myself I may 
 briefly chronicle for the sake of my autobiographic 
 Ego. The whole subject I seized upon and threshed 
 over to the limit of my powers. Then I began to 
 write it out into the essays aforesaid, which were 
 somewhat later printed in The Western and after- 
 ward gathered into a booklet. No other person has 
 left any record of those colloquies; here first I 
 elected myself by some unconscious ballotage to be 
 the scribe of the St. Louis Movement, which office 
 I am still filling. I may add that after a few years' 
 fierce wrestle, the problem of Reconstruction be- 
 gan to be practically settled (in 1876), and my 
 booklet fell into a kind of oblivion — it had almost 
 lapsed from my own life and memory — till after 
 several slumberous decades it suddenly wakes up 
 today with a new prophetic meaning. 
 
 The treatise first unfolds the theory of the State 
 as such, in which Hegel is mainly followed. But 
 Hegel's ideal was the Prussian State, at which 
 point I began to break away from him, and to
 
 194 T HE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 philosophize our American political system in a 
 way quite different from that of the master. Espe- 
 cially the meaning of our Federal Constitution and 
 its place in Universal History was set forth with 
 some emphasis and with an import quite unknown 
 to the great German thinker. There are scattered 
 glimpses of the new political Order which "must 
 will the existence of the individual State as uni- 
 versal principle, must realize this principle in a 
 new form of government, and must define that form 
 of government in a new Constitution." 
 
 I need hardly say that Europe is trying to do 
 something of that kind just now with much ques- 
 tioning and somewhat of terror. But all her His- 
 tory, when rightly seen and overseen, shows itself 
 evolving toward some such federated State. And 
 here in this Essay rises another conception which 
 has followed me through life : that of the presiding 
 Genius of History, or of the World-Spirit, a very 
 old thought — I can trace it already in ancient Her- 
 odotus — but whose name here is taken from German 
 Philosophy. Yet its significance is to-day far more 
 commanding than ever, though little realized in 
 present historical literature. 
 
 2. Shakespeare. I began about this same time a 
 scrap heap of jottings which in the course of years 
 organized themselves at first into magazine articles, 
 and thence into a book, which is the best known 
 of all my writings, and on the whole the bulkiest. 
 Circumstances threw into my hands the High 
 School's instruction in Shakespeare, and therewith
 
 THE BOOK TWINS BORN. 195 
 
 started a new and almost continuous strand of my 
 life's work down to the present, with intervals of 
 suspended interest. 
 
 There is no doubt that I was getting somewhat 
 tired of my excessive philosophical immersion in 
 Hegel, which had already lasted several years. 
 Philosophy had delivered to me its message, or as 
 much of it as I could take, for the present at least. 
 That another world-discipline had begun to germi- 
 nate underneath all my Hegel, I may have dimly 
 forefelt, but I certainly did not then recognize. 
 Still I longed for a new expression of myself and 
 of the universe, less abstract, more living and 
 concrete, that of life itself, if possible. Hence I 
 seized with all my might the opportunity to change 
 my masters and their universities, to pass from 
 Hegel the philosopher to Shakespeare the poet, 
 acknowledged to be the greatest of his kind and to 
 have built a world wholly of his own, which my 
 task was now to rebuild in myself. And some 
 transition of the sort was also working deeply but 
 secretly in the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 Still it must not be thought that I flung away 
 philosophy entirely and forever; I could not. On 
 the contrary, I took it over with me into Shakes- 
 peare, who also has his philosophic subtrate, as 
 his deepest students have always noted. I hold 
 that he would not be the supreme poet that he is 
 unless he were in his way at the same time the 
 supreme philosopher. Thus in my case my Hegel
 
 196 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 was the forecast and the preparation for my 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 It so happened that my pupils took as their first 
 study Julius Ccesar, a political play, in which we 
 see the poet grappling with the loftiest world- 
 historical character of all time at one of History's 
 supreme nodes. Such was for me the right cue for 
 interpreting the whole drama, which, rippling 
 along so buoyantly and on its surface so easily 
 understood, has been so grievously misunderstood 
 in its depths, for it is the deepest work of Shakes- 
 peare, with one possible exception. The poet 
 probably conceived and wrote this play at the very 
 culmination of his genius, somewhere about his 
 thirty-seventh year, and hence it contains his 
 sublimest, his one most ideal conception and char- 
 acterization, that of the "World-Spirit itself, the 
 immortal soul of History, incarnate in a poor 
 mortal, who sinks to death in its conflict, and there- 
 fore represents the supreme tragedy of the indi- 
 vidual man in his earthly career. 
 
 Another personal touch which brought me at 
 once into the closest intimacy with Julius Ccesar 
 and its author is that there are no less than four 
 acknowledged philosophers in this play, of whom 
 one is a woman, Portia, wife of Brutus. For her I 
 have to think that Shakespeare had a tender affec- 
 tion, as it is the special privilege of the poet to fall 
 desperately in love with his own characters. Thus 
 Philosophy is not merely introduced into this 
 drama, but is domesticated and joins the Family.
 
 THE BOOK TWINS BORN. 197 
 
 Still it must be added that all these philosophers 
 perish, and they alone perish of the prominent per- 
 sonages, so that seemingly Philosophy itself, of 
 Greek birth, turns tragic in old Rome according to 
 Shakespeare. And, indeed, to look about us just 
 now, has not German Philosophy been marching 
 toward tragedy along with its peculiarly philosophic 
 nation? Will it ever revive to its former life and 
 influence ? Or has it passed on as has the old Greek 
 philosophy, though still indispensable to be known 
 as a part or phase of the race's grand historic dis- 
 cipline ? The answer of centuries must be awaited. 
 The ordinary view of Julius Ccesar is that the 
 play has not been rightly named, that the hero is 
 Brutus. Such a conception destroys for me the 
 supreme purport of the work, lopping off the gran- 
 deur of its thought, as well as grievously misunder- 
 stands the poets psychology. Indeed, Brutus is rel- 
 atively a common-place moralizer whelmed into the 
 vortex of Universal History to his utter confusion. 
 Hence he is the prototype of the purely moralistic 
 mind, be it orthodox in religion or agnostic. So I 
 challenged in my first essay the whole trend of the 
 traditional Shakespearian criticism as regards this 
 most popular work of the poet. Moreover, Shakes- 
 peare, in passing from his English-historical to 
 Roman-historical dramas had a great personal 
 experience : he became himself universal, rising out 
 of his limited national consciousness and commun- 
 ing with the World's History in one of its highest 
 manifestations. In my humble, very different life-
 
 198 T HE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 line I had gone through a similar experience, and 
 had come to know, philosophically at least, some- 
 what of the World-Spirit; hence I recognized it 
 with no small wonder and interest in its poetic 
 appearance. 
 
 Next, another philosophic play dropped down on 
 my pedagogic path, Hamlet. 'Here, then, I found 
 not the ancient but the modern philosopher set 
 forth with his unique tragedy. The resemblance 
 between Julius Ccesar and Hamlet has been often 
 noticed, and it runs very deep, starting from the 
 outer style and structure and reaching down to the 
 very soul of all these dramatic souls on the stage. 
 Hamlet, too, has felt the philosophic limit : ' ' There 
 are more things in Heaven and Earth than are 
 dreamt of in our (not your) philosophy." So this 
 foreboder glooms his dark questionings to his next 
 friend and fellow-student. Here I seemed to feel 
 Shakespeare as a profound and intense student of 
 philosophy, now dramatizing the results of his con- 
 siderable discipline. He, too, must have had his 
 philosophic epoch, and transcended it, having won 
 its culture and put it into his poetry. 
 
 I had often read these two dramas before my pres- 
 ent school-time, and had felt their power, especially 
 in their single scattered grandeur, for I had early 
 plucked their gorgeous lollipops for school-boys. 
 But now I began to recreate them through and 
 through, not only in feeling but also in thought, of 
 which I even discovered Shakespeare to be as great 
 a master as Hegel, if not greater, though using a
 
 THE BOOK TWINS BORN. 199 
 
 wholly new kind of expression. Moreover, the 
 realm of institutions upon which the St. Louis 
 Movement had put so much stress in theory and 
 also in practice, I found permeating Shakespeare 
 everywhere as the basic presupposition of all his 
 characters and of his social world. 
 
 In like manner I continued to tackle one by one 
 the rest of the works of the poet, to organize them 
 internally, and then to unite them externally into 
 groups according to what seemed to me their deep- 
 est principle. Moreover, I kept writing out and 
 working over my results till I kneaded them into 
 the shape of essays, which were printed in St. Louis 
 periodicals, then blooming but now wholly de- 
 funct — notably The Journal of Speculative Phil- 
 osophy, and The Western. Also, though a full- 
 houred teacher in the High School, I found time to 
 propagate my ideas to little coteries at the Uni- 
 versity Club and to various literary societies else- 
 where in the community, thus starting uncon- 
 sciously the Communal University, which still is 
 sending forth in a very quiet unnewspapered way 
 its living sprouts and some happy but modest 
 flowerets. After the growth of years, about half a 
 dozen, I think, all these writings, scattered singly 
 and looking very lonely in the old magazines, per- 
 sisted in celebrating a general harvest-home, which 
 brought them all together into one associated work 
 then called The System of the Shakespearian 
 Drama, whose title even flung a word of defiance. 
 
 The publication of this volume, when I was
 
 200 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 thirty-six years old, marked better than any other 
 incident the close of one large long Period of my 
 life— the first. But other and greater enterprises 
 were budding in the meantime. Shakespeare to my 
 mind could not help calling up his fellow-giants of 
 the World's Literature, of whom I then had begun 
 to see the huge outlines of three more — Homer, 
 Dante, Goethe. Were these Goliaths also to be 
 encountered by little me after my long desperate 
 battle with the one, probably the greatest? The 
 thought kept rising, but I shrank from the task ; I 
 felt myself unprepared for this new Gigantomachia. 
 I had read each of these supreme poets after the 
 usual fashion, and looked into not a little criticism 
 of them ; but all that amounted to a mere speck, for 
 now I was to re-live them, talk their native dialect, 
 rebuild their world, and, as far as possible, recreate 
 in myself their very consciousness. At first I 
 skulked out of the fight, but I could not escape the 
 ever-haunting idea. I must go to Europe and there 
 speak and hear spoken the mother-tongue of Italian 
 Dante and even of old Greek Homer. This, I may 
 premise, was one of the incentives driving me to 
 the European Journey which is soon to start. 
 
 These two works of mine, then, I dare baptize my 
 Book-twins, my first printed contribution of any 
 consequence to the St. Louis Movement. Both have 
 been somewhat prolific of their kind, having scat- 
 tered a considerable line of progeny along my much 
 bewritten orbit of books down into the present, with 
 still other kindred embryos struggling in my brain
 
 THE BOOK TWINS BORN. 201 
 
 for daylight, though yet unborn and possibly un- 
 bearable. They both plumped forth into the black 
 sunshine of printer's ink and got themselves dressed 
 in the beautiful white rags so wonderfully trans- 
 figured at the paper-mill, breaking from their hum- 
 ble source in Philosophers' Row, where Harris once 
 dwelt, and Childs, and Kroeger, but now an ancient 
 African rookery domiciling many playful but some- 
 times saucy picaninnies. Still the life there was 
 quite plain even then ; rents unpretentious, salaries 
 very moderate, social standards not exacting, sym- 
 posiums frequent but wineless, though not always 
 beerless. So we indwelt our little temple of Phil- 
 osopholis located in a St. Louis alley, pursuing 
 dutifully our daily bread-winning vocation, but also 
 cherishing whole-heartedly our breadless Super- 
 vocation. 
 
 I should add by way of connection that these two 
 preceding books of mine arose in the height and 
 overflow of the German Era of St. Louis, and to 
 keen vision still show its traces. We all were under 
 the Teutonic spell, which won an earth-circling new 
 glamour by the sudden dazzling triumphs of the 
 Franco-Prussian War, whose event centered in this 
 same time. To German Philosophy I have already 
 ascribed my acquaintance with my ideal life-long 
 friend, the World-Spirit. And our ever-spurring 
 ambition to rise and to sail over the world's top 
 was only keeping pace with our city's Great Illu- 
 sion of being just about to become the terrene cen- 
 tral metropolis of all futurity — an access of urban
 
 202 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 megalomania which infected and puffed up every 
 petty civic Ego in every little alley, especially in 
 that of the Philosophers, who are usually supposed 
 to be peculiarly liable to the disease transcendental. 
 Under such conditions we philosophized and in- 
 terpreted Literature and Life, and then taught our 
 spirits' winnings wherever we might catch a stray 
 listener. Moreover, we began to write ourselves 
 out into self-expression, which could not be deemed 
 complete till it stood forth in the world as a defiant 
 reality fighting its own way through the printed 
 page. Thus we centered round about us a consider- 
 able activity of thought and its applications. But 
 alongside, or rather underneath, this more open 
 philosophic endeavor was flowing a less obvious but 
 even more persistent and, perchance, deeper stream 
 of tendency, of which a few forecasting items may 
 be next set down for sake of the Future. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Poetic Element. 
 
 Yes, the confession has to be made to this prosaic 
 time and people, that in the St. Louis Movement 
 lurks a poetic strain which has continued to sing 
 through it, often in an almost inaudible undertone, 
 but at times with a sudden outburst of melodious 
 energy, from its birth in the days of the first Phil- 
 osophical Society down to the present moment of 
 its white-haired senescence. Pure Thought, even in 
 those its young years, had a way of getting weary
 
 THE POETIC ELEMENT. 203 
 
 of its own excessive purity, and of taking flight 
 from itself down into the more tangible, but more 
 earthly and concrete forms of the Imagination. On 
 this score also I shall briefly call the roll. 
 
 I never knew Harris to strike off a verse from 
 his own poetic mint, if he had any; only once he 
 submitted to me his English translation of an 
 Italian poem, which was intended as I remember, 
 to be sung at the old Philharmonic, and which he 
 for some reason wished to be fairly accurate in 
 meaning and meter. This he did on account of my 
 supposed superior knowledge of Italian, which he 
 had heard me jabber with peanut venders at street 
 corners. Still Harris read and studied the world's 
 great poems, especially Faust and the Divine Com- 
 edy, of which the latter became deeply ingrained 
 and intergrown with his own spirit. He had also 
 the curious habit of memorizing and declaiming to 
 his friends Bronson Alcott's transcendental poetry, 
 especially before his departure from St. Louis to 
 Concord, for which this may have been a pre- 
 paratory exercise. Several of our members would 
 poetize upon occasion chiefly for their own pas- 
 time. In this line the best-known and most suc- 
 cessful production was that of Judge J. G. Woer- 
 ner, who wrote a drama, first in German and then 
 in English, which was played on a number of 
 stages throughout the West. Besides this drama 
 two novels are to be set down to his credit. One of 
 our lady-teachers wrote at least one very accept- 
 able little lyric, from which she gathered many
 
 204 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 flowerets of laudation. As far as I am aware, Miss 
 Blow never dallied with the Muse creatively, though 
 she was certainly well-versed in other great people's 
 verses, notably in those of the Literary Bibles. I 
 judge that she hardly dared trust herself in meter, 
 else she would have made her own translation of 
 the quite simple and rather prosaic rhymes in 
 Froebel 's Mother-Play Songs, when she was getting 
 out her new English edition of that work. But she 
 turned over to another hand even that not very 
 exacting requirement of versification. 
 
 Still we had a poet in our midst, a genuine orig- 
 inal elemental poet, I maintain, but whose poetic 
 gold remained as usual in the natural nugget, or 
 was strewn about at random underfoot as so many 
 shining sands mingled with so much dirt. Again 
 the unrealized, perchance the unrealizable genius of 
 our St. Louis Movement, Brockmeyer! Without 
 this poetic power he could not have barbed his 
 weighty philosophy with flashes of lightning which 
 would pierce and illumine for a moment at least the 
 dullest and darkest brainpan. He seemed able to 
 reach down to that first fountain-head where Phi- 
 losophy and Poetry, or the Abstract and the Con- 
 crete are one, and, tapping that prime creative 
 course, to draw off each into its own conduit of 
 utterance, distinct, yet mutually illustrative. Not 
 always could he do so by any means, but only at 
 his best. 
 
 Indeed, I am now inclined to think that just this 
 poetic element in Brockmeyer was his deepest and
 
 THE POETIC ELEMENT. 205 
 
 most original gift — deeper and more original than 
 his philosophic endowment. For his philosophy 
 was not his own but derived, not his inner creative 
 self but something accepted from the outside, a very 
 good European affair but at bottom not ours or 
 his, not finally the St. Louis Movement's when this 
 has come to full maturity and realization. How- 
 ever, such a result belongs to the future. At pres- 
 ent I may add, that Brockmeyer, the completest in- 
 carnation of our whole Movement, could always be 
 observed passing from his abtruse thought and 
 speech to his vivid poetic imagery whenever he was 
 stirred in the depths. His conversation would flash 
 up at times ablaze with metaphors, so that the 
 mind would blink bedazzled at his fire-works of 
 fantasy, even when freighted with his heaviest phil- 
 osophemes. 
 
 More than once I have intimated that Brock- 
 meyer would never smelt and turn into pure coin 
 the crude but rich ores of his genius; rather he 
 would let them lie scattered around, quite as Nature 
 threw them out in her primordial upheavals. The 
 final human touch of art to the original cosmic 
 creation of worlds he seemed unwilling or rather 
 unable to give. Still I must note the exception, par- 
 tial though it be, for it seems to hint the deeper 
 and truer vein of his originality. He did actually 
 finish two dramas in his way, though they were 
 born more than thirty years apart. The first was 
 named A Foggij Night at Newport, a most nebulous 
 message, as if sent down directly from old-Norse
 
 206 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 Niflheim, the primitive Teutonic fog-world of the 
 North. It shows, however, a goodly study and not 
 a little straight imitation, even in words, of those 
 two greatest skaldic descendants, Shakespeare and 
 Goethe, both of them Northern in origin and 
 tongue. It was written about 1860, printed, paid 
 for, and distributed by a few philosophic friends 
 who were poetic enough to hail it as the new avatar 
 of Poesy herself in America, a young Faust at 
 least. That was some four or more years before my 
 arrival in St. Louis, so that Brockmeyer and the 
 philosophers had been allowed time enough to be 
 cured of this first little illusion, and to get obsessed 
 fully of the second, the great St. Louis Illusion, 
 under whose spell I found them, and not long 
 afterwards myself. Brockmeyer then lodged some- 
 where on the old South Market in a single bare 
 attic, boarding himself and sleeping on the floor, 
 (so I have heard him with humor dilate). He had 
 been frugally pensioned with bread and roomrent 
 by the fore-mentioned group of friends, whose 
 leader was Harris, and who were themselves at 
 that time a set of poor vagabonds in the city, to 
 make the translation of Hegel's Larger Logic (the 
 Book of Fate,) which was also intended to be a 
 world-stormer. I should here add that Harris was 
 then a wandering teacher of Ben Pitman's short- 
 hand. But Brockmeyer after a time grew sick of 
 tracking and mapping that vast Sahara of Hege- 
 lian abstractions, grew so desperately image-thirsty 
 that he took sudden flight one day from anhydrous
 
 THE POETIC ELEMENT. 207 
 
 Philosophy to upwelling Poetry as the green oasis 
 of salvation, from whose fountains everywhere be- 
 gan to bubble out this fantastic drama, the whim- 
 sicalities of which he patched together into a rather 
 crotchety whole. In 1866 when we were forming 
 the first Philosophical Society, I heard of it and 
 tried to drum up a copy, but could not; Brock- 
 meyer told me he had kept none himself, and I 
 thought somehow by his nose-sign that he never 
 wanted to hear anything more of it. Soon, how- 
 ever, in rummaging over an old dirty mess of sec- 
 ond-hand books in a book-stall, I came upon six 
 new copies and at once filliped down the small price 
 in the Civil War's paper money then still current. 
 I showed them to Harris who on the spot claimed 
 three of them as his own precious treasure; the 
 other two I gave away, while the third I kept for 
 a time but must have loaned for good, since I have 
 these many years moused after it in vain among 
 my book-refuse scattered along the path of my 
 travels in Chicago, in St. Louis, and even in 
 Cincinnati. 
 
 The inaugural of Brockmeyer as President of our 
 Philosophical Society, which I heard, made the an- 
 nouncement that he was then writing a drama 
 "with an American content", but he never fin- 
 ished it till a quarter of a century later, when he 
 was getting to be an old man. He read it to me 
 from the easy chair of his back-room, with many 
 side flashes of metaphorical humor, often more tell- 
 ing, I thought, than his text. For I have to think
 
 208 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT—PART FIRST. 
 
 that the cream of Brockmeyer 's genius usually got 
 quite skimmed off when he squeezed it through his 
 pen-point into ink. It is too bad that he never 
 found, or provided for himself a human phono- 
 graph, like the talk-recording Eckerman, as old 
 Goethe did. Strange to say, this second drama 
 seems to have spontaneously uprisen in him as kind 
 of poetical relief or counterblast, while he was 
 making, about 1890-5, his second translation of 
 Hegel's Logic, (a kind of translation of a transla- 
 tion), reviving thus the ambition and the task of 
 his thirties in his grayed sixties. Again I have to 
 think in this case also that his larger and more 
 creative nature was asserting itself as the poet 
 against the philosopher, who was simply revamp- 
 ing an old transmitted doctrine of a past and alien 
 time, instead of creating out of himself an original 
 work of his own spirit and age. Still these two 
 dramas are his only finished first-hand products, 
 and seem to suggest that he might have achieved 
 some work massive and organic in poetry, if he had 
 only kept up the training of his wayward genius. 
 
 The present autobiographic Ego may be per- 
 mitted here to append a few brief notes upon his 
 own small poetic household. So I shall mention 
 that a stream of verses would gush up to the sur- 
 face of my best daytime, and insist upon some form 
 of expression for a spell, then it would quietly sink 
 away into my unvoiced underworld, like a Greek 
 catabothron, where it would seemingly sleep a wee
 
 THE POETIC ELEMENT. 209 
 
 dark life of its own, not by any means dying, but 
 secretly dreaming. In the present period I re- 
 sponded to my two closest associates, Brockmeyer 
 and Woerner, by writing a drama also upon an 
 American theme. This was my first-born produc- 
 tion of any size or consequence, to which I gave the 
 quite neutral name of Clarence. The skillful ob- 
 server, if he takes the trouble, can discern in it 
 everywhere the traces of the St. Louis Movement, 
 to which it was my earliest independent contribu- 
 tion. And here I may note that Brockmeyer 's 
 aforesaid drama, A Foggy Night at Newport, was, 
 as far as my knowledge goes, the first preluding 
 note of our coming St. Louis Movement, the first 
 printed document forecasting its possible birth, 
 which thus had something poetical in its very 
 genesis. Now I believe that it was this funda- 
 mental imaginative power which drew me and 
 clasped me to Brockmeyer, who could be otherwise 
 very unattractive. Harris had no such ultimate 
 poetic element in his nature, as I construe him; 
 though he used imagery often with effect, it ap- 
 pealed rather as an outside illustrative decoration ; 
 he was first and last the philosopher purely, where- 
 in lay his power. Of these two life-friends of 
 mine, I have to conclude, therefore, that Brock- 
 meyer held me by a deeper, more innate spiritual 
 bond than Harris, though both I felt to be sym- 
 metrical and integrating halves of one common 
 brotherhood of spirit, whose kinship with me ran 
 deeper than that of blood, and was twined insepa-
 
 210 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 rably with my immortal part, whenever I dared 
 think I had any. 
 
 In my own poetical history, the earliest remem- 
 bered composition of mine expressed a sudden spon- 
 taneous upgush at school, when I was some nine or 
 ten years old, being a perfervid boyish harangue in 
 verse inspired on the moment by and imitated from 
 Shakespeare's speeches, which I found in M'Guf- 
 fey's Fifth Reader. At College there was an occa- 
 sional versified outbreak — not many, for another 
 more crushing question (the national) menaced the 
 time and me. But when I reached St. Louis at the 
 close of the War, there arose a rather steady stream 
 of versicles for a couple of years or more, inasmuch 
 as the young man's emotional nature insisted upon 
 its God-given right of tuneful expression. At a 
 somewhat later time both love and sorrow burst 
 furiously, I may say tragically, upon me and broke 
 up the even course of existence, so that they could 
 only be placated by the corresponding utterance 
 in poetry, which thus had for me always a healing, 
 remedial, vicarious function, though upon others it 
 may have produced an opposite effect. So through 
 all this first Period of mine kept trickling at certain 
 intervals as far back as memory can grope drop- 
 lets of rhymes from my perturbed soul-world, 
 whose little gushes would intermit after an over- 
 flow, but would in time begin again. Of their 
 strictly poetic value I took less account, as I never 
 sent one of them to newspaper or magazine; but 
 their relieving, reconciling power became the deep-
 
 THE POETIC ELEMENT. 211 
 
 est need of my spirit, which never failed to find 
 in them a self-sanative, even a self-fulfilling virtue. 
 Poetry in my case always paid its own bills in 
 advance. 
 
 It must, however, be granted that the poetic ele- 
 ment in the St. Louis Movement never brought forth 
 any great or lasting literary work; no verse or 
 phrase of its production is rememberable to-day, 
 unless dug up by a special antiquarian excavation. 
 Nothing of ours ever approached in universal fame 
 those winged words of Reavis: The Future Great 
 City of the World, which seemed to be flying 
 around the globe. But at the time this poetic ele- 
 ment of us performed its good part for a small 
 circle. Then poetry was here in deep eclipse ; the 
 man who dared the Muse was by the majority 
 deemed badly rattled, if not irresponsible outright. 
 At best the jingling lilt of verse was handed over 
 to the school-age, more or less in imitation of Long- 
 fellow, true poet of adolescence. Very different is 
 the situation to-day. Poetry is challenging the at- 
 tention of the world, and is performing all sorts of 
 new gyrations and somersaults metrical and other- 
 wise, having risen to rival even the novel in public 
 vogue. Verily every man and woman, high and 
 low, seem now verse-bitten; each self will be its 
 own poet. Thus is poetry getting truly democ- 
 ratized along with the rest of the world, being no 
 longer the aristocratic art of some solitary genius, 
 but the universally attuned expression of the folk 
 itself. So it may be said that the poetic element
 
 212 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 of our St. Louis Movement even in its well-leveled 
 mediocrity, has its significance, its germinal fore- 
 show of the coming efflorescence, piping its small- 
 voiced message almost inaudible from its first mo- 
 ment. As for me, during a life-time I have cher- 
 ished it as one of my striving spirit's chief liber- 
 ators into the freedom of my own self-expression, 
 which, being fully realized, is the fulfillment of a 
 man 's having lived. 
 
 So it may be prognosticated that underneath all 
 the philosophy and the literature, and even the 
 psychology perhaps, of our St. Louis Movement, 
 lies an underworld of poetry which has never yet 
 been able to form itself and to push up to the light. 
 Let the forethoughtful reader take note. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Life's Central Node. 
 
 When I had broken away from St. Louis and 
 from America and was tossing toward Europe up 
 and down on shipboard along with the shoreless 
 ocean's uncertainties, I dimly felt myself making 
 the unique change of my life, the central transi- 
 tion of it from a considerable amount of the past 
 to a possible considerable amount of the future. 
 I was no longer young, nor was I exactly old, but 
 on the road somewhere between; the first half of 
 the human drama seemed over, the second half 
 seemed about to start playing. I had just quit 
 my own past, and was going toward my race's
 
 LIFE'S CENTRAL NODE. 213 
 
 past^-a deep separation both in space and in spirit, 
 as it turned out. Thus I sat on deck mooning over 
 myself both in backlook and in forelook, having 
 scored six and thirty in the tale of years ; whereof 
 I find the record jotted down in a little diary which 
 still bears the spray marks of the plunging steam- 
 ship. Evidently I felt the presage then and there 
 that I was undergoing the pivotal transfer of my 
 career, rounding into a new stage or sweep my 
 life's chief node. I did not then glimpse what time 
 has since taught me, that this was quite an uni- 
 versal human experience, though it stood out the 
 grander always in the grander spirits of the cen- 
 turies. 
 
 A theory or rather an ingrown conviction of 
 mine has slowly matured that somewhere about the 
 middle years of his third decade, the man makes 
 the supreme orbital turn of his whole life's cycle. 
 He then evolves into and across his most signal and 
 decisive line of demarcation between what he has 
 been and what he is to be, even if he is always 
 drawing similar lines with the years. Still there 
 is, I believe, one such all-comprehensive land-mark 
 or turning-point in life. The fact is of such gen- 
 eral interest and, I think, of such far-reaching sig- 
 nificance especially in biography, that I may be 
 allowed to fortify the doctrine with some details. 
 
 To begin with the highest examples, Dante 
 clearly indicates such a change of himself in the 
 first line of his great poem, where he tells openly 
 of the strange new condition in which he found
 
 214 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 himself "at the middle of the journey of our life," 
 when he was about thirty-five years old. Even 
 more emphatically and directly Goethe points out 
 the grand climacteric of his total career, bringing 
 forth in him a new birth of the spirit, which took 
 place through his journey of Italy, starting when 
 he was thirty-six. Thus these two supreme poets 
 have told on themselves in so many words; but I 
 hold that even the self-secreting Shakespeare has 
 revealed the same leading life-line in his works, as 
 these move out his first stage into his second and 
 greatest stage, that of his mighty tragedies — which 
 transition must have taken place between his 
 thirty -fifth and fortieth years, though it cannot be 
 precisely dated. Even oldest Homer, whose single 
 personality has been doubled and even manifolded, 
 and whose century cannot be given with certainty, 
 has left us two books, which with all their objectiv- 
 ity are likewise autobiographical to the open-souled 
 reader, who will feel and also see that Homer him- 
 self in his spirit turned away from Greece and 
 went to Troy with Achilles when a younger man, 
 and then returned after twenty years' separation, 
 with old-wise Ulysses to "sunny Ithaca and pru- 
 dent Penelope." Thus the greatest human world- 
 makers, authors of our Literary Bibles, show this 
 distinctive crisis or turning-point both in life and 
 in writ. 
 
 Some celebrated people have not made the 
 grand passage, into this new stage, but have been 
 halted by death at its entrance: such we may re-
 
 LIFE'S CENTRAL NODE. 215 
 
 gard Byron, Raphael, Shelly and I would add Mar- 
 garet Fuller. Our Emerson achieved, as we con- 
 strue him, somewhat earlier than usual, at the age 
 of thirty-two or thirty-three, his transit into his 
 characteristic period, becoming the recusant of his 
 age, revolutionary, transcendental. His friend 
 Carlyle had a similar periodic turn-over when he 
 passed locally from Scotland to London, and spirit- 
 ually from writing magazine articles to composing 
 Great History. And our humble unobtrusive 
 Johnny Appleseed upon his wandering path mani- 
 fests a similar essential change in his career. 
 
 In like manner the leading worthies of our St. 
 Louis Movement, of whom this book specially seeks 
 to bring four to the front, show an axial, all-deter- 
 mining turn in their lives. Brockmeyer had sev- 
 eral momentous crises, but the central one, in my 
 judgment, was his return about his middle thirties, 
 out of his Titanic estrangement in the Missouri 
 backwoods, to civilization and to institutional life, 
 whereupon among his varied achievements he 
 founded our St. Louis Philosophical Society, which 
 otherwise had never existed, and without which this 
 book of mine could not have been written, and 
 probably some others. Harris had also his nodal 
 separation from St. Louis, and his return to New 
 England, which actually took place in his forties, 
 though spiritually it was manifest years earlier. 
 In a similar way I conceive Davidson's main life- 
 stroke, which came about when he quit his St. 
 Louis schooling, more significant for him than his
 
 216 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART FIRST. 
 
 Scotch University, and thereupon turned back 
 Eastward, as he circled around his thirty-fifth year. 
 And Miss Blow had her profound separation — 
 doubtless more deeply rending and painful than 
 either of the others, for it nearly killed her, being 
 a rupture from home, friends, social rank, and espe- 
 cially from the scene of her great personal achieve- 
 ment — which event occurred somewhere near her 
 middle thirties; so we dare vaguely guess in the 
 sensitive matter of a lady's age. 
 
 In fact the St. Louis Movement itself manifested 
 in its history this same breach or rupture, as we 
 have already portrayed it, in the flight of its lead- 
 ing early members, and their scattering, like a 
 flock of blackbirds shot into and flying asunder 
 toward all points of the compass. And it may be 
 here foresaid, that long afterwards there took place 
 a kind of return to the city, not complete certainly 
 but perceptible. Whereof somewhat may be told 
 in a later chapter. 
 
 Nor should we forget to remark a far-reaching 
 inference from the foregoing instances: all these 
 particular biographies suggest or perhaps enforce 
 the idea of an Universal Biography ; there are many 
 lives of many men of the widest diversity, but in 
 them all lurks the one life of the one Man, life of 
 Genus Homo, of the true Super-Man (not that of 
 Nietzsche). Emerson has now and then, but not 
 always glimpsed this Universal Man incarnating 
 himself in the myriads of individual men, and 
 named him the Standard Man, who is the real cen-
 
 LIFE'S CENTRAL NODE. 217 
 
 tral creative source of interest in human biography. 
 And here may be permitted another brief infer- 
 ence : this universal principle or all-pervasive proc- 
 ess of every man's life may yet be unfolded as the 
 law of Biography itself, thus transforming the 
 present biographic chaos into the order and trans- 
 parency of a science.
 
 Renascence 
 
 I would gladly now take my reader, if he be 
 willing, into my confidence and whisper to him 
 with some trepidation, my present object: I am 
 trying to periodize myself. What is that, he may 
 well ask. In general, it is to survey and, if pos- 
 sible, to define a Period of my entire life — not the 
 whole cycle of it but one of its great arcs. Such a 
 task is, in my view, fundamental for every work of 
 biography. 
 
 The widest, deepest break in my existence, or the 
 grand node of my life-work, was when I turned 
 away from St. Louis and started for Europe a 
 few days before I was thirty-seven years old. As 
 I look back at my deed now, through the interven- 
 ing trials of nearly half a century, I almost tremble 
 218
 
 RENASCENCE. 219 
 
 at what I then dared, merely throwing some inquis- 
 itive glances into the dark chasm ahead. Of course 
 I did not, could not foresee what a long discipline 
 lay in that seemingly insignificant act, whose direct 
 effects were to run through a full generation of 
 my years. At least so I now mark out and con- 
 strue, from my old-age's height of retrospect, the 
 Middle Period of my life, which started with my 
 first departure from St. Louis in 1877 and lasted 
 till my completed return to the same place some 
 three decades later. Let these dates be set down 
 as the two temporal limits, fore and aft, which can 
 be made elastic according to need. 
 
 The next problem is to find some brief phrase 
 or even single vocable which may suggest, even if 
 remotely, the meaning or general purport of this 
 protracted and somewhat diversified Period. Can 
 I compass it in a passably intelligible term or fore- 
 word which may always be recalled when wanted, 
 as a kind of clew mid the tangled labyrinth of life 
 now to be explored, and ordered if possible ? Such 
 a word, after some search and repeated changes, I 
 have found in the term Renascence, or New Birth 
 which at least hints the spiritual process not only 
 in myself, but also in the St. Louis Movement, and, 
 as I believe, in the time. Thus I began to be 
 born again through my European Journey, and 
 I kept up this my Renascence till old-age started 
 to steal slyly over me, upon whose advance I have 
 placed the foregoing limit of a date which may 
 be only artificial and perchance temporary. Ob-
 
 220 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 serve that I avoid the corresponding French term 
 Renaissance, which bears a different though related 
 significance. 
 
 Two other expressions in the preceding account 
 may need a brief comment. I have alluded to my 
 Departure from and my Return to St. Louis, which 
 I would again emphasize. Thus is hinted the 
 spatial round, or it may be the encircling orbit of 
 the Period sweeping through its time. Now this 
 Departure and Return, outward in Nature, has 
 also its inner counterpart in Spirit — both in me 
 and in the St. Louis Movement. Both of us went 
 away and came back. Birth is the first great sepa- 
 ration which ushers the individual into the light; 
 my Renascence was my second birth into the 
 world's illumination, for which I had to quit my 
 immediate environment till I had wrought out my 
 restoration. The infant coming from its immediate 
 sinless and sunless home into sunshine, has made 
 its first new Departure, typical of others in after 
 days, so the original human nascence becomes the 
 foreshow and the primal expression of all later 
 human Renascences. 
 
 Accordingly, this my Second Period, opens with 
 a great separation from my previous immediate 
 American life, which I had hitherto lived, umbili- 
 cally as it were, remaining unborn in a sense, till I 
 pushed out across the interjacent ocean to my re- 
 generating home. Even from my last-acquired St. 
 Louis descipline, Philosophy, I must part; I had 
 gotten all it would give, at least so I thought, 
 and even more deeply felt. The philosophical
 
 RENASCENCE. 221 
 
 world view I had absorbed, wrought over into my 
 mentality, and applied to a number of intellectual 
 realms in my own private workshop, and especially 
 in my instruction at the High School. Nature, 
 Art, History, Institutions, yea Philosophy itself 
 from old Greece down to the present, I had Hegel- 
 ized. I felt the surfeit of abstraction and of tradi- 
 tion as well as the prison of my locality — of St. 
 Louis, yea of America. Finally the circumstances 
 of life had so squared themselves to my Departure 
 that I seemed to hear the urgent invitation of 
 Providence Himself: "Now is the time to go — 
 pack up and be off. Forward to the other side 
 of the World, or of the Universe, and see what is 
 there." 
 
 I felt it also to be a going back to my old antece- 
 dent pre- American self in distant lands and long- 
 agone cultures. Still, in a sense, I could not run 
 away from the St. Louis Movement, I had to take 
 it with me, and through it look at my fresh expe- 
 riences. It had become integrated with my life, 
 with my very consciousness. 
 
 Departure, then, is the word and the thing which 
 I have to stress at this point. Doubtless the term 
 sounds strange on its first hearing — Departure — 
 by which I seek to designate the break into an en- 
 tire new Period of my own evolution, and also of 
 the St. Louis Movement, in so far as the latter pro- 
 ceeds along my lines of activity. Moreover this 
 Departure from St. Louis, or separation from its 
 local and cultural life, continued toward thirty
 
 222 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 years, till the Return came and with it a kind of 
 rejuvenescence of the old Movement. The preceding 
 Epoch, which shut down somewhat abruptly as I 
 leaped on a railroad train and crossed the Mis- 
 sissippi River, speeding in an unbroken time-line 
 for Europe, embraced my stay at St. Louis lasting 
 some thirteen years. But now I am off, on this 
 December day of 1877, having passed just beyond 
 the middle year of the journey of human life, as 
 Dante records of himself when he steps out of his 
 previous world over into his Inferno. So the old 
 Florentine poet preludes his famous Departure, as 
 we may call it here for the sake of a moment's 
 comparison, and proceeds to sing, through his three 
 Canticles, the marvelous experiences which befell 
 him after his Grand Crossing. And every man 
 has his Grand or Petty Crossing in life's journey; 
 this European trip I hold to be mine. 
 
 In the present Departure, then, I quit St. Louis, 
 but I take the St. Louis Movement along with me 
 over lands and seas, and then bring it back home 
 again. Hitherto I clung to the immediate locality 
 of the Movement, to its city and people and to its 
 studies ; but now the breach has come, that separa- 
 tion, spatial and spiritual, which seldom is wanting 
 to any complete human discipline. 
 
 In the larger sense the Departure was along its 
 entire course a Departure from Tradition, and in- 
 deed a new and deeper Departure therefrom. Al- 
 ready we have indicated that the St. Louis Move- 
 ment had its first push in a strong spiritual revul-
 
 RENASCENCE. 223 
 
 sion against the four prescribed cultural elements 
 which it found already seeded and greening in St. 
 Louis. Hence arose the fifth cultural element, 
 home-grown, distinctive, sprung of the time and 
 the city's native character; this we called our own 
 St. Louis Movement, which never failed to assert 
 its prime originality. And yet it too was based 
 upon Tradition; it prescribed a European philos- 
 opher and his philosophy just to attack and sup- 
 plant European prescription. We followed tradi- 
 tional Hegel in order to become anti-traditional. 
 And this negative service, very necessary at the 
 start for clearing the way, the German thinker 
 performed for us, and along with it conferred other 
 great, though perhaps lesser benefits. 
 
 But in time the lurking contradiction strove to 
 work itself out, and it made itself felt at first un- 
 consciously by me, and, as I believe, by the Philo- 
 sophical Society, which began to waste away 
 through its own inner self-attrition and to pass 
 over into something else. Now it was primarily 
 this feeling of discord with myself and with my 
 accepted philosophic doctrine that drove me out of 
 my first exclusive cultivation of it, so that I be- 
 took myself to other forms of human expression, 
 such as art and poetry. I may add, in view of 
 what occurred long afterwards, and will be re- 
 counted in its place that I must have begun to 
 catch the undertone of contradiction not only in 
 Hegel but in all Philosophy, from old Greek Thales 
 down to the present. Hegel had indeed answered
 
 224 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 the so-called antinomies of Kant, so I believed; 
 but he had left in his own work a yet deeper anti- 
 nomy, in fact the deepest of all, the one inherent in 
 Philosophy itself as the supreme European world- 
 discipline. This ultimate philosophic antinomy 
 was seething itself out in my laboring mind, as 
 thought's final self-negation, when I seized my 
 opportunity to run away from it in search of some 
 more harmonious utterance of myself and of my 
 time. And to-day the reflection keeps echoing 
 within me that Europe now is working out in the 
 blood of her peoples the original contradiction of 
 her spirit as expressed most deeply in the whole 
 line of her Philosophies, from Thales to Bergson. 
 
 Thus in a far-away retrospection I try to ex- 
 plain myself, looking through a commentary of 
 forty years. I was then unconscious of what was 
 impelling me, now I believe me conscious. So long 
 it has taken me to know the cause which I then 
 dimly felt, and which was driving me to solve the 
 philosophic dualism of Europe, which I had in- 
 herited and laboriously overwrought, and to re- 
 place it by a new world-discipline born of our own 
 country's deeds and institutions. In other words 
 universal Psychology was throbbing embryonically 
 underneath my Philosophy, but the embryo would 
 require many a long year before it was ready to 
 spring forth into the light of day! 
 
 So I in review have to think my journey 
 abroad was the creative urge to a new and pro- 
 tracted stage of my career. Meanwhile what be-
 
 RENASCENCE. 225 
 
 came of the St. Louis Movement? I can only re- 
 peat that I bore it along with me, what of it was 
 mine ; what of it was not mine, I naturally left by 
 the wayside. I could not wholly escape from all 
 that I had been and done ; it still murmured along 
 within me as an underflowing current of influence 
 throughout this fresh voyage of discovery. But I 
 can truly say that Philosophy was subordinate dur- 
 ing these travels; my mind was turned outward, 
 not so much inward. 
 
 Even in my reaction against Tradition, I found 
 I had been all the while absorbing the traditional 
 culture of Europe which had come to me through 
 various channels from the outside, and which I 
 had duly appropriated as my first education at 
 School and College. But just this outsideness of 
 my spirit's most precious aliment made me feel 
 unfree and even unhappy, and I resolved to find 
 the remedy by going back to the prime cultural 
 source, and there observing life afresh, and, if pos- 
 sible, living it in its very origin. So from St. 
 Louis I started for the head-waters of European 
 civilization in old Hellas. The prescribed Greek 
 tongue I had learned in the school-room after the 
 prescribed way, but now I would seize it unpre- 
 scribed by drinking of it at its first throb from the 
 hearts of the people who still spoke it attuned to 
 their mother's early lisp. And I would make Cas- 
 talia's fount gush into spontaneous English. Thus 
 the mere erudite tradition of classic lore with its 
 dead grammar and dictionary I would re-bear to
 
 226 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 new life from my own spirit's genesis, and en- 
 deavor to transfuse the same into my modern ver- 
 nacular for my own self-expression, as well as for 
 impartation to others who might be willing to lis- 
 ten. 
 
 But this Greek revival was only the first act of 
 the present Period, which was to be followed by 
 others in due evolution both of myself and of the 
 St. Louis Movement. For the Greek Renascence 
 in me was to rise to the European, and beyond 
 Europe it was to become universal. All of which 
 is first to be lived and achieved, and then to find 
 expression. 
 
 iThe interest of this deepest Departure of all my 
 days turns on the fact that while I was all unaware 
 of its meaning at the time and whither it tended, 
 I still was carrying out into reality the true pur- 
 pose of my existence. The total round of life with- 
 in was simply drawing one of its largest arcs with- 
 out. As I trod contemplatively the steamer's deck, 
 the first sunset on the boundless ocean, when the 
 ship had lost sight of land, made me feel the depth 
 of my present crisis, so that I jotted down: "I 
 have come to the end of something and now I am 
 beginning something else ; but what it is, I cannot 
 tell." So I rode over the seas peering out for that 
 future of me which my whole life, still implicit in 
 me, had to unfold to its fullness, whereof I am 
 here trying to give some account. For now I can 
 see what I was then about, inasmuch it has attained 
 a certain fulfilment in the deed, which is fairly 
 discernible and describable.
 
 RENASCENCE. 227 
 
 What, therefore, was I seeking to accomplish 
 during this whole generation filled with middle 
 life's best? Can I summarize in a far-hintful con- 
 cept that long sweep of the busy years, each of 
 which is full of its own separate details ? As far as 
 I may be able to construe my own life-task, I would 
 recreate within myself, express in speech by voice 
 and print and impart to others whom I might get 
 to hearken and to read, the cultural evolution of 
 man. This considerable labor I dared tackle in my 
 own limited environment, and perform to the ex- 
 tent of my powers. The race's civilization I was to 
 re-live and make mine ; then I was to formulate 
 it anew in my own terms, whereby I might be able 
 to share my best with the like-minded. Or, to em- 
 ploy a different nomenclature for the somewhat 
 elusive thought, the "World-Spirit as manifested in 
 and over the course of human History I was to 
 appropriate mentally, then to express in my own 
 speech, that I might give away my excellence if I 
 had any to give. 
 
 The three portions of this life-task, or its three 
 duties may be briefly categorized: (1) Acquisi- 
 tion, or the getting to know; (2) Expression or 
 the forming what you know; (3) Impartation, or 
 the giving away what you know. 
 
 For me, as this living individual existence at a 
 certain place, in a limited time, and under a given 
 social and institutional order, the second of these 
 parts was and still is the most significant and im- 
 perative; that is, mine is the supreme need of ex-
 
 228 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 pression. Such a part, accordingly, is that of a 
 mediator, a gospeller, or perchance an evangelist, 
 whose function is to become in a small way or 
 large, the voice of all time to his own time, to 
 unite self-expression and world-expression in the 
 one act of utterance. 
 
 And now with this general outlook upon what I 
 call my Middle Period, embracing inner develop- 
 ment, literary production, and active promulga- 
 tion, I wish to recur to the statement of it as a 
 continuous Renascence of myself, and along with 
 me of the St. Louis Movement. Neither of the 
 twain can escape the other, so intergrown have we 
 become, though I am not by any means the whole 
 Movement. Others, indeed many others, contrib- 
 uted to it their own distinct lines of achievement; 
 and still more may yet take the chance of adding 
 to it somewhat of their work, worth, and word. 
 
 But of this long and complex Period there should 
 be subordinate groupings or stages with their land- 
 ing-places as joints of the total organism. So in my 
 purview I think I can discern three considerable 
 sweeps or waves with rise and fall over this sea 
 of time, which reveal in outer form the inner pro- 
 cess going forward in the soul of the man and the 
 movement. That is, of the one grand Renascence 
 there are three lesser Renascences, which may be 
 measured from crest to crest, somehow as follows: 
 
 First is The Renascence torn, or The Classical 
 Renascence; the Epoch of the acquisition of Greek 
 Spirit, with its varied expression in Art, Litera-
 
 RENASCENCE. 229 
 
 ture and Philosophy. This is the prime germinal 
 deed, the fruitful embryonic Renascence of all 
 future Renascences. Here, then, is the genetic 
 starting-point of the Period, which in my case con- 
 tinued some seven or eight years (1877 till 1884-5). 
 
 Second is the Renascence evolved and propa- 
 gated, or its double development. That is, it moves 
 along two distinct, yet parallel lines: on the one 
 line runs its internal growth till it embraces all 
 four Literary Bibles together with my expression 
 of them in writ and print ; on the other line runs 
 its external dissemination in various forms (lec- 
 ture, class, school, the communal institute). Now 
 the seed has to be sown far and wide, which calls 
 for a time of wandering in the propagator or mis- 
 sionary, along with elaboration, extension, and ex- 
 pression of the work. This Epoch, full of journey- 
 ings interspersed with a number of writings, lasted 
 toward a dozen years (1884-5 till 1895-6). 
 
 Third is The Psychological Renascence, or the 
 New Birth of the Psyche, Self, Ego, which has 
 hitherto secretly lurked and wrought in the fore- 
 going Renascence, but now becomes explicit, un- 
 folding itself into its own forms through its own 
 activity, and so making its own new science. Thus 
 that which created the previous Renascence is now 
 to create itself, or is to bring forth its own Renas- 
 cence, whereby it passes from appropriating or 
 fabricating alien forms for itself, (such as Art, 
 Literature, Philosophy) to producing and ordering 
 its own native form for itself, with all the varied
 
 230 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 manifestations of the same — such we name The 
 Psychological Renascence. The course of the pres- 
 ent Epoch at its beginning may be dated about 
 1895-6, and continues for a decade and more. 
 
 So this total Renascence rounds itself out when 
 it returns into itself from other-creating to self- 
 creating. Thus too it has periodized itself in its 
 long evolution lasting some thirty years. The 
 general sweep has been in this wise : from Philos- 
 ophy, through the Classical world and its evolu- 
 tion, to Psychology. All this seems a strange de- 
 velopment or education of a human soul, but it is 
 mine, being my life's achievement, and constitut- 
 ing that which I truly am, my very individuality. 
 Of course the more significant details of this long 
 process are to be set forth in the account which fol- 
 lows. But here let us add that not only the old 
 Greek seed is to be re-planted, but a new kind of 
 seed is to be evolved; Man's Renascence has now 
 to take place not merely in and through its outer 
 expression (Art, Literature, Philosophy), but 
 turns to the inner creative Self, which must hence- 
 forth make its own expression in a new science 
 (Universal Psychology). Whereof the full expo- 
 sition lies quite a distance ahead of us. 
 
 Thus in vague foreshadowy outlines the reader 
 may glimpse the sweep of the present Period with 
 its three Chapters or Epochs. Of course my in- 
 separable companion in all these rounds was the 
 St. Louis Movement, not St. Louis herself, who 
 did not go along, but seemed to sink down into a
 
 RENASCENCE. 231 
 
 strange barren lethargy during these years. As 
 for me in this crisis, I had to separate not only from 
 my urban life but from my American or Occidental 
 world, and flee to its opposite on the other side of 
 our earth-ball, that I might win my spirit's Renas- 
 cence, I in person beholding the Hellenic folk in 
 person, talking with it in its own primal spon- 
 taneous dialect, thereby taking up its first creative 
 soul into mine, whereupon I could return home 
 and give out whatever of worth I had brought 
 back, to those who might feel the same need of a 
 New Birth. 
 
 Nor could I stop and settle down contented with 
 my mere appropriation of the most beautiful and 
 best in the world — that were indeed the death, not 
 of it but of me. So I had to impart in order to be. 
 And not only impart through the voice but through 
 the pen — this being the eternal impartation. And 
 still further, the thing imparted and penned must 
 be the Eternal as adjudged by the Tribunal of the 
 Ages. So I chose the Literary Bibles of the Race 
 as the true vehicle for my own ever-renewing 
 Renascence as well as for that of my time. 
 
 I may here append that this cultural Renascence 
 (as it can be qualified) is not merely mine, but 
 also the world's; and the world's cultural Rena- 
 scence had its start in time and place as well as 
 mine, and the latter must be nourished from the 
 former. In other words, the race's civilization is 
 the prime genetic source of the spiritual training 
 of the individual. So I must be culturally re-born
 
 232 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 from my race's first cultural fountain, which is an- 
 cient Hellas whose Nascence is the original well- 
 head of all Renascences since then — Latin, Italian, 
 German, French, Shakespearian, Goethean, and 
 perchance American. Indeed our last world-poet, 
 Goethe, has become conscious of this fact and has 
 poetically set forth his own as well as his time's 
 Renascence springing out of the old Hellenic spirit, 
 in the Second Part of his Faust — the truly proph- 
 etic Part of his poem, and the one yet to be real- 
 ized. Moreover he lived this Renascence, starting 
 with his Italian Journey, and evolving it after his 
 return and expressing it in verse and prose. And 
 every man, great and small, is to pass through 
 somewhat of the same process, if he wishes to win 
 an universal culture. So I from my little far-away 
 nest make a journey to antique Hellas for its 
 eternally creative Renascence. 
 
 Let me again emphasize that the significance and 
 the sweep of this renascent starting-point lay 
 wholly unconscious within me from its first germ- 
 ination, and that it unfolded itself according to its 
 own native law of growth. And remember that I 
 am now trying to trace its course through the 
 perspective of a life-time.
 
 CHAPTER FIRST 
 
 The Classical Renascence 
 
 tFirst it was a flight on my own part to the 
 immediate outer locality of Rome and Greece, and 
 to the external sense-arts of which they were the 
 masters and transmitters. So I became a fugitive 
 from too much of philosophy, poetry, music of the 
 introverted North to the architecture, sculpture, 
 painting of the extroverted South. I had begun 
 to feel myself painfully but a half of our whole 
 Human Nature at its highest achievement ; hence 
 I quite instinctively made a move to complete my- 
 self by seeking the other moiety of me in its sunny 
 home by the Midland Sea. I migrated like the 
 fowls of the air, when my winter came upon me, 
 toward the summer clime both of space and of 
 spirit. Or from my modern one-sided Teutonic 
 development of more than a decade, I reacted to 
 the antique Mediterranean culture of Classic 
 times. I repeat, this break came of no conscious 
 intention ; it was the spontaneous thrust of the 
 incomplete soul struggling to make itself com- 
 plete ; it was the entire life of my race, born with- 
 in me the implicit, as it is in every man, pushing 
 to become the explicit and real. Thus at present I 
 construe to myself my instinctive drive to the cul- 
 tural Past of my race. \ 
 233
 
 234 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 This Classical Epoch, as I call it, lasted dis- 
 tinctively some eight years, as the dominant fac- 
 tor of my activity, beginning in 1877, with my first 
 step toward Europe across the Mississippi, and 
 continuing till 1884-5, when another and greater 
 interest subordinated but did not destroy it by 
 any means. During this time the Greek world was 
 uppermost with me in thought, instruction and 
 literary creation. Three different localities, each 
 with its task and its training, play into and 
 through this Epoch: Europe, St. Louis, Concord, 
 whereof now we are to give the account. 
 
 The St. Louis Movement had also its Classical 
 phasis, which differed a good deal with different 
 members. Brockmeyer, our President, was not 
 without some trace of Greek, which he picked up at 
 Georgetown College and Brown University, both 
 of which he attended as an undergraduate. But I 
 never saw him look at or cite a Greek text. Still 
 he showed a keen appreciation of Classic form, es- 
 pecially as revealed in the dramas of Sophocles, of 
 which the Antigone was his favorite. I have heard 
 him say, that the only true Art is the Classic, and 
 he belittled the distinction into Symbolic and Ro- 
 mantic Arts of his master Hegel. He gave me a 
 great surprise in his old-age when he wished me to 
 study with him Aristotle in Greek, saying he could 
 easily brush up his former knowledge of the 
 tongue. We never started, and in a year or two 
 he had passed away of himself into the Elysian 
 Fields, and left me behind.
 
 THE CLASSICAL RENASCENCE. 235 
 
 Harris studied the old Greek philosophers some- 
 what in the original, and he would cite rather tot- 
 teringly now and then certain brief Greek philo- 
 sophic terms, like the Aristotelian Nous poieticos. 
 Greek poetry I do not think he cared for. But 
 antique Sculpture he worked at theoretically a 
 good deal; especially I remember his elaborate 
 study of the Venus of Milo with illustrative draw- 
 ings. In the main, however, he took his Hellenism 
 at second hand, namely from Hegel, who for real 
 mastery was one of the greatest of modern Hellen- 
 ists in the sphere of Aesthetics as well as in that 
 of pure Philosophy. 
 
 But confessedly the transcendent Grecian both 
 as to erudition and activity among us and in the 
 whole town was Thomas Davidson, our professor 
 of Greek in the High School, graduate of Aberdeen 
 University, Scotland. He would even claim upon 
 occasion to be a Classic Heathen in religion; I 
 once heard him at Rome berate modern Christian 
 degeneracy, as we paced the world-tragical ruins 
 of the Villa Hadriana. He was very learned, and 
 had read much of old Greek poetry, though I never 
 knew him to allude to the Greek historians, 
 Herodotus and Thucydides, who meant so much to 
 me. His overflowing knowledge streamed mainly 
 into the literary and the etymological channels at 
 this time. There is no doubt he stirred up a good 
 deal of interest in the community by his public lec- 
 tures and discussions on Greek topics. His dis- 
 course on Aristotle read at the University Club was
 
 236 TEE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 the triumph of the season. By way of opposition 
 to our Hegelians, he adopted Aristotelianism, for 
 Davidson could not help being contradictory and 
 critical — delighting far more to kick in the traces 
 than to pull the load. 
 
 After his stay in St. Louis, Davidson went to 
 Greece in order to drink at the first sources of his 
 favorite Hellenic antiquities. "When I was at Rome 
 in 1878, who should appear at my quarters one day 
 but my old associate of the St. Louis High School, 
 Thomas Davidson, now in a retreat from his once 
 dear Hellas back to the "West. He told me much 
 about Athens in response to my questions, for I 
 had already made up my mind to go thither my- 
 self. I found him a good deal disillusioned in re- 
 gard to his former Greek ideals or idols; the old 
 enthusiasm was not wholly gone, but seemed de- 
 cidedly on the wane. He declined going with me 
 to the Vatican Museum for a survey of its Greek 
 treasures, of which he had once been the student 
 and the adorer, and over which I longed to hear 
 him expatiate with his old learned exuberance. 
 
 Davidson deserves the credit of having aroused 
 quite a thrill of communal interest in the Greek 
 classics during his stay in rather stolid unclassic 
 St. Louis (about eight years 1867-1875, if I re- 
 member the dates correctly). He excited a per- 
 sonal fascination in his own right, as well as won- 
 der at his unusual erudition. But Davidson had 
 no creative gift, he left no reproduction of the 
 Greek spirit to live after him, or of any other. "We
 
 THE CLASSICAL RENASCENCE. 237 
 
 were all shocked by the damnatory bitterness which 
 saturated his essay on the Frieze of the Parthenon; 
 very one-sided also was his view, I thought, and he 
 showed himself in angry reaction against his for- 
 mer German tendency at St. Louis. On my travels 
 I once met a distinguished archeologist who had 
 made a special study of the ancient Greek sculptor 
 Phidias, and I asked him : "Have you ever crossed 
 the path of our friend Mr. Thomas Davidson?" 
 His smile soured at once into a scowl, as he hissed 
 out: "No, and I do not wish to see him, he has 
 slandered the greatest teacher of my science," 
 meaning probably Overbeck of Leipzig. This hints 
 the chief fatality of the man, who negatives all, 
 and in the same act particularly himself. 
 
 Still Davidson had not a few excellent qualities, 
 and his career kept a strange tendency to inter- 
 lace with mine at certain points for many years — 
 his love of the Classical world being the deepest 
 and most enduring of our common attachments. 
 He will appear repeatedly with the years in the 
 course of the present narrative, and play his chosen 
 part of the advocatus diaboli, which was indeed his 
 office in the St. Louis Movement, of whose famous 
 members he was one, being also distinguished as 
 the most restless globe-rounder of us all. 
 
 As for me, by way of contrast with Davidson, I 
 can say that my visit to Greece brought no disillu- 
 sion, but rather increased my Classical devotion, 
 and certainly stimulated my creativity, whatever 
 that may be worth. I felt the strongest desire to
 
 238 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 reproduce the Greek spirit in mine, and then to 
 make it speak my own tongue for my self-expres 
 sion, which might also have some meaning for 
 others. To discover Hellas afresh, to recreate it 
 in new forms, and thus to impart it, will be the 
 occupation of what I here call the Classical Epoch 
 of myself and of the St. Louis Movement, which, I 
 may here testify, never failed to shadow me all 
 through my wanderings. 
 
 Let me then emphasize that the St. Louis Move- 
 ment along with myself is now to have its Classical 
 Renascence (or Renaissance, if you prefer Ithe 
 French word) ; we both are to take a dip back into 
 the old Greek world, which always brings a new 
 cultural birth to the individual and his age, re- 
 bearing and transfiguring all the formal knowledge 
 and the oft-rehearsed texts which make up the 
 grind of the much-worn drill-mill of College and 
 University. We are now bound for the actual liv- 
 ing Hellas, unparadigmed and unmummied, for 
 the very center of it, for the top of Parnassus it- 
 self. Let the watchful reader see if we get there. 
 Good-bye, we are off, both of us, for the St. Louis 
 Movement is going along. 
 
 I 
 
 The Classical Itineeary 
 
 tAlready I have alluded to my somewhat ex- 
 tended European Journey as the new starting- 
 point of my later life. It is the overture to all of
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 239 
 
 me that follows till I am played out to the last 
 note. Can I give this Journey in one brief con- 
 centrated action which will show the whole of it 
 in a single image beforehand for the reader ? Con- 
 ceive me now breaking away from St. Louis and 
 moving in a line of ascent up a mountain, rounding 
 quite this our side of the earth-ball, through many 
 laborious months, till I reach the top and take my 
 goal's prospect there at leisure; then, soulfully 
 satisfied, I run rapidly down the same path back 
 to the prime departing point, St. Louis. Such is 
 the long cycle or rather loup which I make in toil- 
 some practice, but which I now seek to compress 
 into one fleet-visioned snapshot of mind as a sort 
 of outline for the future. 
 
 Let me add that this mountain peak attained by 
 me was a real visible object, none other, than the 
 Greek Parnassus, which has upheld and still up- 
 holds its marvelous ideal or universal counterpart 
 ever floating down the ages and round the globe. 
 I can stoutly affirm that no such objective, when I 
 rode across the Mississippi bridge, lay in my 
 farthest-winged flight of fancy. In fact, I hardly 
 knew where I was till I got there, and looked 
 around. After some full days of delighted circum- 
 spection, I knew that the time was up, I had 
 reached the original source of what I came for. 
 Then I sprang down hill homeward. 
 
 Similar small turns or loups I had pre-enacted 
 several times on my main line of ascent. One of
 
 240 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 these^ the most impressive to me, I may recount. 
 Italy I could not leave without going to the top of 
 Vesuvius, and looking into, perchance descending 
 into, its ever-menacing crater which had shortly 
 before had a furious eruption. Several hours it 
 tasked me to toil up through yielding ashes and 
 scoriae to the top of the steep cone, where I saw 
 and even fondled the monster, asleep indeed, but 
 still breathing heavily with occasional grunts of 
 fire and lava. Then I leaped down the cone in as 
 many minutes as previously it took me hours to go 
 up. So the old Roman poet sang of Avernus, 
 Facilis descensus. 
 
 It will be in place now, I think, to mention 
 briefly what was the fulfilment which I experi- 
 enced at the last stage of my Classical Journey. 
 I felt that the Parnassian life, which still actually 
 existed quite in its primitive simplicity, was the 
 original well-head, the germinal reality of the Art 
 and its spirit which I first glimpsed at London in 
 the Elgin Marbles, and tracked through France, 
 Italy, Greece, till here I had reached at last its 
 native fountain in the actual folk. On this spot, 
 then, I seemed to have come upon the small, but 
 still living cell of Classical civilization, pre- 
 Athenian, pre-Homeric perchance, certainly proto- 
 Hellenic. That antique Tradition which I had 
 learned at school as dead, I here found alive in its 
 primal, quite microscopic stage, out of which the 
 old Greek culture evolved and has continued down 
 the ages till the present moment.
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 241 
 
 But along this outstretched line of travel of 
 many months, what was I to do? It must be ac- 
 knowledged that my hardest labor lay on the way, 
 not at the close— the getting, not the gotten. For 
 I had to clamber through the vast ruins of an- 
 tiquity scattered from one end of Europe to the 
 other. As I viewed the wrecks of a past civiliza- 
 tion, what was to be my attitude? I would re- 
 store them within me to their original form and 
 life, not only as isolated works but in their total 
 compass and environment ; indeed, I would try to 
 revivify through them the sunken social order 
 which produced them, resurrecting it at least in my 
 own spirit. For instance, when I contemplated the 
 huge torso of Hercules in the Vatican Museum at 
 Rome, the problem bade me thus: "Complete it, 
 reproduce it, as it once was; see the fragment of 
 the hero sitting there headless, armless, nearly leg- 
 less; be it thine to make him whole in thy soul's 
 sculpture. Go back and live in that old Greek 
 statuary's workshop, and there recreate in thine 
 own way his Art. But that is not all: through 
 this statue and its Art and the necessary presup- 
 positions of that Art, thou must reproduce the so- 
 cial structure antique, which called forth such a 
 work for its self-expression. In truth thou hast to 
 behold the entire Olympian Pantheon coming down 
 and taking-on their beautiful plastic shapes just 
 here in this Vatican Museum, in whose walls they 
 have been carefully imprisoned by the Pope as the 
 sovereign of the new order which has conquered
 
 242 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 them. Thine it is now to be present at the resur- 
 rection of the Gods." 
 
 So it happens in this Classical Itinerary that I 
 must for a time become a ruin like the Coliseum, 
 like the Parthenon, yea like all Rome, like all 
 Athens, re-living in myself also the fates of those 
 ancient edifices and of their cities. Then I have in 
 spirit to make myself over into these old mutilated 
 torsos, and to re-feel the stroke of destiny which 
 smote them to these remnants of a once great and 
 beautiful completeness. Can I sense the blow 
 which knocked off the head of this Hercules, or the 
 fall which broke the arm of yon Venus ? Methinks 
 that I must even die with this dead world in order 
 to resurrect it in myself, and there possibly re- 
 create it in a form of my own. 
 
 For all antiquity, Greece and Rome, as well as 
 their greatest individuals, had a tragic outcome of 
 existence. We feel their doom still as we wander 
 through their beautiful and often colossal ruins. 
 "We ask what was their deed which evoked such an 
 awful judgment. That, too, must be fearfully wit- 
 nessed and profoundly realized both in heart and 
 in thought, as one travels through the scenes of 
 this Classical Journey. What is the Lacoon but 
 the Greek man and even his Gods, yea his very 
 Zeus, fated ? So I sauntered along the time-stream 
 of History and beheld the tragedy of tragedies, 
 that of a whole world and its civilization. Yet per- 
 chance just now a mightier world-tragedy than 
 that of antiquity is being enacted before our eyes —
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 243 
 
 not the partial Greek or Roman one but that of 
 total Europe sinking under its long accrued tragic 
 guilt. 
 
 Nevertheless, through all this death I am going 
 back to life. The old chorus consisting of dance 
 and song and drama in one, is still leaping with 
 youthful freshness in Greece, though it seems al- 
 ready remote and somewhat artificial in early 
 Aeschylus and Pindar. Many a turn of the an- 
 cient Mythus I heard in living words still spoken 
 through the vales of Parnassus. Even the real 
 breathing model of the Faun of Praxiteles I saw 
 or fancied I saw standing in the Delphic sunlight. 
 Every statue of that artist's Faun housed up in 
 the galleries of to-day is said to be some copy of 
 the lost original; but I throbbed with joy at the 
 thought of looking on the original of the old sculp- 
 tor's original, his very model breathing still and 
 basking in the free mountain air of sunny Parnas- 
 sus. Such I acclaimed my native Dimitri, as he 
 stood before me mid his pasturing flock. So I 
 travel back in time through a ruinous, fragmentary, 
 scattered world to its earliest bud, which is still 
 alive and bursting into fresh flowerage just now 
 and every day. "When I realize fully this fact, 
 what I call my Delphic Moment, long forefelt, has 
 actually arrived, and my own Classical inflores- 
 cence has appeared and given its spiritual guerdon. 
 Then I turn about and face westward, whence I 
 came, bearing with me what spoils I have been able 
 to cull and to carry off in the course of my Jour-
 
 244 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ney, of which I may here add a few of the salient 
 details compiled with some care into a book show- 
 ing a timed succession of epistles from ancient 
 places. A Tour in Europe — such is the name of 
 the mentioned book in which I have gathered the 
 ripest fruits of my enterprise, after rejecting the 
 cruder stuff of many neetingly jotted memoranda. 
 Considerable heaps of the traveler's literary litter 
 were flung back into chaos whence they had es- 
 caped with the better harvest; still a few transi- 
 tory note-books survive awaiting their doom. 
 
 The aforesaid book remains, accordingly, in the 
 form of successive letters, into which I condensed 
 my capital experiences, as I journeyed along their 
 ascending line till they reached the apex already 
 described. The manuscript written on the spot 
 dates from first to last through the years 1877- 
 1879 ; the printing of it took place in 1907. Thus 
 the book lay hid in the author's drawer for nearly 
 thirty years, during the entire middle Period of 
 life. Finally the psychologic moment (as they 
 call it now) struck when it insisted on being at 
 least put into type, though it was never published 
 in the strict sense of the deed. As a legitimate 
 child of my brain, though long neglected, it had a 
 right to its inheritance of print, whereby it could 
 voice its thought and its heart to the reader who 
 might care. 
 
 This is the first and only book of mine which 
 took an epistolary form. On the whole I do not 
 like to write letters ; therein I have been a laggard
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 245 
 
 all my years, belabored by many justifiable com- 
 plaints. But these short daily communications to 
 my distant friends compelled me to put together 
 and to condense my scattered sight-seeings and my 
 random note-scribblings into a compacter writ. The 
 result was they took a native shape which could not 
 be broken without losing their character. So I let 
 them stay in print quite as they once dashed in 
 wild freedom through my pen over my papery 
 prairie. 
 
 London was my first halting-place. It was hid 
 in its winter overcoat of fog, and refused to let it- 
 self be seen for days at a time ; so I was driven into 
 two large edifices where things could be observed 
 by gaslight. In the National Gallery I studied the 
 paintings, especially those of Turner. Then I 
 passed to the British Museum, in which was housed 
 Classic Art, and I soon centered upon the Elgin 
 Marbles. Still I worked hard at Turner, having 
 previously read Ruskin, with great admiration for 
 his style but with small respect for his thought. 
 The gorgeous colors of the English painter daz- 
 zled, and I tried to believe in him, but very fanatic- 
 ally I could not. Will he signify anything great 
 and permanent in the march of the ages? The 
 Oracle was silent, and I thought shook his head. 
 Then I turned to consult the statues of the Par- 
 thenon, here in a kind of exile, and I received the 
 oracular nod to seek their birth-place for my fu- 
 ture salvation. So I started with a somewhat more 
 conscious pace toward my Renascence.
 
 246 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Paris was the next stop, the gaudy urban en- 
 chantress of the world. Behold now the sullen fog 
 cleared away, and the sun laughing with his earthly 
 children once more. Here two centers of attrac- 
 tion tied me fast for five weeks. The first was 
 French Literature, with which the very atmosphere 
 of Paris seemed to be overcharged till it dripped 
 on the pavement. That was a new and to me a 
 very congenial experience. It was a city more de- 
 voted to self-expression than any other on the globe 
 probably. Still in spite of the charm of literary 
 Paris, I again chose Hellas as my goal, and kept 
 sweet converse with the sculptured antiques of the 
 Louvre as my most intimate companions. Victor 
 Hugo was still alive, but even of him I did not try 
 to catch a living glimpse. I wish now I had. 
 
 Rome was the third landing to which my many- 
 leagued boots bore me at a single stride southward 
 high over the white-hatted Alps down through the 
 genial sheen of the Italian spring. March (1878) 
 had just begun when the railroad train whizzed 
 me through a crevice in the old Roman wall past 
 a ruinous aqueduct, and set me down inside the 
 Eternal City. Properly I had now reached the 
 first goal of my Journey (not yet the second or 
 the third). The contrast with London and Paris, 
 which are essentially present-lived, shot at once 
 into my eye, which here beheld on all sides the 
 fragments of a foregone world. The Past was 
 everywhere in evidence; the very atmosphere 
 seemed overladen with former greatness. Rem-
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 247 
 
 nants, torsos, ruins, tragedy crushed not only into 
 outer vision but into mind and feeling. Not the 
 Coliseum alone rose up a fragment, but all Rome 
 was a ruin often mossy-green and in places even 
 flowery (at that time the young Italy of Victor 
 Immanuel was just budding into its early spring, 
 having won its new-old capital). Roman Spirit 
 still lay here a huge torso on its seven hills like 
 that of Hercules; the Roman People '(Populus 
 Romanus) appeared yet existent in name and in 
 life, but was the greatest, most impressive ruin of 
 all Roman ruins, because a living ruin. What am 
 I to do with such a massive shattered world? Re- 
 store, recreate, and make integral this broken Past 
 as a true part of myself, else the present European 
 discipline will be for me in vain. 
 
 Thus I grapple with my desperate problem, for 
 I must actually be all these Roman torsos, and 
 likewise the one universal torso of Rome herself, 
 that I may live out her death and her resurrection. 
 Daily I sit down before her monumental works and 
 strive to re-create their creative spirit as well as to 
 become its downfall, and thus live anew and mas- 
 ter my own tradition as a child of my race's 
 civilization. Of which struggle the inquisitive 
 reader can consult the record in the before-men- 
 tioned book. 
 
 I must not, however, omit one wholly unexpected 
 hatch from my long Roman incubation : the Classic 
 verse called elegiac with its peculiar hexametral 
 cadence. I had never in my life tried or thought
 
 248 TnE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOKD. 
 
 of trying such a poetical venture ; but of a sudden 
 one day at Rome "fleets in at my window" the 
 antique epigram after the model of the old Greek 
 Anthology. I obeyed the Muse with an incredulous 
 titter, thinking it only to be one of her little mo- 
 mentary fantasticalities, several of which she had 
 already served up to me passingly just in the 
 Eternal City. But this present mood of hers has 
 proved at least obdurate, possibly eternal, being 
 no petty Anacreontic jet, or deftly intermetered 
 Horation lyric, in which I had often tested myself 
 here on the Classic terrain. Moreover, this poetical 
 bent of mine has met with a decided rebuff even 
 from friends, who have said it was a great mis- 
 take, I being no poet. Still I have persisted in 
 giving literary form to myself in my own way, re- 
 fusing to be recreant to my primordial right of 
 self-expression, or untrue to my Super-vocation, 
 which awaits no vote of otheis, not even compli- 
 mentary. So the hexametral swing, first rollicking 
 in me and around me at Rome, has kept up its 
 rhythm in my heart and in my voice at intervals 
 down to the present hour in thousands of verses. 
 It is one form of that re-production of the antique 
 world which flowered along the wayside of this 
 Classical Itinerary. 
 
 After nearly four months, the hot weather of 
 Rome with its army of fleas remorseless in their 
 morsels of me, put me to flight toward the North 
 where I made the German detour of my Itinerary. 
 I passed through the old Teutonic heart of Father-
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 249 
 
 land, and swam (on a steamboat) up and down its 
 main artery of song and story, the Rhine stream. 
 I actually saw the Lorelei and hymned its legend 
 after Heine, but without the old appeal ; and when 
 I, crooning Byron, looked up to the Drachenfels, 
 Nature's mad Gothicism, I shrank. Indeed I sur- 
 prised myself, as I recognized how complete was my 
 revulsion against my former German tendency in 
 St. Louis, whose spell had lasted toward a dozen 
 years. I had gone back to my earlier Romanic pre- 
 ference for France and Italy ; but still more deeply 
 I had become already intergrown with the Classic 
 World, and sought here just under the Northern 
 Star through memory to recreate it in prose and 
 verse. No more fairyland, no more ballads, no 
 more rhymes even, my delight was to hymn elegiac 
 stanzas with the hexametral flow right in the pres- 
 ence of the nixes and norns of the venerable Teu- 
 tonic Rhine. Not ungrateful was my deed, I hope ; 
 but such was now the irrespressible call to round 
 out the Classic arc of my life's fulfilment. So 
 when the first autumnal leaves had begun to twirl 
 down upon the causeway of "Wiesbaden, I started 
 off southward again for Rome, and then for Hellas. 
 The fact was I had already felt that I «ould not 
 bring to a close in Rome this Classical Itinerary. 
 Its edifices, its galleries, even its ruins pointed back 
 to a previous original source, to the higher-up 
 creative Hellas. So I set out once more from Rom,?. 
 now for the South. I caught in Naples a still liv- 
 ing undertone of its old Greek origin, and pon-
 
 250 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 dered in Pompeii the appalling torso of a whole 
 ancient community, symbol of an entire fated 
 civilization. Finally I reached the templed home 
 of Athena, itself another antique torso, most beauti- 
 ful of its kind, and still seated upon its lofty Acro- 
 polis, though begirt now with harsh and homely 
 unclassical modernities. There I take lodgment 
 for many moons, and start to talking Greek right 
 in the Pnyx and the Academe still echoing with 
 the words of Demosthenes and Plato. 
 
 But now I find that Athens too points else- 
 whither, it is not my goal's last turnabout. I be- 
 gin to feel the old city had also its antecedent 
 aforetime, its original atomic life-germ. I started 
 from St. Louis for the head-waters of the cultural 
 evolution of Europe, and I must keep up the quest. 
 People at Athens pointed out to me on the Par- 
 nassus an autochthonous, pre-Athenian folk still 
 alive and doing their day's little task in their 
 primitive mountain hamlets. Thither accordingly 
 I take my way with a premonitory joy in my heart, 
 wandering quite by myself on mule-paths over 
 crags and dowu gulches where no wheeled vehicle 
 is possible. 
 
 I have already indicated the result of this my 
 last push for the primordial home of that Greek 
 tradition which had been very traditionally handed 
 down to me, an American youth at a Western Col- 
 lege, through thousands of years. The St. Louis 
 Movement with its anti-traditional trend had 
 driven me to travel backward to the earliest pre-
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 251 
 
 suppositions of my culture, imposed upon me as it 
 was and as it had to be, from without. I was not 
 able to turn around till I had reached the original 
 source, perchance the elemental microscopic gem- 
 mule of Europe's civilization. I may here repeat 
 that when I heard the horologe of my Classical 
 Itinerary strike the Delphic Moment, I faced about 
 and sailed rapidly down the time-stream till I once 
 more landed at one of its far-western ports, named 
 St. Louis, where I now am starting over on a new 
 journey. 
 
 This Delphic Moment darted a sudden leave-tak- 
 ing sensation which insisted upon attuning itself 
 within me to a classic measure as I shed my last 
 glance over the Parnassian landscape. Conceive 
 me, then high up the mountain on a little perch 
 overlooking the Delphic vale, when the Moment 
 strikes me and I seize my notebook from my pocket 
 to scribble down these verses: 
 
 The Delphic Moment 
 
 All the year has suddenly bloomed in this day, 
 in this minute; 
 The whole world is a flower fragrantly blowing 
 just now. 
 
 Every rise of the Sun hath seemed in some joy 
 to look forward, 
 This is the moment it saw far in the glow of its 
 eye.
 
 252 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 All the days of the year have been climbing above 
 to this summit, 
 Now each tick of the clock sadly must knell their 
 decline. 
 But thy journey of life has now reached its most 
 beautiful moment, 
 Hold it fast in thy heart — that is thy conquest 
 of Time. 
 
 Such was the pivotal turn of my Classical Renas- 
 cence with the slow journey forward, and the 
 swift sweep back homeward. A new curriculum 
 (or spiritual race-course) in the University of 
 Civilization it may be regarded, which is yet to be 
 adopted into the completed system of Higher Edu- 
 cation. That little Greek world has shown itself 
 the creative prototype of all later cultural Renas- 
 cences, the primogeniture of Europe's noblest sons 
 in Literature, Art, Science, History, Philosophy. 
 And to that regenerative El Dorado I took my pil- 
 grimage, walking through Hellas alone and afoot 
 (monos kai pezos, as I had often to explain to the 
 astonished and sometimes suspicious Greek peas- 
 ants). It was my second considerable soldiering 
 campaign, the first being that of the Civil War, in 
 which I as an infantryman learned how to make 
 long marches, to dare hunger and thirst, and in the 
 pinch to face fire-arms. This Classic Itinerary, 
 especially the last Greek stage of it, I never could 
 have compassed without my testful experience of
 
 THE CLASSICAL ITINERARY. 253 
 
 military life, which was then still youthful in me, 
 being about fifteen years old. 
 
 When I had gotten back to London, from which 
 I had started many months before, I took occasion 
 to visit again the two great art-magnets of all Eng- 
 land, centering in the Turner Pictures at the Na- 
 tional Gallery, and in the Elgin Marbles at the 
 British Museum. I had first come to them from 
 my abstract philosophic studies eye-thirsty for the 
 beautiful plastic shape, and devoured both kinds in 
 an indiscriminate Bacchic debauch of vision. But 
 how do they appear to me now, after my long com- 
 munion with formful South, darling of the Sun? 
 For Italy and Greece had been to me one con- 
 tinuous art gallery, through which I had slowly 
 wandered contemplating their great works and 
 stilling my long-suppressed form-hunger. Again 
 the interrogation rises: Which of these two men 
 Turner or Phidias, the modern Englishman or the 
 old Greek, has best given us to view the Eternal? 
 Indeed which of the two has already outlasted the 
 testing blows of old Time's trip-hammer? Harris 
 I had heard philosophize the Turnerian iridescence, 
 with a wonder hopeful of knowledge, and I had 
 much admired Ruskin's own artistry in re-paint- 
 ing with words full of rainbows Turner's seduct- 
 ively chromatic art. Still I have to put the ulti- 
 mate test : Which of the two artists has the crea- 
 tive power to produce again and again the cultural 
 Renascence of the race? Just now that is what I 
 am hoping for in myself and also in the St. Louis
 
 254 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Movement. So I set out from England in my one- 
 sided antique glow, without seeing Shakespeare's 
 Stratford, home of our most eternal modern man, 
 greatest possibly of all our greatness. But we need 
 not try to anticipate the tribunal of the milleniums. 
 Yet alas for me ! I still am commiserating my lot on 
 account of my lifetime's penalty for a moment's 
 negligence. 
 
 II 
 
 The St. Louis Literary Classes 
 
 Now occurs the strangest, suddenest cultural up- 
 burst within my experience. It was the almost 
 universal rise of independent clubs or classes 
 throughout the St. Louis community for the study 
 of the masterpieces, chiefly literary — wholly so as 
 far as my horizon extended. Something incalcu- 
 lable still lurks in the phenomenon after more than 
 thirty years have passed in which it has had good 
 time to tell what it meant. 
 
 I had scarcely gotten home from my European 
 Journey and settled down to begin life anew in the 
 fall of 1879 when people began to come to me as 
 a known schoolmaster, and to ask for some kind of 
 instruction in what I had learned abroad. The first 
 gathering, as far as I now recollect took place in 
 the pleasant and spacious parlor of an old friend 
 on the South Side, a cultivated and traveled gen- 
 tleman who had shown a special interest in Italy. 
 A considerable audience we succeeded in bringing 
 together, to which I read and talked with some en-
 
 THE ST. LOUIS LITERARY CLASSES. 255 
 
 thusiasm, I suppose, about scenes and glories 
 classical. Two results began to show themselves. 
 First, a book started on its evolution, as I put 
 together and wrote out my salient experiences in 
 Greece: which book not long afterward completed 
 itself and made its little bow to the public under 
 the name of A Walk in Hellas. The second result 
 was that a number of people then present wished 
 to make special studies of the classical world, 
 about which they had heard and even read some- 
 what, but knew little worth while. Whereupon 
 several small clubs, or rather classes (the latter 
 is the better name for the thing) began to nucleate 
 and then rapidly to put forth into button and 
 flower. They appealed to me for instruction, as 
 they imagined I knew something about what I had 
 just seen, at considerable expense of brawn and 
 brain and of shoe-leather. 
 
 Other independent centers seemed to spring up 
 at once in different parts of the city. People whom 
 I never knew appeared before me with the request 
 that I take the lead in their circle for the study 
 of Homer or Shakespeare. Astounding to me and 
 without parallel in my later experience was and 
 remains the fact that wealthy high-toned ladies 
 took zealous part in this movement, being eager 
 to go to school again and to study the prescribed 
 lesson at the feet of the rather mannerless school- 
 master. Evening classes for men occupied with 
 the day's business were formed; afternoon classes 
 for ladies of leisure were perhaps in the majority ;
 
 256 TEE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 two-sexed classes also could not be prevented. I had 
 taken work again in the High School,but after little 
 more than a year I resigned my appointed position 
 to assume charge of what seemed to me a greater 
 call, namely to be an unappointed professor in the 
 new university of the rising educative institution, 
 perchance just the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 Tell us now — I hear myself demanding of my- 
 self — what were the branches taught, give us the 
 curriculum of your young Academe of the world's 
 best training? Hardly a rigidly fixed course can 
 be pointed out; it was to be free, self-chosen, self- 
 unfolding. Still I may give the general trend and 
 center of my prime endeavor: the revival of the 
 classical spirit as expressed in Greek Literature. 
 Homer, the fountain of Hellenic culture, and per- 
 haps the best and completest single utterance of 
 it was my chief text-book ; to this was added Greek 
 History, Greek Drama, Greek Art. I required 
 every member to read and to study the assigned 
 lesson in some good translation, which was usually 
 designated. Besides this stricter pedagogy, I 
 would talk, read, and lecture generally on Greece, 
 modern and ancient, interspersed with my fresh 
 personal experiences of the land and its folk. Nor 
 were my own metered effusions always withheld 
 out of modesty, for I often thought them the best 
 of my best, through some born infatuation for my 
 poetic children. The ancient tongues were not 
 taught by me, I refused the drill of grammar and 
 dictionary, and of painful syntactical construction ;
 
 THE ST. LOUIS LITERARY CLASSES. 257 
 
 whoever wanted such training must go to the High 
 School and College and University, which were only 
 preparatory to this higher Institution. I sought 
 to compass in myself and to impart to my pupils 
 that elusive entity called the Greek Spirit, the very 
 soul of the antique world. 
 
 Thus a strange cultural epidemic broke out in 
 St. Louis and raged continuously for some years, 
 passing through the usual stages of growth, cul- 
 mination and decline. The period of this peculiar 
 Greek Renascence in my range lasted about six 
 years, say from 1879 till 1885. I of course am 
 speaking only for myself, and to a certain extent 
 for our St. Louis Movement. There were other 
 classes and other intellectual centers scattered 
 through the town. Both the Universities had their 
 own courses of public lectures, doubtless in re- 
 sponse to the general tendency. I remember at- 
 tending some prelections on Dante from a Catholic 
 viewpoint, which were held in the audience room 
 of the Jesuits. Some churches also had their lit- 
 erary appendix. Personally, however, I never had 
 anything to do with these side-issues; my work 
 was independent, self-supported and self-con- 
 tained, and it continued to evolve in freedom on 
 its own lines in the community. It was not at- 
 tached to any school or religious organization, 
 although all of its members and teachers were 
 professors of one thing or other, not excepting 
 religion. Somehow the new energy kept rising 
 and pushing its own way, I never started it
 
 258 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 or even directed it after starting, as far as I am 
 aware. It found me at hand and eager, undoubt- 
 edly, but I found it too, just ready to be turned 
 loose into the classical garden of beautiful Ely- 
 sium. Thus, if we dare think Homerically, the 
 God within and the God without flew together and 
 kissed in a kind of rapture. 
 
 "What had our earlier philosophic set to do with 
 this fresh turn of its history? It had changed or 
 rather developed a good stretch out of and beyond 
 itself. Brockmeyer, our President, took no part 
 in this phasis of the work; in fact he was mostly 
 absent during all these epochal years, having taken 
 flight from the City and State to the Indians, and 
 quit even philosophy for a time — a deeply dis- 
 illusioned Missouri politician. Once he dragged 
 me with him down to the Indian Teritory from my 
 Homer classes, to help him start some sort of kin- 
 dergarten for red children. I was thrown with 
 him several days, and he drew my sympathy more 
 than poor untutored Loo, for in living, hapless 
 reality I saw before me the hero Achilles, wrath- 
 ful, estranged from his people, and sulking in his 
 tent unheroized. Without intending it, he gave me 
 a memorable lesson in the eternal Homer. 
 
 Harris also had abandoned the then discordant 
 and disenchanted St. Louis (in 1880) and had 
 betaken himself to aged Concord in his dear 
 Yankeeland. He was another instance of great 
 Departures of the Great from the city about 
 this time. Still he came back every winter and
 
 THE ST. LOUIS LITERARY CLASSES. 259 
 
 held classes and lectures on an admirable variety 
 of clashing topics, some of which were Philosophy, 
 the Madonnas, Holy Pictures set off with a stere- 
 optieon, old-Norse Sagas, the Christian Trinity, 
 including talks on Dante and Goethe's Faust, espe- 
 cially the Second Part of the latter, and most 
 especially the Church Patres of the last Act. He 
 had his devoted band of followers who still upheld 
 his cultural headship, though he was no longer a 
 resident. As usual his personality was more win- 
 ning than his word, which was too often obscure, 
 rambling, and I have to think, indigested. In fact, 
 Harris would not, perhaps could not easily, organ- 
 ize his subject. Still he deserved the spiritual 
 hegemony which he had won by long, able, and 
 disinterested service. 
 
 Thus the St. Louis Movement was throbbing with 
 fresh energy during the present salient turn in 
 its career. While Harris was inclined to scatter 
 his efforts, I went the other way, and concentrated 
 chiefly upon the one theme of Greek spirit in Lit- 
 erature, though I too had some lateral branches. 
 But the prodigy of the fact which crossed me then 
 and still haunts me is that so many good people 
 of St. Louis, perhaps nearly a thousand from first 
 to last, should be suddenly seized with that classi- 
 cal spell, almost a convulsive fit of old Greek 
 Heathendom, against which as a deadly contagion 
 one worthy minister I heard of proposed a general 
 church quarantine. 
 
 Never since then has any such fever of learning 
 scourged our naturally reposeful population. And
 
 260 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT—PART SECOND. 
 
 never before was it known, as far as I have been 
 able to dig in our dust-wooing ereole archives. The 
 quiescent volcano erupted the one time, and soon 
 thereafter went to sleep again in a long, long nap, 
 but I hope not eternal. Why just then for once 
 and for all? What possible cause? Did some 
 super-eminent Power, like the World-Spirit, prod 
 us afresh for its end? Hard to see any such high 
 intervention in the present case. Or was it a bot- 
 tomless popular caprice, an unfathomable sudden 
 fad of the folk-soul? I have tried to connect it 
 with the city's prevailing mood of those years, 
 which was that of the Great Disillusion through 
 the census of 1880. Or could I have been the one 
 wee microbe which spread that Greek contagion 
 through the whole community? I think I may 
 have been the main center round which it chiefly 
 gathered and hovered for a season; but then I 
 have never been able to start any such epidemic 
 since, though I have tried hard more than once 
 to give a fresh inoculation. I may tell of me, how- 
 ever, that I was then at the highest creative up- 
 burst of what I may call my Greek productivity in 
 verse and prose. Under such a spell it is possible 
 that I may have been somewhat more contagious 
 than usual in imparting my Greek enthusiasm. 
 
 But the individual impulse to recreate in fresh 
 forms of my own speech that subtle classical spirit 
 had likewise its climacteric from which it went into 
 decline. The red flush of my first Greek enchant- 
 ment began to pale, and to move into another
 
 THE ST. LOUIS LITERARY CLASSES. 261 
 
 epoch. But for this transition the present narra- 
 tive is not yet ripe. 
 
 A more subtle result of these classes had started 
 to outline itself in my mind: the new educative 
 institution of the whole community, which lies 
 beyond all the academic forms of instruction — 
 High School, College, University. I did not per- 
 ceive at the time the full bearing of this phase of 
 our St. Louis Movement. But really we had broken 
 ground for the coming home-grown University, 
 quite different from the traditional one imported 
 from Europe. I gave it then no name, because I 
 was hardly conscious of its existence ; in fact, the 
 germ had still to unfold and to show itself per- 
 manent. As far as I then could tell, it might 
 be merely a temporary bubble of the time's caprice, 
 refulgent as the spectrum to-day, exploded to zero 
 on the morrow. Still it put an enduring stamp 
 upon my form of instruction, indeed it sealed my 
 life to its propagation. I never since that experi- 
 ence with communal classes and their native spirit, 
 was able to be a member of any academic institu- 
 tion in spite of some fair opportunities. I have 
 not been hostile ; I have co-operated dozen of times 
 with the scholastic tradition; but I have refused 
 to be subject to it, or to submerge in it my own 
 educative organism, small and incomplete though 
 this be. Thus I have evolved along with my 
 instruction my own instrumentalities of imparta- 
 tion, which, hardly more than embryonic at pres- 
 ent, have, I believe, a distinctive future. At a
 
 262 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 later period when I had become more fully aware 
 of this secretly growing institute of universal cul- 
 ture, I named it the Communal University. 
 
 So much for the St. Louis Movement in its new 
 stage on its own native soil. But we are to witness 
 it making a migration out of the West to the East, 
 out of a young free-born State to an old colonial 
 State full of manifold tradition, which it has to 
 meet with fresh energy. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Concord Philosophical School 
 
 Another step it was in the Great Departure of 
 the time, when the St. Louis Movement itself de- 
 parted or began to depart from St. Louis, its orig- 
 inal home, and to settle elsewhere in a sort of 
 spiritual estrangement. Our philosophic President 
 Brockmeyer had departed from us into a voluntary 
 exile among the unphilosophie savages; but he 
 cannot be forgotten by this history — he the massive 
 but increate and uncreative potentiality underly- 
 ing the entire St. Louis Movement. Our Secretary 
 Harris, the tireless propagandist, had departed 
 from us in the other direction, toward the highly 
 tutored New Englanders, whom he would still 
 further tutor and inoculate with the philosophic 
 world-view of Hegel. Here we may be allowed to 
 mention the third man of the original triad, none 
 other than private Snider who was still holding 
 the fort at St. Louis with the loyal assistance of
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 263 
 
 other privates. But he too was getting ready to 
 straddle, that is, both to stay and to depart, seek- 
 ing if possible, to unite the two sides in some new 
 reconciling combination. Each of these three 
 diverse actions doubtless sprang from the deepest 
 instinct of their respective doers, and mirrored 
 their individual characters, re-acting on the com- 
 mon cause, which we still shall name the St. Louis 
 Movement. 
 
 Taking up now this third person and making 
 him the first, at least grammatically, I may an- 
 nounce concerning myself, with modesty I hope, 
 that I received not long after my return to St. 
 Louis an invitation to give a course of lectures on 
 Shakespeare at the Concord School of Philosophy 
 during the summer session of 1880. To me, the 
 St. Louis schoolmaster, with small ability for self- 
 pushing and seemingly smaller for any public 
 function, this seemed a surprising advancement. 
 Moreover it has remained an influential turn in 
 my life. How did it come about? And what is 
 this new School of Philosophy which has risen to 
 light during my absence overseas on my European 
 Journey ? 
 
 I think it was in September, 1879, as I was 
 sauntering around Lafayette Park, rather listless 
 and Uncertain of the future, that I saw Harris, 
 recognizing me, leap out of his buggy and approach 
 me with a hearty smile and salute, which I warmly 
 requited, as I had not seen him since I had come 
 back from abroad, for he had been out of town.
 
 264 THE ST. LOUIS ^MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 He told me that he had been giving some lectures 
 at Concord, Massachusetts, during the summer, 
 that a School of Philosophy had been established 
 there to be held every summer, and that I had 
 been appointed one of the lecturers. He further- 
 more informed me that he had just given his first 
 course at the Orchard House, the old well-laureled 
 mansion of Mr. A. Bronson Alcott and daughters, 
 that the attendance, beyond all expectation, had 
 overflowed parlor and hall and even windows, and 
 that next year the School was to have a new com- 
 modious building, known as the Hillside Chapel, 
 the generous gift of a New York lady philan- 
 thropist, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson. 
 
 It was evident that Harris felt very buoyant in 
 his new elevation (so he held it), and he radiated 
 over me and into me his glowing prospects. He 
 said he had calculated upon my help, and at once 
 asked what theme I would like to take on the 
 program : philosophic or literary, Hegel or Shakes- 
 peare? I answered that I was not in the mood for 
 philosophy, not even for Hegel, and that he was 
 well able to cover the field himself, but that I 
 would come to his aid in the discussions, whenever 
 I could serve him. "Very well," he replied, "I 
 shall put you down for Shakespeare; your book 
 has made you known ; you are recognized as" — and 
 so forth and so forth — all of which had better here 
 be expurgated. Finally looking around to see if 
 anybody were near, and then bowing his face close 
 to mine he spoke in a whisper: "When this scho-
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 265 
 
 lastic year is up, I intend to resign as Superinten- 
 tendent of the St. Louis Public Schools, and move 
 permanently to Concord, where I shall occupy with 
 my family the Orchard House of Mr. Alcott, who 
 is going to live down town in the old Thoreau 
 residence. Just across the street from me, you 
 know is the home of Emerson." It was evident 
 that Harris smiled much elated over his establish- 
 ment among the eminent Concord Worthies, whose 
 coming successor he might with some self-appre- 
 ciation regard himself. Fleeting traces of this am- 
 bition I had long forefelt in him at St. Louis. 
 
 Still my surprise hit me hard, indeed I became 
 quite speechless at this strange new throw of fate 's 
 dice-box. Meanwhile he had turned away, and 
 with the parting words, "Enough for this time, 
 come to see me as soon as you can," he leaped into 
 his buggy nodding to me a flash of felicity as he 
 whisked around a corner. He left me quizzing: 
 Well what does this sudden fresh intervention of 
 the Powers mean again? For it was evident that 
 here had arrived some decisive crisis or node in 
 the St. Louis Movement, of which Harris had been 
 hitherto the most efficient and the most dis- 
 tinguished propagandist. And he was going to 
 quit his own well-tilled field, abandon the world 
 he had built during his whole youthful two dec- 
 ades of years in St. Louis. He touched now forty- 
 four, and had poured forth an enormous energy 
 in a number of directions. But is his creative 
 power still at high flood?
 
 266 T H E ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 I paced the Park in slow deliberation about what 
 I should do with myself in the emergency. It 
 seemed indeed a new allotment, but also a new 
 opportunity, and the trend of it looked toward the 
 scattering of the St. Louis group and of their 
 Movement. The oracle appeared foretelling to us 
 our dispersion, or, to employ the capital term 
 already used, our Departure. My trip abroad lay 
 ensconced in the same general plan. This Concord 
 project signified at least a separation into two 
 lines, possibly a transfer from West to East. Did 
 Harris, who had in him ever the lurking Yankee, 
 intend such removal ? I did not fail to notice that 
 the glow of his talk with me illumined especially 
 the famous men of Concord headed by Emerson, 
 to whom he was now to be the next neighbor. 
 
 Harris had at this time the outlook upon a mod- 
 est but sufficient competence for the future, as I 
 understood from several of his allusions. He had 
 saved something from his salary, he received fair 
 royalties from his publishers, his articles and lec- 
 tures produced quite a little income — once and 
 only once, as far as I know, he took home to Con- 
 cord from a six weeks' course of lectures in St. 
 Louis some fifteen hundred dollars — which he 
 thought pretty good, and so did I even more em- 
 phatically, for it summed up considerably above 
 all that I could scrape together in a year through 
 my class-work. Moreover his living expenses 
 needed not to be so very high in a New England 
 country-town. Thus Harris was going to Concord
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 267 
 
 in company with that first and best freedom, con- 
 dition of all other kinds of freedom, namely eco- 
 nomic freedom. If he chose, he was now in a con- 
 dition to write unremunerative books and to do 
 free labor in honor of his dearest Philosophy, and 
 for the sake of his love alone to defy the three 
 primordial fates of human existence — food, rai- 
 ment, and shelter. In other words he could now 
 give himself up wholly to his Super-vocation, to 
 which indeed he had already shown himself con- 
 secrated at St. Louis. 
 
 In this seemingly sudden and cardinal change, 
 which included vocation, career, and locality, Har- 
 ris had his unspoken motive deeper than the 
 spoken. I had noticed that underneath all his 
 enthusiasm for the West lay in the bottom of his 
 heart an exile's longing for his native New Eng- 
 land. Now there has come the opportunity in his 
 homeland for a new succession in philosophy after 
 Transcendentalism, whose very fortress he wished 
 to capture and reconstruct. Emerson, though 
 still alive, was mentally gone; Alcott had turned 
 eighty, and was creatively closed out, but he could 
 yet be active enough to form an excellent bridge 
 from the old into the present. But he, not very 
 long after the School had well begun, went to 
 pieces, still living. And Sanborn, the unparalleled 
 man of publicity and doubtless the School's chief 
 practical organizer, was even eager to start a new 
 order for a number of reasons, some of them with 
 me conjectural. In his cwvn town I once heard him
 
 268 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 berated as the Yankee renegade for his part in 
 foisting the Western set of philosophers upon 
 Emerson's Concord. And I had kept wondering 
 in St. Louis why Harris should so often bring to 
 us the aged Alcott to say over again and again 
 what the repeating sayer of the said had already 
 better said, and why he should be so assiduous in 
 admiration of what, he had often already suffi- 
 ciently admired. He was preparing the time and 
 manner of his great Departure from the St. Louis 
 Public Schools to a new career purely philosoph- 
 ical. In 1879 he went to Concord and made his 
 opening trial ; he found the transition begging him 
 to seize it at the right psychologic moment. I 
 saw him while still in the furnace white-heat of 
 his first resolution. Certainly a justifiable goal 
 for him or any man; but will he be able to do the 
 deed against all the learned jealousies of Har- 
 vard and the other Academics elsewhere in New 
 England? It was Emerson's^ old fight to be fought 
 over again without his chances. So the question 
 has often come up to me, Was it the part of wis- 
 dom in Harris to make this change, and never to 
 unmake it afterward when he had found out? 
 
 He probably proposed to hitch the two horses, 
 Concord and St. Louis, to his philosophic chariot, 
 and to keep them in the race from his Eastern 
 home. This he succeeded in doing for a time. 
 Then he had here able and devoted lieutenants, 
 especially one cleverest woman, who would obey 
 him to the letter. For when Harris quit us, he
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 269 
 
 easily held the cultural primacy of St. Louis, and 
 he knew it. He dominated more than any other 
 man or institution the intellectual character of our 
 city. Undoubtedly he had opposition, and at times 
 much worry even in his official administration. 
 Still his influence was central, and radiated 
 through the whole community. 
 
 As for me, my attitude was that of independent 
 co-operation. I followed a somewhat different line, 
 but in the same St. Louis Movement. I had to 
 develop and then to express myself in my own 
 right. I may say here that I also harnessed those 
 two steeds, St. Louis and Concord, to my little 
 wain not the philosophical but the literary, and kept 
 them prancing together for several years. But my 
 goal remained in the West, even when I was com- 
 pelled to quit St. Louis; I had no Mayflower tra- 
 dition to chain me to Plymouth Rock or any other 
 piece of stone. 
 
 Accordingly, in the summer of 1880, I again 
 turned my face Eastward, sped across the Missis- 
 sippi, over the Alleghanies, to the ancient Bay 
 State, and in due time stepped off the railroad 
 train at Concord. It was a new sensation to find 
 myself and the St. Louis Movement steaming across 
 the mountains and over the rivers toward the 
 Atlantic seacoast, and entering an old colonial 
 Commonwealth, just the most highly educated and 
 self-appreciative in the whole country. It was an 
 adventure, however, in which I was not alone. 
 
 Evening had come, I had taken my repast, and
 
 270 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 was seated on a little veranda at the Hotel Middle- 
 sex, gazing toward 's Thoreau's Musketaquid, and 
 listening still to that famous Emersonian shot 
 heard round the world and also down time, when 
 three men came up to me in the twilight. I soon 
 recognized the first of them to be Harris, who in- 
 troduced me to the others. One of the two was 
 Mr. S. H. Emery, Director of the School, who, a 
 born New-Englander had early in life come to the 
 West, made his fortune in business at Quincy, 111., 
 and especially had become inoculated with Hegel 
 through Harris's Journal of Speculative Philoso- 
 phy. He was still in middle life, had given up a 
 profitable partnership, and had settled at Concord 
 for the purpose of devoting himself to Philosophy, 
 as I then understood him, for the rest of his days. 
 Can he hold out ? The fact, however, of his doing 
 such a deed at once gave him a high standing in 
 my eyes. The second stranger was Mr. F. B. San- 
 born, officially called the Secretary, the chief jour- 
 nalistic spirit of the enterprise. He was tall and 
 spare, with keen-edged feature in the center of 
 which would play a little drama of winsome smiles ; 
 I might call them honeyed from the bee, for there 
 is no doubt that his mellifluous mouth concealed 
 a stinger which he know how to flesh upon occa- 
 sion. In a few days I found that out and somewhat 
 more. Just now he bantered me pleasantly by fling- 
 ing at me the name of Elpinike, the Greek maiden 
 of my Delphic Days, which book he had in some 
 way unknown to me gotten hold of, and out of
 
 TEE CONCORD PEILOSOPEICAL SCEOOL. 271 
 
 which he had at least fished that one word for 
 future use, whose moment had now arrived. I want 
 to say that just on account of this character I 
 took a decided liking for Mr. Sanborn; we could 
 antagonize, even get a litle angry, and still remain 
 friends. His last letter to me I received only a 
 few months before his death during the past year 
 (1918), and it remains to me a precious heart- 
 stirring token. Just now I have taken his letter 
 out of its corner and read it anew as a memorial 
 of the man. He was still, though very old, on the 
 look-out to do a service, as usual, without request. 
 Though we often took a tilt at each other in the 
 course of the School's discussions, and once at a 
 private house in the town, with mutual satisfac- 
 tion of triumph, I think, I would plant now upon 
 his new-made grave in Sleepy Hollow this little 
 flower plucked from my own experience: Among 
 all the men whom I have ever seen tested he stands 
 first in his love of secretly extending anonymous 
 help to those who might, in his opinion, have need 
 of it, and who would never let such need be known. 
 The course of my Shakespeare's lectures started 
 and plodded along rather uneventfully, as far as I 
 now remember, with the usual amount of criticism 
 and of defence. I should conjecture fifty people 
 were the average of attendance; among them was 
 Miss Blow, whom I had not seen before, but she 
 soon made herself known. Indeed there was quite 
 a delegation from St. Louis in the audience, who 
 were especially friends of Harris, and in conse-
 
 272 THE BT.LOUI^ MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 quence strong supporters of the St. Louis Move- 
 ment. I think Emerson appeared once to hear me, 
 and Mr. Aleott presided. Men of distinction 
 dropped in to see what was going on, since the 
 public press was making a great noise by extended 
 reports, and by comments serious and comic. One 
 day a stately gentleman having a look of eminence 
 passed the door with his lady, and took a seat 
 near the front row; I recall the crinkles in the 
 rim of his furled Panama hat, as he lifted it off 
 his head and laid it down beside him with judicial 
 dignity. When I had finished my lecture, in which 
 Hamlet received his tragic doom, Emery, who sat 
 near, leaned over to me and whispered: That is 
 Judge Alphonso Taft, ex-Attorney-General of the 
 United States. I had heard a good deal some 
 years before about Judge Taft of the Superior 
 Court when I lived at Cincinnati, though I had 
 never seen him ; and Harris ("William Torrey) told 
 me once, with the only gleam of family pride I 
 ever knew him to shoot, that he was related to 
 Mrs. Taft through the famous New England Tor- 
 reys. Judge Taft now. twisted a little in his seat, 
 and started to cross-examine me on the question 
 of Hamlet's madness, as was his right, when I 
 laid down the law, at least my law, in the case: 
 "Hamlet is never so mad as not to be respon- 
 sible; hence our poetic Judge Shakespeare con- 
 demns him to his tragic death at the end of the 
 play; and this Superior Court now sitting here 
 in the Concord School of Philosophy affirms the
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 273 
 
 judgment of the poet." Somehow thus, not pre- 
 cisely perhaps, was worded the rather legalized 
 decision in honor of the distinguished guests. The 
 audience stared with vacant face-long gravity, no- 
 body seemed to understand the nub, being deemed 
 possibly some deep metaphysical subtlety, such as 
 is expected of philosophers. Only Mrs. Taft turned 
 to her husband and smiled against him (I think) 
 so exuberantly that she raised her fan to her lips 
 to check or at least to hide their perhaps too in- 
 formal overflow. The Judge murmured a word 
 which I did not then understand, but which I dare 
 now conjecture to have been "overruled." This 
 ended the discussion, when Harris ran down from 
 the rostrum in front of me to salute his illustrious 
 kinsfolk. 
 
 But the real episode of the course took place at 
 the last lecture, which I concluded to make prac- 
 tical and to apply directly to Concord. I had 
 found in my studies an entire group of Shakes- 
 peare's comedies in which there is a flight from 
 civilized life to the woods and to a primitive ex- 
 istence, whereof an example is seen in "As you 
 like it." Then, after due experience there is a 
 return of the fugitive to civilization and its insti- 
 tutions. Now the poet makes such flight and return 
 the setting of his comic action in no less than eight 
 plays, according to my count. Herein lay the point 
 of comparison: Concord in her famous individu- 
 als had passed through a very similar phase of 
 human experience, had fled in protest from the
 
 274 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 existent social order, had remained out for a while 
 in the new sylvan or rural paradise, but had at 
 last come back in a sort of penitent disillusion. 
 Thus Concord had actually lived through a great 
 human comedy of the Shakespearian model, which 
 was thus verified in the town's history. Alcott had 
 taken his flight to Brook Farm, Thoreau to Walden, 
 Emerson longed to flee to Berkshire Hills, even to 
 Canada, as we see by his Journal, but he never 
 could quite break loose from his family and from 
 his revenues. These men were the great Concord- 
 ites of the past and representatives of their town 
 and time ; and with them were other, even if lesser, 
 examples of the same tendency, making a comic era 
 which Shakespeare had already observed more 
 than two centuries before, and had put into a dra- 
 matic structure. 
 
 The special play of Flight and Return which I 
 took up for local application was Love's Labour's 
 Lost, in which the King and his three Lords retire 
 from the world, and especially from the presence 
 of woman, for the purpose of studying philosophy, 
 making the court "into a little Academe," named 
 and patterned after the Athenian home of Plato. 
 Herein lay a striking similarity to the Concord 
 School of Philosophy, which also had its Platonic 
 course of lectures with devoted followers, and had 
 even called itself the modern Academe. But now 
 enters the trouble; love, the old enemy of con- 
 templative philosophy, appears in the persons of 
 four ladies who storm the whole celibate Academe
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 275 
 
 and carry off the four philosophers as their cap- 
 tives. Such was the outcome of the Shakespearian 
 School of Philosophy as portrayed in the poet's 
 famous comedy, a far-off foreshow of our present 
 School, and now held up as a kind of mirror before 
 Concord. Three-fourths or more of the audience 
 were ladies, who smiled appreciation if not ap- 
 proval of the solution of the great master's dra- 
 matic collision between Love and Philosophy. And 
 it so happened that this was the main theme which 
 the jokesmith of newspaper and even of magazine 
 delighted to set forth in the supposed dialect of 
 the School, when it discussed "the Whatness of 
 the Howsoever", or "the Thingness of the Why", 
 though I never heard such talk there. One of these 
 squibs crossed me several times in its travels round 
 town, running thus: Two philosophers, a young 
 lady and a young gentleman (both of them not so 
 very young) were promenading in the Walden 
 woods, and had become deeply entangled in a warm 
 philosophic discussion, when the woman was heard 
 to exclaim: "Pshaw! you are no philosopher, else 
 you would understand the Yesness of my No!" 
 In a shoemaker's shop whither I had gone to get 
 my foot-gear cobbled, and where I heard the talk 
 told with new variations, I was asked by the artist 
 point-blank: "Were you that philosopher? 
 
 But the worst scrimmage I ever saw in the 
 School, with angry flashes and hot words, I hap- 
 pened to be the means of bringing on quite unin- 
 tentionally at the close of my last lecture. I was
 
 276 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 talking about Thoreau's flight to Walden hardly 
 a mile distant from his best friend's door and from 
 the town itself, and I rather -made light of such a 
 minute separation from society. I know that I 
 was thinking of, but I did not mention, the far 
 more spacious and defiant withdrawal of Brock- 
 meyer to a hunter's life in the primitive forests 
 of "Warren County, Missouri, from which, however, 
 he also had to come back to civilization and earn 
 money for his gunpowder and some apparel, and 
 finally to win a wife. When I had finished, San- 
 born jumping up scowled at me in a sort of pale 
 tremble, and declared that he was there to defend 
 the good name of his friend Thoreau who was no 
 longer on this side to defend himself. Thereupon 
 he launched into a sharp damnatory criticism of 
 my whole Shakespearian course, and especially my 
 attempt to make fun of his townspeople. I felt 
 inclined merely to smile at him, for in his ire he 
 hardly grazed the mark ; but I noticed that Harris 
 began to get white about the lips, which I knew 
 of old to be his native war-paint; then he started 
 a warm defence of my views, of course without 
 their teaseful banter. Sanborn replied and Harris 
 retorted. It looked squally for a moment when 
 the two chief promoters of the School began to 
 knock their heads together in hot disputation. 
 Then the aged reverend form of Mr. Alcott rose 
 from his presidential chair, and with his calm 
 rather sepulchral voice and words allayed the tem- 
 pest, saying that he had in his life fled thrice from
 
 THE CONCORD PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL. 277 
 
 the established social order, and had thrice re- 
 turned, and that he still thought himself young 
 enough to play once more at least the same Shakes- 
 pearian Comedy of flight and return before he 
 passed over into Sleepy Hollow. Whereat we all 
 rippled into a smile at the old man's Yankee 
 humor and philosophic serenity, in spite of the 
 somewhat funereal close of his talk. The session 
 broke up in a love-feast ; still I rather thought that 
 this last speech of mine would be my last at Con- 
 cord. 
 
 Here I may remark concerning the conversa- 
 tional frequency of Sleepy Hollow in Concord, that 
 this beautiful cemetery seems to be inwoven into 
 the very life and speech of the citizenry. I never 
 knew an American town whose graveyard was such 
 a vital, intimate even artistic part of its daily 
 existence. Dead Concord in a way appears more 
 alive than living Concord. I suppose that Egypt 
 with its mummied cities must have been somewhat 
 similar, and perhaps China is, with its worship of 
 ancestors. At times there came over me in cer- 
 tain places of Concord the uncanny feeling with 
 which I wandered through the old Etruscan tombs 
 of Italy — all that is at present left of a great 
 people, of its glory and its civilization. Concord's 
 own folks are now saying, as I have been told, in 
 grim self-criticism, that Sleepy Hollow has become 
 their chief civic asset.
 
 278 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 IV 
 
 After School 
 
 This first course of mine ended with the second 
 year of the Concord School which was now deemed 
 a success, and perhaps a permanent institute of 
 Philosophy in America, to be supplemented with 
 special application to various fields of knowledge. 
 Another year was enthusiastically agreed upon, 
 and some forecasts were given concerning its top- 
 ics. As for me, I had enjoyed the School's people, 
 who on the whole formed quite a little museum of 
 characters from all parts of the country, espe- 
 cially from New England, though the St. Louis 
 contingent seemed the largest, or at least the most 
 pronounced group in the audience, with Miss Blow 
 at its center. In one respect I had found myself 
 out: I must go back to St. Louis, at least for the 
 present. 
 
 A day or two after the close of the School, I 
 went over to the Orchard House to see how Harris 
 felt in his new situation, for the shock of the 
 change to a new vocation and to a new life must 
 have been somewhat volcanic. But I found him 
 stretched out at ease on his sofa, to which was at- 
 tached an apparatus, partly of his own contriv- 
 ance, I believe, whereby he could not only read but 
 also write while lying down. He took pride in 
 showing me the great convenience of the thing, 
 especially as he had a shifty knack at mechanical 
 tinkering amid all his philosophy. He advised me
 
 AFTER SCHOOL. 279 
 
 to help myself to ease in a similar way when I 
 took pen in hand; but I had to say: "Not for me; 
 when I write, I cannot even sit down long, I have 
 to stand up and draw tense every nerve of my 
 body in response to the exertion of my brain; 
 otherwise what I scribble is utterly flabby. My 
 act of writing is a self-wrestling, perchance a 
 wrestle with the God unwilling, in which at most 
 I can hold out but a couple of hours or so at a time. 
 As you have started to attend church here in Con- 
 cord, which you did not in St. Louis, let me give 
 you a single article of my creed: to write is my 
 prayer. I have changed the old Saint's Latin 
 maxim Laborare est orare to this briefest breviary, 
 Scribere est orare." 
 
 Harris listened to my homily with added lan- 
 guor, as he was then letting himself loose from his 
 six weeks' strain of lecturing and other anxieties 
 connected with the School. He looked reminiscent 
 also, though he said nothing of the past. Soon, 
 however, he picked up the future: "When I get 
 a little rested I am going to finish my book on 
 Hegel's Logic, which I have planned these many 
 years, but I had not the time to write it out at 
 St. Louis. In order to compel myself to the task, 
 I have already promised it to a Chicago publisher. 
 This winter I shall have leisure." Thus Harris 
 at Concord was thinking of Hegel more intently 
 than ever. He said he purposed to make "that 
 German philosopher Hegel talk English." I said 
 nothing but felt the difference between his present
 
 280 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 aim and mine.. Still I could not help wondering 
 at that "Book of Fate," in which he had become 
 so deeply entangled. Can he extricate himself by 
 writing? Here, however, we are able to foresay: 
 Not one but ten years will glide away before he 
 can ban that ever-threatening Tantalian Book into 
 
 print. And even then 
 
 But soon he started to talk of next year's School 
 which was likewise on his mind, and was not wholly 
 absent from mine, though I did not then know 
 whether I would be invited again ; I rather thought 
 not, after the Thoreau episode with Sanborn. 
 Nevertheless I had already made my plan. Harris 
 hinted that he would like me to give a course on 
 Hegel's Aesthetic, or better still, upon Hegel's 
 Science of Law and the State, saying in his per- 
 suasive tone of appreciation : "I know you have 
 especially studied those two subjects, have written 
 and lectured upon them, and moreover have 
 spouted (his word) them all around town in years 
 past, so that you can easily put your stuff to- 
 gether." I answered: "No, I cannot do that; I 
 am at present outside of Hegel and all his works, 
 and have been ever since my European Journey. 
 I live now in the Greek world, and I forecast I can 
 live nowhere else for some time to come, till I live 
 it out, teach it out, and write it out of myself. 
 Besides I have resolved to undertake no written 
 work in which my whole Self is not present ; I can 
 help you discuss at the School of Philosophy, but 
 I cannot produce on those old lines. I may get
 
 AFTER SCHOOL. 281 
 
 back to Hegel again with the years, but not till 
 I have compassed my mind's most pressing charge. 
 And let me add, I am done with Shakespeare for 
 the present, though I may return to him likewise 
 after I have evolved some more." So I spoke in 
 a sort of prophetic banter, for evolution was rioting 
 in the air and in me personally at that time, which 
 had become decidedly Darwinian. 
 
 Harris shot at me through his spectacles with 
 his one eye, for he had but one, and exclaimed: 
 "Indeed!" Then he seemed to turn inwardly and 
 to talk with himself for about two minutes, as was 
 his frequent habit. The fact is he had never taken 
 full measure of the mental change wrought in me 
 by my trip abroad. But soon he was ready with 
 a smiling answer. "Very well; I shall suggest to 
 our Committee that you be invited to talk en 
 Greece next time." "Ye Gods," I shouted, 
 "that theme intoxicates me already; of course I 
 shall come back with all the Olympian effluences 
 I can command; I am going to court the Muse the 
 whole year for her inspiration." To speak un- 
 mythically, I was just then starting to write a 
 book (my Walk in Hellas) on the subject, and I 
 forethought I could test my salient chapters on 
 that Concord audience of philosophers. 
 
 Then I ventured to put to Harris a question 
 which I had often thought of asking him before, 
 but hardly dared: "The person who knows more 
 about the State and political philosophy, than any
 
 282 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 other man within my purview is none other than 
 your nearest friend, our President of the old Philo- 
 sophical Society, Governor Brockmeyer. Both prac- 
 tical and theoretical knowledge he unites; he has 
 personal experience along with speculative study. 
 He is famed as the father of the present Constitu- 
 tion of Missouri. "Why not call him?" Harris 
 leaped up from his lounge and paced the floor: "It 
 cannot be done, it cannot be done! Yet he is the 
 genius of us all, and that is the fatality of our cause ; 
 he would be sure to spill over into some diablery, or 
 even profanity, which would shock all New Eng- 
 land. How the newspapers would gloat over such 
 a morsel of Concord Philosophy! As it is, they 
 find enough for caricature. I have told you what 
 I once heard him in company say in reply to Miss 
 Brackett — O No. ' ' I could only mumble : "I sup- 
 pose I shall have to agree with you ; I would simply 
 call our old common friend back to memory even 
 here in the land of the Puritans, to which that first 
 little seed-plume of his has been wafted. Anyhow 
 he has fled far off the other way, westward to the 
 copper-colored world down in the Indian Terri- 
 tory. ' ' I started for the door breathing an under- 
 toned laugh: "Yes, Concord has enough of the 
 Wild West in me if not too much, not to speak of 
 Brockmeyer." Harris shook my hand: "Indeed 
 you have made us remark you — bring with you next 
 time your serene Greeks balancing on their golden 
 mean, and possibly we shall be able to keep you." 
 One of those summer evenings I received an in-
 
 AFTER SCHOOL. 283 
 
 vitation from Mrs. Lathrop (Rose Hawthorne) to 
 take a cup of tea under the trees of the old Haw- 
 thorne mansion, which she with her husband 
 (George Parsons Lathrop) was then occupying for 
 the season. Mementos of the famous novelist were 
 all around us, and anecdotes of the man and the 
 locality made the clock tick very rapidly. Mrs. 
 Elizabeth Thompson of New York, wealthy, philan- 
 thropic, embarrassed of riches, was sitting near me 
 at the table, and asked me now and then a ques- 
 tion about St. Louis which had the strange gift of 
 of producing such a multitude of philosophers, not 
 only men but women, for both sorts were in ample 
 evidence at Hillside Chapel. She had shown her 
 interest in the Concord School not only by erect- 
 ing the new building but by a still more heroic 
 test: she had attended those abstruse lectures on 
 philosophy, two a-day for six weeks. Rumor had 
 it that she purposed some permanent endowment. 
 At last she plumped out the question: "Why do 
 you not come East and stay with your friend Har- 
 ris and others?" The surface answer was ready: 
 "I am not yet philosopher enough to live without 
 bread." "That can be supplied in the East, too," 
 was her reply. "Doubtless." I dropped, and with 
 it dropped the plan, if there was any, and I 
 dreamed that there was at the time. But she 
 never gave again to the School, never appeared 
 there again in the years afterward, as far as I 
 ever saw or heard. One of her last remarks to me 
 was : "Oh I have done so much harm with gifts of
 
 284 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 my money." I did not tell her that she must be 
 very careful never to harm me in that way, and 
 she never did. 
 
 On a sunny afternoon of leisure, the day before 
 I intended to leave for St. Louis, Emery, Director 
 of the School, came to the Hotel and asked me 
 to take a final stroll with him down the Lexington 
 road. We happened to meet Mr. Emerson on the 
 way, and we spoke with him a moment about the 
 School, but he could not recall a single proper 
 name, even that of Mr. Alcott he stumbled over, 
 till Emery helped him out. At some question, he 
 exclaimed: "My reading has all gone from me," 
 and he started on. I quizzed Emery: "Tell me 
 now, is your School to be Emerson's successor, 
 with Harris and Hegel at the head?" My com- 
 panion merely gave a little tee-hee for an answer 
 and branched off to another topic, saying: "You 
 had better make up your mind to follow your 
 friends and come here to live." We passed a 
 dwelling near the road, when he stopped and 
 pointed : ' ' See there ! you can buy that farm house 
 for less than it cost, with the land thrown in. You 
 see it does not pay to cultivate this meagre soil 
 in competition with the rich "Western prairie. I 
 know you have to earn your way; but you can 
 gain enough by your pen and by giving lessons 
 for your simple needs. We are going to have a 
 great revival of philosophy here, you ought not to 
 be absent. Look! standing at yonder window of 
 yours you could see in a single sweep of the eye
 
 AFTER SCHOOL. 285 
 
 the houses of Emerson, of Harris (once Alcott's) 
 and of Hawthorne." 
 
 I gave him my answer, for the problem was not 
 new : ' ' My dear friend, you have not yet found 
 me quite, and here I may give you a little lesson 
 on me as subject. My field is now in the "West, 
 and my present passion is not philosophy, which 
 no longer satisfies me, though I may have nothing 
 as yet to take its place. I could not endure to 
 impart instruction for money merely and not for 
 myself, that is, for my ever-evolving selfhood. And 
 what is more crushing than the life of a scribbler 
 for magazines and newspapers ? I tell you, I have 
 to write not for my living but for my salvation. 
 Then I have found the town here not altogether 
 friendly to new-comers, being very well satisfied 
 with itself and its two centuries of ancestry; at 
 you philosophers it secretly turns up its nose, as 
 I have repeatedly glimpsed ; even the two of you 
 (Sanborn and Alcott) who have long dwelt on this 
 spot, are not besung heroical by Concord in my 
 hearing. I ponder what is going to become of the 
 fresh arrivals, Harris and yourself, for you both 
 have invested mind and money here. But tell me, 
 ye avenging Powers, what would be my fate on 
 this spot?" 
 
 I intended to heat Emery to a hot shot with 
 these warm words, still he kept cool in his answer : 
 "I know all that, and have felt it and more, but 
 such feeling is transitory. Then you are not going 
 to come back next year?" "Yes I am, I shall
 
 286 T H E ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 stick to you, for the thing means much to me, espe- 
 cially if I can rise out of the prairial "West to the 
 mountainous East once every year, and make some 
 kind of synthesis of the two. And I am eager to 
 watch the outcome of this philosophical renascence 
 when transplanted from St. Louis to Concord." 
 Having come back to the Hotel we parted. Here 
 I may be permitted to say in advance that Emery 
 after some years will quit Concord and his new 
 home, will go back to the West and resume busi- 
 ness at Quincy. And somewhat later Harris will 
 leave for "Washington to take charge of his new 
 office. 
 
 Still another little adventure before I could get 
 out of town crossed my path. I was always fond 
 of diving into the undercurrents of subliminal Con- 
 cord, where I might catch what the folk was think- 
 ing and gossping about, and consult that truly 
 American oracle, called Public Opinion. Such an 
 oracle was quite accessible in the popular workers 
 of the place — the artisan, the tradesman, and the 
 neighboring farmer. It was soon evident that 
 Concord had its own peculiar town-soul different 
 from any other I had ever known in my experience, 
 and so it presented to me a new phasis of village 
 psychology, the true unit of all social psychology 
 in America. I never found a foreigner in the 
 place a real inhabitant, though some Irish laborers 
 lived in their shanties near the railroad on which 
 they were employed. And all the residents, at 
 least the ones that counted, had a long pedigree,
 
 AFTER SCHOOL. 287 
 
 reaching back generations and traceable still in 
 the surrounding graveyards which thus kept up a 
 continuous ghostly line of memories of the past, 
 and created a sentiment or rather a consciousness 
 impossible in the new settlements of the West, 
 where I was reared. For instance, Reverend Peter 
 Bulkley was founder of Concord about two cen- 
 turies and a half before the School of Philosophy, 
 and still there was a Bulkley and a Reverend on 
 the ground (not merely in it) and I talked with 
 him (a delightful man by the way). This town 
 had ensconced within its small space a more unique 
 individuality, had made more history, had been the 
 home of more persons of distinction than any other 
 community of its size in the country. And well 
 did Concord know it. Hence a very pronounced 
 local pride, which could become in extreme cases, 
 arrogance. It had its good right to a super-abun- 
 dant share of self-esteem, and I found it could 
 easily be brought to assert its God-given right, as 
 does its typical hero, that minute-man on the bat- 
 tle-field near the bridge. Hence it comes that Con- 
 cord may well be acclaimed the most traditional 
 town in the United States — which fact was for me 
 a good experience and a new discipline. 
 
 But I started to tell my final adventure, which 
 took place in a barber shop, the well-known whis- 
 pering-gallery of the town's gossip. The razor- 
 master knew me for a stranger by my straw-hat, 
 and by my un- Yankee accent of the Buckeye- 
 Hoosier twang, and the rest he could guess, since
 
 288 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 about all the strange faces and costumes then in 
 the streets, belonged to the philosophers, men and 
 especially women. With the first soap-splash of 
 his brush, his tongue began to lather me freely: 
 "Lively times down at your church, I hear; broke 
 up in a spat ending in a regular fisticuff; a fellow 
 from Missouri, a right-down border-ruffian, such 
 as that State sent out to Kansas several years ago, 
 tackled Frank Sanborn in a tiff, till it came to the 
 knock-down. " " Indeed ! that is news ! But which 
 one got licked?" asked the befoamed shavee with 
 an eager twitch up from his suds, whereupon he 
 caught the answer: "What! weren't you there? 
 They called each other bad names, the women ran 
 out screaming as the two made for each other, at 
 last old man Alcott rose up from his chair and 
 parted them, and then adjourned the School maybe 
 for good." The fascinated listener though under 
 the knife queried: "So there is to be no School 
 next year?" "Can't tell. But I know the things 
 people are buzzing round our corners: when those 
 borderers invade us again, we shall be on guard; 
 we shall have our new Penitentiary ready to give 
 them a free lunch over by the railroad station on 
 the other side of town, as a kind of makeweight 
 against your Hillside Chapel of philosophers." 
 Somehow thus, perhaps not exactly bespattered me 
 with his chatter the grimly humorous beard-sur- 
 geon as he slashed his scalpel defiantly about my 
 throat, but without injury. 
 
 Such was the living commentary to that ton-
 
 BACK TO ST. L0VI8. 289 
 
 sorial work of art, with whose last touch I sprang 
 from the chair, threw down my dime and rushed 
 for my train: "Good-bye, I shall see you next 
 year, if they don't put me in stripes meantime." 
 The Concord Penitentiary alluded to in the fore- 
 going conversation was an actual fact, and it is still 
 busy in its line of work (I suppose) and full of in- 
 mates ; but the Hillside Chapel on the other side of 
 town in the Emerson quarter, has been emptied of 
 all its original folk for many a year, not, however 
 into the rival State-paid institution, even with its 
 free lunch and schooling, as far as I know. But 
 hold ! there may have been one exception among 
 the philosophers ! Yes, I remember — but, indul- 
 gent reader, you will have to wait, or turn over 
 several pages ahead for relief, if your curiosity 
 gets to hurting you. 
 
 Back to St. Louis 
 
 Thus two strands of this Classical Epoch of mine 
 have started at St. Louis and at Concord, and will 
 continue to spin themselves out for some five years 
 longer. So much I can foresay, looking backwards 
 now; but looking forwards then, when I reached 
 home in the fall of 1880, I could see nothing but 
 the blank pathless cloud of futurity, into which I 
 had to take a plunge for life. Only one prescribed 
 part I knew beforehand: I was to teach in the 
 High School my routine of instruction. But after
 
 290 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 one year this remaining shred of my old vocation 
 was torn away ; I had quit it and still more it had 
 quit me; so I gave myself up wholly to the spon- 
 taneous promptings of the time, as they kept 
 knocking at my heart. 
 
 Classes increased more than ever; I soon had all 
 I could attend to aright, for I sought to teach 
 creatively ; mechanical drill was reduced to its low- 
 est terms. I was groping for the higher educa- 
 tional institute, quite beyond the traditional aca- 
 demic establishment though at the time I had con- 
 sciously no purpose of the sort. And the rage for 
 such instruction persisted still in the city; that 
 was the riddlesome event; for these classes were 
 not confined merely to my own field of work, but 
 bubbled up quite everywhere and for everything, 
 planned and planless, under all sorts of leaders. 
 This fact veritably startled outside observers who 
 came to the city with their fore-ordained pre-con- 
 ceptions of us and of themselves. Mr. John Albee, 
 disciple of Emerson, and literary friend of Harris 
 from the East, could not shake off his surprise 
 even after several weeks of lecturing and visiting 
 among us; he kept repeating to me at our last in- 
 terview: "it is phenomenal! I never saw the like; 
 everything here has smack of your St. Louis Move- 
 ment ; I read some of your philosophical lingo in a 
 leading article of yesterday's newspaper; I have 
 not talked with any woman here yet who has not 
 philosophized me beyond my depth. A day or two 
 ago I went with Miss Blow to one of her kinder-
 
 BACK TO ST. LOUIS. 291 
 
 gartens to see the children play, and she so over- 
 whelmed me with her ponderous Hegelian nomen- 
 clature in explaining a little game of the babies 
 that I heard my brain-pan crack like a pistol shot. 
 How phenomenal, yes, most phenomenal." 
 
 It is not necessary to give all the variations and 
 the eccentricities of these studies. I have no record 
 even of my own circle except some memory peaks. 
 Enough it will be to say that the central work for 
 me and mine just then was Homer, who suddenly 
 gushes up the original well-head not only of Classi- 
 cal but of all European Literature. We took in- 
 deed other branches by the side, other poetry all 
 the way down to Keats. But we turned at the 
 main start back to the Iliad and Odyssey, the two 
 nourishing breasts of the beautiful young Greek 
 mother of our civilization. It was our first object 
 to become acquainted with her in her primal crea- 
 tive shape. 
 
 "With Homer, indeed, I had long been on good 
 reading terms, so I thought when I opened the 
 present course. Far back in my Freshman year 
 at College, I had pushed beyond the prescribed 
 four books of the Odyssey of the regular curriculum 
 and had read the entire original text, and dipped 
 also into that of the Iliad. Moreover I had never 
 allowed my knowledge of the Homeric dialect to 
 pass out of mind. Still I found now, on looking 
 more deeply into the poet creative, that I had never 
 really seen Homer. And that is not all. I went 
 to the vast pile of comment of every description in
 
 292 THE ST. LOUTS MOVEMENT— PATtT SECOND. 
 
 the libraries, and thus I picked up many needful 
 facts about him and his world, but the poet in his 
 all-embracing, well-ordered wholeness I could not 
 find, in spite of or possibly because of the mul- 
 titudinous particulars. What is still more strange, 
 I could discover no adequate guide who could show 
 me how his works were built, who could lead me 
 into and through the architectonic of his two spa- 
 cious, noble edifices. So I began at this time one 
 of the most labyrinthine but fascinating pursuits 
 of my life — the quest of the architect Homer in 
 Homer. At first I tried to believe with German 
 Wolf and his disciples, whom I studied with in- 
 dustry in the original, that there was no inner 
 genetic order in the two poems, that they were a 
 collection of ballads more or less skillfully spliced 
 together. But I soon found myself in revolt against 
 such a view, and felt more deeply than ever their 
 spirit's unity. At the same time it was my ulti- 
 mate faith that this spirit must have its distinct 
 organization in the poems, and the year's search 
 was to uncover and to express this poetic struc- 
 ture. 
 
 While thus exploring the primordial organism 
 of Homer's poetry, and jotting my results down in 
 scraps, I was at the same time moulding into shape 
 my exploration of the primordial elements of Greek 
 life in their earliest germs. As already indicated, 
 a chief incentive to my Classical Itinerary was to 
 reach the first sources of Homer himself, as he 
 lived and spoke, in the still living and speaking. I
 
 BACK TO ST. LOUIS. 293 
 
 wanted to get back to the very well-head of the 
 world-civilizing Greek Tradition, and listen to it 
 flowing from its original fount of the heart into 
 the primitive word. Then I desired to make it 
 talk English through the lips and the types, in re- 
 sponse to my own deepest need of expression and 
 impartation. Hence in a few months after home- 
 coming, I had my Delphic Days in print, whose 
 object is to poetize that old Greek world as still 
 alive in the modern. Then I started to give the 
 same theme a different form, that of prose, which 
 records my personal experiences during my travels 
 through rural Greece. Thus the Walk in Hellas 
 rapidly coalesced into its present shape, a book 
 which has its own independent life, but may also be 
 taken as a kind of living commentary on Homer. 
 Another cognate work I conceived at this time, 
 which, however, took many suns to ripen fully, 
 namely a life of Homer, constructed out of the 
 personal hints and presuppositions which lurk un- 
 consciously imbedded in his two poems. All these 
 books of mine were for me at least a resurrection 
 of antique Homeric life into the living present, or 
 a rejuvenescence of the oldest poet into youngest 
 America. 
 
 But the chief Homeric incident of the present 
 season occurred in a small class which was held in 
 the private parlor of a well-known lady, who had 
 assembled about a dozen of her acquaintances for 
 the purpose of taking a good long draught from 
 that earliest fountain of Literature, Homer's Iliad.
 
 294 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 We had already taken one or two lessons when to 
 my great surprise Miss Susan E. Blow entered the 
 room unexpectedly, having been brought by one of 
 her friends who was a member. She had only 
 come for a single visit, as I understood the situa- 
 tion. I suppose that she might be deemed already 
 the most distinguished woman of the city, having 
 done a famous educational deed in the establish- 
 ment of the Kindergarten which had begun to 
 sprout and spread from St. Louis as a center over 
 the country, chiefly through her energy and ability, 
 even if it had been known elsewhere in America 
 before her time. But the Kindergarten, though 
 her main and deepest attachment, was not her sole 
 interest. She had studied philosophy under Har- 
 ris, from whom she had learned the Hegelian 
 thought, and she could employ its subtleties and 
 their peculiar technique with fluency and insight. 
 Theology, especially in its Calvinistic form — she 
 was raised a Presbyterian — I heard Harris declare 
 to be one of her profound attainments, though she 
 never presented that side to me, whom, as gossip 
 once whispered me, she was inclined to believe as 
 too Greek, if not altogether a heathen backslider. 
 Hence my astonishment at her sudden appearance 
 in a Homer class of mine. 
 
 Miss Blow may well be acclaimed the greatest 
 public woman that St. Louis has hitherto sent 
 forth; she has to her credit the largest, most en- 
 during work; hence her life belongs to the public. 
 She was not a member of our Philosophical Society,
 
 BACK TO ST. LOUIS. 295 
 
 which did not admit ladies, at least I never saw 
 a woman present at any of our regular meet- 
 ings, though they were elsewhere and otherwise 
 the decided majority. That, however, counted for 
 little. Miss Blow was above all others, the fe- 
 male representative of the group by her talent, by 
 her knowledge, and especially by her deeds. In 
 fact she was at her deepest a will character rather 
 than speculative, and she showed herself such fin- 
 ally by her career, and I hold likewise by her fate. 
 Still she philosophized also, ardently and pro- 
 foundly, not, however, on independent lines, but 
 like the rest of us, after Hegel interpreted by 
 Harris. 
 
 I first heard of Miss Blow shortly after the close 
 of the Civil War at a dancing club composed of 
 young gentlemen and young ladies, of which she 
 and her sister were members, being especially prom- 
 inent as daughters of a distinguished Congressman 
 and Southern Unionist, Henry T. Blow. I re- 
 member well that by these golden youths she was 
 privately set down as too bookish, as displaying 
 quite too much erudition for a woman. The com- 
 plaint was interesting to me as it could not justly 
 be made against a single one of these young fel- 
 lows, nor against any other of these young ladies 
 as far as my information extended. Thus Miss 
 Blow already at the age of twenty, more or less, 
 had won a certain unique distinction in her own 
 circle, and, on account of her family's prominence, 
 in the community.
 
 296 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PABT SECOND. 
 
 Another reflection of Miss Blow in her earlier 
 years came to me by chance in 1868, when I was 
 staying for the summer in South St. Louis, enjoy- 
 ing a little villa with my wife on the heights above 
 the Mississippi. In some way we happened to be- 
 come acquainted with a trained German pedagogue, 
 somewhat given to beer but of keen intelligence, 
 who had been a private instructor in the Blow 
 family at Carondelet. He repeatedly dilated upon 
 the surprising ability of the oldest daughter, Miss 
 Susie, in her study of German Literature, of which 
 she had read under his tuition some of the chief 
 authors. The time was that peculiar era of St. 
 Louis already set forth, when the whole city was 
 Teutonizing, and she evidently shared in the com- 
 mon trend. He, however, had his German criticism 
 of her educational bias, declaring that for a woman 
 her culture was too reflective, too philosophical, 
 too much inclined to the abstract and logical 
 rather than to the poetic and emotional. Another 
 fact he let drop by the way: he once happened to 
 meet at the house the clergyman of the family, 
 who had been summoned to give spiritual advice 
 and consolation to the daughter, who was in some 
 great religious crisis of life through which she was 
 passing with no little distress. This somewhat pri- . 
 vate matter is to be noticed, since it has its signifi- 
 cance in her public career and character, as well as 
 in its relation to my own future literary work. 
 
 No sooner had Miss Blow entered the before- 
 mentioned parlor and had taken her seat beside
 
 BACK TO ST. LOUIS. 297 
 
 her friend, than every eye in the room seemed sud- 
 denly pulled toward her, announcing her at once 
 to be the center of that company. She had a com- 
 pelling personality which would ray itself out into 
 her environment, wherein she showed herself as a 
 kind of sun both through her secret attraction and 
 her very manifest light. The lesson had already 
 begun and was proceeding in its usual way ; but I 
 know that I immediately directed my look and my 
 talk toward her, she became at once the queen of 
 that audience. Yet not by any display of jewels 
 and wardrobe; she was the worst dressed woman 
 of that well-gowned company, as I distinctly recol- 
 lect; her hat lay somewhat askew, her hair was 
 riotous and her shoes were unshined ; I thought I 
 noticed our elegant hostess inspect her with 
 glances betokening criticism. What of it? Here 
 was the heroine, and everybody present in spite of 
 a little female jealousy perhaps, acknowledged 
 secretly her supremacy — I the teacher being therein 
 foremost. She knew well her peculiar power ; when 
 I aimed my eye-shot at her — and I could not help 
 it — following it up with my words, her naturally 
 red face turned redder with a defiant smile, and 
 flashed a response which I traced thus as writ in 
 her features: Come on, I am ready. 
 
 Now it so happened that the lesson turned upon 
 that primary problem of the Iliad, the quarrel be- 
 tween the hero Achilles and the leader Agamem- 
 non. I went on to expand the thought which lay 
 yeasting in this vigorous, elemental poetry, and
 
 298 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 which gave to it eternal life, so that we are study- 
 ing it today in St. Louis more than 2500 years 
 later and on the other side of the globe. It is the 
 perennial conflict between the individual of greater 
 talent or perchance genius and the ordinary mortal 
 who is the prescribed wielder of authority. Be- 
 hold, then, the original divinely born man without 
 dominion (Achilles) versus the regular ruler with 
 his transmitted right (Agamemnon). Such is the 
 collision of all ages between the individual and the 
 institution, between this one single great Man and 
 associated Man, here represented by the everlasting 
 Achilles and the everlasting Agamemnon. I must 
 have said, for it was already a sort of hobby with 
 me : This opening strife preluded by the old poet 
 is far stronger to-day than it ever was before the 
 walls of ancient Troy, and it is going to be yet 
 more intensified in the future. Hence antique 
 Homer never gets antiquated, but keeps growing 
 in significance and magnitude, when we truly come 
 to know him, and speak with him face to face. I 
 tell you that all of us, you and I too, have a more 
 or less vivid lightning flash of this very conflict in 
 our own souls just now. And this is the problem 
 of us all : What am I to do with my unappreciated 
 Self now rasping with or perchance overwhelmed 
 by some form of the established Order? 
 
 Landed upon this rock of utterance the lesson 
 closed, and the members rustled their wraps for 
 starting home. I could not help watching Miss 
 Blow during the talk, for she always commanded
 
 BACK TO ST. LOUIS. 299 
 
 the personal attention of every eye in her own 
 right. If I mistake not, I saw her press her lips 
 more firmly together when I spoke of Authority's 
 wrong done to Heroship, and the danger thereof; 
 did she even clench her little fist a little? There 
 was certainly some response, the deeper cause of 
 which I then knew nothing about. ' Indeed when I 
 noted her reaction on the lesson, I naturally grew 
 more emphatic in speech, and laid it on harder, 
 with hotter illustrations. Also there ran a warm 
 streak of my own confession through the talk, for 
 I had begun to feel at the High School what I 
 deemed an unjust nagging of me from the powers 
 above, and had already started to whisper to my- 
 self: I too shall withdraw to my tent when the 
 time comes, I am myself an unheroic Achilles. 
 
 As I was passing out of the door, Miss Blow 
 stepped up to me, and asked: "May I join your 
 class in Homer?" "Certainly," said I, "glad to 
 have you; and next time you can speak out your 
 interrogation, for I saw its mark to-day dancing 
 all over your face." "Yes I know," she an- 
 swered, "my features have a bad habit of tattling 
 on me, especially when something touches me in- 
 wardly. And I could not help noting the scope 
 you give to Literature." Thus she parried me off 
 to a less internal topic, and bowed herself across 
 the door-sill. 
 
 After the next lesson or two Miss Blow came to 
 me with a new request: "I heard you speak of 
 Sophocles in your remarks by way of illustration;
 
 300 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 especially you impressed me with Antigone's con- 
 flict. "Would you take a class comprised of my ad- 
 vanced Kindergartners, some ten or a dozen of 
 them, in that old Greek dramatist ? Come and have 
 dinner with me this evening, and we shall talk the 
 matter over." I assented, and then walked away 
 somewhat stunned at the three new conjunctures 
 which her interview brought up to my mind. First 
 was her invitation to dine at her supposedly ex- 
 clusive table; secondly, I wondered at what she 
 meant by choosing that Greek author Sophocles, 
 whom I had never taught in a class hitherto. But 
 the third incident turned out altogether the farth- 
 est-reaching in my life, for it brought me into con- 
 tact with Kindergartners, of whom this was my 
 starting experience personally, though I had often 
 heard of them and their distinctive work in the 
 city. Harris had brought about its introduction 
 into the Public Schools, and thus given to it the 
 first great center for its propagation, which was 
 furthered by the zeal and commanding talent of 
 Miss Blow. She was now in her best years, and 
 showed her aspiring and limit-transcending char- 
 acter by the fact that to her pedagogy (Froebel) 
 and to her philosophy (Hegel after Harris) she 
 had become eager to add literature as a new dis- 
 cipline, even if she knew many facts about it be- 
 fore. 
 
 At the dinner I was her only guest beside two 
 other members of her family. As she had traveled 
 a good deal in Europe, and had been at Rome, our
 
 BACK TO ST. LOUTS. 301 
 
 talk began at once to push for that famous city of 
 which she showed good knowledge. But soon I was 
 on my Greek rambles again, in which her interest 
 seemed to increase to enthusiasm. Hereafter she 
 will react from this Greek trend, deeming it and 
 me "too heathenish." But at present the longing 
 must have come over her to know and to be her- 
 self somewhat of the Classical Renascence, which 
 differs indeed from her Calvinistic Regeneration, 
 though both were at bottom phases or stages of one 
 great world-religious experience of the race. Also 
 I spoke of the artistic unity and completeness of 
 Greek History, with its two supreme historians, 
 Herodotus and Thucydides. "These also we must 
 have in our class," she said, with a note of exultant 
 will-power, I thought. "But first let us take the 
 poets, as they are the forerunners and the prophets 
 of Hellas realized, ' ' was my response. ' ' Certainly ; 
 then to-morrow afternoon our class will start with 
 Sophocles in the board-room of the old Polytechnic 
 Building;" such was her appointment, as I passed 
 out the door. 
 
 This little unstylish dinner I deem worth the 
 words since out of it sprang a very important life- 
 line of mine, which interwove my brain and tongue 
 and heart with the Kindergarten for more than 
 forty years. Miss Blow held of the larger St. Louis 
 Movement, and she must have her picture taken 
 and set in its gallery, of which she was decidedly 
 the most prominent woman, being too the greatest 
 of our philosophic ladies, who were the majority.
 
 302 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 She rose to be a distinguished public character; as 
 writer, as lecturer, and especially as controversial- 
 ist she challenged publicity, and she is of such im- 
 portance that she deserves to be seen in her great- 
 ness as well as in her limitation, for she had her 
 human share of both. Miss Blow, accordingly, I 
 commemorate as one of the four main personages 
 whose careers more or less mutually interlace and 
 unfold in the same general direction, and together 
 constitute the chief propelling forces of the St. 
 Louis Movement in its sweep toward ;its goal. 
 Hence she alongside the other leaders is to have her 
 monument erected in this book, as the author sees 
 her and is able to limn her character's features. 
 
 VI 
 
 Back to Concord 
 
 'Summer of 1881 it was when I again, with an 
 unusual uplift of spirit, turned my face from our 
 hot and flaccid Southern city toward breezy and 
 stimulating Concord with its School of Philosophy. 
 The year had been good to me in St. Louis, full of 
 surprises and fresh outlooks; it seemed one long 
 spring of a burgeoning young world, still to flower 
 and to bear fruit. I was forty years old, a slow 
 grower but seemingly a persistent; what I was to 
 do, if anything worth while, remained yet to be 
 done. Still I think I may look back at this year as 
 a starter on several new roads along which I was to 
 travel the rest of my days. I had tapped a youth-
 
 BACK TO CONCORD. 303 
 
 ful life for me in old Homer, whom I had known 
 about, but never known, in former years. And yet 
 further, I had caught many a glimpse of Homer's 
 .supreme poetic succession down to the present, that 
 of the Literary Bibles, as I began to call them, 
 though probably I was not the first to give that 
 name. But the thought had come to stay by me 
 and unfold to its fulfillment through many a future 
 season. Such was the swelling germ of this year 
 which time will bring to full ripening. Then my 
 new vocation had definitely started, giving me a 
 moderate recompense for bread, but also economic 
 independence for the pursuit of my Super-voca- 
 tion, which I myself had to pay for as the price of 
 my soul's redemption. I resigned even my half- 
 day at the High School, the last traditional shred of 
 my old profession in a prescriptive institution, for 
 I remained a free lance all the rest of my life, 
 even when I taught in my own College. 
 
 During this year likewise I had been wandering 
 back and living over my Greek outing from Athens 
 to Delphi, the written notes and the ever-gushing 
 memories of which I had been kneading into a 
 series of chapters, originally lectures, which be- 
 came moulded to a final shape in the already named 
 Walk in Hellas. This book played a sort of musi- 
 cal undertone to my labors of the entire year — a 
 character which, I hope it continues to preserve 
 and to inspire even now amid the far-away retiring 
 years. The Classical Journey was still very young 
 in my soul, being as yet only a biennial remin-
 
 304 TEE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 iscence in age. Somehow it seemed to strike a per- 
 fect chord with the Homer lessons, each not only 
 supporting but attuning the other. Thus I passed 
 a happy, and what is far more, a creative year. 
 
 But I must not forget the counterstrokes. Of 
 the early group of fellow-workers I stood nearly 
 alone; the older members of the St. Louis Philo- 
 sophical Society had taken flight; I have already 
 told of the departure of our Secretary and of our 
 President, the great well-known Prime-Movers. 
 About this time our sole clerical member, Dr. R. 
 A. Holland, quit us for Chicago, somewhat disil- 
 lusioned, I think, in accord with the city's Great 
 Disillusion, which was already announcing itself 
 in our civic spirit. He was one of our ablest, with 
 keen philosophic penetration; but the field of his 
 highest originality was, in my opinion, not the re- 
 flective but the imaginative, with his unique power 
 of metaphorical expression. That is, his gift was 
 the poetic, even if he did not versify. I think too 
 that he, more than any other member, helped make 
 us philosophers respectable through his social and 
 ministerial position, as well as through his ability. 
 For after all is said apologetically, the most of 
 us were inclined to be vagabonds, or to be re- 
 garded as such by the stolidly standardized 
 community. Dr. Holland liked Emerson, the 
 grand defier of tradition, and he himself often de- 
 fied tradition, even that of his own pulpit. Emer- 
 son's picture I once saw hanging in his study. 
 It was a daring thing in him to give a course of
 
 BACK TO CONCORD. 3Q5 
 
 lectures on Shakespeare Sunday evenings in his 
 church, despite all protest, asserting that the Liter- 
 ary Bible (as he once told me) had also its evangel 
 which he was not going to neglect or abandon to 
 the ungodly, nor yet to the unchurchly — a lenient 
 hit at me, I thought. Later he threw open his 
 guild-room to our Literary Schools which were 
 held at St. Louis in conjunction with Chicago. He 
 also made his pilgrimage to Concord, being a warm 
 friend and admirer of Dr. Harris. As an Epis- 
 copalian clergyman and a St. Louis philosopher, 
 he visited the Oxford group of Hegelians, with 
 great mutual satisfaction, though the details he 
 never gave me. After a considerable detour of the 
 spiritual shepherd, around to Chicago and then to 
 New Orleans, he came back to St. Louis, where he 
 built a new church when his old one had burned 
 down. On my return to the city, which took place 
 a good many years later, I found him still at work 
 in his philosophic-poetic harness and had some pre- 
 cious evenings with him before he passed away. 
 
 But picking up the stitch that I let drop a page 
 or two since, I may begin again with the remark 
 that I reached Concord in good trim one summer 
 morning, and in the afternoon I found myself 
 floating down the river in a light boat, and pluck- 
 ing the lilies which shot up into a kind of saluting 
 nosegay along the rather sluggish stream. Now 
 and then I would surprise a muskrat taking his 
 meal among the bulrushes, or a mud-turtle sun- 
 ning himself on an old log from which he would
 
 306 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 give a sudden flop into the water. I dreamed I 
 saw several of Thoreau's birds of which a little 
 covey took flight as I landed on Egg rock, which 
 seven years before I had visited in company with 
 Mr. Emerson and Mr. Alcott to attend a Concord 
 picnic. Thence I sailed down past the old battle 
 field and tried to catch some whiff of the once 
 evoked "Spirit that made those heroes dare" a cen- 
 tury ago and more. Thus I sought to steep my 
 soul in the memories of traditional Concord, which 
 are the town's most exhilarating atmosphere. 
 
 Again back in my hotel, I found a note on my 
 table inviting me to a sociable at the Old Manse, 
 Miss Ripley being still the hostess. With all these 
 ancient names and scenes buzzing through my head 
 I seemed to be living over a tale of long ago, not in 
 aged Greece, but just here in young America. Of 
 course I went to the party, and drank a cup of tea 
 in the former home of two supreme literary geniuses 
 of our new world, Emerson and Hawthorne. As I 
 went peeping through its rooms with the guests, 
 Tradition herself rose from every corner to salute 
 us. A strange blend of emotions haunted me that 
 night into dreamland, for I could not help feeling 
 some pulsations in common between Concord and 
 Athens. 
 
 Next morning I sauntered down the road to the 
 Hillside Chapel, with some forty or fifty people, 
 nearly all of whom were new to me and to the 
 School. Still I recognized a few of last year's faces. 
 The lecture was by Harris and contained some of
 
 BACK TO CONCORD. 307 
 
 his heaviest philosophic cannonading for about an 
 hour, whereupon all the elements present, Transcen- 
 dental, Platonic, Hegelian, were turned loose into 
 a discussion, weaving a many-colored metaphysical 
 web of the universe in which we all were gossamered 
 for another hour. In the evening my talk came on, 
 by way of contrast, not philosophic but easily de- 
 scriptive, with occasional frolicksome reflections. 
 I took my listeners by the hand and led them from 
 Athens over Mount Pentelicus to Marathon, where 
 I made a speech in the wineshop to the assembled 
 Greeks. Then followed an excursion to the Mara- 
 thonian plain, including a brief account of the 
 battle there fought, with side glances at the Con- 
 cord fight for the sake of comparison, the one her- 
 alding perchance Europe's historic independence, 
 the other America's — at which point several tiny 
 hands in the audience came together with a tiny 
 clap, the act of some Concord ladies, I conjecture. 
 Such was the Greek-attuned overture of my second 
 course, audibly harmonious if not very boisterous. 
 Similarly programmed the gracious sunshiny 
 days of Concord's summer come and go with many 
 a little episode heroic for a moment perhaps, but 
 hardly worthy of special fame. On the whole I 
 believe this third year to have been the culmina- 
 tion of the School, its best and happiest year. I 
 attended three later seasons, but there never was 
 quite the same upspring, never the same sponta- 
 neous overflow of enthusiasm. The two main 
 threads of the School were now spun alongside of
 
 308 THE ST. L0VT8 MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 each other by those two ardent philosophic spin- 
 ners, Dr. Harris and Dr. Jones, propagandists of 
 Hegel and of Plato respectively. Between these 
 two speakers, as well as between their doctrines, 
 there was felt to be a gently throbbing undercur- 
 rent of rivalry, amicable but still somewhat fric- 
 tional, which made perceptibly warmer the inter- 
 est in the cold abstractions of metaphysics. Each 
 leader had his followers in the audience, and both 
 sides kept watching intently the tournament, yet 
 with impartial sympathy determined to give the 
 palm to the best man. Of course there was no pub- 
 lic prize, and no open challenge, still there pulsed 
 a tacit emulation which at last crowned the victor 
 in secret eulogy. I am sure I often heard the 
 whispered decision in the final weeks: Dr. Harris 
 has taken intellectual possession of the School. This 
 was not merely my judgment, though it was mine 
 too ; it was the general concensus of the best of all 
 those present. It seemed to me that the last day 
 of the session wound up with an unspoken but dis- 
 tinctly felt award of victory. 
 
 Now the significant fact must not be omitted that 
 both these leaders were from the West philosoph- 
 ically, wherever might have been their respective 
 birthplaces. Thence both had come to the East, 
 to the very home-town of America's most original 
 thinking, now grown somewhat aged, in a kind of 
 hidden hope for the future of philosophic succes- 
 sion. Three summers the contest had already lasted, 
 with an increasing, even if smothered intensity ; this
 
 BACK TO CONCORD. 309 
 
 third round of six weeks (I think) was culminant 
 and triumphant, if I have guaged it aright. Dr. 
 Jones will come once more, and perform worthy- 
 service in his cause, but he is soon to withdraw; 
 at the final sessions of the School he will be no- 
 ticeably absent, which must be deemed an unbal- 
 anced loss. And we shall see that the School itself 
 will begin later to pass out of Philosophy, or at 
 least to bolster it with another discipline. 
 
 Moreover this third year is to be the last in 
 which the School will know the presence of the 
 town's first and greatest Transcendentalist. The 
 following Spring (1882) Emerson passes away, 
 and somewhat later in the same year Alcott has a 
 stroke of apoplexy which he survives, though quite 
 broken in speech and mind. Thus the link which 
 connects the School with the great Past, seems 
 shattered. Still some members of the early Tran- 
 scendental movement are alive and will give occa- 
 sional addresses, for instance Dr. Hedge and Dr. 
 Bartol ; also I remember the discourses of two 
 ladies, Mrs. Cheney and Mrs. Howe, with their 
 reminiscences of the Yankee golden age and its 
 Worthies, especially their apotheosis of its heroine, 
 Margaret Fuller. 
 
 Meanwhile I continued to wander through 
 Greece with my hearers sitting in the Hillside 
 Chapel for an hour each evening. I rode over 
 Parnassus, the seat of the Muses, on the back of a 
 donkey, at which passage I looked up from my 
 page and dared extemporize: "Not the first time
 
 310 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 that feat has been accomplished by a poet without 
 going to Greece at all — something of the sort I may 
 have done myself. ' ' Only two of the philosophers, 
 as far as I observed, tittered a little in response; 
 but a heavy-booted countryman, who seemed to 
 have just dropped in at the door from his hay- 
 field, gave one horse-laugh which drew the whole 
 audience to him away from me. I found out after- 
 ward that he was a neighboring farmer who had 
 come there for his wife, as she was a philosopher. 
 Nor did I fail to show to my little company the 
 genuine rill of Castalia at Delphi, the real thing 
 itself, the famed fountain of the Sisters Nine, in 
 which I had to confess how I saw the women of the 
 nearby village bending over, not as undraped God- 
 desses in the bath, but washing their soiled linen 
 and even trampling it with naked feet and shanks, 
 above the knees sometimes visible. Still I did not 
 give up the quest; I waited till the stream had 
 purified itself by running off, and the next day I 
 took my symbolic dip in that pellucid spring of 
 the poets, an actual palpable spring by the way- 
 side. <So I prattled how I laved my hands and 
 face in it, then thrust my head down into its little 
 gushes and drank of their first bubbles, and would 
 have laid me flat upon its kissing ripples, but I 
 hardly dared make myself so purely and barely 
 statuesque before the passing townsfolk. Still I 
 pulled off shoes and stockings, and piously waded 
 the limpid shrine of Castaly's Muse in a kind of 
 prayer. A fanatical, heathenish action, I know;
 
 BACK TO CONCORD. 3H 
 
 still it made me feel happier at the time, and it 
 even now pleasures me in this classical reminiscence 
 of the far foregone. 
 
 But what means this ribboned envelope which is 
 put into my hand one morning? It contains an 
 invitation to read and talk about my Marathonian 
 experience next afternoon at three o'clock near the 
 North Bridge. Yes, yes, I shall go, I am only too 
 glad. At the appointed hour I stroll down the 
 road past the Old Manse toward the well-known 
 locality, and find a new audience seated in the open 
 under the trees which form a leafy overhead 
 against the summer sun. The place by the river 
 bank levels straight down to the Concord battle- 
 field, and naturally all sorts of comparisons, near 
 and remote, political and historical, were drawn be- 
 tween the Greek and the American far-trumpeted 
 war-overtures. "My dear lofty friend, the World- 
 Spirit, was present," I emphasized, "at both bat- 
 tles, though more than two thousand years apart. 
 I tell you in all faith, the Gods fought along in 
 each of these twin conflicts, more or less visible to 
 their respective worshipers, heathen and christian. 
 Old Herodotus records that at Marathon a new 
 deity appeared, called Echetlus or the worshipful 
 hero with the plowshare, image of the fighting far- 
 mer of ancient Greece slaying the invader of his 
 sacred soil with his native weapon. To him, in that 
 land of divine sculpture, many a statue rose up out 
 of the faith of his folk. Look yonder just across 
 the bridge ; can you not behold the modern Yankee
 
 312 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 farmer Echetlus leaning on his plow at his Mara- 
 thon battle with his native weapon in hand ready- 
 to meet his approaching foe? You call him the 
 Minute Man ; to me he now rises up the old Greek 
 Echetlus resurrected, for I am still to-day at 
 Marathon, and I dream that you are there too." 
 
 As I stretched out arm and forefinger in the 
 given direction toward that sculptured Yankee 
 plowman with his gun, the little company, nearly 
 all of them Concordites, sprang to their feet and 
 centered more searching glances possibly than ever 
 before upon the most familiar figure in their town, 
 as if to see in him also the Marathonian hero, who 
 fired that strangely universal shot heard not only 
 round the world but down time. Thus closed the 
 afternoon in a kind of benediction which linked to- 
 gether Marathon and Concord. And as I glanced 
 up at the Old Manse on my way homeward, I could 
 not help seeing the good old Revolutionary min- 
 ister, Dr. Ripley, standing with uplifted hand at 
 his attic window from which he is said to have 
 watched the battle across the meadows on April 
 19th, 1775. 
 
 The next evening was the last talk of my course 
 at the Hillside Chapel, where another stimulating 
 co-incidence prodded me with a fresh surprise. A 
 new character entered my horizon unexpectedly, 
 so that before me in the audience were three men, 
 all Americans, who, independently of one another, 
 in wide-apart places of the country, driven by 
 their own spiritual needs, had found in ancient
 
 BACK TO CONCORD. 313 
 
 Plato, especially in the form of Neo-Platonism, 
 their supreme truth, their satisfactory explanation 
 of the Universe, their divine Order. Dr. Jones of 
 Jacksonville, Ills., and Mr. Alcott of Concord, 
 Mass., both often already mentioned, held mainly 
 to this world- view; but they are now reinforced 
 by the third, Thomas M. Johnson, just arrived 
 from Osceola on the Osage in Missouri, most apos- 
 tolic and single-hearted of all modern Neo-Platon- 
 ists. This was to me a stunning philosophic con- 
 junction, to which I deemed I owed some recogni- 
 tion from my old Greek experience. 
 
 Accordingly in my talk I narrated to the au- 
 dience, but particularly to these three congenial 
 souls, my haunting reminiscence, doctrine dear to 
 the Platonist, of a former life as I ran down a lit- 
 tle knoll at Marathon. I could not there disen- 
 chant me of the impression that I was an Athenian 
 Hoplite or heavy-armed soldier on that battle-field 
 more than twenty-three centuries ago, and, reach- 
 ing the top of a certain hillock I felt me irresistibly 
 pushed to repeat my old Marathonian charge down 
 that slope at double-quick against the Oriental foe. 
 "I confess to you, my friends," I spake, turning to 
 the Platonic trio in succession "your Plato's idea 
 of pre-existence and re-incarnation became to me 
 an overpowering reality for about two hours, but 
 I was unable to bring it away with me from Mara- 
 thon. Still on that spot I could not help feeling 
 that I had been there before; the mountains, the 
 streams, the fields with their rainbow wavelets of
 
 314 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 poppies rippling in the breeze were an old familiar 
 presence, though this was my first conscious glance 
 at them in this life. I seemed to be re-enacting my 
 ancient actions, I stooped and picked up the same 
 white pebble thousands of years ago, I reached and 
 plucked the same flower, and I drank at the same 
 gurgle of the rivulet. Still more deeply I felt the 
 Greek hate of the Orient which would enslave Hel- 
 las; I refused to cross in my travels the dividing 
 seas to Asia, but turned away with repugnance 
 from its people and its spirit, and then ran back 
 home." 
 
 I did not obtain from my Neo-Platonic friends 
 any response concerning my strange experience ex- 
 cept a smile of non-committal, as I construed it 
 after one questioning eye-shot. Hence I hurried 
 off spurring my discourse at once to Delphi, where 
 on a beautiful April day I climbed again the Par- 
 nassus and looked over the far stretches of the sil- 
 ver-green sparkle of the olive orchards for the last 
 time. There I perched myself upon a small emin- 
 ence and experienced what I have already called 
 my Delphic Moment, which gave a sort of closing 
 consecration to my Classical Itinerary, and under 
 whose urge I hymned my little versified valedictory 
 to Hellas, as I turned my front westward. This I 
 read as my final paragraph of the course, and made 
 it into a good-bye to Concord, when I, facing 
 about, again set my look toward the Mississippi. 
 Let the stout-hearted reader hunt up and peruse 
 that elegiac farewell once more on a previous page,
 
 THE ST. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN CLASS. 315 
 
 if he thinks he can stand the shock of the sentiment 
 and the meter. 
 
 VII 
 
 The St. Louis Kindergarten Class 
 
 Than ever before or since, with a heart hope- 
 fuller and more heightened, I entered St. Louis on 
 my return from the East in the fall of 1881. At 
 once the work began, the classes increased in num- 
 ber and zeal, the St. Louis Movement along my 
 lines seemed to expand and to push ahead to a new 
 and higher stage of development. It is true that 
 the city-soul was still brooding over the Great Dis- 
 illusion, and was beginning to see itself falling be- 
 hind in the grand competitive "Western race of ma- 
 terial progress. Meantime my little group con- 
 tinued to find solace and perchance some compen- 
 sation in the flight back to antique Hellas, that 
 ideal world of long-ago, unclouded by the frowning 
 present. As for me, these two coming years I may 
 call the buoyant boyhood of my Renascence, even 
 if I was crossing the middle life-line into the 
 menacing forties. 
 
 The most important and the most lasting fact of 
 this season I shall pounce upon first: the Kinder- 
 garten Class which now started under the head- 
 ship of Miss Blow. I was the teacher, but she was 
 the ruler. The previous year, as already recounted, 
 she had made a small tentative beginning with 
 Sophocles, as if to test me and my work, about 
 which there was some suspicion in certain quar-
 
 316 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ters. She had evidently made up her mind, from 
 her investigation, to introduce Great Literature 
 studied in the way she had just seen, into her Kin- 
 dergarten training-school, which certainly had no 
 such branch in it before. I may add here that she 
 remained faithful to this work till her last day, re- 
 inforced undoubtedly by the advice and consola- 
 tion of Dr. Harris. 
 
 Moreover she possessed the ability and the am- 
 bition to make her class the central one, and her- 
 self the center of the movement in the city. This 
 she did easily; the leadership came to her by a 
 kind of natural selection, and she by no means 
 shrank from her pre-eminence. She was well aware 
 of her own gift, and she asserted it strenuously 
 after her way, as was her right. Still even in the 
 day of her triumph, she felt the hero's fate, per- 
 chance tragedy. "We have already noticed that 
 peculiar flash of self-revelation which she showed 
 by her sympathy with Achilles in his conflict with 
 Agamemnon. Something of the same sort occurred 
 in the study of Sophocles. Strangely she seemed 
 to prefer the poet's Ajax, ordinarily deemed one 
 of his inferior plays compared to Antigone and 
 Oedipus. The choice along with her reasons struck 
 me as another instance of unconscious confession. 
 Ajax, the strong man, heroic in his way, unappre- 
 ciated and dishonored by his own people, goes 
 crazy and commits suicide — a tragic character. 
 With a feeling which seemed to bubble up from 
 the depths she expressed her pity for the fate-
 
 THE ST. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN CLASS. 317 
 
 stricken hero. Indeed I cannot help thinking that 
 with her pity was mingled a slight shiver of fear, 
 as if she were glimpsing a far-off cloudlet of her 
 own possible destiny. Be that as it may, she ap- 
 peared at times to illustrate in her words and even 
 in her looks the famous statement of Aristotle con- 
 cerning tragedy, whose function, he says, is to 
 purify through fear and pity. Some eight years 
 later I had to recall this singular sympathy of 
 Miss Blow with Ajax as prophetic of her own lot, 
 for she herself had then become a sick heroic char- 
 acter physically and mentally, even if after years 
 of suffering she recovered herself and completed 
 her task in life. 
 
 Thus Literature began to be her true self-ex- 
 pression, for a time at least. And her spirit went 
 over into her devoted followers, who also found 
 themselves in the characters of the old Greek 
 dramatist. Indeed one of these pupils exclaimed 
 on a time : ' ' Old Sophocles must have been a Kin- 
 dergartner." ''Certainly," said she, "how could 
 he help it?" 
 
 But her most audacious request was made to me 
 in the fall of 1882. It was that I should in the 
 forthcoming season conduct her stalwart Kinder- 
 gartners on a far-flung journey through the re- 
 mote and difficult Greek Historians, Herodotus and 
 Thueydides, of course in translation. That was, to 
 my mind the climax of her Classical adventure. No 
 university in the land had or dared attempt any 
 like historical course. Once before in a private
 
 318 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 conversation she had hinted some such crowning 
 aspiration, but I deemed it a mere passing spirit 
 of enthusiasm. But now she makes ready to realize 
 what was to her a deeply cherished ambition. " It 
 is true that I had told her of my own studies of 
 these two books while still an undergraduate of 
 Oberlin College, which had neither of them in its 
 curriculum. That time saw the outbreak of the 
 Civil War when our nation was engaged in the 
 making of its greatest history. I had then studied 
 in the original these two historical works supreme 
 of their kind, seemingly in unconscious response to 
 the events of the day. I remembered especially 
 Thucydides recording the innar dissolution of the 
 Greek world through war and mutual antagonism, 
 for I was pondering over his pages just during the 
 secession of the Gulf States headed by South Caro- 
 lina. In his weighty bodeful sentences I seemed to 
 hear the far-off echo of our own political destiny. 
 Though twenty years had rolled over me since 
 then, I felt strongly the desire to review and re- 
 new this early stage of my Greek inheritance, il- 
 lumined by my recent experience in Greece itself. 
 Moreover Thucydides is as tragic as Sophocles, 
 both being contemporaries ; the historian tells the 
 same story actually which the poet tells mythically. 
 Thus each is a commentary on the other, while 
 both reveal one common underlying Hellenic con- 
 sciousness of the time, and its tragic outlook just 
 at its height. 
 
 And to-day Thucydides rises up the primordial
 
 THE ST. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN CLASS. 319 
 
 prophet of the present European dissolution. As 
 little Greece went to pieces in antiquity, so Europe 
 seems now disintegrating, from essentially the same 
 ultimate cause. Here I may be allowed to say that 
 I felt myself often driven back to the old His- 
 torian during this year of 1918, as the best recorder 
 and reflector of the present political earthquake. 
 For he gives in small what is now happening in 
 large, scattered over vast spaces; he shows the 
 minute Greek germ or cellule of what is to-day the 
 world's monster. 
 
 This study of the Greek Historians was the cul- 
 mination of the Greek Renascence in St. Louis, and 
 I have to think, the beginning of its decline. It 
 started to show signs of having spent itself. Like 
 the Greek world of which it was the offspring, it 
 too was born tragic, at least in St. Louis. Our 
 lessons in Thucydides began to partake of the lot 
 of the time which the Historian delineates, and 
 they seemed to share actually in the fate which his 
 History foreshows. 
 
 But my best and most enduring acquisition dur- 
 ing these years I deem to be my communion with a 
 new spirit in human life, especially as regards edu- 
 cation. I came to know the Kindergartners, a 
 unique body of people aflame with zeal and sacri- 
 fice for a noble cause. I felt deeply their example 
 and its inspiration, since I too had my call and 
 my higher duty above my merely bread-winning 
 vocation. The best of them showed the supernal 
 spirit of service to an Idea which transfigured their
 
 320 THE ^. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 lives and even their looks. Modern missionaries 
 they were on their own soil, wherein I responded 
 strongly to their unspoken but soul-compelling ap- 
 peal. It is true that I never became a practical 
 Kindergartner, I was too old, and besides I had 
 heard my own distinctive call. Still I, getting 
 gray and bald, squatted on the floor and played 
 with the little children ; then I would crouch down 
 into their wee narrow chairs at their low tables, try- 
 ing to be one of them in sport and spirit; or I 
 would join hands with them and dance around the 
 circle not merely for pleasure but for my spirit's 
 sustentation. It was a great new experience, my 
 dulled life's daily renewal from the fresh foun- 
 tains of first existence bubbling out of those young 
 hearts, a baptism which I, the solitary, much-in- 
 troverted student, sorely needed. I had already 
 experienced that my own children, small as they 
 were and fleeting, had given me a blessed discipline 
 just through their infancy. But now I was alone, 
 and deeply immersed in my studies, against whose 
 absorption of me I would frequently revolt and 
 run out to play with the little ones. That helped 
 to keep me human, and more of it would not have 
 hurt me. But thus in a measure was supplied me 
 the loss of my family, which had been torn from 
 my bosom by remorseless fate, and I was bidden 
 unto doing my life-task alone. 
 
 Such was the place which the Kindergarten 
 spirit now took in the unfolding of my career, a 
 place which it retained through all my active years
 
 THE ST. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN CLASS. 321 
 
 till I had rounded life's meridian into the after- 
 noon of old-age. In a sense I was married to it by 
 a vow unspoken, yea unconscious largely, but 
 sealed in the soul's deepest loyalty. I believe too 
 that the St. Louis Kindergarten spirit was at its 
 highest during this its early period ; the primitive 
 purity of the cause had not yet been tainted by 
 success, by fame, by partisan and personal ambi- 
 tion, with its bitter antagonisms. I saw and felt 
 the work when it was still small, but all the more 
 consecrated; in that state it engrafted upon nry 
 very existence its abiding worth and its ideal de- 
 votion. To be sure certain limitations soon began 
 to show themselves both in the theory and in the 
 practice, in the work and in the workers. Even 
 the negative woman playing her subtle part in the 
 innocent paradise of the Kindergarten I thought 
 I glimpsed already once or twice. 
 
 Such was the fresh baptism of the spirit which 
 that St. Louis group of Kindergartners gave back 
 to me in some hidden response to my instruction. 
 Now the creative source of this influence always 
 streamed up to Miss Blow as the genius who pos- 
 sessed the power of infusing herself into the very 
 character of her pupils, and of moulding them 
 over into her own image. A transcendent gift was 
 that, yet not without its dangers, as we shall have 
 to note later. But at present it made her little 
 training-room a center of a grand Kindergarten 
 overflow not only into the city but into the sur- 
 rounding states, and it penetrated even to Canada.
 
 322 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Such was the beginning of her great educational 
 deed, which ranks with, or possibly outranks the 
 greatest yet done in America. This too may well 
 be deemed a phase or a part of the Renascence em- 
 braced in the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 I had many other classes about town, but hers 
 always took precedence, and indeed made itself the 
 typical one of all through her leadership, keeping 
 somehow its sovereign place in the heart of the 
 business. During a few weeks of the winter months 
 she would bring Harris from Concord to give lec- 
 tures mainly on Religion and Philosophy with oc- 
 casional excursions into Art and Literature. Thus 
 she rose to a kind of intellectual primacy in the 
 city, such as no man ever won in my time. For a 
 while she appeared to be our urban sage, more dis- 
 cussed, more wondered at, more influential, I think, 
 than any other personality in our midst. Primarily 
 this pre-eminence of hers sprang from her unique 
 talent, but it was strongly seconded by her high 
 social position among the old reigning families, by 
 her independent wealth, and especially by her 
 sovereign achievement in education now growing 
 in importance every day over the whole country. 
 I also think that Miss Blow during these two or 
 three years was at her life's culminating excel- 
 lence, at her very perihelion in her total career's 
 orbit. To my mind she never again reached the 
 same native illuminating height in word and deed, 
 though she afterwards both wrote and did a good 
 deal. For her later work always showed a strain
 
 THE ST. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN CLASS. 323 
 
 of estrangement from her nature's right environ- 
 ment and from her best self. But at present, let it 
 be emphasized, she attained a unique spiritual 
 hegemony in the community, and her influence 
 kept streaming out over the entire land in new 
 triumphs, especially for her Kindergarten message. 
 
 To be sure, the time and the place strongly co- 
 operated with Miss Blow, who had the insight and 
 the good-fortune to launch her ship at the favoring 
 flood. It is my opinion that St. Louis during these 
 years was permeated with a deeper, more aggressive 
 and more wide-spread intellectual interest than it 
 has ever shown since. Let the reader, however, 
 take into account that it is an old man now speak- 
 ing and looking back at his somewhat distant past 
 through the glass of reminiscence, which has the 
 tendency to magnify generally, and sometimes to 
 distort. Still I meet on the streets of the city to- 
 day dozens who will stop me and spend some happy 
 minutes in recalling voluntarily and re-affirming 
 that long-gone golden age of intellectual St. Louis. 
 
 But I have to repeat that signs of a decline had 
 begun to peep out on various sides. This was 
 manifest in Miss Blow herself, who started to 
 show pronounced indications of a reaction, espe- 
 cially against my Greek Renascence, and doubtless 
 against me personally. Religious scruples were 
 rising in her mind, and she failed not to let them 
 express themselves in class. A spiritual crisis was 
 coming over her from causes which were whispered 
 everywhere among her friends. It was even said
 
 324 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 that she in her doubt and tribulation had thought 
 of taking flight to the bosom of the old Mother 
 Church of Rome. Her Kindergartners, so some of 
 them told me, found her often in deep melancholy, 
 from which they could drag her only by taking her 
 to play with the children. Such was her supreme 
 relief, and it indicates the reason why she so fer- 
 vently embraced the Kindergarten — to escape the 
 dark fiends which she thought were pursuing her 
 and hers with some fatality — possibly the imagined 
 counterstroke of her genius. It was no secret that 
 Miss Blow's life was passed in the midst of some 
 long private trouble which colored her whole life, 
 and which haunted her after she quit St. Louis, 
 and was at least one cause of a protracted malady, 
 ever threatening death, from which, however, she 
 victoriously rescued herself by sheer will-power — 
 personally her most characteristic action, and pos- 
 sibly her grandest fate-coercing triumph. I was 
 not her confidant, still she could not help confess- 
 ing herself even in a brief answer before her class. 
 I have seen that peculiar look of destiny flush sud- 
 denly her face, as if it welled up from the last 
 depths of her experience, though she said nothing. 
 Still she could be merry, and I have remarked her 
 once or twice a little boisterous. Her conversation 
 at its best was tinged with a smiling streak of 
 humorous irony, which, however, seemed quite to 
 disappear in her writings. 
 
 In relation to myself, it was evident that a rift 
 had started and was growing in depth and inten-
 
 THE ST. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN CLASS. 325 
 
 sity. Moreover the breach could not be healed, 
 since it reached down to a fundamental diversity of 
 character, as well as to a difference of view con- 
 cerning the nature of education. The disagree- 
 ment became pronounced when Miss Blow tried to 
 subject my work and myself to Dr. Harris. I 
 asserted very decidedly my right of independent 
 self-development. And I insisted that true edu- 
 cation ought to be based ultimately upon that same 
 right in every individual, which doctrine crossed 
 her inborn grain and possibly her secret ambition. 
 Harris was unfolding on his own lines at that time, 
 chiefly in the religious sphere; really he was 
 Catholicizing, wherein I could not follow him. We 
 were friends and both belonged to the St. Louis 
 Movement, which ought to be large enough, so I 
 thought, to contain us both in our fullest and 
 freest evolution. But that was just what Miss 
 Blow would not, indeed could not stand for ; there 
 must be subordination, prescription, personal dis- 
 cipleship. She was a will-character, and was going 
 to enforce her decree, especially as she now felt her- 
 self to be the literary dictator of our St. Louis 
 work. And this she was, more than any other per- 
 son, and by rightful pre-eminence, in my opinion. 
 But her very power seemed to destroy her gift of 
 co-operation; she could not tolerate, could not as- 
 sociate strong independent individualities; hence 
 she failed to train her pupils to self-determination, 
 the topmost flower of instruction. This in spite of 
 the fact that she was always emphasizing self-
 
 326 THE ST.L0UI8 MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 activity, the favorite educational category of Dr. 
 Harris. Here too lies probably the main reason 
 why she succeeded better with women than with 
 men. 
 
 Other classes of mine over town wound up their 
 season's work in a satisfied frame of mind, and the 
 outlook bespoke promise. But the central class 
 ended in a distinct undertone of disharmony, and 
 our happy Greek Renascence threatened to close 
 tragically, like the Greek Drama and the Greek 
 History which we had just studied. How about 
 next season? Not a word from either side. Let 
 the boiling summer clarify the turbid waters, if it 
 can, during the intervening vacation. Soon I had 
 packed up and was off for Concord, where I was on 
 the programme for another course, dealing with 
 Homer and the Greek Religion. Thus I edged into 
 the Philosophical School one of my Literary Bibles, 
 the second of the sort in my courses there, to be 
 followed by a third — whereof a later explanation 
 will be due in its own good time. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Psychology Appears at Concord 
 
 By means of the first word of this caption I 
 would emphasize the appearance of a weighty new 
 fact in the School, in the time, and somewhat dimly 
 in myself. For my attention was now challenged 
 by the new Psychology to a first distinct encounter,
 
 PSYCHOLOGY APPEARS AT CONCORD. 327 
 
 as far as I can at present remember ; both the name 
 and the thing swept across my mental horizon and 
 left their impress, which, however, is to lie dormant 
 yet yeasting for many years. I would have little 
 or nothing to say of this session of the School (in 
 1883) so like was it on the whole to former ones, 
 were it not for the course entitled Three Lectures 
 on Psychology, by Professor William James of 
 Harvard University. 
 
 Such was the subject and such was the man now 
 announced, both belonging to the future more than 
 any of us or anything of us. Professor James was 
 then almost unknown, though over forty years old ; 
 he had not yet written his books, though his name 
 had been appended to some magazine articles; I 
 had noticed especially those in the Journal of 
 Speculative Philosophy, though with no pronounced 
 attraction. Nor had I ever heard Harris speak of 
 James the son, though he often mentioned the 
 father, eminent for his advocacy of Swedenborg 
 and among us for his declared hostility to Hegel. 
 And Psychology as the new sovereign science was 
 then just beginning to peep out of its egg-shell 
 here in America, showing its early callow features 
 copied mainly from the class-room of the German 
 University where it had been hatched. To be sure, 
 Psychology as an old discipline tacked on to Philos- 
 opy was known to all readers of the great thinkers 
 back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. But this 
 course of lectures suggested, though it hardly pro- 
 claimed or revealed, the new-world birth of an old-
 
 328 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 world science. I doubt if James himself was yet 
 fully aware of himself and of his theme, for he 
 seemed often very tentative and experimental; he 
 was already a pragmatist before pragmatism; he 
 could not help practicing his basis consciousness 
 before he had evolved it and formulated it into his 
 far-famed theory. 
 
 But how strange it all appears now, as I look 
 behind me through the ageing decades! Nobody 
 then in Concord, not a single philosopher — and we 
 privately talked over James and his subject a good 
 deal outside the public discussion — had the least 
 inkling of a forecast concerning the great future 
 import of the man and his theme. I asked Harris 
 about both, but policy bade him hold his tongue, 
 though it permitted him to give one little shake of 
 his head in doubt. Professor George Howison was 
 there, and I quizzed him: Tell me what does the 
 thing mean and whither? Howison, who was at 
 that time located in Boston, and who had looked 
 into the university instruction of James, so he 
 stated to me, unhesitatingly declared then and 
 there: "I cannot quite make out what James is 
 after, and I never found anybody at Harvard who 
 could." Still James had appreciators in the Con- 
 cord set. These, as far as my knowledge went, 
 were mainly lady philosophers in attendance at 
 the School, a little group of whom I once asked: 
 "How do you like James and his Psychology?" 
 They all expressed themselves as charmed by the 
 man and by his waywardness of word and of
 
 PSYCHOLOGY APPEARS AT CONCORD. 329 
 
 thought. One of them struck off a sentence like 
 this : "lam enraptured with his freakish oddities, 
 I love to ramble after him through the fantastical 
 jungles of human subjectivity." I have forgotten 
 my answer, if I gave any ; but now I find me re- 
 flecting to myself: Yes, another case of like lik- 
 ing like. 
 
 And here let us look forward seven years from 
 the time of this course of lectures. In 1890 James 
 published his two considerable volumes under the 
 one title, Principles of Psychology. The work, 
 though of the heavy sort, had a surprisingly high- 
 soaring popularity in America, and its fame swept 
 across to England and beyond. Evidently the au- 
 thor had just hit the mood of the time, and had 
 given expression to a dawning consciousness. The 
 reception of the book seemed to indicate that the 
 new thought-era was to be psychological, and the 
 new world-discipline was to be Psychology. Of 
 course James does not directly say this, and I 
 doubt if he himself then discerned the full bearing 
 of his prophetic initiative. 
 
 On the other hand that same year (1890) saw 
 the appearance of a much smaller yet parallel book 
 by a Concord philosopher, the foremost of us all. 
 It was rather a modest-garbed volume, which was 
 named Hegel's Logic, being written by Dr. W. T. 
 Harris. The writer's proclaimed intention was to 
 popularize what has been already called the hard- 
 est book in the world. I had to confess to him that 
 his interpretation of it in English was often more
 
 330 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 difficult for me than the original Hegel himself. 
 A dozen years later he told me with hesitating sigh 
 that he had not succeeded in his design, that his 
 hook had been a failure. But after two or three 
 melancholy reflections he brisked up and affirmed 
 with decision: "Now I am going to make the 
 whole thing over in a new edition." On this work 
 he was engaged when he passed away. Thus that 
 Hegelian Logic was to him a veritable "Book of 
 Fate," with which he wrestled all his mature life 
 till he sank down at grips with it still in his last 
 moments. 
 
 Meanwhile during these same dozen years let us 
 glance at the prodigious ascent and flight of Pro- 
 fessor James quite round the whole world. For 
 not so many months later there has arisen such a 
 popular demand for his work that he condenses it 
 into a text book (1892), which in its field practic- 
 ally takes possession of the higher educational in- 
 stitutions throughout the entire land, giving a 
 mighty uplift to the new Psychology, at least to 
 his form of it. He was now probably deemed Har- 
 vard's most distinguished Professor. Moreover we 
 read him heralded America's greatest philosopher, 
 not merely her greatest psychologist. And we are 
 surprised to learn that in his university instruc- 
 tion he has passed from his professorship of Psy- 
 chology to that of Philosophy. Indeed in the 
 course of his academic career he has made the 
 same change twice, as if he were somewhat uncer- 
 tain whether he were a philosopher or a psycholo-
 
 PSYCHOLOGY APPEARS AT CONCORD. 331 
 
 gist; perchance he felt himself both somehow in- 
 termingled, and at times interwarring. 
 
 It would seem that the best commentary on 
 James' doctrine is his biography. In one friendly 
 account of him I find no less than ten different 
 changes of vocation. He appeared to be on the 
 hunt after a working hypothesis for himself during 
 his whole life, shifting about a good deal in search 
 of practical consequences and never quite satisfied. 
 Thus his biography has a pragmatic cast from 
 start to finish. At first he was an artist, and some- 
 what of this artistic vein trickles through him to 
 the last. Then he was a scientist of various kinds, 
 culminating seemingly in his study of Physiology 
 at Berlin (1867), and this physiological element 
 stayed with him as the substrate of his later work. 
 But soon we find him transferred in his instruc- 
 tion to Philosophy, from which he went over to 
 Psychology, and then back again to Philosophy of 
 which he was Professor when he retired. Now this 
 brief snatch of biography shows not merely James 
 but the time in its deepest spiritual transition, 
 with many an oscillation back and forth between 
 Philosophy and Psychology. Such repeated fluctua- 
 tion betokens the struggle of our western world to- 
 ward a new universal discipline as the successor of 
 Philosophy, toward a fresh interpretation of the 
 Universe in terms of the American institutional 
 consciousness. Thus James in his work and in his 
 life has the value of mirroring his age at an epochal 
 turning-point.
 
 332 T H E ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 From these two significant contemporaneous cir- 
 cumstances, one is compelled to the inference that 
 Dr. Harris in his book was not in touch with the 
 trend of the time, while Prof. James had at least 
 tapped the fountain of the future. Whatever ex- 
 ceptions might be taken to the latter 's somewhat 
 choppy treatment of his subject, and to his short- 
 comings in thought, he had uttered and emphasized 
 that creative and prophetic word, Psychology, 
 which meant in its fulfilment a new-born world of 
 thought. I heard the word at Concord and pon- 
 dered and wondered, but did not then even for- 
 bode its full meaning for my own life, or for the 
 coming time. 
 
 The year during which Prof. James lectured at 
 Concord was the fifth of the School, whose course 
 then had reached its culmination. Philosophically 
 Harris was enthroned over all, and the Hegelians 
 held the citadel. Their earlier competitors, the 
 Platonists, were withdrawing and soon quite 
 dropped out of the race. Such was the general 
 philosophic situation when James appeared with 
 his Psychology, which was probably intended as a 
 kind of antidote. For James had already entered 
 the writing arena as a pronounced if not bitter 
 antagonist of Hegel. The preceding year (1882) 
 he had printed in a well-known philosophical Jour- 
 nal his essay called "Some Hegelisms", in which 
 he seeks to make an end of the German philosopher, 
 planting his front blow thus: "Hegel's dialectical 
 method I believe to be wholly abominable when
 
 PSYCHOLOGY APPEARS AT CONCORD. 333 
 
 worked by concepts alone." Herein one may well 
 hear the eminent professor telling on himself, and 
 marking with emphasis, almost with passion, his 
 philosophic limitation. For that subtle dialectic 
 process which old Eleatic Zeno first glimpsed, which 
 was seized upon and exploited not a little by 
 Greek Plato, especially in his Parmenides, and 
 which Hegel sublimated into the inner driving- 
 wheel of his whole Logic and hence of the Uni- 
 verse, James confesses that he hates, and will 
 fling to the Furies. Doubtless he does not inti- 
 mately and creatively grasp it, for it is not to 
 be gotten by a passing ordinary act of intellec- 
 tion, but it must be long lived with and wrestled 
 with and wrought with. Here too we may note 
 also that dislike of all abstract thought which 
 winds through and bounds his whole mentality. 
 And yet James could not leave Philosophy alone 
 but always went back to it, as the very goal of his 
 spirit's deepest striving — to Philosophy which may 
 be regarded as the science of pure abstraction itself. 
 Is not his chief term Pragmatism an abstract con- 
 concept? A good deal of criticism it evoked when 
 it was first broached, wherein he might have seen 
 that it too was dialectical. 
 
 Connected with the history of the Concord 
 School is another utterance of James in his printed 
 essays. He has announced the arrival in a philo- 
 sophic club at Boston of two young business men 
 from Illinois, enthusiastic Hegelians, "who with 
 little or no knowledge of German had actually
 
 334 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 possessed themselves of a manuscript translation 
 of the entire three volumes of the Logic made by 
 an extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant named 
 Brockmeyer." Such is the faint rather spectral 
 glimpse which the Harvard Professor has caught 
 of the strange original demiurge of the St. Louis 
 Movement and of its big "Book of Fate." Brock- 
 meyer by the way was not a Pomeranian but a 
 Prussian of Minden. Moreover James observes 
 that the said Club, of which he was a member, "had 
 gone over a good part of Hegel's Logic under the 
 self-constituted leadership" of those two green 
 philosophic suckers from Quincy, Illinois, who had 
 never been at a German University, and who could 
 not even read the original text of their master, 
 digging laboriously their knowledge of his doc- 
 trine up from Brockmeyer 's barbarous Teutonic- 
 English. It could only be deemed an act of un- 
 paralled presumption on the part of those insolent 
 "Westerners, as we may hear in an undertone out 
 of the epithet self-constituted, and some other 
 nuances of style. And all this took place in the 
 sacred precincts of Boston and Concord, for in the 
 latter place these bold Illinoisans had actually 
 settled down as permanent residents planting them- 
 selves as local pillars of the Concord School of 
 Philosophy. 
 
 And here I may dare propound a problem to 
 myself, and to my reader also, if he will not get 
 angry. Did you ever think, when hearing or read- 
 ing James, that he at times shows a streak of that
 
 PSYCHOLOGY APPEARS AT CONCORD. 335 
 
 peculiar psychical distemper known to outsiders as 
 Bostonitis — not dangerous, hardly offensive, but 
 symptomatic of some mighty local and possibly 
 personal superiority ? This runs often through the 
 man a vein of subtle sarcastic contempt for the 
 rest of the world, especially for the savage West, 
 tincting the manner, the look, the style of the Pro- 
 fessor as well as the content of his utterance. All 
 of which, however, cannot seriously affect the 
 inner worth of his message. 
 
 Now I am inclined to believe that just this meet- 
 of James with these two fervent believers in Hegel 
 and their one Great Book was an important epoch 
 in his philosophical development. He did not say 
 so and probably did not think so, and might even 
 have resented such a statement, still he bore the 
 impress of this experience through life, even if 
 by way of opposition. For he now saw men who 
 had a living faith in Philosophy, and were ready 
 to impart it with a missionary zeal, expounding 
 it to him and the Club from the strange hieroglyphs 
 of the "three big folios" of their manuscript Bible. 
 Moreover he had brushed against the greatest Ger- 
 man world-book of Philosophy, not excepting 
 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, of which it is 
 indeed the sovereign remedial corrective, bringing 
 intellectual restoration after overcoming man's 
 ultimate denial. I dare think that Professor James 
 must have gotten lasting, even if unconscious value 
 from the scene and the man thus described by 
 him: "A more admirable homo unius libri than
 
 336 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 one of them with his three big folios of Hegelian 
 manuscript I have never had the good fortune to 
 know." Doubtless this passage is tuned to an 
 ironical note, still the writer of it never forgot, 
 never could rid himself of the impressive fact 
 which he here witnessed at least from the outside — 
 the fact of the world's thought unified, inter-re- 
 lated, and organized into one complete system, and 
 of one man's unshaken belief in such a system. 
 That was a new strange lesson for the pragmatic 
 Professor, probably not obtainable at Berlin or at 
 Harvard. To be sure, James the pluralist, prag- 
 matist, theoretical opportunist, fought, ridiculed, 
 satirized all such systematic unity of Mind and 
 "World, but he must have been convinced by the 
 weakness of his own arguments, for he wound up 
 his life trying to build some such a system of his 
 own, which he actually calls "my system" in what 
 seems almost his last-voiced breath. 
 
 There is no doubt, however, that James had good 
 reason to be puzzled at the Concord phenomenon. 
 He had studied at Berlin, home of Hegel and 
 Hegelism, whose decadence in that city he saw to 
 be complete. He declares that he could find there 
 "but a single youthful disciple" among the vast 
 horde of Professors and Tutors in the great Berlin 
 University. For young Germany Hegel was dead 
 and buried out of sight; only some very old Pro- 
 fessors still lingered pathetically over the grave 
 of their once triumphant Philosophy. One of these 
 antediluvian Hegelians I saw at Berlin during my
 
 PSYCHOLOGY APPEARS AT CONCORD. 337 
 
 visit there in 1878 — the aged Michelet, co-editor 
 of Hegel's Works. The then recent German Em- 
 pire he could still deduce philosophically, employ- 
 ing the Hegelian categories. In spite of my sym- 
 pathy with him and his cause, he impressed me as 
 reminiscence mid ruins. 
 
 But think of the young ambitious student, Wil- 
 liam James, returning from Germany laden with 
 its latest erudition; suddenly he finds that the 
 main article of philosophic equipment, as here 
 called for, has been omitted from his Berlin studies. 
 Just outside of Boston, in the illustrious town of 
 Concord a new School of Philosophy has been 
 started, and its strongest man is a follower of He- 
 gel. And what is most confounding, a fresh philo- 
 sophic stream appears to be setting in from the 
 West, that wild West of which the right hero was 
 supposed to be Buffalo Bill, whose big show of 
 savagery was trumpeted as the true university of 
 the backwoods. But now the most abstract of all 
 abstract Philosophies comes driving Bostonward 
 not from Berlin but from St. Louis. Can we won- 
 der at the perplexity, the pragmatism, and the iron- 
 ical pique of Professor James? That was enough 
 to make all New England turn pragmatist. 
 
 Still let it be strongly affirmed once more that 
 James brought to the fore the cardinal discipline 
 of the age — Psychology. Concord did not, could 
 not do that, Such remains his supreme achieve- 
 ment, and a great one it is, even if he had a final 
 relapse to Philosophy, rebounding between his two
 
 338 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 antitheses again and again. Nor must we forget 
 the conclusion; the system-destroyer seeks by a 
 last effort to become the system-builder, very prop- 
 erly of his own fragmentary work. Pathetic is 
 what stands printed as his parting testamentary 
 utterance: "Say that I hoped by it (his last un- 
 finished book) to round out my system which now 
 is too much like an arch built only on one side." 
 
 IX 
 
 Finale at St. Louis 
 
 Shall I go or stay? Has the moment come for 
 me to quit St. Louis the disillusioned, and follow 
 my fleeing comrades? Let the reader imagine me 
 propounding such questions to myself as I sit 
 lonely in my room after my return from Concord, 
 about the first of September, 1883, when the season 
 of renewed study is soon to open for the coming 
 year. Before me lies a copy of Goethe's Faust, 
 much thumbed and bescribbled round the margins 
 with notes, signifying at least a considerable 
 amount of reading and meditation. During the 
 past years I never once took a class in Faust, still 
 I have devoted to it many odd moments and not 
 a few moments that were not odd, but stolen from 
 other less attractive duties. For somehow this 
 poem has recently kept overflowing me like a deluge 
 from unknown sources, giving me no peace till I 
 might be able to master it and co-ordinate it with
 
 FINALE AT ST. LOUIS. 339 
 
 the other great poems which I have been working 
 at, especially Homer and Shakespeare. 
 
 Chiefly through the Concord School and its ad- 
 vertising power my name has been scattered very 
 thinly indeed over a considerable newspaper sur- 
 face, and some notion of my line of effort has been 
 planted in a few congenial minds on divers spots 
 east and west. The result is a number of localities 
 outside of St. Louis have requested my presence 
 for similar courses. Shall I accept ? But whenever 
 I think of saying Yes, as I do repeatedly, that 
 Faust-book lying before me seems to bristle up its 
 leaves like a hedgehog, and take visible human 
 shape, looking an emphatic if not angry No into 
 my very heart, and reaffirming with decision my 
 new task. 
 
 Still the doubt will flutter up again. There is 
 in the first place the economic problem, my own 
 little personal one and a larger, for I have to sup- 
 port and educate my child, now rapidly growing 
 into her earliest teens. Then the unimproved Real 
 Estate in North St. Louis, the millstone tied around 
 my neck by the Great Illusion some fifteen years 
 since, not only refuses to budge in value but keeps 
 sinking lower and lower, and also dragging me 
 down deeper into its mudhole with an ever fresh 
 burden of taxes, general and special. Now and 
 then I mount a street car for that part of town, 
 and take a brief look at myself reflected in my mir- 
 roring pond with a kind of self-pity, to which the
 
 340 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ripples murmur in scoffing smiles: "Are you not 
 yet disillusioned of the Future Great City of the 
 World? Well, more discipline awaits you." 
 
 The recompense, however, was not wanting. 
 Classes reported as usual, with one striking ex- 
 ception, and a modest living rose in sight, very 
 modest and shrinking but still adequate. So I 
 braced myself to the emergency. Only in one 
 quarter was there a gap and that was at the cen- 
 ter. The Kinder gartners gave no sign of resum- 
 ing their work under my tuition. The previous 
 season had ended in a discord, as the reader may 
 recollect, and I had come to the conclusion that 
 the movement in that direction had been perma- 
 nently blocked. For I knew Miss Blow to be in 
 a state of reaction against me and my tendencies; 
 nevertheless, though she more than any other per- 
 son held the intellectual leadership among the 
 city's best, I made up my mind to go my ways 
 without her assistance, and even under her frown 
 if need be, at least for a year. The Faust poem 
 would not loose its hold of me ; I had won new in- 
 sights, as I believed, into its structure and mean- 
 ing, but they were still scattered, unfinished, lying 
 around in my brain disorganized ; I needed a whole 
 season to work it over in private and in class, and 
 thereby make it my own, elevating it into my con- 
 ception of a Literary Bible. This I could best do 
 while teaching it; and already I had succeeded in 
 forming two little groups in Faust, one of men 
 and the other of women. Thus I had started my
 
 FINALE AT ST. LOUIS. 341 
 
 special present task of Super-education, now more 
 imperious over me than ever before. 
 
 Accordingly I resolved to make this my Faust- 
 year (1883-4), in response to an irresistible inner 
 demand of my whole selfhood. I had found that 
 Faust's spiritual career, as set forth by the poet 
 passed through a great Classical Renascence, espe- 
 cially in the Second Part of the drama. Thus there 
 was revealed a bond of intimate personal expe- 
 rience which companioned me with the poem at the 
 very shrine of the spirit. To live this fact in the 
 form which is given it by the poet had become with 
 me not merely an ambition or desire, but the soul's 
 hallowing redemption. 
 
 And now it behooves me to take note of another 
 significant coincidence, external perchance, yet of 
 great influence over my choice. Let me state it 
 thus: Faust, on the whole, may well be deemed 
 the distinctive poem of the St. Louis Movement — 
 the favorite poem, more read and more bespoken 
 than any other. Never since then has any great 
 work of genius taken such deep and persistent pos- 
 session of the city's mind. I do not say that every 
 person in our midst rushed to studying Faust; 
 still within my range there was more discussion 
 of it than of any other poetic masterpiece. It 
 seemed for a while to express our very conscious- 
 ness. Let us recall that this took place during the 
 German Era of St. Louis, as I have labeled it in 
 a former chapter. The great Teutonic poem we 
 adopted as our own in accord with the urban char-
 
 342 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 acter of the time, or possibly in response to the 
 world's chief trend, which was then German, or at 
 least Germanizing. 
 
 No less than four eminent and gifted expound- 
 ers had held classes and given lecture courses on 
 Faust in English during the fore-mentioned pe- 
 riod, each according to his viewpoint, and native 
 ability. Davidson fell into line, and expressed his 
 varying opinions upon the subject, whch were 
 mainly critical, though he was then not so hostile 
 to Goethe as he became later. He was at that time 
 reveling in his German ecstasy with the rest of 
 us, rather more raptured perhaps than the rest of 
 us, from which exuberance he afterward had a vio- 
 lent rebound to the opposite. Soldan was the leader 
 of coteries studying Faust which were composed 
 of the first ladies of the town mostly living on 
 Lucas Place, then aristocracy's quarter. Soldan 
 may have been selected by this high-toned set be- 
 cause he was the politest man of us all, and like- 
 wise well versed in the German erudition of the 
 subject, having been born and educated in Ger- 
 many. Dr. Harris, most influential of our whole 
 set, gave frequent talks on Faust and scattered 
 many allusions to the work even through his more 
 cryptic discourses. His influence carried the study 
 among the more aspiring teachers of the Public 
 Schools, and put stress upon its relation to phi- 
 losophy. The poem as a whole he did not seem 
 to care for or even to seek after; certain favorite 
 passages and incidents he would pick out and dilate
 
 FINALE AT ST. LOUIS. 343 
 
 upon with a special relish. Thus each of these 
 men in his own way and sphere kept the great mas- 
 terpiece alive and working for years. 
 
 Still they were not the first in origination or in 
 originality. A course of conversations on Faust 
 given by Brockmeyer during the year 1864, at a 
 time before I knew him, is set down as the historic 
 starting-point of the St. Louis interest in the poem. 
 Harris engineered the matter and got together the 
 little audience. So I have heard from him the story. 
 Moreover he induced Brockmeyer to commit to 
 writing his exposition in the form of letters which 
 were afterwards published in the first numbers 
 of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the earli- 
 est original writ begotten of the St. Louis Move- 
 ment. A couple of these Letters on Faust in manu- 
 script I heard the author read at the house of Har- 
 ris on my first visit to the philosophic group in 
 1865. I hardly caught their bearing at the start, 
 but gradually through them and the discussions 
 generated about them, there began to dawn upon 
 me the grand new field of the literary interpreta- 
 tion of the greatest masterpieces. 
 
 In fact, Faust was Brockmeyer 's one poem, the 
 only one for him and the sovereign over all others. 
 He would recognize Homer and Shakespeare, still 
 he did not know them as wholes, but merely in 
 salient points or episodes here and there. People 
 have said that he in one of his high tantrums could 
 look Mephistopheles better than any actor; a cer- 
 tain demonic impression lay in his grimace, and
 
 344 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 roused sometimes a little tremor, especially in 
 women, and even antipathy. I have often tried to 
 identify his life with the career of Faust ; his flight 
 to the backwoods was his grand act of negation 
 by which he would do away with society and state. 
 In this way he had lived the poem, and so he be- 
 came for us its creative expositor. 
 
 Still here too he manifested that same lack of 
 realizing power, which has before been noted of 
 him ; after making a fair start he utterly refused 
 to complete his grandly conceived work, leaving it 
 a wonderfully promising but unfinished chaos. 
 Thus his Letters on Faust remain an unrealized 
 fragment, one of his numerous much-bestrown 
 torsos. Still they showed a marvelous gift of start- 
 ing a spiritual fermentation in individuals, and 
 even in the community; but they remained yeast, 
 and never became bread. Similar was the case with 
 his single supreme philosophic labor over Hegel's 
 Logic, indeed with his whole life. His genius per- 
 sisted in staying germinal, never unfolding into 
 fulfillment. 
 
 I have now to ask the question: why should St. 
 Louis or a goodly proportion of her thinking peo- 
 ple adopt this poem as a kind of spiritual breviary, 
 as an ideal reflector of their very soul-world, mak- 
 ing such a book unconsciously into a sort of Lit- 
 erary Bible? Let it be premised that Faust pro- 
 claims at the start the great negation of the age, 
 the denial of all truth or at least of men's ability 
 to know truth. The course of the poem shows a
 
 FINALE AT ST. LOUIS. 345 
 
 human soul laboring through life's experiences 
 under the burden of such a denial, verily the new 
 Fall of Man which took place not six thousand 
 years ago, but just to-day and here. Goethe's 
 masterpiece indicates also the redemption of this 
 last fallen Adam, at least as conceived by the 
 poet. Manifestly if we cannot know the true, 
 or if what seems such, is only a mirage, a lie, 
 then we live in a world of Illusion, of Untruth, 
 like that of Faust, when he preaches his first 
 soliloquy. Now let us seize the connecting 
 link: St. Louis, during these her Faust-years, was 
 engrossed in her Great Illusion, as already nar- 
 rated; her fatuity was to believe in a phantasm, 
 a lying appearance conjured up for the time ; yet 
 she could not help wrestling far down in her un- 
 conscious depths with her own unreality, with her 
 negation, with her falsehood. And just that is 
 the grand agony of Faust, his ever-recurring inner 
 battle between his denial of truth and his deeper 
 aspiration for truth. He believed in the Illusion, 
 yet fought it, had to fight it unto the death. Thus 
 for her deepest self-expression, yea for her hope 
 of ultimate salvation St. Louis adopted as her own 
 this world-poem of Goethe, which thereby became 
 her truly modern and remedial literary Gospel, at 
 least while she lay under her illusory spell. 
 
 Here is to be added the fact that this writ 
 bloomed, not a native product of our city, but was 
 transplanted from Germany, who had begotten it 
 out of her deepest consciousness, and who, as we
 
 346 THE ST. L0UI8 MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 see to-day, had her own Great Illusion, of which 
 she is just now being terribly disillusioned. Of all 
 this vast recent experience our German St. Louis 
 seems now but a small far-off presage. "We may 
 well think that time has written a vivid new com- 
 mentary on Faust, revealing it mightily as the 
 supreme poem of Negation negated, or more con- 
 cretely worded, of the Great Illusion disillusioned. 
 These four expositors of the one poem, all of 
 them men of mark in the community, had created 
 for years a Faust atmosphere, of which I took 
 deep inspirations, though I had never felt myself 
 competent to unfold a distinctive standpoint of my 
 own upon this subject. But some time during this 
 period, just when I do not know, but say about 
 1882-3, I felt goaded to take Faust creatively in 
 hand, and to re-read it with the time's stress, and 
 with a great fresh discontent at what I had pre- 
 viously accepted by way of interpretation. Espe- 
 cially Brockmeyer's Letters no longer satisfied me, 
 though they were my first germinal stimulus to a 
 deeper view of this work and of all Literature. 
 But I found that I must run new lines of organi- 
 zation through the whole poem, and construe its 
 meaning afresh, even if a number of suggestions 
 belonging to my old teacher I preserved and devel- 
 oped. Especially in my Greek journey, I had after 
 my mental build re-enacted the deed of Faust in 
 pursuit of Helen, which is the central theme of the 
 Second Part of the drama. Thus I saw my Rena- 
 scence poetized before my mind's eye, and felt an
 
 FINALE AT ST. LOUIS. 347 
 
 epoch of my life expressed as nowhere else. Against 
 all critical opinion I came to prefer the Second 
 Part of Faust to the First Part, on account of this 
 personal appeal through experience. 
 
 The year's campaign had fairly begun, when one 
 day a missive was put into my hands with the fol- 
 lowing purport: "I have heard of your Faust 
 work. Please call at my home to talk the matter 
 over for a Kindergarten class." Signed by Miss 
 Blow. The request was a surprise, and I confess 
 for me a glad surprise. Of course I obeyed the 
 summons, the arrangement was made, and the les- 
 sons started. But there was not, and could not 
 be the same enthusiasm and mutual sympathy as 
 in former years. Miss Blow felt and rightly felt 
 that I was developing on an independent line in 
 the St. Louis Movement, a line quite distinct from 
 that of Dr. Harris, whose word was her infallible 
 evangel. Such a presence as mine she deemed dan- 
 gerous if not heretical. Now it lay in her deepest 
 spirit to subordinate, yea to suppress even with 
 some show of force individual tendencies which did 
 not square with her views or with those of her 
 sponsors, for on this side she was traditional to the 
 core. With all her strength, and to my mind she 
 was the strongest personality of us left in the city, 
 she had the autocratic weakness which is certain t' 
 show itself in due season. I could not help some- 
 times thinking that nature had interwoven in her 
 iron-willed character a strain of the Spanish in- 
 quisitor. In the absence of our leaders who had
 
 348 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 taken flight, she was through her unquestioned 
 talent as well as her social prestige, the literary 
 potentate of our St. Louis Movement. Anyhow, 
 I was not. 
 
 Still I had my lasting reward in a fresh com- 
 munion with the spirit of those Kindergarten young 
 ladies, who were training for their tasks in life. 
 They brought to their calling a consecration which 
 no money, no salary, no fame, could possibly pro- 
 cure or pay for, but might destroy. In them I 
 could see a telling example of my own Super-voca- 
 tion, to my unalloyed edification and delight. So 
 deeply was I impressed with their missionary spirit 
 that I began to re-construct in consonance with 
 my present Classic Renascence, an old Greek leg- 
 end, that of Iphigenia, in order to embody their 
 deed and its godlikeness in a poetic form for my 
 own better contemplation and self-expression. This 
 work grew to be my Agamemnon's Daughter. 
 
 The class ran on through its season with occa- 
 sional little seesaws between my views and those 
 of Miss Blow, who sometimes showed her disre- 
 gard or possibly her protest by absenting herself, 
 which she had never done before. To be sure, by 
 way of excuse, reports of her private troubles 
 were flying in the air. Finally the last lesson 
 came with a kind of relief all around. She made 
 her appearance in her front chair of state, and the 
 result was the worst explosion of the year. In 
 the Fifth Act of the Second Part of Faust occurs 
 the sad episode of the aged pair, Philemon and
 
 FINALE AT ST. LOUIS. 349 
 
 Baucis, which I interpreted as the tragedy of 
 Civilization whose remorseless advance assails 
 and often overwhelms ancient and revered land- 
 marks of the past, here represented by the old 
 hut and the old church of the old couple. Thus 
 the transmitted world, both secular and religious, 
 kept vanishing or indeed burning up to make way 
 for the new incoming order of the ever-evolving 
 Faust. Sacred Tradition may become tragic — with 
 which words I dared throw an eye-bolt at Miss 
 Blow, behind which every glance in that class fell 
 into line and shot to the same center. That was 
 the signal for the denouement — the blazing fire- 
 brand flung into the full-charged magazine. 
 
 For at this point Miss Blow turned on me and 
 broke out into decided passionate exception to what 
 I had said, since she grew redder and louder with 
 every word. She whipped the air with her pointed 
 index, her face almost boiled, and her voice was 
 at times pitched to a height which made it grate 
 screechy. She seemed to feel that my interpreta- 
 tion was a personal attack, though I said nothing 
 of the sort, whatever I may have looked. To be 
 sure she had the right to apply my general remark 
 to herself, if she chose; she certainly was in all 
 honesty a prescriptive soul and clung to tradition 
 as was her right; report ran that she thought of 
 going back to that aged, revered church which 
 Faust had here destroyed, and of which, she gave 
 a hot defence against its destroyer, and me, I sup- 
 pose.
 
 350 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 I could do nothing but let the storm spend itself 
 without reply. When the end came I simply said : 
 "The lesson now closes, and with it the season, 
 and also myself." I went up to Miss Blow in the 
 presence of all, and extended my hand, which she 
 took with a smile, sardonic I thought. Such was 
 the conclusion; I never had another class under 
 her guidance. But the Kindergarten itself did 
 not and would not quit me, nor I it. In fact, its 
 attachment to me and my work, as well as my 
 attachment to it and its work had now only begun 
 their long mutual devotion and service running 
 into the decades. Still from Miss Blow and her 
 class this most fruitful and enduring life-line of 
 mine took its start. 
 
 X 
 
 Finale at Concord 
 
 Landed at Concord once more, summer of 1885, 
 and taken lodgment at the hotel, I slipped off to 
 the village barber for needed service. He recog- 
 nized me as I entered and stretched myself out in 
 his chair, and then he proceeded to welcome me 
 with the following salutation: "Well, at last they 
 have caught one of your St. Louis philosophers ; I 
 hear that he is working for his board over yonder 
 in the Penitentiary. Whose turn will it be next?" 
 Whereat he gave a smart chuckle, to which I re- 
 sponded in a brief teehee, for I knew well what 
 he was talking about, and indeed, since I had sized 
 the man before, I expected some such greeting when
 
 FINALE AT CONCORD. 351 
 
 I stepped into his shop. I gave him a little tit- 
 for-tat in the remark: "Yes, I have come back 
 to you here to let you try your hand in catching 
 another sleek philosopher. ' ' 
 
 The foregoing allusions pertained to an actual 
 new scene in the Concord drama, namely, the ap- 
 pearance of the villain acting his part, or if you 
 prefer, of the serpent sneaking into our little philo- 
 sophic Eden. One day a stranger entered the 
 School, paid his fee, and took his seat on the 
 wooden benches of Hillside Chapel. He made him- 
 self remarked as an intense listener to all the deep 
 discourses there given, and especially did he seem 
 to look up from his front seat with rapt apprecia- 
 tion into the face of Dr. Harris, as the latter 
 would elaborate his most recondite disquisitions on 
 Hegel's Logic. For our new-comer, the abstruser 
 the better, and after the lecture he would go for- 
 ward and ply the speaker with some telling ques- 
 tion about this or that doctrine of the discourse. 
 He also played the jolly good-fellow to members 
 generally at the boarding-house and the hotel. 
 Meanwhile he had begun to ask for money accom- 
 modation in personal checks of small amounts, be- 
 ing careful to redeem his obligation the next day 
 or so. Thus it went on for perhaps two weeks, 
 when one morning the ardent philosopher was seen 
 in his place no more. 
 
 "Within a few days the secret was out. He had 
 succeeded in utilizing the good name he had so 
 carefully nursed in the School, in the town, and
 
 352 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 it seems in the adjacent country, so that he was 
 able to pass fraudulent paper in considerable sums 
 upon confiding people ; the total amounted to nearly 
 a thousand dollars, according to the statement of 
 Mr. Emery, the School's Director, in a note to me 
 personally. It so happened that I was not present 
 during this session, hence I did not know the man. 
 My escape was narrow, for I was gullible enough, 
 especially by a philosopher. Still I got a little 
 involved in the case through an accident. The 
 scoundrel had decamped for unknown parts in 
 good time; particularly he had left the town bank 
 at Concord in the lurch, and its cashier was in- 
 clined to fall back upon the officers of the School 
 as responsible, which they contested. The right 
 in the matter I do not know ; but the result was a 
 great uproar in quiet Concord, with charges and 
 countercharges buzzing through the air and sting- 
 ing everywhither at random like maddened hor- 
 nets, but winding up with the universal execration 
 of the School of Philosophy which had lured such 
 an infernal serpent into that innocent paradise. 
 Still the daring scamp who could counterfeit Phi- 
 losophy herself right in her sacred temple, and 
 coin his fraud into dollars, had to be caught and 
 punished; else what becomes of us and our new- 
 born Academe in a naughty world? 
 
 News of the catastrophe, and such it seemed to 
 be for a little while, had traveled to me in St. 
 Louis through various channels when I received 
 by mail from Emery a peculiar request. Our
 
 FINALE AT CONCORD. 353 
 
 Satanic philosopher had been traced to a small 
 medical college at St. Louis (of which institution 
 by the way I had never heard), and was suspected 
 of playing the same trick there which he had 
 worked so successfully at Concord. "Will you ask 
 to accompany you, ' ' wrote my Concord correspond- 
 ent, "Madam Soso of your city, who was here at 
 the School last summer, that she may identify the 
 man at the Medical College ? ' ' Detectives were also 
 to be sent by the Chief of Police, whom I had to 
 visit for the purpose — my first errand of that kind 
 in my life. I did not relish the job, but concluded 
 I must sacrifice my little disinclination to the great 
 cause of Philosophy now in sore trouble. The lady 
 designated was a member of one of my classes, 
 and so I with letter in hand, went to her and told 
 her the new duty which Providence seemingly had 
 laid upon her, perchance for her greater distinc- 
 tion. Then came the explosion: "No, no, I can- 
 not; what will my husband say? I shall never 
 hear the last of it — was I really sitting with jail- 
 birds in your Concord School of Philosophy? 
 Never, my daughter will feel disgraced, ashamed 
 of her mother. ' ' I could only reply : ' ' Wait then ; 
 I shall explore again to-morrow." 
 
 Accordingly I went once more to consult with 
 the Chief of Police. I found that the suspect was 
 already under arrest for similar offenses in a num- 
 ber of places; Concord was only one and the last 
 of his victims. Thus our Philosophy which had 
 speculated so much about the Negative, was quite
 
 354 THE 8T.L0VIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 upset by the actual incarnate appearance of that 
 Negative in its very home, and experienced some- 
 what of its doctrine as realized in a living person. 
 And the town barber had his justification when he 
 saluted the stranger before him with the riddling 
 query: "Are you to be the next?" 
 
 Let us now pass, after such a wayward intro- 
 duction, to our regular Hillside Chapel where is 
 to be given during the present summer (1885) a 
 course of lectures and discussions whose theme is 
 Goethe. This was the seventh annual session of 
 the School, which now began to show a deflection 
 from Philosophy to Literature. The Platonic 
 strand had already dropped into the background; 
 on the whole it had pretty well spent itself. The 
 Hegelian strand was still kept up, especialy by Dr. 
 Harris; but it too had seen its best days at Con- 
 cord; it was getting a little monotonous through 
 repetition, even if the audience changed somewhat 
 from year to year. I think Dr. Harris himself 
 showed more zest this season for Goethe than for 
 Hegel. He was feeling the need of making the 
 transition from Great Philosophy to Great Lit- 
 erature — a change which appeared to lie also in 
 the time. 
 
 Naturally I was delighted at this turn in the 
 tendency of the School; I flattered myself that it 
 seemed to be going my way of itself, without, how- 
 ever, renouncing wholly its original philosophic 
 purpose. I was overflowing with the theme, inas- 
 much as I had devoted myself to the study of
 
 FINALE AT CONCORD. 355 
 
 Goethe exclusively during the past year. Espe- 
 cially the two masterpieces, Faust and Wilhelm 
 Meister I had wrought over and taught over and 
 I may say fought over several times, taking not 
 simply a cold intellectual interest in their contents, 
 but bringing my total selfhood of emotion, will, 
 and intellect to the examination of their artistic 
 values as well as of their spiritual problems. For 
 Goethe never fails to call up opposition in the 
 Anglo-Saxon mind. The result was a very pro- 
 nounced Literary School already at Concord, as 
 shown both by the papers read and especially by 
 the fruitful discussions afterward. The whole 
 drift of the work struck me as something new in 
 scope and in form. I now believe that my later 
 idea of a Literary School dawned upon me during 
 this very suggestive session. But such a School to 
 be intensively effective, should be limited to one 
 week and concentrated on the one greatest poet, 
 and mainly upon his greatest work. 
 
 Moreover this was my last season at Concord; 
 in fact, I have not seen the town since. I had 
 stayed there for weeks at a time during five sum- 
 mers, and had tried to imbibe somewhat of the 
 spirit of the place from various sources, humble 
 and high. Undoubtedly it had an inner social 
 sanctuary which I never reached, and which was 
 shut to the School. Still I caught the setting of 
 nature for Emerson, and had partaken somewhat 
 of his life's communal environment — a precious 
 experience of America's greatest literary man,
 
 356 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— FART SECOND. 
 
 whom I fain would understand and commemorate. 
 The Concord School had devoted a session of lec- 
 tures to the memory of Emerson in 1884; I was 
 present and took part, by special request of Dr. 
 Harris, in the discussions, but I did not then think 
 myself ready to give a course upon the life and 
 work of the great man. My deeper spiritual inti- 
 macy with him was to come later and to express 
 itself in writ. 
 
 Probably this series of discourses on Goethe, if 
 not the best, is the best-known of all the labors of 
 the Concord School during its entire period. The 
 lectures had the good-luck to be printed in a book 
 under the editorial supervision of Mr. Sanborn. 
 This book is still read a little for the sake of the 
 names of its lecturers, most famous of whom was 
 Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, though I cannot think her 
 contribution to have been the best, even if it was 
 so acclaimed at the time by W. D. Howells. Here 
 can be found Dr. Harris' larger study of Faust, 
 excellent in style and thought for the first portion, 
 not so good for the last half, to my mind. This 
 peculiar descent toward the close, instead of an 
 ascent, may be remarked in other writings of Dr. 
 Harris, owing, I think, to his method of composi- 
 tion. 
 
 Mr. Thomas Davidson, with that canny Scotch 
 burr of his on the tip of his tongue, was present 
 at this session and made himself an enlivening 
 center, as usual, round which revolved a number 
 of ladies and a couple of gentlemen. That was his
 
 FINALE AT CONCORD. 357 
 
 habit somewhat; he did not and could not seize 
 the intellectual sovereignty of the School, but 
 formed a little coterie of his own off to one side. 
 I had last seen him in Rome some six years be- 
 fore; he was then in strong reaction against his 
 old St. Louis Teutonizing tendency, and he now 
 was in no friendly mood toward German Philos- 
 ophy and Literature. Over Hegel especially he 
 could almost fall into an access of frenzy, and he 
 was full of exceptions against Goethe, some of 
 which were certainly well taken. We often clashed 
 in the discussions, and we came to be regarded the 
 two chief pugnacities in the School; whenever he 
 would vent one of his polemical diatribes, a num- 
 ber of eyes would at once roll around toward me 
 with the little twinkle of a laugh as if to sing: 
 "Your turn now; up, sail in." This I usually did, 
 for he gave opportunity enough ; in fact, my opin- 
 ion was that he had never penetrated to the inmost 
 soul of the great poet, whose two masterpieces, 
 though he may have read them even with care, he 
 did not really understand, not having lived with 
 and wrestled with them and thus appropriated 
 them to himself in a spiritual conquest of assimila- 
 tion. He always seemed to stand outside and 
 above, and thence to criticize them, never getting 
 down inside and reproducing in his own way what 
 he found there. His attitude seemed to declare 
 that he knew them better than they did themselves. 
 Still genial, red-bearded, hot-headed Tom David- 
 son was the most interesting man present, not the
 
 358 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 most convincing — rather the opposite. Brilliant, 
 learned, far-travelled, still you could not help 
 spotting him all over with interrogation marks. 
 He gaily loved paradox excessive just to see the 
 shock it made ; and he could riot in the exploitation 
 of his ingenuity and erudition, simply for his own 
 dear delighted self's sake. And yet he was full 
 of kindnesses, of good works, also of genial mildly 
 bibulous comradery ; in right mood, and he was pre- 
 eminently a man of moods, he could lift up and 
 lavishly praise what he had not so long since 
 damned to the last depths of the Inferno. I may 
 add here that after all our antagonisms over Faust 
 and everything else, he suddenly took a notion to 
 commend, and that with some warmth before the 
 whole School, my lecture on Wilhelm Meister which 
 I gave during that session. Very unexpected of him 
 was that turn — a feat never performed by him be- 
 fore or repeated by him afterwards, as far as my 
 knowledge now prompts. 
 
 A small biographic item I permit myself here 
 to jot down for those who may be interested, since 
 I have been once or twice asked about the matter 
 thus: "Where is that work of yours on Goethe's 
 Wilhelm Meister?" Never printed, never indeed 
 finished to suit my test of literary publication. I 
 had classes in that novel and gave lectures upon 
 it, and wrote many pages of notes with infinite 
 marginalia; I even put together some essays on 
 the subject. Still somehow it would never organize 
 itself into a genuine book for me, but it persisted
 
 FINALE AT CONCORD. 359 
 
 in staying more or less frowsy, disjoined, recalci- 
 trant to any pervasive light-radiating order. In 
 other words, it would never get itself born out of 
 its second embryonic stage into its third organic 
 self-integrating form. Harris would have pub- 
 lished the fragments in his Journal, but such scraps 
 offended my sight in print, and moreover violated 
 my literary conscience. I was beset by some fatal 
 instinct which made me a writer of books, not of 
 magazine articles, which now hold the author's 
 cash-box and blow his fame's trumpet. Off and on 
 for a dozen years I was engaged in expounding 
 and otherwise belaboring this book, but it would 
 not come forth to any right coherence. So I now 
 fumble over the old yellow pile of manuscript 
 showing a task unfinished and unfinishable, with a 
 kind of jaundiced pathetic look. Let it sink into 
 the time-waves of oblivion, as one of my lost books. 
 On a fine day during this or possibly some other 
 summer, I felt a longing to run over to Walden and 
 take a boat-ride just to see if I could not catch one 
 of Thoreau's fishes, most eternal of the kind, except- 
 ing old Jonah's. I asked friend Emery to be my 
 companion. "We shall have to get permission from 
 Farmer Moore," says he; "the pond has recently 
 been stocked, strangers are not allowed to fish 
 there, but I, as a resident, can obtain a permit 
 from the guardian, and may take you along." So 
 we went to Farmer Moore, as he was familiarly 
 called, who was next neighbor to Alcott's Orchard 
 House, and whose white tidy New England grange
 
 360 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 stood nearly oposite to Emerson's mansion. "Who 
 is this man?" asked the bluff heavy-handed soil- 
 tiller, as he was shoveling compost in his barnyard. 
 "A lecturer at our School from St. Louis." "A 
 philosopher, eh?" "Yes, I suppose so." "Well, 
 I'll give you a permit right off," whereat he 
 clutched a piece of scratch-paper and scribbled. 
 "Take it ; no danger ahead I see ; philosophers don't 
 catch any fish." I made answer, which, as I think 
 it over now, must have run thus: "Some forty 
 or fifty years ago you had two philosophers fishing 
 in Walden, named Emerson and Thoreau, both of 
 them once, your neighbors over younder in that 
 house; they caught the biggest string of fish ever 
 taken from this or any similar pond on this globe, 
 and people are eating of that catch yet; I took a 
 meal of it far away in St. Louis only a few weeks 
 ago. So I have come to the source, for I would 
 like to learn the same trick." "Take your per- 
 mit," interrupted Farmer Moore, turning away 
 to business; "but leave a few for us." "I am 
 going to bag the whole thing, if I can, and carry it 
 off to the West," I gasconaded after the humorous 
 husbandman as he disappeared through his barn- 
 door. 
 
 We sauntered along the path to Walden, took 
 a boat and I threw in my line — not a nibble. We 
 tried all the nooks around the edges of the pond, 
 then we sought its center, sounding the shallowest 
 and the deepest places — no luck. In my home- 
 creek I knew every hole where the suckers lay,
 
 SOME RESULTS. 361 
 
 every riffle where the minnows sported, every mill- 
 dam where the bull-pouts nestled; but here my 
 boyhood's skill availed not, Emery cried, "I have 
 enough." I answered, "Patience is now our School 
 of Philosophy — once more." But blue-eyed Wal- 
 den looked again her silent No, and we, rejected 
 and dejected, soon turned homeward. As we ram- 
 bled through the fields we moodily philosophized: 
 "A prophetic day? We certainly can catch no 
 fish in Walden; yes, Farmer Moore was right." 
 
 XI 
 
 Some Results 
 
 The Concord School of Philosophy considered 
 itself, according to the statement of its leaders in 
 various public utterances, as an attempt to stem, 
 by a revival of the great idealistic thinkers of the 
 past, the materialism of the time. This world- 
 view, the materialistic, had received an enormous 
 impetus from the works of Spencer, Mill, Darwin, 
 Huxley, and had won its chief prestige and sup- 
 port from the recent triumphs of Natural Science, 
 which was in these years exulting in a sort of 
 universal war-dance of victory round the civilized 
 globe, having pushed itself not only into the Uni- 
 versities and Colleges of most countries, but also 
 into the Common Schools. Many of its contribu- 
 tions to education were valid and much needed ; but 
 as usual with novelties, it claimed too much, indeed
 
 362 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 all, and so had to be remanded to its limits, in 
 which it is still alive and doing its indispensable 
 part. Here we may remark that Natural Science 
 through Physiology seemed to pass gradually over 
 into Psychology as the time's new educative prin- 
 ciple, of which transition Professor James may be 
 deemed the chief agent in our land, though he had 
 many co-workers. 
 
 Confessedly, then, the Philosophy of the Con- 
 cord School was derived from tradition, from 
 Europe, and made no claim to be a native product 
 of the country or of the time. Indeed it was 
 openly reactionary against present tendencies in 
 the world of thought, and proposed to flee back for 
 refuge from the incoming tide to systems past and 
 distant, if not transcended. Now this was the 
 point at which I was inclined to turn aside, not 
 so much through conscious opposition as from a 
 fermenting unconscious doubt concerning the 
 function of Philosophy itself in our new social 
 order. To be sure I had nothing then to put in 
 its stead, I only felt the void in myself without 
 being able to compass it or even distinctly locate 
 it. So I veered off into Great Literature as my 
 best self-expression for the time instead of Great 
 Philosophy, and began to interweave the Literary 
 Bibles into the Concord School just at the start 
 with my first course of lectures on Shakespeare, 
 followed later by the course on Homer. 
 
 Now the curious fact comes up that the School 
 itself started to tilt gradually in the same direc-
 
 SOME RESULTS. 363 
 
 tion. As already recounted, it devoted in 1885 the 
 larger and more exuberant part of its energy and 
 enthusiasm to Goethe, upon whose different works 
 more than a dozen lecturers discoursed, bringing 
 renewed interest and refreshing variety into the 
 School. That was a great step forward, or it might 
 be said, aside from Philosophy, though the latter 
 was not by any means abandoned. And the next 
 year (1886) one-half the time of the School, whose 
 course had been limited to a fortnight, was to be 
 given to Dante. I was not present at Concord 
 during this session, but I had transplanted the 
 work to the "West, where I was nursing into exist- 
 ence a new Literary School without the specially 
 philosophic department. But let it be duly re- 
 marked that the Concord School of Philosophy in 
 the eight years of its active life hitherto, had 
 evolved, quite unintentionally I think, a line of 
 lecture courses or of spoken commentaries on the 
 four Literary Bibles, elevating them to an equality 
 with, if not precedence over the great philosophic 
 masters. Such an evolution of the School I need 
 hardly say, gratified me, indeed tallied with my 
 own personal evolution, and I took it as a sign 
 of the time and of myself, since it seemed to be a 
 pointer to my future pathway. 
 
 Thus the Concord School, starting consciously 
 with Philosophy had unconsciously developed its 
 first unsupected literary germ into a growth even 
 more vigorous than itself, being younger and not 
 so dry. iStill it must not be forgotten that another
 
 364 TEE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 germ much smaller and more embryonic than 
 this literary one was planted in the Concord School 
 by Professor James, namely, that of Psychology. 
 But it did not grow perceptibly in the School's 
 mental soil; James never gave another course at 
 Concord, and nobody else on that subject, so that 
 his seed did not sprout there as far as I could dis- 
 cern. Still his work was not forgotten, though it 
 took longer to mature, and had to seek a different 
 field for its coming harvest. Hence we may set 
 down this to have been a chief merit of the Con- 
 cord School, that it attracted to itself and bore 
 along in its bosom three major disciplines of spirit 
 in three different stages of their evolution: (1) 
 Philosophy as evolved, (2) Literature (in its 
 greatest poets) as openly evolving, (3) Psychology 
 as still secretly germinating in embryo. 
 
 In regard to the external success of the enter- 
 prise, that will be viewed variously according to 
 the viewer's standard. It had the vitality to last 
 ten years, during which time some 2000 people 
 attended the sessions all taken together, according 
 to Sanborn's estimate. The regular audience ran 
 from forty to sixty at each meeting, though a 
 famous lecturer would treble these numbers. John 
 Fiske filled the Chapel to overflowing, and Emer- 
 son once compelled the managers to secure a larger 
 hall, though he then often enunciated indistinctly, 
 and his son sat at his side to help him over the 
 harder words, and to prompt his lapsing memory. 
 On the other hand I saw the number present drop
 
 SOME RESULTS. 365 
 
 to eight for Dr. Harris on a bad night, although 
 he generally had the average attendance of forty 
 to fifty for his most abstruse philosophemes. I 
 believe, too, that he, of all the lecturers, had per- 
 sonally the most devoted band of listeners. As to 
 compensation in cash, mine was not enough to 
 pay my railroad fare; still the investment was 
 one of the best of my life. Of course none of us 
 received any adequate pay for our service, except 
 our audience possibly. Sanborn, the treasurer, 
 reports that after all the expenses for the ten years 
 had been met, there remained less than a dollar 
 in the treasury, which he pocketed, evidently with- 
 out much compunction, for he smilingly tells on 
 himself. Dr. Harris would have shown a similar 
 financial balance, if he had left any exhibit of his 
 outlay. Still every participator was gratified, I 
 think, by the result, and felt that his time and 
 money had been well spent. 
 
 As to myself, I hope that the foregoing pages, 
 which have already swollen to a generosity in 
 numbers far beyond my original frugal plan, will 
 reflect somewhat of the exuberant delight and 
 profit, which overflowed me quite unexpectedly I 
 may say, from the School and its varied experi- 
 ences, serious and humorous. It seemed to drop 
 into my life at an epochal turn, and it certainly 
 had an important part in shaping my future career. 
 I am not certain that I otherwise would or could 
 have broken away from my confining pinfold in 
 St. Louis, and have won a deliverance, which
 
 366 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 meant a new expansion beyond the old limits, in- 
 stead of a possible shrinkage back into the trans- 
 mitted humdrum of a vocation with little or no 
 relief from its treadmill. But Concord brought 
 me more than one opportunity to push out else- 
 where, and to show myself able to break over my 
 local limits and to shake off their fetters. Then 
 by means of the School I had seen and heard and 
 conversed with a larger number of eminent living 
 men than ever before or since. Such a personal 
 intercourse had its special training for me who 
 had ever preferred to commune with the great 
 souls of the past through the printed page. I was 
 already too much inclined to flee to the companion- 
 ship of the makers of the Literary Bibles, shun- 
 ning my lesser pen-wielding contemporaries who 
 had still the disadvantage of being able to draw 
 breath. More alive to me than all living comrad- 
 ery was the dead. From this point of view my 
 personal experience now turned to a kind of 
 green oasis in the foregone world of disembodied 
 spirits. 
 
 Here again I must touch upon the fact that the 
 Concord School was through some cause or other 
 the most miraculous dispenser of reputation over 
 the whole country that has ever crossed my life's 
 orbit up to present date. Indeed, I think I dare 
 take oath that the only time when the crotchety God- 
 dess Fama ever smiled upon me her fleeting favors 
 was in that little Hillside Chapel. For some reason 
 the newspapers showed an extraordinary interest
 
 SOME RESULTS. 367 
 
 in our philosophic experiment. Two reporters 
 from the great Boston dailies were usually present 
 at the School, and one of them at least was quite 
 a philosopher, who used to make little metaphys- 
 ical speeches, besides sending very full reports, 
 which were copied in part or paragraphed all over 
 the country. I think this publicity was mainly due 
 to the expert skill of Sanborn, who was a journal- 
 ist by profession. Of course there must have been 
 some real public curiosity about the matter. Then 
 Concord and its Worthies and its other antiquities 
 possessed a distinction of their own, even to the 
 extent of having a guide-book for visitors. But 
 judge of my surprise when a complimentary letter 
 was handed me by the mail carrier from a former 
 critical fellow-student at College whom I had not 
 heard of for twenty years, and who now was lo- 
 cated in the everglades of Florida, whither my 
 name had penetrated to him in print. And at the 
 hotel one day who should slip up behind me and 
 tap me on the shoulder but my Athenian compan- 
 ion, the fair youth whom I re-named Narcissus, as 
 he wandered with me along classic streams trying 
 to behold the antique nymphs but seeing only him- 
 self and me. I had left him behind in Hellas, I 
 thought, to woo the Greek tongue ; but here he sud- 
 denly turns up again after years, having tracked 
 me through some newspaper notice, and at once 
 we start to take another classic promenade, not now 
 along the waterless Ilissus but the full-flowing Mus- 
 ketaquid, interwreathing sighfully remembrances
 
 368 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 of fair Praxilla, Maid of Athens, though not that 
 far-sung damsel of Byron. 
 
 Still the most stunning windfall of propitious 
 publicity overwhelmed me with a rush when one 
 Sunday morning I opened the Boston Herald, and 
 saw several columns of its large issue headed by 
 my name in big black letters. It was an extended 
 notice of myself and of the three or four books 
 I had then written, with a very friendly account 
 of my work at the Concord School. Thus I felt 
 myself borne along Fameward in a first trip on 
 a huge paper balloon inscribed with my name leg- 
 ible to all New England, from which authoritative 
 source it percolated in a few driblets to my home 
 in the West. But let the main result be at once 
 told: through invitations from sundry places, I 
 found myself able and willing to quit St. Louis and 
 to start on my coming career of dissemination. 
 
 I have already alluded to the fact that the Con- 
 cord School had its critics and still more decidedly 
 its caricaturists and satirists. Though expressly 
 traditional, it nevertheless offended a good many 
 dear New England traditions, for which offense re- 
 sentment could hardly help speeding its venomed 
 arrows. The established order in Church, School, 
 University, Literature was at least indirectly chal- 
 lenged, and failed not to hit back with its multi- 
 farious missiles. Then human psychology would 
 manifest itself practically at the effrontery of that 
 "Western invasion which dared foist its culture and 
 philosophy and literary doctrine upon their true
 
 SOME RESULTS. 369 
 
 home-land, yea upon their very home-town in the 
 East. I collected quite an anthology of stinging 
 epithets flung sometimes at me in person, but 
 oftener heard 'round the hotel corridors and on the 
 streets, and particularly in Boston. But who would 
 wish to resuscitate these little biting insects after 
 so many years of torpor? So I sweep them out of 
 scrap box and brain into the fire. Sanborn at 
 whom chiefly they seemed to unsheathe their 
 weapons as the prime offender, rather enjoyed, I 
 think, roiling up Boston and even Concord on ac- 
 count old local grudges now and then audible but 
 quite unfathomable to the outsider. 
 
 St. Louis also did not fail to furnish keen detrac- 
 tors of the St. Louis Movement, for she could not 
 help being herself, and giving a slap to her own. 
 And they have not yet died out with the death of 
 the semi-century since its birth. The latest history 
 of the city, published only a few years ago, inter 
 sperses mid its other statistics quite an itemized 
 contempt, lampooning that old philosophic folly 
 and its gullible gudgeons. There is no question that 
 philosophers have from long ago been objects of 
 ridicule and envy, not without provocation. In an- 
 cient Athens we all have read how that supreme 
 scoffer, the comic poet Aristophanes, derided the 
 all-greatest Socrates and his movement, and how 
 his fellow-citizens compelled him, in his old age, to 
 drink the cup of hemlock for his last draught. 
 Moreover, the charge was often heard in antiquity 
 that the folk as a whole, especially the Athenians,
 
 370 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 was addicted to Envy, suspecting and even aveng- 
 ing any excellence above its own level. Hence that 
 city was said to have banished its Great Men by 
 means of the ostracism, which, however, according 
 to Grote and others, may have had a different pur- 
 pose. In like manner, the accusation has been made 
 that St. Louis has shown a decided streak of that 
 old Athenian trait in her communal character, 
 being endowed with more than her share of civic 
 Envy (the ancient hag Invidia), and hence driv- 
 ing away her eminent men by a subtle but effective 
 ostracism. 
 
 At any rate the Philistines had their inning 
 against our St. Louis Movement. I received now and 
 then an unsigned letter which caricatured and 
 abused, but never threatened me with an infernal 
 machine. The newspapers had their little spirts 
 of wit usually pumped up from rather dry wells. A 
 long editorial in a Sunday edition of a leading daily 
 took the matter seriously, arguing that the study of 
 Homer and the old Greeks was utterly purposeless, 
 if not injurious, in this new time of this new world 
 of ours, and advising us to take up the History of 
 Liberty as set forth in Motley's Dutch Republic, a 
 book then much in vogue. The article was brought 
 to me and I replied, not to the newspaper, but to 
 the bringer, a pupil of mine: "Our old Greek 
 Thucydides contains all of that book of Motley's, 
 good as it is, and indeed all the History of Europe 
 up to date in its embryonic form, if you only read 
 him aright. And the right way is to make a new
 
 SOME RESULTS. 371 
 
 translation of him, not merely into verbal English, 
 but into the whole historic evolution of Europe and 
 America till now." 
 
 Occasionally the philosophers would start a hum- 
 orous bout at burlesquing themselves in their own 
 ponderous nomenclature. ' We were all well aware 
 of the comic possibilities which lay in our speech, 
 in our doctrine, and also in ourselves. We had not 
 read the Aristophanic Clouds in vain, and we failed 
 not to enjoy the satirical grotesquery of Dean Swift 
 and Rabelais. We could caricature our own dear 
 Hegel in a kind of relief from the oppressive sever- 
 ity of his hugely organized system, and for the mo- 
 ment's amusement make his unwieldy gigantic 
 framework trip an elephant dance on a pin-point. 
 A favorite jest was the Hegelian definition of a hole 
 in your coat, as "the partial negation of the totality 
 of the being on-and-around-itself (des an-und-um- 
 sich Seyns) . ' ' This piece of badinage tricked out in 
 its Hegelian categories, was, if I remember correct- 
 ly, flung scoffingly at us in one of our meetings by 
 a former student of a German University, where 
 he had picked it up, as the final bomb demolishing 
 our philosopher's entire Coliseum of the Universe. 
 But the best known skit produced by the St. 
 Louis Movement in burlesquing itself was a clever 
 little book, which was published under the name of 
 " Our Odyssey Club, by Agnes Gragg." Its scene 
 is pictured from a Homer Class, and it satirizes ,not 
 in a wholly unfriendly way, the appearance, doings, 
 and sayings of the teacher, to whom is given the
 
 372 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 highly Teutonized title of Professor Wolfgang. The 
 ladies in attendance are set off with bright touches 
 of satirical humor, which now and then seem sea- 
 soned with a little spice of feminine malice, adding 
 a piquant flavor to the style. And the dressing 
 talent of her sex there present is not wholly neg- 
 lected by Agnes. The content of the Homer lesson 
 is generally, though not always, shaded into the 
 mock-heroic, something which happened to old 
 Homer himself in the ancient parody called "The 
 Battle of the Frogs and Mice." The sprightly 
 travesty was received with a whoop of applause by 
 the newspaper critics, naturally of the Mephisto- 
 phelean strain, and I read in a Chicago Literary 
 Periodical a grave article which deemed the book 
 a timely antidote against a very dangerous epi- 
 demic in Literature then raging at St. Louis. 
 
 I would not omit the tender touch, since through 
 the litle book sweetly interweaves a little novelette 
 with a love intrigue whose heroine bears the name 
 of Rose Duane, of a very red-rosy look. She starts 
 with scoffing at Professor Wolfgang's views and 
 bemocks the man himself for his various oddities of 
 dress and behavior. But somewhere about the last 
 lesson he fortunately gets his leg broken in a rail- 
 road accident, whereupon the sarcastic young lady 
 hastens to nurse him back to health. Then we 
 hear the hapy end: "The Odyssey Club had done 
 its work. The Professor took upon himself the 
 vows . . . the name of the bride was Rose 
 Duane."
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 373 
 
 As for me, who had also led an Odyssey Club, 
 when I read the fascinating romance, I queried 
 who this Professor "Wolfgang might be, and even 
 more closely I interrogated my inner oracle con- 
 cerning the reality of the rubicund Rose Duane. 
 and especially of that last reported act of hers, for 
 these two names were not to be found on any list of 
 my classes, or of my acquaintances. And there the 
 matter hangs to-day. 
 
 XII 
 
 A Writer of Books 
 
 With this rubric I would signal to my reader the 
 topmost flowering of the present Epoch namely, the 
 books which I wrote and put into print. The high- 
 est point, I deem, of my self-realization was this 
 expression of me in the word. For therein I became 
 creative, to the extent of my native gift; I made 
 over into a new world of mine own that old Clas- 
 sical world which I had seen and mentally appro- 
 priated. Back to the head waters of my age's cul- 
 tural evolution I had traveled, in quest of my com- 
 pleted selfhood, and had given the record of my 
 journey. Thus I recreated after my own spirit's 
 ultimate form the already created forms which I 
 had found and assimilated. 
 
 Moreover it was ancient Hellas which gave me 
 my task and my opportunity. For I had, first of all, 
 to recover and to reproduce within myself that 
 primal germ of our European development; my
 
 374 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 race 's civilization I was to make my own, going back 
 to its early budding in Greece, and taking it up into 
 myself on the spot of its origin, that I might the 
 better transmute its expression into my expression. 
 Hence this was the peculiarly Greek epoch of my 
 whole career; I have named it my Classical Rena- 
 scence, since it was my cultural New Birth through 
 Greece. It was a stage or term of my life 's spiritual 
 discipline, lasting some seven or eight years, as al- 
 ready stated, being supplementary to my Academic 
 training. 
 
 Just now there is considerable discussion con- 
 cerning the value of the Classics. Greek and Latin 
 have been stoutly assailed, being proclaimed un- 
 worthy of the time spent upon them in our institu- 
 tions of learning. Natural Science in particular 
 has been the chief antagonist seeking to ban or at 
 least to limit the ancient tongues and to put itself 
 in their place. The new utilitarian and vocational 
 trend also is trying to elbow them out of the curric- 
 ulum. To their defense the old scholarship has ral- 
 lied and has emphasized their many values, educa- 
 tional, literary, historical. A great modern historian 
 has said that ancient History is the key to all 
 History ; such it is, and yet more, for Greek History 
 taken by itself is the embryo of European History, 
 and also of Historiography. Still among the warm 
 supporters of the Classics there is a good deal of 
 discontent, especially with the method of teaching 
 them, wherein is deeply felt and loudly proclaimed 
 the need of a thorough-going reformation, which,
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 375 
 
 however, has not yet been very clearly formulated. 
 Perhaps as a result of this fresh stirring of rather 
 stagnant waters, we may hope for a renewal of 
 interest in Classical studies, and possibly a pro- 
 founder resurrection of the spirit of antique Hellas. 
 
 As an undergraduate I felt some such discomfort 
 over my Classical instruction, which was probably 
 that of the average American Colleges of the time. 
 In a number of ways I sought to remedy its defects 
 by outside studies of my own. Still it laid the foun- 
 dation upon which I could build in the future, if I 
 was man enough to realize myself as a man, making 
 actual in my own training humanity 's cultural evo- 
 lution. Through all that long Greco-Latin past, I 
 had to return upon myself, as it were, to go back 
 to my civilized beginning, and make it over into 
 mine own. That was my grand Classical quest of 
 my cultural reality and of man's; I had to travel 
 the way of the ages in order to find myself ; world- 
 renascence I must win and transfigure into self- 
 renascence. 
 
 Anything else could there be wanting after the 
 attainment of such a desperate quest ? For me there 
 persisted a lack, a gap, a part unfulfilled. Even on 
 the soil of Greece the Classical world was yet a tra- 
 dition, an echo of the long-ago, which I still heard 
 from without me. What is now to be done ? I must 
 turn to reproduce it also, create it as it once was 
 created in the aforetime. Hence I too, if I would 
 complete my past, must become a Classical world- 
 builder, such as was its original and originating
 
 376 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 demiurge, whose first and best human representa- 
 tive was ancient Homer, through whom I might 
 reach back to that primal genetic act of Hellenic 
 spirit. So the ultimate of tradition was to create 
 the traditional, to make it reproduce itself in its 
 own primordial genesis. Such might be deemed the 
 highest achievement of the coming educational in- 
 stitution, namely the University of Man. 
 
 Now the fixity and permanent manifestation of 
 this new Classical course was to be found in the 
 printed page. Such had become the supreme func- 
 tion of the Writer of Books in his Classical Epoch : 
 he was not merely to learn, or to assimilate, or even 
 to reproduce old forms ; he had to create a new ex- 
 pression into which he must transfigure the spirit 
 antique, that he attain his own self-expression for 
 a stage of his life's total achievement. 
 
 The foregoing account has sought to indicate in 
 what way I endeavored to plant the seeds of a 
 Classical Renascence in myself first, and then in 
 others, as one fruition of the St. Louis Movement. 
 The Homeric poems were taken as the best revela- 
 tion as well as the earliest starting-point of the 
 stream of civilized time, which we were to follow 
 down the centuries into our own present city of St. 
 Louis. But the Writer of Books had as yet imper- 
 fectly thought out and written out, not merely his 
 exegesis, but, what was far more exacting, his re- 
 production of Homer's work and its co-ordination 
 with the other Literary Bibles. All that remained 
 for a later Epoch. Still the study of Homer con-
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 377 
 
 stituted the background and the germinal poten- 
 tiality of what I have named my Classical Rena- 
 scence, as it seemingly did in all ancient education. 
 Accordingly the Homeric fulfillment in my writing 
 had to wait for my own fuller evolution, which in 
 its turn will seek its completer realization through 
 the printed page. Whereof something more in its 
 place. 
 
 Now I have brought me to the point where it is 
 in order to tell directly, yet briefly, of the books 
 composed and issued by me during this Classical 
 Epoch. As already repeatedly stressed, it was my 
 time of intense and exclusive Classicism ; I properly 
 could not bring myself to do anything else, except 
 in a perfunctory way. It seemingly called up in 
 me a unique power of concentration on the one su- 
 preme object till it got itself done, persisting 
 through workless moods, interruptions, spells of 
 ill health. The visible output for the whole Epoch 
 was six printed books, all of them revealing my 
 strenuous classicality which I had to make over into 
 self-expression for my life's joy, as well as for my 
 spirit's completion, indeed I may say, for my spir- 
 it's salvation. 
 
 I shall try to put these six books into an order 
 which will suggest their movement through this 
 Classical Epoch of mine, from their starting into it 
 till their transition out of it toward another stage 
 of my life's fulfillment. 
 
 I. The general quest of the Greco-Roman world 
 or of the ancient Mediterranean civilization as the
 
 378 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 genetic source of my mind's acquired stores I 
 have already indicated. I, the outsider from an- 
 other continent, was seeking to put inside of me 
 my own spiritual antecedents, and thus to awaken 
 my sleeping wholeness. To this preliminary pur- 
 suit I assign two books of travel which grew as I 
 journeyed toward my goal. 
 
 The first of these books bears the title of A Tour 
 in Europe, whose purport and place I have suffi- 
 ciently set forth in a former section under its own 
 special designation. 
 
 My second book is a Greek episode of travels be- 
 longing emphatically to my Classical quest at its 
 most intensive stretch and is called A Walk in 
 Hellas, which has been likewise mentioned pass- 
 ingly in the foregoing account. It is the concentra- 
 tion and final rounding-out of my Classical Jour- 
 ney, which in it penetrates to the original Greek 
 life still existent in its primitive haunts among the 
 dells and on the slopes of Parnassus. I may re- 
 mark of this book that on the whole it has been 
 received with greater favor by the literary guild 
 than any other writing of mine. This does not 
 mean that it ever attained any pronounced vogue 
 with the public. I printed it privately in 1861-2 
 at St. Louis, and it had a small local distribution 
 chiefly among friends. Generous Judge Woerner 
 wrote a somewhat lengthy account of it, which he 
 had the influence to get into a Sunday edition of 
 one of the city's newspapers — a feat which lay be- 
 yond my power. Sanborn took an interest in the
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 379 
 
 book, and without any request from me secured 
 for it an offer from a Boston publisher, to whom I 
 consigned the rest of the unbound sheets for a 
 trial in publication. But it persisted in being un- 
 saleable, and after a few years I unloaded the re- 
 mainder upon myself. Still most of the reviews 
 leaned to the side of a modified mercy, though a 
 few seized a good chance to set off their happiness 
 in abuse. The book continued to have in my hands 
 a hidden little undercurrent of life, which many 
 years later burst up to the light with a sudden 
 prominence, wholly unexpected by me, and never 
 since fully accounted for to my mind. But let that 
 future incident be remanded to its time. 
 
 It should be added that both these books dressed 
 themselves naturally in prose, which accords with 
 their fundamental prosaic conception. That is, 
 they were primarily inspired by the external scenes 
 and circumstances which I was passing through 
 and describing; the stress was upon the imme- 
 diately seen and experienced, even if the antique 
 kept playing into the narrative from the Classic 
 past with many a suggestion. I was the reporter 
 of the real life and nature before me, through 
 which, however, would fleet in a common harmony 
 an ideal life and nature imaging a former greatness, 
 truly a stage of the World's Civilization. 
 
 II. But along with, yea out of this essentially 
 receptive prosaic work would break forth a crea- 
 tive poetic activity, quite the reverse of the for- 
 mer in movement and character. Instead of ac-
 
 380 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 cepting and recording in writ my impressions 
 from without I began transmuting and recreating 
 them into a new-made world within me, which I 
 projected into being through my pen. The result 
 was a group of three poems, which likewise move 
 along the line of my Classical Journey, but at- 
 tuned to another rhythm and mood. For I was 
 now to endow with a fresh existence what I had 
 simply received and adopted before as already ex- 
 istent; in other words I was to pass from prose 
 with its theme outwardly given and prompted, to 
 poetry whose theme itself was to be new-created 
 both in form and matter. 
 
 Prorsus Retrorsus. The first verses of this group 
 began to shape themselves in Rome, which old city 
 I tried to re-embody in fresh forms for my own self- 
 expression. That is, I had to make-over the trans- 
 mitted Rome before me into my own Rome. Such 
 was the work of the poet or maker. The result can 
 be seen in my little book called Ecce Roma (printed 
 as the First Part of the volume entitled Prorsus 
 Retrorsus, which label has been decried as a Latin 
 riddle more brain-befogging than even Carlyle's 
 famous Sartor Resartus). 
 
 When the railroad train had borne me into the 
 Eternal City on the Tiber, I was greeted from all 
 sides by the ruins of an old civilization. Un- 
 doubtedly there stood before my eyes many new 
 buildings and other modernities, for instance just 
 this steam car on which I wheeled hitherward ; but 
 the mightiest presence here still for me was the
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 381 
 
 ancient structure whose fragments lay scattered 
 about in every direction. These fragments I be- 
 gan to pick up and to reconstruct; them I would 
 vivify, and bring to some utterance of themselves. 
 Even the living Roman People of to-day seemed a 
 huge torso of the old Romanus Populus, whose 
 broken or lost members I would restore in imagina- 
 tion, giving to the renewed whole a present voice, 
 necessarily my own. 
 
 The outcome of my prolonged stay and contem- 
 plation was a series of some thirty-nine urban 
 idyls, if I dare christen them with a famous name : 
 or perhaps their better title would be that of 
 Roman Elegies, a term applied to a somewhat 
 similar kind of old Latin poetry. Moreover they 
 had often a pensive undertone elegiac in the mod- 
 ern sense, for they hymned echoes out of the grand 
 tragedy of ancient civilization which lay always in 
 their background. Thus I would rebuild old Rome 
 for myself from the pieces of its ruin, and make 
 each piece reflect the whole in each little elegy, in 
 which I too found my own Roman expression, voic- 
 ing a phase of my life's total experience. 
 
 On the whole these Roman Elegies of mine have 
 proved themselves, of all my writings perhaps, the 
 most remote and estranged from the popular mind. 
 Even trained intellects and friendly to me per- 
 sonally have pronounced them poetryless and pur- 
 poseless, unreadable in meter and meaning. Too 
 much foreknowledge required of ancient History 
 and Mythology, of Roman localities and dilapidated
 
 382 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 buildings, of dead things generally in a dead 
 world — thus sings the outraged complaint. Then 
 that ghostly enigma staring at the reader in the 
 first words from a dead tongue — Prorsus Retrorsus 
 — stops him with a sudden shock, so that he often 
 cannot get a step further. So let us quit the book 
 now, and push ahead. Every shred of Rome pre- 
 supposes Greece, let us then move forward, or 
 backward if you choose, for both these opposite 
 ways are here strangely blent and lead us to the 
 same place. But here again that riddlesome Latin 
 lingo sleuths us still even in our English, for now 
 we are told that our forward (Prorsus) is at the 
 same time our backward (Retrorsus). 
 
 Epigrammatic Voyage. The considerable tran- 
 sition, both in space and in spirit, from Rome to 
 Greece, had next to be undertaken by me, realized 
 lifefully and then poetized. Herein the Greek 
 Anthology furnished both suggestion and inspira- 
 tion, with its rich clusters of ancient epigrams or 
 inscriptions written upon every conceivable little 
 theme. So I for the occasion became a Greek epi- 
 grammatist, and I turned into a versicle each pass- 
 ing view or impression punctuating my pathway. 
 The result was again a little book which I called an 
 Epigrammatic Voyage, meandering over sea and 
 land till I reached Athens. (At first printed separ- 
 ately, but now as the Second Part of Prorsus 
 Retrorsus) . 
 
 In this book it was my delight to re-live still an- 
 other phase of Greek life and to re-create it as a
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 383 
 
 part of my own, moulding my most modern self 
 into an antique poetic form, since I continued to 
 meter it after the hexametral elegiac. This was no 
 translation, but a poetic transfusion of new blood 
 into an ancient body through a fresh reproduc- 
 tion. The old epigrams of the Greek Anthology re- 
 veal better than any other ancient work the per- 
 vasive poetic spirit of all Greek existence down to 
 the humblest. Hence their creative fascination for 
 me in my Greek mood. I often interwove them into 
 my later talks on Greece and her art; still these 
 dear beautiful playthings of Hellas, so native to 
 me for years, I never could quite domesticate, I 
 have to believe, in any American heart. 
 
 But thus I had transformed myself into a bub- 
 bling line of versicles strung along all the way 
 from the Roman to the Athenian world-centers of 
 antiquity. A rare enjoyment it was of the deep 
 undertow of the old Greek life, revealing its ever- 
 active subliminal poetry as it shot up into its first 
 atoms of expression, which were gathered and 
 vased for a thousand years and more into the afore- 
 said Greek Anthology. Now this atomic Greek 
 life stimulated me to a new creation of itself in my 
 own life, when the right environment embraced me, 
 and I was ready to respond to its spell. Hence was 
 forged along with my every step this somewhat 
 sagging chain of separately rounded out epigrams, 
 two hundred or so, which interlinked for me the 
 Tiber and the Ilissus. 
 
 Delphic Days. When I reached Athens, I found
 
 384 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 it too a civilized ruin, like Rome in this regard, or 
 it may be called a beautiful fragment of a ruined 
 civilization. Still this likewise I would take unto 
 myself and make it spiritually mine own, identify- 
 ing it, as far as I might, with my Classical self in 
 its present Renascence. So I lived in and also 
 loved old-new Athens for several busy months. 
 But the former dissatisfaction arose anew which 
 I had felt at Rome, whispering to me: "Here is 
 not thy goal; start once more for the head-waters 
 of this Nile-stream of antique life, still hidden to 
 thy look and to thy soul. Report tells thee that 
 thou mayst find its first fountain off yonder on the 
 Parnassus in the region of ancient Delphi. So set 
 out again, be thy journey without a comrade, go 
 thy ways afoot and alone." 
 
 Accordingly I pushed forward (or backward) to 
 Delphi with its vivid drama of Nature, visible out- 
 wardly as of old, and peopled with primitive Greek 
 characters living yet to-day and talking a kind of 
 Homeric dialect, and even singing many a little 
 epical adventure of their heroes. And so it came 
 about that this elemental Parnassian life I eagerly 
 adopted and appreciated, starting soon to re-pro- 
 duce it over into my inner world, and then shap- 
 ing outwardly in verse its many-hued transforma- 
 tions which at last fascicled themselves into a book- 
 let called Delphic Days. 
 
 Those Delphic idyls are essentially rural; they 
 stress the present in scenery and costume, in lan- 
 guage and emotion, also in man and woman. Still
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 385 
 
 they, like Delphi herself, hold within their small 
 bosoms a buried past which peeps out here and 
 there from its cover, and which can be unearthed 
 by a little digging. Since I was there, the ancient 
 Delphic temple has been excavated, and also va- 
 rious parts of the old town. But Delphi appeared 
 to me not the huge torso of some antique Hercules 
 like Rome, like Athens; it had still a complete, 
 unbroken though small life of its own, which had 
 maintained itself through the milleniums from twi- 
 lit primordial Greece, undoubtedly with many 
 changes. Accordingly in Delphic Days I sought to 
 re-animate within myself that original protoplasm 
 of early Hellas, and then to portray this real sur- 
 vival of it here on the real Parnassus. Hence it 
 comes that these poems are relatively easy to un- 
 derstand, since they have little of erudition, or of 
 mythology, or of ruins antique. Still some Classi- 
 cal knowledge is dangerously pre-supposed. 
 
 With these three poetical books was completed the 
 versified portion of my Greco-Roman Journey, or 
 the little Epic of my Classical Renascence. I may 
 egoistically conceive it as my little Iliad, in which 
 the solitary hero, this Ego, with his army of one 
 soldier, who was himself, pushing forth from St. 
 Louis across continents and sailing over oceans to 
 attack and capture, not the hill of old Troy, but the 
 very top of Mount Parnassus itself and its whole 
 antique life. Such a warlike expedition, however, 
 did not seek to burn or destroy that lofty world- 
 citadel of our race's civilization, but would strive
 
 386 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 to restore, to renew, and to re-create it at least in 
 myself, and in any other questing self whom I 
 might persuade to hearken or to read my fresh 
 construction of it through voice or through print, 
 in prose or in verse. At any rate to me this poetical 
 foray was one continued music-festival of ancient 
 Classical harmonies, which found its own reward 
 in the spirit's deepest attunement. 
 
 But if I can summon audacity enough to keep 
 the Homeric simile running, which I have already 
 once tapped, I may add that this little Iliad was 
 succeeded by a little Odyssey of mine, the return 
 home of the Classical wanderer, if not to the shores 
 of small sunny Ithaca, at least to the grandiose 
 mud-stream of the ever-roiled Mississippi. Such 
 was my Ulyssean nostos, or spiritual home-coming 
 from my Parnassian expedition, which being in- 
 grown a musical part of my life, had to realize it- 
 self in a versified expression, that is, in another 
 poetical booklet. 
 
 III. This was baptized under the name of 
 Agamemnon's Daughter, which composition I would 
 like to stress as the third leading stage of this my 
 poetized Classical Renascence, inasmuch as the lat- 
 ter starts now to moving out of itself into what 
 comes next in my life's ever-advancing yet ever- 
 returning cycle. Thus the poem is essentially the 
 transition from the antique to the modern, which 
 transition pours itself into an old Greek vase of a 
 mythus, that of Iphigenia. The verse, the spirit, 
 the style breaks away from the foregoing elegiac
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 387 
 
 hexameters and strikes a new key-note in the 
 rhymed iambic stanza of eight lines. The music, 
 the inwardness, even the organization bespeak the 
 Romantic transforming the heart of the Classic. 
 Thus the poem is a continual metamorphosis of 
 the old into the new, to which the mind of the 
 reader is to keep itself always attuned. 
 
 The image of Iphigenia (Agamemnon's Daugh- 
 ter) followed me everywhere around through 
 Greece, from Athens to Delphi, from Delphi to 
 Mycenae, from Mycenae to Aulis, from Aulis back to 
 Delphi. I was conscious of her presence at my 
 side, but I could not yet catch her shape and ban 
 it into verse, though I often tried. She crossed the 
 ocean with me homeward ; like a ghost she haunted 
 me for years in St. Louis, till at last one day 
 through a fresh experience I grew able to clutch 
 the very form of her soul, which I then could re- 
 create for my new self-expression, as being a stage 
 of my own evolution just attained and crying out 
 to be realized. 
 
 It should be noted that I did not in this work 
 pick up individual impressions and occurrences 
 along my path and transmute them into separate 
 elegies or epigrams or idyls as heretofore. On the 
 contrary I took a connected story, that ancient 
 mythus of Iphigenia, and overwrought it into an 
 integral part of my own life's experience and ut- 
 terance. Still that old tale in time revealed itself 
 to me as a torso also, like Greece and Rome, as a 
 mythical fragment which I had to make whole in
 
 388 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PAET SECOND. 
 
 my creative spirit. Hence instead of the two Iphi- 
 genias handed down from antiquity by Euripides, 
 I had to create four, or rather they all were the 
 one Iphigenia completing herself in her four grand 
 stages or crises of her spiritual evolution. To use 
 a former comparison, the Greek mythus of Iphi- 
 genia, like the torso of Hercules in the Vatican 
 Museum, had no head and no feet, no right begin- 
 ning or end, but only a lopped-off body which had 
 to be restored mythically before it in its wholeness 
 could be poetized. So I fabled an Iphigenia at 
 Mycenae for the overture and an Iphigenia at Del- 
 phi for the finale of the finished work. 
 
 Thus the eidolon of Iphigenia, that completest 
 Greek woman-soul, haunted me for years, fleeting 
 airily throughout my whole Greco-Roman Epoch, 
 in a kind of sub-conscious prophetic presence, which 
 I was at last to evoke into a conscious reality, 
 thereby building the bridge out of my Classical 
 Renascence. So I freed myself of her ghostly pur- 
 suit by the exorcising magic of the written word. 
 Not a few emotional currents out of my own experi- 
 ence streamed into and through this poem, where- 
 of I have already mentioned one, that of the Kin- 
 dergartners. Iphigenia 's tale became for me the 
 woman's world-mythus, in deep parallelism to the 
 man's, the Christ-tale, to which it is startlingly 
 similar. I ought to add that already at St. Louis 
 I was first introduced to Goethe's beautiful Iphi- 
 genia by Brockmeyer, who knew her and exalted 
 her with his sort of boisterous admiration. I kept
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 389 
 
 her acquaintance and took her along with me to 
 her old home-land in the course of my Classical 
 Journey, during which she unfolded for me into a 
 marvelously new personality, far richer and more 
 universal than Goethe's. (A fuller account of this 
 whole subject can be found in the appendix to the 
 second edition of my Agamemnon's Daughter) . 
 
 With this final book of the six I had rounded- 
 out my distinctively Classical Epoch lasting seven 
 years and more of exclusive and absolute devotion 
 to the winning of the antique world and to its ex- 
 pression in my own tongue. The outer spatial 
 flight of this Epoch may be figured as a kind of 
 ellipse, which, rising up from St. Louis, topped 
 the real Greek Parnassus, then circled back again 
 to its starting-point. I culled the spiritual treas- 
 ures possible to me along my path and strung them 
 on the foregoing bead-roll of six books, which ex- 
 press what I have labeled my Classical Renascence, 
 all of them being printed and distributed by my- 
 self, except one for a little while, as already ex- 
 plained. In the sense of the book-trade these works 
 remain unpublished to this moment. I can truly 
 say that I never offered them to any publisher in 
 manuscript ; but I have once in a while amused my- 
 self at getting his quick refusal of my stuff when 
 he found it already in type. Still he never would 
 confess that he was firstly, and often lastly, a 
 printer. 
 
 Nor were these books ever put through the maga- 
 zine mill and articled in small bits for the sake of
 
 390 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 publicity, of which process so many good volumes 
 to-day bear the lasting marks or scars. I never 
 submitted the shorter poems to the editor of any 
 periodical, though a few times I have been asked for 
 a specimen, and have furnished it gladly without 
 price. 
 
 Nor did I ever succeed in getting the average 
 Profesor of Greek in College or University, whom 
 I would meet occasionally, to take any living part 
 in this my rejuvenation of Classical antiquity, 
 which is or ought to be a kind of re-animation of 
 his rather sterilized and often mummified calling. 
 Some verbal or metrical or exegetical or even 
 epexegetical stumbling block he was sure to kick 
 up and fall over in a learned sprawl, where he 
 could coil down at ease in the traditional security 
 of transmitted erudition. The fragments of the 
 Classical world seemed to be his chief knowledge 
 as well as his sole delight ; my plan of not only re- 
 storing the broken old torso of all Hellas, but of 
 re-modeling a new statue of her sprung of a new 
 conception belonging to our own age, he deemed 
 chimerical, when he understood it, which was not 
 always. I may here remark that in the somewhat 
 extensive discussion of Classical instruction going 
 on just at present, its own pedagogues are the keen- 
 est critics of its moribund pedagogy. 
 
 I have been often asked, and do not fail to ask my- 
 self, what is the value of this long moneyless and 
 thankless revaluation of old Classical values? I 
 esteem it a stage of human culture which every
 
 A WRITER OF BOOKS. 391 
 
 succeeding stage has to regenerate in and through 
 itself in order to be cultural at all. And every in- 
 dividual man if he is to attain the full manhood of 
 his kind, cannot leave out its highest realization in 
 the course of its antecedent evolution. Through 
 some form of the Classical Renascence he is to 
 make himself complete in our Occidental world; 
 then, too, he may be able to impart his completeness, 
 when he has won it through his own creative 
 energy. He can give away his best only when he 
 owns it, and he owns it only when he has made it 
 himself. 
 
 My Classical Renascence as here set forth in its 
 various labors I deem an indispensable part of 
 what I have called my Super-vocation — a work to 
 be done for its own worth, and if need be, without- 
 pay or even recognition. Such a discipline has no 
 other end than itself; it is not merely its own ex- 
 cuse for being, but is its own supreme reward ; all 
 other human incentives, such as wealth, fame, in- 
 fluence, are only servants in the mansion of this one 
 sovereign end of our existence. These servants 
 are very convenient and indeed necessary up to a 
 certain utility; but at times they may refuse to 
 take their subordinate place in the economy of 
 life, and seek to usurp the sovereignty. Then 
 comes the crucial test of the man's ultimate value; 
 he will dare become his own servant, rather than 
 be the slave of his servants. Some such test I felt 
 now to be crushing in upon me, and producing no 
 little unrest, but without a serious breach in my
 
 392 THE ST, LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 deeper resolution, whereof the future must certify- 
 to the fact. 
 
 This Writer of Books, therefore, found his solid 
 reward in the practice of his own creative energy ; 
 he might even call it a foretaste of his eternal hap- 
 piness. In this way he felt and communed with 
 the first sources of being ; or, to employ perchance 
 a more daring locution, he shared in the original 
 Primal Love creating the "World. At any rate he 
 may here repeat the sentence of faith already cited 
 from his private breviary: Scribers est orare. 
 Prayers are sometimes paid for, it is said ; but 
 mine were not, and all these books of mine are in 
 their first genesis my orisons. 
 
 And here at the close of the present Epoch I may 
 be permitted to turn one brief cast of my pro- 
 phetic search-light upon the farther future, fore- 
 saying that this Classic Renascence simply preludes 
 and prepares for another and deeper Renascence, 
 not only mine but time's also, namely the Self's 
 very Renascence in its own native form of utter- 
 ances. Or let it be thusly said : underneath this outer 
 Classical Itinerary runs an inner unconscious 
 Psychical Itinerary, which with the years is des- 
 tined to burst up to consciousness and win a new 
 self-expression in its own science. 
 
 But mark now the shifting of the scene, both 
 outer and inner. Along with the change to a new 
 stage of my spirit's development, is conjoined a 
 most surprising change to a new locality as the 
 right environment of my fresh task. Guess me the 
 name of the place.
 
 CHAPTER SECOND 
 
 The Renascence Evolved and Propagated 
 
 Here, to my mind looking backward over life's 
 mountain peaks, appear in a single group or mass 
 the next ten or a dozen years, representing this 
 cardinal fact: the evolution both internal and ex- 
 ternal, of the foregoing Renascence, which in its 
 classical form could only be germinal, yet not for 
 me alone, but likewise for all civilization. 
 
 Now this Renascence in my special case unfolds 
 doubly: first, inwardly into the four Great Books 
 of Literature with my completed expressions of 
 them in the so-called commentaries ; secondly, into 
 their outer propagation over the country at some 
 favorable places for growth. Moreover I may add 
 that this was peculiarly my Chicago Epoch, in con- 
 trast to the previous one which had centered in St. 
 Louis. 
 
 What has been won in the foregoing Epoch at 
 St. Louis and Concord, is next to be scattered far 
 and away over all the land, to the outreach of my 
 ability. The propagation of our so-called Rena- 
 scence, or of that phase of the St. Louis Movement 
 which I had especially cultivated and developed, 
 must now be the work of a new Epoch quite dis- 
 tinct from the one which I had just passed 
 
 393
 
 394 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 through. First of all, the change involves a break- 
 ing loose from my two chief centers hitherto, and 
 a dispersion of energy, both mental and physical, 
 in order to plant the seed-corn in as large a terri- 
 tory as possible. 
 
 Thus it was for me a time of wandering, and I 
 rambled continuously over a greater space than 
 ever before or afterward in my career. My jour- 
 neys extended from Boston, New York and Wash- 
 ington along the Atlantic Coast, to Omaha and 
 Minneapolis in the "West. Still the most of my 
 work lay in the two central States, Indiana and 
 Illinois. I can truly say that this was the busiest 
 portion of my entire life. It lasted some thirteen 
 years from 1884 till 1897, to reckon its full day 
 from dawn to sunset. I was forty-three years when 
 it started, and I kept up the campaign till I 
 brushed the border of old-age, and heard its warn- 
 ing. Moreover the Epoch itself began to wane in 
 strength and fervor, having delivered its message, 
 and also to show signs of making a transition into 
 a new and more advanced stage of that total life of 
 which it was but a part. So much for the outer 
 spatial dispersion of myself as well as of my teach- 
 ings. 
 
 Next I may tell something of the methods which 
 I employed in this propagation. First was the 
 single lecture (or Lyceum) which I always deemed 
 insufficient in itself, though needful as a stimulus 
 and as an overture to deeper and more organic 
 work. Hence I would try to push the interested
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 395 
 
 listeners forward into the Class, which took a 
 course of connected lessons on a great and abiding 
 theme, like a Literary Bible. But the plan did 
 not stop with these Classes, which, after being 
 trained separately in a given locality, were unified 
 and intensified in the Literary School, which was 
 held eight times in Chicago alone, and several times 
 elsewhere. To a still higher and final stage did we 
 strive to carry the work, which we sought to make 
 complete and permanent in what at last became 
 known under the name of the Communal Univer- 
 sity. 
 
 Now these four pedagogical forms or methods 
 will continually recur in the course of this narra- 
 tive, so that it is worth while to keep them in mind 
 by a recapitulation: (1) the Lecture, (2) the 
 Class, (3) the Literary School, (4) the Communal 
 University. Though these separate forms were old, 
 they together constituted a new order, or it may be, 
 a new system of pedagogy, specially applicable to 
 social conditions, as I found them here in the "West, 
 but lying outside the traditional lines of education. 
 It was not hostile to the transmitted educational 
 training, but supplementary. For the human be- 
 ing as active citizen has still to receive his or her 
 best and deepest instruction after the High School, 
 the College, the Scholastic University, as they have 
 been handed down from the past. They cannot 
 educate for life, as they often claim, for life itself 
 is to be always an education, and must have in this 
 field its own educative institution. Indeed profes-
 
 396 T HE ST. L0VI8 MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 sional educators themselves ought especially to be 
 pupils in this Higher School. 
 
 But behold the unexpected turn: amid all this 
 scattered propagation and far-away dispersion of 
 mind and body, a center insists upon creating it- 
 self just for the purpose of better dissemination. 
 This center was not St. Louis, not any city of the 
 Atlantic Coast, but that youngest Westerner, Chi- 
 cago. Unwillingly I may say, and at first uncon- 
 sciously I found myself driven toward the over- 
 mastering rival of St. Louis, whose phenomenal 
 rise to supremacy I had watched for many years 
 with no little jealousy, I must confess. I had seen 
 many a changeling pass from the river-town to the 
 lake-town with a feeling of reproof for their dis- 
 loyalty. And now I woke up to find myself just 
 such a disloyal changeling in spite of my own self- 
 reproach and even inner repugnance. I turned my 
 breast against that irresistible current surging Chi- 
 cago-wards, and tried to swim up stream, only to 
 see myself borne into the heart of the maelstrom, 
 which was just the swirling city itself. 
 
 Thus my Chicago time opens, which starts and 
 runs parallel with this Epoch of Propagation. I 
 soon discovered that nowhere else could such a task 
 be accomplished. Chicago had already become the 
 great center of Western distribution, both for mer- 
 chandise and for intelligence. The latter fact I 
 could not at first believe, till immediate experience 
 pounded it painfully into my brain. Moreover the 
 city itself began to offer me a new and very inter-
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 397 
 
 esting problem, quite different from that of St. 
 Louis or of any community I had ever known be- 
 fore — a problem that appealed mightily to the un- 
 traditional motive ever propelling me from within. 
 So I was to receive here, too, a communal training. 
 'To my mind Chicago soon started to reveal itself 
 in three marked phases, which rounded out to- 
 gether one great all-overwhelming process. In the 
 first place, the town sped away with a furious mo- 
 mentum, being externally dashed forward on the 
 roaring stream of events, as they drove it and with 
 it, so that it seemed all afloat. But in the second 
 place the city was even more violently agitated in 
 and through itself, becoming a very whirlpool 
 of whizzing humanity, within which it was almost 
 dangerous to get caught. Thirdly, this rapid revo- 
 lution generated a kind of centrifugal energy which 
 hurled the city's transactions of every sort in 
 every direction over the land, making it the great 
 center of distribution, to which all products were 
 drawn, swallowed up for the moment, and then 
 regurgitated far away every-whither. No other 
 urban maelstrom like it on this globe is the general 
 verdict of travelers. It seemed to challenge com- 
 parison with any one of the elemental Furies of 
 Nature — the earthquake, the cyclone, the volcano 
 in eruption. 
 
 Thus the outer appearance of Chicago as well as 
 the inner character seemed the opposite to that of 
 St. Louis, whose law after 1880 was relatively re- 
 tardation which at times seemed to approach stag-
 
 398 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 nation. The contrast between the two cities was 
 smiting, and became the literary common-place of 
 all recording observers, partial and impartial. 
 Somehow the great tide of Western migration came 
 pouring into and through Chicago, which repre- 
 sented the world afloat, she being afloat and awhirl 
 herself. Meanwhile the paralyzing disillusion of 
 St. Louis lay heavy upon her brooding spirit. So 
 I was compelled to re-read the old tale of two cities 
 not in the romance of Illusion now, but in the fact, 
 as this unrolled before my eyes. I took lodgment 
 in Chicago, but my domicile there never could get 
 fully anchored, the city itself being so unanchored, 
 as if it were a thousand floating islands on Lake 
 Michigan. 
 
 (Well might I ask myself : Have I any function 
 here in this most restless, uncertain, transitory ex- 
 istence? The head gets dizzy at first with merely 
 looking at the swirl and you begin to query, what 
 will become of you, with your philosophic emphasis 
 upon the abiding and the essential, if you once 
 plunge into this cyclonic ever-shifting multitude? 
 After some days of drifting, I concluded that my 
 part was to stabilize it, to steady it, to put some- 
 thing permanent into the evanescence before me, as 
 far as my bit of power would hold out. The ven- 
 ture began to interest me, to allure me, to absorb 
 me, yea to hypnotize me through its very hazard. 
 In this sense I became a gambler literally on Chi- 
 cago change or rather on Chicago changefulness. 
 
 But what capital could I get for such a specula-
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 399 
 
 tion ? I had brought with me from my former ac- 
 quisitions the intensive study and interpretation 
 of the great Literary Bibles of the Race, which 
 have shown a more enduring power of immortality 
 than any other spiritual treasures of the past. I 
 have already mentioned my labors in the exposi- 
 tion, propagation, and reproduction of the four su- 
 preme poets — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and 
 Goethe — to whom I had devoted several years at 
 St. Louis and at Concord. They were the ever- 
 lasting anchorage of all Literature, now becoming 
 the most transitory of sublunary things, anchorage 
 too of those spirits who sought for some fastness in 
 the fleeting panorama of this our sense-life. No 
 shriller, more grinding, pulverizing contradiction 
 could be found than that between Chicago and the 
 Literary Bibles, symbols respectively of the mo- 
 mentary and of the perennial in human achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 Now the fascination came strongly over me to 
 perform just this feat of planting the opposition 
 of all Time, indeed the extremes of the Universe 
 itself — that of eternity and that of the instant — 
 right in the heart of the purest manifestation of 
 restless fugacity on our globe. Could it be done 
 without money, without influence, even without 
 books, other than the simple text of our Literary 
 Bibles? For I had nothing else. Undoubtedly 
 there was some literature written and printed in 
 Chicago, yes a good deal of it, but it was almost 
 wholly of the. public press, and of all the ephemeral
 
 400 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 records of the ephemeral in this inky deluge of 
 ours, the Chicago newspaper was then the most 
 ephemeral, and it still is not lacking in that quality. 
 Indeed it had no belief in immortality of any 
 sort, especially in the lettered one; and it would 
 jet its Mephistophelean sneer at any attempt to 
 introduce such a faith into Chicago's fleet modern- 
 ity. Eugene Field, born and reared in St. Louis, 
 but a fugitive (or deserter) to Chicago like my- 
 self, though in a very different vocation, made fun 
 of our Literary Schools in his journalistic Sharps 
 and Flats, and set all the scoffers of the town to 
 sniggering and mocking at us for our Chicagoless 
 follies. Still I must say, to the credit of "Genie" 
 Field, as our St. Louis printers used to call him 
 affectionately, when he was there a genially 
 crapulous reporter, that he induced his journal, the 
 Chicago News, to hire me to write an article on 
 Irving 's rendition of Faust, which was then on the 
 stage in Chicago. I accepted the offer for the sake of 
 the publicity, inasmuch as I was then having classes 
 in Goethe's Faust, and was working desperately to 
 get ready for our Literary School, or general In- 
 stitute of Lectures on the same subject. Field of 
 course never came to the classes or to the Literary 
 School, but he did hunt me up, and he gave me 
 box tickets to the theater to see the play and its 
 famous English actors, solacing me by the way 
 with some very white complimentary flimflams, tell- 
 ing me confidentially how much he "had profited 
 by reading my books. ' ' I was not cruel enough to
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 401 
 
 test his knowledge of them, but I cannot think that 
 Field expected me to take his words at ear-value, 
 though I appreciated his dexterous courtesy, and 
 his generosity self-suggested, for I never would 
 have dared ask him for such a favor. In his earlier 
 days as a reporter, he must have often heard at 
 St. Louis of our Movement and of its members, and 
 he was probably astonished at its audacious migra- 
 tion to Chicago, the supposed newspaperial In- 
 ferno of scribbling demons, into which I now dared 
 venture, pen in hand. 
 
 The article was duly written and published, tak- 
 ing up about a column in length, as I recollect, for 
 I have lost or mislaid the document somewhere in 
 my wanderings, though I thought to preserve it as 
 a keepsake. It was not a good article, a kind of 
 abnormal hybrid, for I tried to newspaperize my 
 Faust work, thus producing an unnatural cross be- 
 tween journalism and philosophy, very unpleasing 
 in feat are to the parent, and probably not attract- 
 ive to the public. I would have rejected it, if I 
 had been in the judgment seat of the editor. Great 
 was my surprise, however, when the office sent me 
 a check for twenty-five dollars, which, I can still 
 say, as I did a few years ago, "has remained the 
 first, last, and only compensation in money for 
 any writing of mine up to this day." Undoubted- 
 ly some of my books have been sold, but they were 
 never written with a view to their saleability. But 
 here appeared the first and the last exception. 
 
 The chief lesson of my article was given to my-
 
 402 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 self, who then and there learned my total lack of 
 fitness for any form of periodiealism. The editor 
 probably thought so too, for he never asked me to 
 send him another article, though there was the 
 opportunity. And he was right. In fact I had 
 already at St. Louis had my deterrent experience 
 with the magazine, whereof I have given some ac- 
 count on a previous page. The newspaper, as the 
 ephemeral record of the Ephemeral, produced a 
 jarring discord in me who was putting all my 
 faith and all my heart as well as my brain, into the 
 propagation of the eternal record of the Eternal, 
 just now in ephemeral Chicago. To be sure I 
 never failed to read the newspaper with diligence, 
 for its own sake first, it being the moment's world- 
 bubble, and then for the sake of the reaction from 
 it, which always tended to give me a quick set- 
 back upon my own true calling. 
 
 And now let the fact be duly acknowledged that 
 I was not alone in attempting to fix some per- 
 manent literary anchorage into the tornado-whirl 
 of Chicago. I remember the efforts of my soldier- 
 friend, General N. B. Buford, who ten years before 
 my time had the battle-courage to organize a huge 
 philosophical Society, which far outstripped in 
 numbers our little St. Louis affair, symbolizing in- 
 deed the two cities. For it had three hundred mem- 
 bers, as he figured it, when he called me to address 
 it far back somewhere in the seventies. That was 
 my first public lecture of the kind away from home. 
 I supposed I would meet a dozen or two people, the
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 403 
 
 usual size of our St. Louis audience. Imagine my 
 terror when I had to face three hundred Chicago 
 philosophers, twenty times as many as I was in the 
 habit of seeing at our meetings. Thus philosophy 
 herself was for a short time enormously Chicago- 
 ized, perhaps two-thirds of the membership being 
 women. The Society did not last long ; I could 
 hardly find a trace of it when I went back to Chi- 
 cago in 1884. And my good friend, the General, 
 had also vanished beyond. Seemingly the science of 
 the Eternal had become altogether transitory in 
 Chicago, taking the character of its environment as 
 the terrestrial paradise of the Ephemeral. 
 
 In this connection gratitude requires that I 
 should mention three faithful friends of the cause, 
 gentlemen of first distinction and influence in the 
 city. The two best-known clergymen of Chicago 
 and public-spirited citizens of the highest charac- 
 ter, Dr. David Swing, and Dr. H. W. Thomas, were 
 always ready to lend us aid by word and deed, and 
 even by lectures before our Literary Schools. They 
 have passed on, but Professor Lewis J. Block re- 
 mains, distinguished as poet, critic, and educator, 
 and specially gifted with profound insight into 
 philosophy. I never failed to gain new light and 
 incentive in conversing with his deeply sympathetic 
 personality. 
 
 In the fall of 1884 I gave my first course of talks 
 on Homer to a small miscellaneous audience in a 
 school-room of Chicago, lasting about five weeks. 
 At the close I was surprised to find requests for a
 
 404 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 number of classes— all that I could attend to — in 
 the several Literary Bibles. These classes were 
 scattered over the city, and were to be held chiefly 
 in private parlours. What could be the source of 
 this sudden cultural outburst in Chicago ? I found 
 that most of the promoters were people who had 
 been either at Concord or at St. Louis — in the 
 latter case they were chiefly Kindergartners who 
 had studied with Miss Blow. I had another en- 
 gagement in Indiana, but I promised to return the 
 following year which I did with the result that 
 Chicago became my center of propagation for quite 
 twenty years. 
 
 When I came back and resumed the classes I 
 found an interest similar to that in St. Louis some 
 five years before. All over town these groups kept 
 springing up, and asking me for lessons in the 
 Literary Bibles. I was puzzled by the fact, inas- 
 much as Chicago acquaintances had repeatedly 
 warned me that no such thing as the St. Louis 
 Movement was possible or even advisable in their 
 wild and whirling town. Of course there were 
 some clubs which studied Browning for instance, 
 who was then in the acme of his vogue. To-day's 
 novelists also Chicago might take in small quick 
 doses, but I was told that it wanted "none of your 
 old Homer or medieval Dante." Still I found re- 
 sponses to these most ancient poets in most modern 
 Chicago, which by report would contemptuously 
 fling under the hoofs of its cattle and swine at the
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 405 
 
 slaughter-house all such long-outlived palaeo- 
 graphs. 
 
 In the great migration to the West from the 
 East, the world was afloat with the Sun's course, 
 and dropped along its path a line of floating com- 
 munities, many of which have disappeared, while 
 others, the most of them, have been stabilized into 
 the prescribed communal life of the past. Chicago 
 was their best representative, and has preserved 
 much of their original Western character of daring 
 initiative, and will not settle down into quiescent 
 tradition, refusing to conform its activity to the 
 transmitted model from the East. In a sense it still 
 keeps on migrating, pioneering, breaking away even 
 from its own prescription, ever re-making itself a 
 new town on some new frontier. Tell me, I would 
 often ask of my self's own Sibyl, what has ancient 
 Homer to do with such a town as this Chicago? 
 Why dare you try to bridge over what Time and 
 Space, Spirit and Speech have so utterly divorced ? 
 The response would run : ' ' That is just Chicago in 
 quintessence: to dare those elemental deities of Na- 
 ture's separation, Space and Time, and to put 
 them to flight across continents. ' ' 
 
 Thus I, a wee vanishing atom myself, made the 
 desperate plunge into the Chicago maelstrom, bear- 
 ing under my arm my big eternal evangel, nothing 
 less than the four greatest, most enduring books 
 written by European man. At first I startled and 
 shrank, still I felt the secret affinity, and so with 
 time I became one with my environment ; I turned
 
 406 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— FART SECOND. 
 
 vortical like Chicago in my outer activity, while 
 my inner remained firmly anchored to my one 
 creative task. 
 
 Having taken a glimpse of external tumultuous 
 Chicago, I began to look underneath the surface, 
 and there I soon found the city-soul in a deeply re- 
 sponsive agitation, perchance even more perturbed 
 inwardly than outwardly, spiritually than bodily. 
 The first and best example rises now before me in 
 the fact that sooner or later I came upon at least a 
 dozen new religions, which were claiming to be 
 here evolved or perchance to have just dropped 
 from Heaven in answer to the crying prayer of 
 the place and the time. Certainly they were all 
 protests against the transmitted theology, and 
 waged war upon prescription. Therein they could 
 touch me to an harmonious thrill, even when I al- 
 together disagreed with their doctrines. A little 
 investigation, however, showed that quite all these 
 new religions were mainly reproductions or recru- 
 descences of old Oriental faiths. The Hindoo God- 
 consciousness showed a strange revival right in the 
 midst of the grand Chicago Maya; Buddhism found 
 followers, the new Brahminism under the name of 
 Brahmo-somaj had its cult, and especially Theos- 
 ophy reaped no small harvest after the seeding of 
 the famous Madam Blavatzky, whose Isis Unveiled 
 I once found Harris deeply pondering and propos- 
 ing to refute, in consequence of its ravages among 
 his friends, chiefly women. An American convert to 
 Mahommedanism came among us and preached to
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 407 
 
 us like a zealous missionary to the heathen, though 
 he kept silent on polygamy. Marvelously success- 
 ful in thrift, in numbers, and in turmoil was the 
 revival of the old Hebrew Zion by John Alexander 
 Dowie, who within a block of my lodging-house, 
 proclaimed himself on Michigan Boulevard in 
 triumph the successor of Moses and David, saying 
 "I am a theocrat! away with your democracy!" 
 But altogether the most active and pervasive reli- 
 gious revolt went under the name of Christian 
 Science, avatar of the returning new Christ, now a 
 woman, and was often deemed Mrs. Eddy's Re- 
 formation of Luther's Reformation. For a while 
 all the Protestant Churches of the city seemed 
 tinged with it, like an epidemic it spread and 
 raged, everybody took to healing one's self and 
 one another. An imprudent excellent clergyman, 
 an acquaintance of mine, dared preach a sermon 
 against it, which was his last from that pulpit when 
 he found the bulk of his congregation preaching 
 back against him. The universal gift of healing 
 played havoc with the regular physicians ; I heard 
 an estimate that one-third at least of the medical 
 practice of Chicago had vanished. One of my 
 curious experiences was that some experts in the 
 new doctrine attended my lectures on Homer and 
 Shakespeare, and declared repeatedly that they 
 contained good Christian Science without my say- 
 ing it or even knowing it. This occurred so often 
 that I concluded there must be some common ele- 
 ment between us — what ? The break from too much
 
 408 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 tradition, perchance. Let the reader be his own 
 oracle and give the answer. 
 
 Thus all Asia in its highest spiritual contribu- 
 tion to humanity, the whole Oriental mind with its 
 supreme gift of the great world-religions — Chris- 
 tian, Jewish, Mahommedan, Hindoo — seemed to 
 bubble up again on this side of the globe in that 
 huge vat of fermentation called Chicago, and 
 started to seething with a fresh creation of them- 
 selves, usually under the old Asiatic names but 
 sometimes not, in this newest city of the Occident. 
 What can it all mean? At any rate the psycholo- 
 gist might glimpse in the phenomenon the soul's 
 early starting of its last and largest return to the 
 Orient,, to the original home of our civilized God- 
 consciousness, and might mark the early chaotic 
 mutterings and struggles of the coming universal 
 religion, in this its grand Occidental dip backward 
 into its first creative sources. Only in Chicago has 
 ever been held a real Parliament of Religions, which 
 took place during her World's Fair, and which 
 still remains a striking revelation of herself in this 
 respect as well as a mighty prophecy, not yet ful- 
 filled, of what is to follow after the political Fed- 
 eration of the Nations. 
 
 So I flung myself with a shiver of terror, yet also 
 with a certain feeling of kinship, into this vortex 
 of Chicago life. One point of sympathy I may 
 here designate : All these propagandists of new 
 religions in one way or other, more or less pro- 
 foundly, sought the re-interpretation and recon-
 
 THE RENASCENCE EVOLVED, ETC. 409 
 
 struetion of the old Religions Bibles of the Orient, 
 which was not dissimilar to my theme, though I 
 clung to the four Literary Bibles of Europe — old 
 and new — with fresh significances, and their final 
 co-ordination into one Book of the Ages. 
 
 Undoubtedly many other long inherited beliefs 
 and disciplines were boiling in that Chicago caul- 
 dron, and undergoing some kind of transformation. 
 Philosophy, Art, and especially Education were 
 subjected to the city's dissolving as well as reno- 
 vating process. This meant not so much the de- 
 struction as the re-construction and rejuvenescence 
 of all ancient Tradition, sacred and secular — an as- 
 piration which St. Louis once owned when I first 
 knew her, but which she had at this time quite 
 lost — perchance again the backstroke of her Great 
 Disillusion. 
 
 Very suggestive of the new social and spiritual 
 Apocalypse, and also deeply motived in human pro- 
 gress were these fresh young Chicago recurrences 
 of aged Asia and Europe, as if here the world had 
 begun over again and I were present at the new 
 Creation ; or at least as if History had started on 
 another great arc of the total cycle of man's de- 
 velopment. The experience of this original proto- 
 plasmic world-life which was then engendering at 
 Chicago, and in which I profoundly participated, 
 became for me the supreme discipline of that 
 greater Chicago University of Civilization, very dif- 
 ferent from, yet by no means so easily discernible 
 as the other great Chicago University (of Rocke-
 
 410 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 feller) dedicated to the well-groomed traditions of 
 time-honored Learning — to all of which I for one 
 insisted upon paying due obeisance, though not a 
 one-sided devotion. 
 
 Accordingly I feel interested enough in myself 
 to set forth a somewhat detailed unfolding of this 
 present Epoch, truly the central one of my entire 
 life in years and also the busiest one in labors, as it 
 evolves its two distinctive strands, theoretical and 
 practical, or of inner development and outer propa- 
 gation, and so brings to light the two opposite ele- 
 ments, the concentrated and the discursive, of my 
 double-tracked existence. 
 
 The New Mythical Setting 
 
 Not long after I had started upon this new 
 Epoch of wandering and of seed-sowing, I became 
 dimly aware of a very subtle change which was 
 slowly entering and transforming my imaginative 
 life. For my conscious activity lay embosomed as 
 it were, in a penumbra of ever-flashing imagery 
 which would stream out from unconscious depths 
 and frequently, but not always, shape itself into 
 prose and verse. Such an elusive nebulous world of 
 Phantasy envelops us all, though few probably de- 
 velop it into an integral part of their larger exist- 
 ence. Now this is what I may here call life's myth- 
 ical setting or frame-work, which often changes
 
 THE NEW MYTHICAL SETTING. 4H 
 
 along with the man's spiritual mutations. Such 
 at least was the case with me at the present time. 
 
 The reader will recollect that everywhere in the 
 previous Epoch my environment was Hellas, her 
 works and her spirit. My quest strove to assimilate 
 and to reproduce both in myself and in outward 
 forms the antique Greek world, hence that time was 
 especially named my Classical Renascence. I found 
 that on all sides the Greco-Roman life with its 
 civilization was enwrapped in the plastic folds of 
 Greek Mythology, from which evolved not only 
 religion, but poetry, art, even history, as we may 
 still observe in the respective works of Homer, 
 Phidias, Herodotus. Thus all Classical expression 
 was primarily mythical, unfolding out of that won- 
 derful Greek Mythus, which I tried to re-live and 
 to re-create for so many years. Let me instance 
 again the tale of Iphigenia, which traveled at my 
 side during my whole European journey and back 
 home, till I could ban it out of me into expression 
 and thus rid me of its haunting presence. 
 
 But now behold the unique metamorphosis in my- 
 self most surprising to myself! A new Mythus, 
 the American one, of the Western frontier, begins 
 to insinuate itself into and even underneath that 
 old Greek one, and to take its place in the back- 
 ground of my consciousness, being native to my 
 birth-soil and not transmitted from hoar antiquity. 
 I refused to believe my own psychology at first, and 
 I revolted at the change. But I could not help my- 
 self, a deeper and more compelling stage of my 
 evolution had set in, something mightier than my
 
 412 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 conscious pleasure or purpose. The lofty Olympian 
 world with its Gods and Demigods was impercept- 
 ibly transmuted into the life and legend of the 
 humble vagabond, Johnny Appleseed, who now be- 
 came, as it were, my spirit's exemplar and my 
 mythical hero, at the start in spite of myself. Is 
 not the Christ-tale something similar in form, and 
 often productive of a similar transformation ? 
 
 Such, then, was the most searching and distinc- 
 tive prognostic of the new Epoch. But who was this 
 Johnny Appleseed? A wanderer and a seed-sower 
 through the Mississippi Valley, or a considerable 
 part thereof ; yet he had an idea in his head which 
 he carried over into life quite at the cost of life, 
 thus making himself the ideal of all idealists, and 
 reducing the three fates of existence, food raiment, 
 and shelter, to their lowest terms — truly a new- 
 world fate-compeller. He grew to be for the people 
 a mythical character, and so he remains to me ; 
 still he was an historic person with a brief 
 biography, to whom a monument has been erected 
 at Mansfield, Ohio, on which we may read the fol- 
 lowing inscription: "To the memory of John 
 Chapman, best known as Johnny Appleseed, 
 Pioneer Nurseryman of Richland County from 1810 
 to 1830." 
 
 This John Chapman was born in New England, 
 but as a young man migrated to the West, and the 
 first report of him has been transmitted that he was 
 seen about the year 1800 floating down the Ohio 
 river, in charge of two canoes lashed together and
 
 THE NEW MYTHICAL SETTING. 413 
 
 loaded with sacks of appleseeds for the planting 
 of nurseries on favorable spots in advance of civili- 
 zation, which was now seeking a new home in the 
 wild North-Western Territory. Thus every hardy 
 pioneer, migrating with his family, would find a 
 young orchard already awaiting him wherever he 
 might settle in the wilderness. Such was apostolic 
 John Chapman's general idea or gospel: service 
 for the ever-advancing immigrant, bearer of the 
 oncoming civilized order. It is added that he was 
 a vegetarian, his chief food being the berries, nuts, 
 and fruits of Nature along with an occasional hand- 
 ful of Western cornmeal. He went bare-footed win- 
 ter and summer, while his clothing was of the 
 rudest make. (More about the historic Johnny 
 Appleseed in my Writer of Books, Appendix.) 
 
 Such may be deemed the primitive real kernel of 
 this Mythus of Migration, which wreathes around 
 Johnny Appleseed, and which the people them- 
 selves made and named — the only original Ameri- 
 can Mythus that I know of, with the possible ex- 
 ception of Uncle Remus. To be sure, the seedlings 
 of many other legends have been imported and even 
 planted in the soil here, where they have not failed 
 to sprout and bloom. But the story of Johnny Ap- 
 pleseed is autochthonous, though it may have anal- 
 ogues in other parts of the earth. Like that of 
 Hercules and of Theseus in Greek fable, it has a 
 unique historic personality as its creative center, 
 from which it continues to grow layer by layer, 
 each generation and often each locality adding its
 
 414 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 legendary anecdote. So I have seen in my life- 
 time what may yet be called the Mythus of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln augmenting itself, story upon story, 
 till its material promises to outstrip the man's 
 actual biography, both in interest and magnitude. 
 Thus the people mythologize their true heroes, 
 even the American people do so, who are on the 
 whole not much addicted to Mythology. 
 
 The doings of Appleseed I have heard celebrated 
 in places where he could never have been, for the 
 Mythus universalizes itself over Space and Time. 
 The date and locality of his death have been care- 
 fully hunted up and specified by investigation ; yet 
 his grave has been pointed out to me in different 
 spots hundreds of miles apart, during the course 
 my own wanderings as lecturer also planting (if 
 you will so construe it) my appleseeds. 
 
 I was nine or ten years old when I first read at 
 home in a local book a brief account of Johnny 
 Appleseed, and his story never left me. In fact 
 it would rise to mind of its own accord, now and 
 then, during all my young-manhood ; but being un- 
 used by me either in life or in writing, it would 
 quietly sink back into its former subliminal depths. 
 I heard of the peculiarities of Johnny Appleseed 
 from the people of my native town in Ohio, which 
 was only a few miles from Mansfield, once Apple- 
 seed's home, and his monument's own town. It is 
 my opinion that the old orchard on my grand- 
 father 's farm originated from one of Appleseed 's 
 nurseries. And thus in my boyhood I ate of his
 
 THE NEW MYTHICAL SETTING. 415 
 
 apples, the real fruit of his service. But more 
 deeply I partook of his ideal legend, which lay un- 
 consciously fermenting in me, and imparting its 
 education to my unrisen Self. Thus a native 
 Mythus was taking part in my training, and to a 
 small degree in that of my little community, alto- 
 gether in spite of ourselves, for openly we ridiculed 
 it while secretly we took it to our hearts, and cher- 
 ished it unforgotten. Indeed the ultimate function 
 of the Mythus in all its shapes — legend, fairy-tale, 
 folk-lore — is that it be educative of the people in 
 the people's own form, whence it unfolds into the 
 higher forms of poetry, art, literature, and culture 
 generally. I hold that the first and greatest edu- 
 cator of the Greek people to its transcendent gifts 
 and works was that unique Greek Mythology, 
 genetic back-ground of the Greek world, and signifi- 
 cant even to-day as educative. So at least I felt 
 when I tramped through Greece to catch it up from 
 its creative living well-head, and not from books, 
 which are necessarily desiccated, yet very neces- 
 sary. Not without an urgent need of the time's 
 training has there taken place a revival of My- 
 thology, and especially of Greek Mythology, v 
 has now become a study in many schools, and is 
 again being told to little children, of course with 
 due selection and modification and often I 
 production. 
 
 Thus I had my little part in a fresh lifting c £ the 
 race's mythical treasures, and in restoring the] 
 their primordial educative value. My special prae-
 
 416 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 tical field in this business I found in the Kinder- 
 garten with its youngest beginners in schooling. 
 But I failed not to stress the Mythus which under- 
 lay and germinally created each of the Literary 
 Bibles, the supreme products of human genius. So, 
 for me the Mythus with its primitive form of im- 
 aginative expression overarched and integrated the 
 beginning and end of man's grand discipline of 
 education, from the little Kindergarten to the 
 loftiest Poem, supreme work of the University of 
 Civilization. , 
 
 In Johnny Appleseed my wandering and dis- 
 semination had found and stirred the far-down ele- 
 mental Mythus lurking from earliest youth in my 
 dark underself, and now bubbling up to the light 
 as the vehicle of my fresh self-expression, in both 
 prose and verse, during the coming Epoch. As al- 
 ready indicated, this juvenile Mythus, so I may call 
 it, now springs forth full-grown after a long but 
 ever- fermenting subsidence, and actually tackles my 
 most cherished G-reek Mythus, flinging the same 
 underneath itself and marching triumphantly 
 ahead on its new career. Still we must not forget 
 that the old Greek world, with its vast rich experi- 
 ence was not destroyed or lost, but was gratefully 
 embraced and borne along in this young ebullient 
 spirit of the time and country. 
 
 In myself the change often seethed up before me 
 as a startling transformation. From the high aris- 
 tocratic antique to the humble democratic modern, 
 from the lofty Heroes and Demigods to lowly bare-
 
 THE NEW MYTHICAL SETTING. 417 
 
 footed Johnny Appleseed, from the ideally beauti- 
 ful plastic form and classic drapery of the Greeks 
 to the savagely blanketed and feathered figure of 
 the Indians ( Appleseed 's companions often), from 
 the grandiose sea-swell of the Homeric hexameter 
 to the petty bits of the jingling doggerel — such was 
 at times the shivering transition, yet supernally 
 ordered for my completer self-hood, as I have to be- 
 lieve, now looking backward. 
 
 Here I may add that the Mythus of Johnny 
 Appleseed, as I prefer to designate it, did not cease, 
 with this Epoch of a dozen years, its mythical ac- 
 companiment to my life. Later I shall recount how 
 'Y; quite suddenly gushed up again from its sub- 
 conscious sources even in my advanced age, and in- 
 sisted upon a fresh renascence. Thus it attuned 
 all my days to an undertone of popular legend 
 which at due periods would break into utterance 
 as an insuppressible element of my total self-ex- 
 pression. In my youth it lay implicit, doubtless 
 ripening ; but in my middle life it became explicit, 
 openly active, quite supplanting my previous 
 Classicism. But behold it again now in my hoar 
 senescence — wait, for this is not yet past. 
 
 In the foregoing account I have tried to give a 
 glimpse of what was darkly and fitfully streaming 
 through my underworld, where the mythical ele- 
 ment had its sway and function, for I believe it to 
 have been one of my best and most congenial 
 teachers, holding its school in the unconscious 
 lower currents of my soul's deep sea. But my con-
 
 418 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 scious, unmythical self was chiefly busy with the 
 Literary Bibles, which had also their mythical sub- 
 structure of prime significance, as I have always 
 tried to set forth with due emphasis. At this more 
 definite, better-lighted objective we may next take 
 a glance. 
 
 II 
 
 The Double Transfer 
 
 The present Epoch is marked at its opening by 
 two significant changes of locality: from St. Louis 
 and from Concord to Chicago. The latter city is 
 to show itself the new center of the Movement, as 
 far as this continues to run on my lines of work. 
 With such a double shifting of my life-scene is also 
 connected a fresh stage of my development. 
 
 That which I had won and wrought out to a cer- 
 tain completeness I was to transplant to a different 
 soil. For Chicago was then bursting forth in the 
 riotous exuberance of early gigantic youth, crude 
 but enormously energetic; while St. Louis seemed 
 to be collapsing into a premature old-age, disap- 
 pointed, deeply disillusioned of life already. The 
 difference in the mood of the two cities seemed to 
 suggest that between the rising and the setting 
 sun. Undoubtedly there was still much activity in 
 St. Louis, mental and commercial; but we all felt 
 a settled something clogging her soul, a despairful 
 brooding over the Great Disillusion. As for me 
 personally, the change meant a new freedom, a get- 
 ting rid of some old fetters which hampered my
 
 THE DOUBLE TRANSFER. 419 
 
 spirit's native evolution. In the first place I wished 
 to take breath outside of the Hegelian atmosphere 
 which had become a kind of tradition, and hence 
 a smothering circumscription of me in St. Louis. 
 Then friction and possible clash with Miss Blow's 
 literary leadership I would avoid as something not 
 only unpleasant but injurious to both sides, and to 
 the general cause. So I left the old field to her 
 alone, while I turned to the cultivation of fresh 
 territory, which was inviting me with alluring out- 
 looks upon the future. 
 
 From Concord also I became totally weaned after 
 the session of 1885, during whose time there dawned 
 upon me some faint hope of transferring to the 
 West the Literary School, which for me had dis- 
 tinctly evolved out of the Philosophical School, and 
 gave promise of being its rightful successor. And 
 now dropped down upon my immature though 
 budding plan an auspicious conjuncture which 
 caused it to ripen at once. I received a letter from 
 a lady who had attended the Goethe School at Con- 
 cord in 1885, suggesting a project for a similar 
 course of lectures and discussions on the great Ger- 
 man poet in the strongly German and Germanized 
 city of Milwaukee. 
 
 On the moment I fell in with the proposition, 
 deeming it a happy omen sent of the Gods, and I 
 offered to do my part toward carrying it out ; but I 
 emphasized in my answer that there must be a 
 previous course of reading and study in prepara- 
 tion for such a considerable work. Accordingly
 
 420 THE 'ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 arrangements were made to start some classes in 
 the poet's Faust, of which I was to be the in- 
 structor. Already I had resolved to locate in Chi- 
 cago, from which I could take a rapid ride to Mil- 
 waukee by rail at almost any hour of the day. 
 Thus for several months the town was not allowed 
 to forget the extraordinary event in prospect, since 
 it was trumpeted by the local press throughout 
 "Wisconsin. 
 
 In those days Milwaukee was already famous for 
 its beer, bubbling up perchance from its deep Teu- 
 tonic foundations, and foaming out over the spa- 
 cious West. I had known the city as celebrated 
 also for its German culture generally, since I had 
 heard it called "the German Athens of America" 
 even in jealously German St. Louis. Its recent dis- 
 tinction of being the Western fortress of socialism 
 had not at that time been won, though it was 
 doubtless on the way. But beer and culture, both 
 just now under such decided eclipse, were then 
 strongly in evidence, and I took pleasure in sip- 
 ping modestly of both, as occasion might offer. On 
 the whole, I never heard the German language 
 spoken so generally along the streets in any other 
 of the larger cities of America. Still my sponsors 
 were almost wholly Americans, whose little group 
 was genteelly housed in the heart of the city, which 
 seemed buoyantly tossing on the ripples of Lake 
 Michigan. 
 
 Among the pleasant memories of Milwaukee I 
 recall especially the extraordinary number of poets,
 
 THE DOUBLE TRANSFER. 421 
 
 singing in English and also in German and then 
 in both tongues together, who appeared to spring 
 out of her soil everywhere at the mere sound of a 
 versicle. In all my travels I do not remember me 
 ever to have poured out so many of my own lines 
 on little coteries of patient listeners, from whom 
 usually would fly back at me a poetical tit-for-tat 
 in response or possibly in revenge. I certainly en- 
 joyed this new tournament of verse, truly a spon- 
 taneous eisteddfod of Wisconsin bards preluding 
 their strains along the shores of Lake Michigan, to 
 whose melodious volume I contributed especially 
 my classic elegiacs interspersed with memories of 
 the trip to Hellas. Thus quite an electric spirt 
 of the Greek Renascence shot up of its own vivid 
 accord outside of the Goethe Classes, yet in an 
 harmonious by-play with them, which had their 
 object and fulfillment in the coming Goethe School. 
 This finally opened August 23d, 1886, with an 
 address from its President, a well-known citizen of 
 Milwaukee, before a large and much-expecting au- 
 dience, and continued for one week, two lectures a 
 day, morning and evening, each lecture about an 
 hour long, followed by a general discussion. The 
 most distinguished man on the list of lecturers was 
 Dr. W. T. Harris, formerly of St. Louis, but now of 
 Concord. He at first rather hesitated about accept- 
 ing the invitation of the Committee, but I by a per- 
 sonal letter urged him strongly to give his powerful 
 aid to this new stride of our St. Louis Movement, 
 which was also a kind of young branching-out of
 
 422 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 the Concord School to the West, when it seemed 
 drooping in the East. He had just concluded the 
 summer's Dante School at Concord, and felt very- 
 tired, as usual; but, what was unusual, he showed 
 no little irritation at certain things which had 
 taken place during that session. Still he packed up 
 and came, to my great relief ; for at Milwaukee the 
 management seemed to be lapsing toward confusion 
 if not failure, and the School had gone too far to 
 be countermanded. Harris, arriving, soon saw the 
 situation, and valiantly pulled himself together and 
 also pulled the lagging School along with himself 
 to a successful close. I think he never showed him- 
 self more masterful, especially in the discussions, 
 which were often better than the lectures, con- 
 spicuously so when he was roused to the fighting- 
 point. And certain occurrences at Milwaukee had 
 roiled him up from the bottom, not to wrath but 
 to supreme exertion. Hence he took possession of 
 the School, not the official but the intellectual, con- 
 trolled it, and steered it safely, I may say triumph- 
 antly, into port. I never saw him do so complete 
 a deed, even at Concord. He was not without his 
 ambitions, and when he looked into the face of that 
 large and notable audience, seven or eight times 
 larger than the average attendance at his own 
 School of Philosophy, he summoned all his reserve 
 power, of which he had no small store, and rose vic- 
 toriously equal to the occasion. As for me I was 
 on hand every time and spoke my part in lecture, 
 discussion, and even in verse, but I had emphatic
 
 THE DOUBLE TRANSFER. 423 
 
 reasons for wishing Harris to take his place to the 
 fore, especially after I had prepared the ground 
 for the School, and in that task had harvested a 
 good ripe crop of disagreeable experiences of peo- 
 ple and of circumstances. So I had already en- 
 joyed honor enough for once, and very willingly al- 
 lowed him to take his share. 
 
 Still the supreme interest of the whole Milwaukee 
 affair centered for me in the phenomenal presence 
 of Brockmeyer, his first and last appearance at any 
 of our Schools either in the East or West. Great 
 was my surprise when I read his name as one of 
 the lecturers on the first program. I was not even 
 asked about his selection for such a place. The 
 management of its own accord had written to him, 
 obtained his consent, received the title of his sub- 
 ject, printed it and advertised it in large letters 
 when it foil under my eye. As far as publicity 
 could go, he was made in advance the cynosure of 
 the School's highest expectations, being hailed not 
 only the Governor, but the Philosopher Brock- 
 meyer. 
 
 And in fact such was his true place. I have al- 
 ready declared often enough that his was the 
 original creative spirit of the St. Louis Movement, 
 and I know that especially his early lectures on 
 Faust in St. Louis more than twenty years before, 
 had been the first germ of this and of all our 
 Goethe Schools, indeed of all our Literary Schools 
 both now and hereafter. To be sure, Brockmeyer 
 had never unfolded that germ to maturity in him-
 
 424 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 self or in his environing constituency ; he had aban- 
 doned it for a far lesser worth, in my judgment, and 
 his small but very fecund bantling was picked up, 
 nursed, and developed to its complete stature by 
 other hands. And now after all these years he is to 
 visit in a strange city his own barely recognizable 
 child, large and robust, but hardly yet full-grown. 
 What will be his new attitude toward it, toward us, 
 and especially toward his present audience, very 
 different from the little knot of us who used to as- 
 semble about him in his little law-office, redolent 
 with tobacco-smoke and not wholly free of a mis- 
 cellaneous litter on the table and on the floor? So 
 I queried myself, and I may say that Harris ap- 
 peared more astonished and even more perplexed 
 than I was, and shook his head at me in a letter all 
 the way from Concord, though I was not to blame, 
 which fact he soon found out. As already stated, 
 he had never dared invite to the Concord School of 
 Philosophy the philosophic father of himself and of 
 the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 Let it be said, however, with emphasis that 
 Harris never failed to give ample credit in print 
 and talk to Brockmeyer's genius, and to assign him 
 his right place in the work. Lest the reader may 
 think that I stand alone in my exalted opinion of 
 our St. Louis philosopher, I shall cite some deliber- 
 ate sentences of Harris written many years after 
 he had quit our city: "Mr. Brockmeyer whose ac- 
 quaintance I had made in 1858, is, and was even at 
 that time, a thinker of the same order of mind as
 
 THE DOUBLE TRANSFER. 425 
 
 Hegel, and before reading him had divined Hegel's 
 chief ideas" — which means the highest praise Har- 
 ris could give to mortal man. But philosophy was 
 not the thinker's only gift, as Harris indicates in 
 the following extract : ' ' Mr. B-ockmeyer 's deep in- 
 sights and his poetic power of setting them forth 
 with symbols and imagery, furnished me and my 
 friends of those early years all of our outside stim- 
 ulus in the study of German philosophy." That is, 
 our philosopher was also a poet, though not in form 
 realized. Still further: "He impressed us with 
 the practicality of philosophy. Even the hunting 
 of wild turkeys or squirrels was the occasion for 
 the use of philosophy," which thus became in his 
 hands "the most practical of all species of knowl- 
 edge. ' ' Harris goes on to say how it was applied to 
 pedagogy, to politics and law, also to literature and 
 art, of which a sample might be found in the treat- 
 ment of the Literary Bibles. (See Hegel's Logic 
 by Harris, Preface, pp. 12, 13, published in 1890.) 
 Personally I had seen little of Brockmeyer for a 
 dozen years or more, during which his political 
 career had budded, bloomed, and ended with a 
 sudden close if not collapse, of which the real causes 
 he never directly told me, drowning them in a dis- 
 illusioned silence, though he could not help letting 
 the bottom of his heart be seen indirectly in many 
 a passing stroke of disappointment. A deep poli- 
 tical estrangement overcame him so that he again 
 took flight from civilized life, for he had already 
 done the same once before if not twice. The date
 
 426 THE sf - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 of this revolutionary shake-up in his career I once 
 heard him give with pathetic emphasis: "In 1880, 
 when I quit Missouri politics, I was the first public 
 man in the state." Thus he spoke with a note of 
 a great disillusion, and at the same time with a 
 stress of self-appreciation, in which he was never 
 lacking. His excuse, external I think, was that he 
 must now do something to make money for his fam- 
 ily. He became an attorney for the Gould System 
 of Railroads, and his chief business was to look 
 after the Missouri Legislature — an employment 
 which certainly brought him no increase of reputa- 
 tion, though he warmly defended himself as lobby- 
 ist. This side of his life was unknown to me, ex- 
 cept as he reported it, and it rather repelled me in 
 spite of the bright, humorous, fantastical descrip- 
 tions of his exploits as the cunning Reynard among 
 Missouri politicians. Still he was not shifty enough 
 to bring the leaders of his party to promote him to 
 the United States Senatorship when he had fairly 
 won it by his long service to party and to public, 
 and by his supremacy of talent. I hold that he was 
 correct in deeming himself then the first public man 
 of the state, for assuredly he had no signal com- 
 petition in the line of statesmanship during those 
 years. The first man in ability certainly, but cer- 
 tainly not in availability — that was his situation 
 everywhere, political and also philosophical, in Mis- 
 souri and in Milwaukee as well — the genius un- 
 realized, supremely endowed, yet overborne with 
 the fatuous gift of always undoing his own great-
 
 THE DOUBLE TRANSFER. 427 
 
 ness often on the spot, wherein lay his ever-re- 
 curring set-back and self-nullification past, present, 
 and future. 
 
 So it comes that Brockmeyer appeared as a 
 philosophic representative not so much from St. 
 Louis as from the Indian Territory, whither he had 
 betaken himself in his profound alienation of spirit. 
 He had been living now for several years among 
 the American aborigenes, with occasional visits to 
 his St. Louis family and to the Missouri Legisla- 
 ture. Moreover he sought to take up into his own 
 the Indian consciousness itself, and to assimilate 
 its political and social institutions, upon whose ex- 
 cellences he proposed to write a philosophic treatise 
 of which he once read me a few fragments. Indeed 
 he would scatter through his talk now and then 
 some Creek-Indian expressions to designate certain 
 peculiar tribal matters or relations whose names he 
 claimed had no equivalent in English. For ex- 
 ample, I still can recall, along with his pointed 
 gesture and high-keyed voice, the strange word 
 tustanucca, so my memory spells it phonetically, 
 into which he poured some unique Creek (not 
 Greek) philosophy. He never printed, probably 
 never completed his book, which in such case re- 
 mained an unfinishable Titanic torso, like his other 
 works, like himself. 
 
 I was glad to see Brockmeyer come to the Mil- 
 waukee School, but also glad that I was not the 
 personal cause of his coming. I wished to watch 
 him tested in this new field, for I was well aware
 
 428 TEE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 of his unexpected possibilities in general ; but now, 
 especially in his present aboriginal mood, I had an 
 uncanny presentiment that he might turn a very 
 unconventional somersault right in the presence of 
 fastidious Lady Convention herself. I immediately 
 called on my old friend, when I heard of his ar- 
 rival, at his hotel, the best then in town, the Plank- 
 ington — for him a somewhat aristocratic stroke at 
 the start. First, he refused emphatically to be en- 
 tertained by any citizen, as were the rest of us lec- 
 turers. Then he rejected rather haughtily, it 
 seemed to me, all remuneration for his services at 
 the School, and even insisted upon paying his own 
 hotel bill, though there was a large over-plus of 
 funds — a state of finance quite opposite to that of 
 Concord. Thus from the outset Brockmeyer ap- 
 peared to take a lofty position of independent 
 aloofness from the School's other people, myself 
 and Harris included. Not without purpose had he 
 traveled all the way from Muscogee, the Creek 
 Capital in the heart of the Indian Territory, back 
 to a civilized community with his new message. 
 
 In his attitude at Milwaukee, Brockmeyer pro- 
 ceeded to exemplify his flight from society by his 
 disregard of the usual social conventions. Almost 
 savagely free he vindicated himself in his new free- 
 dom. He delivered his address with what may be 
 called a backwoods informality of speech and man- 
 ner which stamped him at once as original, if not 
 aboriginal. The result was at first a shock in his 
 refined audience, then a subdued titter, and after-
 
 THE DOUBLE TRANSFER. 429 
 
 wards a tidal wave of gossip through the town. 
 How shall we construe his conduct ? I believe that 
 in it lay a considerable amount of downright inten- 
 tion. For Brockmeyer had lived in the South, espe- 
 cially in Kentucky, during his younger days, and 
 he claimed to be an adept in all the Southern cour- 
 tesies when he chose. But now he did not choose, 
 or rather chose the opposite — why? I thought I 
 detected a spice of malice in his criticisms ; his old 
 philosophic friends had gone on without him ; Con- 
 cord, though Harris his nearest disciple was there 
 in the lead, had neglected him ; the St. Louis Move- 
 ment for years had forged ahead and left him out. 
 Chiefly, however, his political disappointment had 
 engendered in him a spite against civilization it- 
 self and its ways, and had driven him back to and 
 even over its frontier, where he planted himself 
 squarely against it in a sort of defiance. The sub- 
 ject of the lecture was Faust, and I thought I could 
 feel the deep throbs of his reaction in his present 
 view of his favorite poem, compared with his for- 
 mer conception of it twenty years ago. For now he 
 gave to the work of the ever-striving Faust a nega- 
 tive outcome, as if echoing or perchance forecasting 
 his own career. That shocked me more than any- 
 thing else he did, more than all his defiance of con- 
 vention ; it thrilled through me as a kind of Adam 's 
 fall of the man whom I loved, to whom I owed so 
 much, and for whom I felt the deepest gratitude. 
 
 It seemed a curious destiny that the three 
 pioneers who had founded and kept up the Philo-
 
 430 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 sophical Society in St. Louis some two decades 
 since, had now come together in a strange city from 
 different parts of our broad country — Harris from 
 the far East, Brockmeyer from the far West, Snider 
 from the Midland somewhere between. Each had 
 undergone since then his own peculiar evolution, 
 which, it may be here foresaid, is by no means com- 
 pleted yet in any single one of the three. Each is 
 still to receive a considerable discipline before he 
 graduates from the school of life, whereof this book 
 seeks to be some faint record telling of that early 
 St. Louis trio of friendship and philosophy. 
 
 From the Milwaukee experience I drew several 
 conclusions for the future, which had driven them- 
 selves deep into the convolutions of my brain. 
 
 (1) The Literary School must go on here in the 
 West; it had shown its validity, at least as one of 
 my instruments. Even under bad handling, it had 
 proved that it could not only live but thrive. 
 
 (2) The management must be changed. I re- 
 solved that hereafter I would take the Literary 
 School into my own hands, especially as regards 
 program, lecturers, and conduct of the exercises. 
 Outside help I would have to seek in other mat- 
 ters, such as finance, attendance, halls for the lec- 
 tures, etc. 
 
 (3) Harris I must secure as my main prop. I 
 found on inquiry that he was as eager to support 
 me in a fresh onset as I was to get his help. He 
 wished in his own right to have a Western audience 
 in Chicago, which was hereafter to be the place
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 431 
 
 of meeting. Milwaukee, in spite of the city's loyal 
 and generous co-operation, had to be given up, 
 though the same management talked of having an- 
 other session the following year. Then after secur- 
 ing Harris I consulted the Sibyl within me concern- 
 ing Brockmeyer: Dare I bring the genius es- 
 tranged, yet once the creative spirit of our St. 
 Louis Movement, to Chicago, itself vortical? The 
 Oracle, to all my repeated entreaties persisted per- 
 versely dumb. 
 
 (4) The theme must be the Literary Bibles, with 
 concentration upon one of the four each season, till 
 all had been presented. And now let us scan some- 
 what more closely this theme, not new, but in a 
 wholly new situation with new outlooks, being a 
 sort of sacred breviary of all lettered excellence, 
 veritably the central Organon of all Literature. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Literary Bibles 
 
 I do not know how many times I have used in the 
 preceding account the words of the above title as a 
 kind of preluding key-note struck in advance of 
 the present Epoch, of which they express the dom- 
 inant theme. I have already stated, and must 
 often repeat that this term, Literary Bibles, in my 
 nomenclature applies especially to the four greatest 
 poetical masterpieces of Europe, which we may 
 call after the transmitted names of their authors,
 
 432 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. I have also 
 confessed that I, through some native bent or spir- 
 itual need of mine own, turned away from other 
 great disciplines, especially from Philosophy, not 
 to speak of Theology, to find in these supreme books 
 of Literature my truest and most compelling form 
 of self-expression, as well as my soul-world's most 
 immanent evolution. 
 
 It is with some flutterings of emotion and of in- 
 terrogation that I now look back at the many years 
 of my middle life, the most active part of this ex- 
 istence of mine, which I devoted to the acquisition, 
 reproduction, and propagation of these Literary 
 Bibles. Was the work worth the doing? Why 
 spend on this far-off adventure so much of my best 
 hope ? But it was surely of no small human value 
 for me personally to become acquainted with the 
 choicest spirits of our race at their highest mo- 
 ments. Not merely the intellect's knowledge of a 
 book I sought, but I would live the life of its 
 creator as he revealed himself in his creation. I 
 would find the man, however subtly ensconced in 
 the multifarious play of his words and deeds. Hence 
 it came that I endeavored not only to re-live but to 
 compose the biography of each of these supreme 
 poets, well aware that his autobiography lay lurk- 
 ing in every true-ringing sentence which passed 
 through his creative soul into song. Even the sup- 
 posed impersonal Homer I sleuthed into and 
 through all his mythical masks and concealments 
 till I saw him face to face, heard his own private
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 433 
 
 story, and re-told it after him in a little epic of 
 my own called Homer in Chios. 
 
 And here I may set down another thought which 
 soon came to me in this quest : the unity of all four, 
 both the doers and their deeds. It was really but 
 one great book written in four parts at different 
 periods of the World's History. Hence I began to 
 feel, though at first in a dim twilight, that I must 
 put together, organize, and associate all four into 
 a new fifth book or work by their deepest spiritual 
 principle of unification. This principle quite un- 
 conscious in the poets themselves, who sprang up in 
 time and place separately in separative Europe, 
 was to become consciously expressed in accord with 
 this our new age and country, and particularly with 
 our new American institutional order. Thus our 
 country, realizing its deepest spirit, was to union- 
 ize even Europe's very diversely timed, placed, and 
 minded Literary Bibles. Still further, these four 
 Great Men might be joined together in the con- 
 ception of one vast personality, the race-man as 
 universal poet uttering himself through the ages 
 in these four books of the World's One Literary 
 Bible. Or, to vary the phrase in this struggle for 
 expression, the World-Spirit voices through these* 
 four poetic representatives one original basic Mind 
 with its speech, though this be divided into four 
 separate dialects. 
 
 Thus I would fain think that a spiritual neces- 
 sity of the time and locality, as well of myself, kept 
 urging me to re-interpret, and therein to overmake
 
 434 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 all these scattered greatest greatnesses of the ages 
 into a new unified work which preserved their full 
 distinctive individuality, yet associated them as 
 one completely rounded literary entirety. In this 
 matter I may give a brief account of my own evo- 
 lution. 
 
 I. Already as an undergraduate at College I had 
 vaguely gotten the conception of these four great- 
 est poems, though without any reason for their 
 special pre-eminence. Still even then and there I 
 could hardly help hearing the consensus of the best 
 concerning what is best in Literature, though con- 
 fusedly commingled with many desultory, and also 
 dissenting voices. I learned Homer and his dialect 
 by routine in my Freshman year, but I also com- 
 muned very sympathetically with his spirit, which 
 awakened in me an antique life, and it would seem, 
 a germinal world for my future. I never dared let 
 him vanish afterwards. Into Dante I likewise 
 dipped, as well as into Shakespeare and Goethe. 
 Very nebulous then to me were these huge giants 
 of the past, somewhat like the Old Norse Gods of 
 Niflheim ; still I started to brood over their super- 
 manlike significance. 
 
 The second stage of my appreciation of the Liter- 
 ary Bibles arose with emphasis when I began to 
 associate with the philosophic set in St. Louis. Our 
 leaders were warm defenders and interrogators of 
 Great Books, especially since they had one of their 
 own, that unique Book of Hegel's Philosophy, as 
 their final Oracle. When it came to Literature,
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 435 
 
 Harris found his most congenial utterance in Dante, 
 upon whom he was destined to lecture and to write 
 a good deal, while Brockmeyer scouted Dante to 
 downright abuse, but proclaimed Goethe's Faust 
 as the greatest of all the world-poems. Each had 
 likewise his secondary preference among the four 
 which were frequently cited in our company and 
 discussed. I think I may say that I was the first 
 of our people who definitely put all four together 
 on equal terms, and called them the "World's Liter- 
 ary Bibles. Still I do not claim universal priority 
 for the act or the title ; the Literary Tribunal of the 
 Ages had already made the selection, though the 
 ultimate ground for such selection remained to be 
 adequately unfolded. 
 
 During my Classical Journey, I experienced the 
 third phase of my training in the Literary Bibles. 
 I would not only read each of them in the original 
 tongue, but I longed to speak and to hear that 
 tongue as it still flowed spontaneously from the 
 hearts of the people. So I never stopped till I 
 talked Italian in Dante's Florence, and till I spoke 
 Greek in Homer's Hellas. Great was the satisfac- 
 tion of listening to the very accent of a Literary 
 Bible, and of replying to it in the native words of 
 the master. Shakespeare 's English was my mother 
 tongue, and Goethe's German had become mine at 
 St. Louis by adoption. Thus I sought to recover 
 partially at least the original heart-beat of the sing- 
 ing poet, as he voiced his pristine measures of song. 
 "Without such preparation I could hardly have en-
 
 436 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 tered into that first communion with these remote 
 spirits, which was requisite for my creative as- 
 similation of their works. 
 
 The fourth stage I may call that which I have 
 already recounted as having begun with my expo- 
 sitions of the Literary Bibles at St. Louis and at 
 Concord, after my return from abroad. That is, 
 I was now to put in order and to impart what I 
 had won through long studious endeavor and 
 through a continuous evolution of myself in this 
 special sphere. The impression would not quit me 
 that I must now reconstruct these books, yea re- 
 write them in a certain sense, if I was to receive 
 from them their best value, which meant also a re- 
 construction of myself at the same time. So these 
 Classes became a new education for me, or at least 
 a new epochal training in my whole life's educa- 
 tion. I was learning as much as my pupils ; indeed 
 I rather thought that I was my own best pupil. 
 
 II. Naturally I sought help in the works of other 
 expositors, which were strown in abundance all the 
 way down the ages. Material assistance in the line 
 of historical, philological and metrical explanations 
 was of basic importance ; but the so-called literary 
 criticism gave me little satisfaction, since it hardly 
 touched upon what I most wanted. Beautiful meta- 
 phors, striking passages, telling descriptions of 
 character and sundry other externals must indeed 
 be duly noted and enjoyed; but the Literary Bible 
 was to be seen and interpreted as a great spiritual 
 document in the progress of humanity, and likewise
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 437 
 
 of the individual. It was not simply exquisite 
 verse-making, though it should be that too and at 
 the topmost ; but the Literary Bible also had ulti- 
 mately to approve itself priestly, mediatorial, cap- 
 able of revealing man's universal religion to the 
 open-hearted reader. 
 
 Hence the question with me rose in regard to 
 these greatest poets, how can I pierce to the center 
 of their mystery of enduring greatness, commune 
 with that and appropriate it, yea reproduce it in 
 my own soul somehow, and re-utter it in my own 
 form ? That might be, for me, a new document in 
 quest of immortality. I would penetrate to the 
 very workshop of their genius, see it at its creative 
 task and then re-word in my own dialect what I 
 saw. Such was my function if I was ever to com- 
 pose a distinctive commentary upon these grand 
 poetic structures, which was to show them re-built 
 and overwrought into my own time, and its way 
 of thinking. They were not to be left merely with 
 some running glosses on the text, linguistic and 
 critical, but the text itself was to be rewritten and 
 attuned to a new style, perchance not altogether 
 poetic in the old sense. The Literary Bibles give 
 you their best when they impart to you their very 
 creative power to re-create in and through your own 
 soul-form their act of genesis. Everything else in 
 the way of translation, comment, or exegesis is ex- 
 ternal and insufficient compared to this ultimate 
 genetic energy of creation's own writ. The very 
 thought of such an attempt seems perhaps the
 
 438 TEE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT—PART SECOND. 
 
 height of egotistical audacity, but the St. Louis 
 Movement with its anti-traditional spirit could not 
 stop to dally with modesty. 
 
 III. It may be here recorded that I never felt 
 the least desire to translate into our vernacular any 
 of these foreign-tongued grandeurs of human ut- 
 terance. All of them indeed I would learn to un- 
 derstand and to assimilate in their immediate na- 
 tive rapture of expression, as jetted up by their 
 own tongue's first gush, but to make them talk 
 English word for word was not my call. Of course 
 I employed translations in my various activities, 
 but I wished to reconstruct, not simply to repeat 
 the poet with a verbal difference. To be sure, I 
 would seek to know his work in itself as a whole ; 
 but this was not the finality of it, for it too must 
 be seen at last as a part of the greater whole, which 
 compels it to be surveyed and constituted afresh in 
 the light of a new literary conception. 
 
 I dared think that this was our American, or if 
 you will, our democratic way of approach to these 
 Literary Bibles, which are all of Europe, being 
 sprung of the European mind, and manifesting its 
 supreme spiritual nodes for more than twenty-five 
 centuries. These far-separated four world-books 
 we must unify in response to our own deepest in- 
 stitutional consciousness; that is, we must federal- 
 ize them out of their European disunion. This will 
 require, to keep up the analogy, a new constitution 
 of the separate poems, a new unitary ordering of 
 them under their higher law, which will not swal-
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 439 
 
 low up their individuality, but will preserve it all 
 the better through our larger poetic association. 
 From this angle of vision such a work may be 
 called the American Federal Union of the Literary 
 Bibles. 
 
 In another aspect we may regard a production 
 of the sort as having in practice a democratic pur- 
 pose or tendency. "We cannot absorb the vast com- 
 plex Literatures transmitted to us from the Past, 
 yet we, as their heirs, must somehow get to know 
 their scope, their essence, and to appropriate their 
 highest worth. It is impossible for us in our busy 
 age to read so many books ; they must be epitomized 
 to their most concentrated values. The tribunal 
 of the centuries has .made and seals with its ap- 
 proval the selection of the Literary Bibles, which 
 thus become text-books in the High School of Civili- 
 zation. 
 
 We might speculate over this selection and its 
 mystery ; I did not make it, nor any nameable per- 
 son of any time, nor did any age make it, however 
 golden. Still we all have heard the decision with 
 more or less distinctness ; I have already told how I 
 learned about it as a boy at College, though very 
 faintly. The first news concerning it came to me 
 hardly more definite than this: a little row of 
 books stand there on the shelf before me, which 
 books the best judges of the best ages decide to be 
 the best in all the world. Out of the vast written 
 chaos of the past a sifting has been secretly made 
 by the most capable just for our behoof. Such is
 
 440 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 our first great help, quite providential; for we of 
 ourselves feel utterly impotent to make any Her- 
 culean choice of the kind. But the next help is that 
 we help ourselves to this noblest gift of time, and 
 make it our own ; for at this point Providence turns 
 the job over to us, insisting upon our free yet thor- 
 ough co-operation. 
 
 IV. A good deal of objection from time to time 
 was raised against my use of the word Bible in this 
 connection, even when limited by the adjective 
 Literary. Not a few religious people, and espe- 
 cially zealous ministers would protest that there 
 was but the one all-sufficient Bible, the one com- 
 prising the Old and New Testaments. I carefully 
 distinguished the Religious Bibles of the Orient 
 from the Secular Bibles of Europe, setting forth 
 their differences but insisting also upon their deeper 
 common spirit and function. My call, however, 
 was to devote myself to the latter, especially as the 
 former had a numerous and consecrated priest- 
 hood, while I in my peculiar labor, as far as I knew, 
 stood quite alone. I never overcame this sectarian 
 prejudice, as I may call it, although I gratefully 
 acknowledge that my warmest and most numerous 
 supporters belonged to the liberal orthodox type. 
 I never made much headway among the strait-laced 
 believers in the letter of Scripture, and still less 
 among the so-called Free Religionists — the two ex- 
 tremes of faith and unfaith in our time, the one 
 of too much tradition, and the other of too much 
 negation. Neither of these opposites could ever
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 441 
 
 realize any great good out of my evangel according 
 to the Literary Bibles. 
 
 Now these Supreme Books became to me, when 
 sounded to their depths, a new revelation of im- 
 mortality, this deepest and most abiding aspiration 
 of the human soul, yet the hardest to make actual 
 not only in life but also in expression. What is 
 eternal in the written word I sought to find, if pos- 
 sible, as the ultimate realization of what lay most 
 profound and compelling and eternal within me. 
 Then I must re-create it, re-write it, and impart it 
 by speech and print, up to the outreach of my very 
 finite power. To popularize means usually to super- 
 ficialize ; but these Greatest Books I dared not shal- 
 low out into merely ephemeral magazinism ; rather 
 would I try to deepen their popularity to their last 
 profundity, wherein lies their crowning, truly re- 
 demptive excellence. 
 
 V. Still it must be confessed that also these Liter- 
 ary Bibles were finally traditional, handed down to 
 us from the outside, being utterances, in form at 
 least, of the European mind, not directly of ours. 
 This, I now feel, was what kept driving me secretly 
 for many years to make them over into a new ex- 
 pression, to transform all four into another book 
 which I have daringly called the fifth in a previous 
 sentence, though it can make no claim to be actually 
 a Literary Bible. Rather is it a new interpretation 
 of the old oracles, than an oracle itself. Still the 
 mark of Europe's prescription is upon them and 
 cannot be, indeed ought not to be, obliterated.
 
 442 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 In this respect these products of mine bear the 
 stamp of the St. Louis Movement, which winds 
 through them all, and which, in its origin, as al- 
 ready set forth, puts an anti-traditional impress 
 upon very tradition, especially in philosophy and 
 in literature. Nevertheless there is felt in them the 
 hidden push for something beyond, for a harmony 
 still unattained. The conscious intended scope of 
 them remains externally philosophical, showing 
 many traces of Hegel, but shot through everywhere 
 with upbursts from a deeper depth, which I now 
 recognize to be psychological. A new discipline, 
 unborn as yet but mentally begotten and stealthily 
 waxing in strength, would send many a throbbing 
 sign of itself to the surface in my most significant 
 writing. And my pupils, especially the later ones, 
 have often made the same observation. Only the 
 other day a penetrating student said to me : "Your 
 Shakespeare has underneath it everywhere your 
 Psychology." My answer followed: "When I 
 wrote that work, I was not conscious of any such 
 underlying substrate pushing up for expression ; I 
 had not yet evolved into Psychology. ' ' Then came 
 the reply : ' ' Yes, I know that ; still it is there all 
 the same, and to watch its first bubbles is one of 
 my chief interests in the perusal of your earlier 
 books." 
 
 So I may be permitted to say here in advance, 
 for the sake of the presaged interlinking future, 
 that within all my volumes (nine of them) on Uni- 
 versal Literature, is fermenting, evolving, erupting
 
 THE LITERARY BIBLES. 443 
 
 spasmodically toward light the deeper Universal 
 Psychology which got definitely born into conscious 
 thought and expression during the last half of the 
 nineties, and which lies ahead of us still some ten 
 gravid years and more. So let my circumspect 
 reader fail not to take this peep forward from his 
 own Lookout Mountain. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Wanderer 
 
 Thus I designate myself distinctively in my out- 
 ward activity during this Epoch : I was seized with 
 that ever-pushing passion called in old Saxon-Eng- 
 lish Wanderlust (word still found in to-day's Teu- 
 tonic) , the irresistible desire to travel, to get out of 
 one spot into another and then away again, to turn 
 up continually fresh experiences in time, place and 
 personality. Such an appetite is usually an asset 
 of the young fellow, before he settles down in life ; 
 he has his years of wandering outer and inner, in 
 which he thirsts after the globe's variety, without 
 much feeling for its unity. But I was crossing the 
 bar into middle-age when this peculiar unrest 
 seized me and whipped me around the country, to 
 my own great satisfaction. Moreover I was free 
 to float about, having cast off my local trammels 
 and refusing to bond myself to any new obligation, 
 which might interfere with my blissful errantry. 
 Prom this point of view it was my time of down- 
 right vagabondage, of literary hoboism, though I
 
 444 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 always paid my scot on the railroad and at the 
 tavern, as well as my printer 's bills for books. 
 
 Still, on the other hand I may be permitted to 
 give myself a better name during this Epoch, call- 
 ing it the period of my long devoted apostolate, in 
 which I dedicated myself to the dissemination of 
 the gospel according to the Literary Bibles. This 
 was the eternal element in all my otherwise fleeting 
 and floating apparitions, hither and thither; I had 
 my evangel to impart and to set down in writ, 
 whereby I was always held anchored. Moreover I 
 clung to my local center in the main, though with 
 many considerable explorations, always sailing out 
 from and porting back to Chicago. 
 
 But my territory had its limits. Mason and 
 Dixon's old line was drawn against me with deci- 
 sion, though St. Louis originated the Movement, 
 and though several times I gave courses at Wash- 
 ington and once at Baltimore. But these are 
 not distinctively Southern cities. From Missouri, 
 outside the St. Louis district, I do not recollect of 
 ever having heard even a pious wish for any of my 
 peculiar biblical lore. To be sure, the city and the 
 state are on bad terms; they both have to live in 
 one limited household, like husband and wife, 
 though perpetually fussing ; they keep abusing each 
 other with good reason, yet are undivorcible, each 
 blaming the other especially for its fatal slowness 
 in the world's grand march westward, and for the 
 lost opportunity of greatness, even for the Great 
 Illusion — the most unhappy civic pair in the land
 
 THE WANDERER. 445 
 
 unless it be that overfat, ever-brabbling couple 
 world-defamed as New York city and New York 
 state. But quite everywhere, town and country are 
 the two huge millstones which are bound to crunch 
 and grind together on each other, the painful grist 
 being civilization itself. 
 
 The Pacific coast I never reached though I had 
 a single chance, rather uncertain. The Atlantic 
 seaboard I tried at several well-peopled spots, but 
 I was soon made aware of what I specially lacked, 
 namely coloniality. Two or three winters I passed 
 in New York city, then and now the center of ex- 
 ploited literature with its three great temptations, 
 money, fame, influence. I saw some literary people 
 in their workshops, best known of whom were the 
 poets Stedman and Stoddard. Very kind and agree- 
 able personally to me were both, but their vocation 
 of letters with its subservience to magazinism and 
 newspaperism drove me to a silent oath of Never- 
 more. New York at that time was the hotbed of 
 American book-publishers and is yet ; still I dared 
 print a work of mine, Agamemnon's Daughter 
 (first edition), whose manuscript I had brought 
 with me, having hired my own little printer not 
 two blocks from Franklin Square. He did his job 
 very badly, and I think dishonestly, all of which 
 may be deemed the penalty for such a deed of local 
 desecration on the part of the sacrilegious West- 
 erner. I never submitted my manuscript to any 
 publisher ; I did not believe, in the first place, that 
 it would be accepted ; but, in the second place, I
 
 446 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 knew that I could get rid of a small edition by my 
 own effort, while I was quite uncertain whether a 
 publisher, after being paid for his service, could 
 do as much if he would, or would do as much if he 
 could. This last alternative hints a dark suspicion 
 which I have heard repeatedly from authors, in one 
 instance from a distinguished and successful au- 
 thor ; but of course I have had no experience of the 
 kind myself, as I never took the chance of having it. 
 But what I do know from some little experience of 
 another kind is that authors as a class are prone to 
 be suspicious of publishers and public, and also 
 they fail not to be jealous of one another. 
 
 Through the kind influence of Stedman I re- 
 ceived a card of free entrance to the famous Cen- 
 tury Club, where I caught a glimpse of many dis- 
 tinguished New Yorkers belonging chiefly to the 
 learned professions. My introduction was mainly 
 to the literary men of the Club, whose works I had 
 never read, often never heard of ; this ignorance of 
 mine caused me embarrassment from the start, for 
 I did not know enough about them even to tell a 
 lie, and I soon observed that they expected some 
 kind of recognition, if not flattery. As for me, I 
 found the easiest way to get along was to conceal 
 my own authorship, which of course was a very 
 easy matter ; in fact, it was already concealed, with- 
 out further effort of mine. So I tried to watch and 
 to learn from my hidden nook; out of my experi- 
 ence I drew the conclusion again that I was an un- 
 fit subject for such a life, in other words that mine
 
 THE WANDERER. 447 
 
 was a wholly tmclubbable individuality, even if it 
 needing clubbing badly. Some time later through 
 the friendly urgency of Librarian Poole, I became 
 a member of the Chicago Literary Club, but after 
 a year's trial I passed the same judgment once 
 more and for a finality upon myself, and withdrew 
 from it on quitting Chicago for another city. When 
 reading Walt Whitman, I always felt that I had 
 not the gift of comradery which he so effusively 
 celebrates, and hence I never could be the loving 
 disciple of his much-lauded message. 
 
 So it came about that the main field of my new 
 gospelling itinerancy lay in the states of the old 
 North-Western Territory long ago dedicated to 
 freedom by Thomas Jefferson in the ordinance of 
 1787 (though this historic point we now hear con- 
 tested) . Of course all these broad acres I was very 
 far from covering. In my native state, Ohio, I ap- 
 peared, according to present recollection, but thrice, 
 in the cities of Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati re- 
 spectively. But I never reached Oberlin, my Alma 
 Mater, with my evangel of the Literary Bibles, for 
 a good reason, I think, since these belonged not to 
 her accepted biblical canon. But the wanderer has 
 now wandered enough even for this wandering 
 Epoch of his; so let him just say once more that 
 Indiana and Illinois persisted in offering to him 
 year after year his main seed-fields, which he, like 
 his exemplar, Johnny Appleseed, often re-visited 
 for the purpose of reaping a small harvest as well 
 as putting in a new crop, never very large.
 
 448 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 From this outer spatial wandering with its many 
 diverse occurrences during the present Epoch, let 
 us next turn to the center, to the wanderer in per- 
 son, who is again trying to express himself in liter- 
 ary form. That is, I, during this whole errantry, 
 kept taking pictures of myself as I moved about 
 from place to place, carrying-on my varied labors. 
 For I had to express myself not only in the thing 
 done, but also in the doing of it, as the doer; in 
 other words, while I wrought at and propagated 
 the Literary Bibles, I uttered myself as worker and 
 propagator in the self's own form of activity, em- 
 ploying my special vehicle of utterance. Accord- 
 ingly in this field, more or less self-revealing, I 
 wrote a little literature of my own, embracing three 
 books which I shall now join together into a com- 
 mon idea, with its label indicating my wanderlust 
 as it expresses itself in the Mythus of Johnny Ap- 
 pleseed. 
 
 These three books, which I thus place under one 
 general head bear the titles (1) Johnny Apple- 
 seed's Rhymes, (2) The Freehurgers, a novel, (3) 
 World's Fair Studies. The underlying character 
 of the present Epoch belongs to them all, though 
 in different ways. Each has its own special sub- 
 ject, as well as method of procedure, yet they all 
 in one way or other pivot on the wanderer, the mis- 
 sionary, who is also the self-expresser. 
 
 The name of the first book, Johnny Appleseed's 
 Rhymes, indicates on the surface perhaps some con- 
 venient reservoir into which a mass of versicles
 
 THE WANDERER. 449 
 
 have been indiscriminately plumped, with little if 
 any connection. But at the start I would em- 
 phasize its inner order and evolution, though these 
 may have to be sharply looked after. For it takes, 
 I would believe, its art-form ultimately from the 
 Epoch which it mythically celebrates — rambling ex- 
 ternally, anchored internally. My name does not 
 appear on thle title-page; the subject-matter is 
 conceived as a considerable miscellany of prose 
 and verse, "edited by Theophilus Middling," who 
 also seems to cite certain commentators. But the 
 chief portion centers in the fabled rhymes of 
 Johnny Appleseed, as he strolled over the North- 
 West, scattering his fruit-bearers of the future. 
 
 As to its origin, I can truly say that the book 
 grew and kept growing for at least ten years, with- 
 out any conscious purpose of ever becoming a 
 book. The first fact which I now can recollect is 
 that little jets of rhymed versicles started to gush 
 up about the time I was quitting St. Louis (1874- 
 5) ; then the fountain would stop playing for a 
 season, and I would think that it had dried out 
 forever, when of a sudden it would begin again, 
 spirting its little rhyme-drops as merrily as before. 
 It seemed to be the successor of my Epigram- 
 matic Voyage, during which the world of the old 
 Greek Anthology took life and shape in my mind 
 and heart, insisting upon a fresh expression, at 
 least for myself. But in her present love of 
 Johnny Appleseed, the Muse persistently refused 
 to breathe a single hexameter, which measure kept
 
 450 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 caroling her sole music during the Greek Journey. 
 She seemed to have fled from Parnassus, and to 
 have migrated with me to the Mississippi Valley, 
 which the new theme and the new world attuned 
 with the new rhythmical cadence. 
 
 At last this intermittent fountain of versicles 
 and ballads stayed intermitted, having apparently 
 exhausted itself toward the- close of the Epoch. 
 Accordingly, in 1894 I printed the book as it now 
 stands, and thus got free of its spell which has 
 never plagued me since. I may add here that after 
 a hundred or so of these wee musical atomies had 
 throbbed to the light in mutually recalcitrant sep- 
 aration, they began to get social, and to arrange 
 themselves in groups after some common principle 
 or rubric. For, as so many little isolated individ- 
 ualities, they appeared rather hapless and hope- 
 less. Then, during the last year or two before they 
 were born into the aforesaid print, an enevloping 
 world of prose started to wreathe itself around 
 them, and took them into its bosom. That new 
 setting really brought to light their hitherto con- 
 cealed background, out of which they had sprung. 
 Hence it became a kind of running commentary, 
 which in its turn strangely ran into the form of a 
 story ending in a little love-romance. Thus the 
 whole work grew to be a labyrinthine commingling 
 of a number of literary forms, making a composite 
 defiant of all artistic tradition. Is it a horrible 
 monstrosity or a newly ordered organism of writ? 
 I printed it myself, and did not even send review
 
 THE WANDERER. 451 
 
 copies to the newspapers or magazines, so that any 
 judgment of the professional critic I have never 
 met with, though I think I could predict it with a 
 little effort. 
 
 So much for the external semblance of the book. 
 The content is the whole St. Louis Movement my- 
 thologized, with its leading personages and its es- 
 sential development and also its philosophy of life 
 cast into the frame-work of a story. The ideas of 
 our St. Louis time are strewn through the text, 
 both the rhymed and the unrhymed; but they are 
 made to portray the different characters who voice 
 them in a responsive interplay. Thus a little epic, 
 or drama, or even novel the work may be regarded, 
 though these traditional terms hardly fit the re- 
 fractory stuff. 
 
 Of course it is specially an eject of my own ex- 
 perience present and past. In fact through it ev- 
 erywhere courses a disguised autobiography of 
 the writer during this Epoch, for he has to be all 
 of these colliding characters and himself too. 
 Somewhere about four hundred verses are here 
 caught and worded, as they bubbled up out of the 
 life-stream from its various inner agitations; then 
 all are built into a structure which seeks to reveal 
 the order in this wayward spontaneity, uniting its 
 scattered fragments of chaos into its cosmos. 
 What he says of Homer, Appleseed might dare 
 think of himself: 
 
 Old Homer shows a young face to the boy 
 
 And gives him in love a beautiful toy;
 
 452 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 But to the full-grown man 
 
 He reveals God's plan. 
 
 The next book on the list, The Freeburgers, 
 has quite a different beginning and ending, as 
 well as a change of manner and matter. Still 
 it keeps the central story of Johnny Appleseed, the 
 wandering minstrel and planter, as its determin- 
 ing factor, but he now appears, speaking, acting, 
 perambulating in his own person, which he did not 
 in the previous book. There he was the silent center, 
 of whom much is said and sung ; but here he is en- 
 dowed with his own voice, talking and versifying in 
 his own right. He is no longer past but present, 
 with his career largely behind him indeed, yet with 
 somewhat of life still before him. 
 
 On the other hand, the scene, the action proper 
 is not cotemporary, but goes back to the time of 
 the Civil War, of which it proposes to picture the 
 beginning, middle, and end. Thus I reached rear- 
 ward in reminiscence thirty years and more to my 
 youth, and set forth my experiences personal, do- 
 mestic, communal, and national, during that su- 
 preme crisis of our country's history. I had lived 
 through it all and taken part in it with thought, 
 feeling, and action; so I would now recall and ex- 
 press it after a generation, before the epochal oc- 
 currence might wane from memory. The time of it 
 lay before my St. Louis period, through which I 
 had passed on my way toward a completer expres- 
 sion of my life and of my environing world. 
 
 Thus I conceived what may be called a national
 
 TEE WANDERER. 453 
 
 Novel, for everywhere through it and around it was 
 to weave the political trend of the country, which 
 turned at last upon the question of Union or Dis- 
 union. The medium through which the great con- 
 flict was portrayed and reflected, was the small com- 
 munity called Freeburg, a typical village of the 
 North-West, very familiar to me during boyhood. 
 For the American village was then and still is, in 
 my opinion, more nearly our institutional unit, 
 than any other communal form. It is the little liv- 
 ing cell which ultimately constitutes the unitary 
 principle of the huge social organism and its dif- 
 ferent members. So this village unit is rightly the 
 miniature mirror which images and indeed vivifies 
 the time's great and varied institutions. 
 
 The novel was thus planned to round itself out in 
 three large sweeps or parts, to each of which was 
 assigned a volume. 
 
 I. The Freeburgers, or Before the War. 
 
 II. Freeburg, or During the War. 
 
 III. New Freeburg, or After the War, wherein 
 was embraced the Nation's reconstruction with its 
 many ups and downs. Abraham Lincoln was to ap- 
 pear, specially in the middle volume. The village 
 had its own characters and life, but into its destiny 
 were woven two wanderers from the outside, the 
 old singer Appleseed and the philosophic pedes- 
 trian, both properly missionaries of the St. Louis 
 Movement, in its two leading phases. 
 
 Thus I, too, with many another ambitious author, 
 meditated the great American Novel on our loftiest
 
 454 THE ST. LOUTS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 national theme. But somehow it refused to get it- 
 self done. Only the first part, The Freeburgers, 
 could be pushed, with some self-lashing, to comple- 
 tion, though I made copious notes on the other two 
 parts, which still lie about in fragments, unrealized 
 and unrealizable. Finally in 1889 I printed this first 
 part, and so disentangled myself forever from a 
 task which I saw to be unfinishable. 
 
 iWhy did I break down? I was in the habit of 
 reading some novels, but not many; a hearty, per- 
 sistent novel-reader like my friend Judge Woerner 
 I never was, and could not be. He said of this book 
 of mine : ' ' Too much of your philosophy in it, too 
 little incident ; you have cheated me of my pleasure 
 and set me at hard work against my will — anathe- 
 ma.*' He found, however, the same fault with 
 Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, whereupon I replied, 
 with a sighful exclamation : ' ' O that my book may 
 be able to raise itself into the high company where 
 you have put it!" Time has shown, I think, that 
 the Novel was not the right literary form for my 
 conception, since afterwards my experience of the 
 Civil "War and of Lincoln wrought for itself a very 
 different garb which got itself finally done to the last 
 stitch. Moreover I was not yet ready for the task; 
 I was not old enough even at forty-seven ; I had to 
 have the discipline of another and new Epoch when 
 the same conception, after more than two decades 
 of additional brooding and incubation, will hatch 
 itself out to light and maturity. 
 
 Still the Novel remained one of my forms of
 
 THE WANDERER. 455 
 
 self-expression, and in its own good time on due 
 provocation it will break out afresh and find utter- 
 ance. But it could never dominate me autocrati- 
 cally, though its personal rewards dance seductively 
 the greatest temptation of modern literature before 
 the easily bedazzled fancy of the writing-guild. 
 
 The third book above listed under the name of 
 World's Fair Studies, appears on the outside a sol- 
 itary bird of passage among my writings. Nothing 
 of mine hitherto or hereafter ever became quite like 
 it in matter or in treatment ; still it belonged to the 
 present Epoch. For I remained in it the wanderer, 
 though my field swept no longer over the broad 
 North-West, but shrank to the small, sharply de- 
 fined area of the Chicago World's Fair. Moreover, 
 not only the space but also the time was very lim- 
 ited; this Universal Exposition was doomed to last 
 only six months, from May till November, 1893, 
 though I added several months before and after. 
 Still within these local and temporal bounds I kept 
 up very actively and intensively the part of 
 Johnny Appleseed, tramping from spot to spot, 
 gathering materials, imparting what I had gotten 
 and put into shape, and finally printing my results 
 in a book. 
 
 The Chicago World's Fair fell across my path 
 at an opportune moment ; I was ready for it 
 internally and externally. I looked upon it as the 
 advent of a new Secular Bible, belonging to the 
 grand disciplinary course of the University of Civ- 
 ilization, in which I deemed myself not only a per-
 
 456 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 petual student, but likewise a self-appointed ped- 
 agogue, hence not dismissible by any Board or other 
 wooden thing except myself. I marveled at the 
 phenomenon for a while, but I soon came to under- 
 stand that here was opened to me another Great 
 Book of the Ages, which I had to assimilate, and 
 organize, and express for myself and for others 
 like-minded. It seemed flung down before me by 
 the genius presiding over my life's evolution, or if 
 you will, by providential interposition at a turn of 
 human destiny, with a secret but shunless behest 
 to seize the unique opportunity. 
 
 Accordingly I went to work almost with violence, 
 visiting the presence of the Fair daily, communing 
 with its Spirit, for it had a distinctive Spirit of its 
 own in its huge organism, of which each part was 
 a vital member. Undoubtedly this communion taxed 
 me to the uttermost, so that I could hold out only 
 a few hours at a time, after which I drooped in 
 weariness and my soul became gripless. Whereupon 
 I would hurry back to my quiet room for rest and 
 sleep and recuperation, and then I would again the 
 next morning start forth to a fresh wrestle with 
 that Spirit, gigantic and also elusive, till I was 
 whelmed down once more into my petty finite self 
 of brain-fag and human limitation generally. So 
 the sun kept rising and setting above and around 
 me, granting several varying hours of daily inter- 
 course with the Spirit of the Fair, which I sought 
 to trace through all its visible component parts, 
 great and small. To me it became a grand incarna-
 
 THE WANDERER. 457 
 
 tion of the Earth-Soul, both civilized and unciv- 
 ilized, for savage life was there too in the Midway. 
 
 It so happened at this turn of time that my long 
 work, already lasting more than a dozen years, on 
 the Literary Bibles, was practically finished, only 
 one of the nine volumes (The Odyssey) remained 
 to be printed, though that too was written. At such 
 a conjuncture the pages of this new World-Book 
 were spread out under my very eyes, pages not of 
 print but of actual, visible, new-created things of 
 a new-created world, whose meaning, however, I 
 felt myself irresistibly impelled to study, to inter- 
 pret, and to give out again in my own form. Hence 
 I had classes in the World's Fair, quite as in a 
 Literary Bible, and conducted them in view of the 
 object itself. How many pupils of that sort? For a 
 guess I may set down a hundred persons, usually 
 in very small groups, whom I personally led once 
 or oftener into the presence of the Great Spirit of 
 the Fair, to attend a service in his majestic temple 
 along the lakeside. 
 
 Little pamphlets of these excursions were printed 
 at the time and met with a small demand, chiefly 
 from my own pupils. A year and more after the 
 Fair (in 1895) I edited and put together my stud- 
 ies and printed them in the mentioned book ; these, 
 however, contained but a small portion of my fugi- 
 tive notes, which I could not take the time to or- 
 ganize and to ensoul, so I consecrated them to a 
 waste-paper grave. A good deal of collateral read- 
 ing was also required ; I needed for my globe-round
 
 458 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 quest a whole Encyclopedia Brittanica, which I 
 bought and tried to devour. Several times I had to 
 stop for two or three days in order to regain my 
 mind's lost edge, which only the lazy turn of lei- 
 sure's drooling grindstone would again sharpen. 
 Once I thought best, about the middle of the Fair, 
 to run away from roaring tumultuous Chicago to 
 St. Louis, placid and somniferous, that I get back 
 my nerves and recover my power of oblivion. Un- 
 expectedly I found Brockmeyer at home, having re- 
 turned from his long exile, and burnishing up his 
 old philosophic ambitions with a new zeal, especially 
 his fateful translation of Hegel's Logic. I begged 
 him: "Come with me to Chicago and see the great- 
 est phenomenon on this globe just now, and help me 
 construe it — Come at once, for it will soon vanish, 
 while that Eternal Logic will keep eternal, being just 
 the Eternal in itself." But alas! I could not drag 
 him out of his own antiquity ; so with much regret I 
 had to leave him behind again, when I had regrown 
 my mental grasp. Accordingly I went back to my 
 grand opportunity, for I felt that I still had much 
 to master of that new World-Book which might 
 audaciously be titled the Collected Works of Ci v - 
 ilized Man, bound in one big volume, and now on 
 exhibition at Chicago. 
 
 But look ! In a few months that mighty apparition 
 of the earth 's grandeur had vanished, utterly tran- 
 sitory in outer material semblance, like a magic city 
 of dreamland. But its Idea abides and will abide, 
 being eternally creative, for I find it still at work
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 459 
 
 more than ever, producing new structures of itself 
 not only here in its original home but in places far 
 remote from Chicago. So I yet take my delight over 
 that colossal manifestation of the Eternal in the 
 very heart of the Ephemeral, and just through the 
 Ephemeral. 
 
 After the "World's Fair my old wanderlust did 
 not cease at once, though it gave many a sign of 
 being on the wane. The three foregoing phases of 
 the wanderer in his personal activity and develop- 
 ment had reached their printed self-expression in 
 books, and with this result the Epoch had begun to 
 face toward its finality. The apostolate of the 
 Literary Bibles had not yet ended, though it too 
 had rounded its meridian, and was verging toward 
 sunset. As this biblical topic is the central, all- 
 pervasive one of these years, it may be allowed to 
 make a new shift in its panorama, as it unrolls the 
 varied picture-gallery of our St. Louis Movement. 
 
 Goethe and Dante 
 
 These two Literary Bibles we would now pair 
 together more closely, employing the names of the 
 authors whose greatest books are known respective- 
 ly as Faust and The Divine Comedy. For it is our 
 experience that they stand in a more immediate 
 relation to the St. Louis Movement, and produced 
 a more direct and intensive influence upon it than
 
 460 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 the other pair, Homer and Shakespeare, the Greek 
 and the English Literary Bibles, of which we have 
 hitherto given some account. This rather unex- 
 pected fact is worthy of a brief consideration. 
 
 First we may set down that these two authors 
 with their Great Books are born of and represent 
 the grand dualism of the Teutonic and the Ro- 
 manic, which we have already noted as lying in 
 the background, and moving with the evolution, of 
 St. Louis herself. Her origin and early history 
 belong to France and Spain, Romanic peoples, 
 which were later overborne and largely submerged 
 by Teutonic peoples, first the Anglo-Saxon, and 
 then the German. When I in 1864 touched the 
 soil of this city and began to look about me, I felt 
 and saw these two racial elements, and their cul- 
 tural differences shading into antagonism; Goethe, 
 the German, and Dante the Italian were already 
 here in their original European pre-suppositions of 
 race and culture, planted as it were in the civic 
 folk-soul itself. 
 
 Moreover the new and last phase of the world- 
 old conflict between Teutonia and Roma was then 
 brewing in Europe, and had soon to be fought out 
 again in the Franco-Prussian "War. An echo of 
 that conflict thrilled through St. Louis, and stirred 
 up its double nature to a corresponding internal 
 struggle, which showed itself in strong feelings and 
 words, though not in violent deeds. The time 
 tallied with that of our young St. Louis Movement, 
 which had in it somewhat of both sides, though
 
 OOETHE AND DANTE. 461 
 
 the preponderance was decidedly Teutonic. Hence 
 Goethe became for us and to a degree for the city 
 the Epoch's poetical expression, though Dante 
 failed not, and somewhat later found his devoted 
 band of apostles. Indeed, I think I know the 
 time when I saw Harris pass over from Goethe to 
 Dante, foreshowing a profound change in his spir- 
 itual evolution. 
 
 I may add here that in our philosophical group 
 the two leaders divided on these two world-poets. 
 Brockmeyer found his poetic bible in Goethe's 
 Faust, and really had none other; Harris took 
 Dante's Divine Comedy to his heart as well as to 
 his intellect, though he studied Faust and talked 
 about it and wrote upon it not a little. Once and 
 only once I heard these two protagonists in a hot 
 word-combat over their favorites. Dante in the 
 course of years became a kind of father-confessor 
 to Harris, and deeply indoctrinated him in medieval 
 theology, over which he specially wrought and 
 pondered during his leisure years at Concord. I 
 have often reveried that the basic spiritual traits 
 of these two men could be glimpsed in this choice 
 of theirs, since Faust is justly called the great 
 philosophic poem, and the Divine Comedy the 
 great religious poem of Europe. For underneath 
 all his philosophy Harris, as a right New-Eng- 
 lander, would reveal his religious Puritanic sub- 
 structure, while Brockmeyer to the last drop of 
 him was consciously the German philosopher (gen- 
 uine sample of the philosophus teutonicus), with
 
 462 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 small claim to any form of religiosity. But un- 
 conscious and unrealized lay yet deeper his poetic 
 strain. Still the two friends co-wrought harmoni- 
 ously in an apostolic zeal for Hegel's philosophy, 
 especially for that one Book of Fate, Hegel's 
 Logic. It lurked in my nature to accept both 
 Goethe and Dante, each in his own worth, and to 
 seek their final co-ordination as two Great Testa- 
 ments in the canon of the one supreme Literary 
 Scripture of Mankind. 
 
 Thus it would seem that these two aforesaid 
 poets were genetically sprung of the same ultimate 
 two folk-souls from which our one city took its 
 dual origin. Of course, far back both were Aryans 
 in their Oriental primogeniture. A remote kin- 
 ship it surely was; still Goethe and Dante, the 
 Teuton and the Latin, had each his consanguine 
 fellowship right in our midst. Moreover this bond 
 of nature was reinforced in each case by educa- 
 tion, history, and religion. Shakespeare is un- 
 doubtedly our Anglo-Saxon poet, but his univer- 
 sality quite overarches and unifies both sides, for 
 I find in him the Teutonic and also the Romanic 
 in happy marriage, as if he felt back and repro- 
 duced dualized Europe's primordial Aryan unity 
 of origin and spirit. 
 
 Another point may be here noted : the difference 
 tween these two pairs of poets in personal appeal 
 and approachability. Homer and Shakespeare are 
 notoriously hard to get acquainted with ; some life- 
 long students of them persist in preaching that
 
 THE WANDERER. 463 
 
 their spiritual lineaments can never be traced from 
 their works. That is of course a mistake. Homer 
 and Shakespeare tell their autobiography in what- 
 ever they say, and cannot shun their self-confes- 
 sion, though it be very elusive and hidden under 
 many a mask, mythic and dramatic. Indeed the 
 crown of their study is the winning of their per- 
 sonal acquaintance and intimacy. Moreover they 
 have left no outside literature to explain them- 
 selves, they live in their one great exploit of su- 
 preme biblical composition. On the other hand, 
 Goethe and Dante have told much on themselves in 
 writings apart from their two respective master- 
 pieces,; they have written not only their Literary 
 Bibles, but also in a way their own commentaries 
 on the same ; thus they are openly self-communica- 
 tive and autobiographical. Accordingly there is 
 felt a personal appeal in the first pair, a cordial in- 
 vitation as it were to a closer friendship, while the 
 second pair, Homer and Shakespeare, are far more 
 reserved in their self-revelation. Still they too re- 
 veal themselves to the persistent cultivator of their 
 personality, and if they did not, they would be a 
 zero with its empty circle. 
 
 Concerning the place of Faust in the St. Louis 
 Movement I have already given the main facts. It 
 was certainly one of our great books of discipline, 
 which we all worked over and over many times in 
 study, in conversation, and in writing. Finally its 
 lesson to me at least seemed to be learned, and I 
 dropped it for years. In 1886 I printed my own
 
 464 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 somewhat detailed commentary upon it, making 
 two considerable volumes. 
 
 But now behold in my old age a sudden renewal 
 of that long-agone Faust, caused by the once so 
 modest Fatherland's desperate world-war for au- 
 tocratic rule and riches. How often have I re- 
 called in the past four years Goethe's German 
 Literary Bible, which seems to forecast in a new 
 edition the very eidolon of its own German people ! 
 In fact the Faust Mythus was originally created 
 and through the centuries preserved by the Teu- 
 tonic folk-soul as its own right image and pro- 
 phecy. Have we not witnessed another contract, 
 now earth-embracing, of the German Faust with 
 Mephistopheles, the principle of inner negation and 
 of outer destruction? And has not that contract 
 in service of the Denier and the Destroyer been 
 signed in the blood — not simply in the blood of one 
 Faust but of millions? And the grand reward 
 offered by the diabolic Tempter — have we not read 
 it a hundred times — the wealth and the power of the 
 whole world, or its economic subjugation and its po- 
 litical enthrallment ? All of which has been told of 
 the people, by the people, to the people in that old 
 Faust Mythus wrought over and over in thousand- 
 fold forms of humble folk-tale and puppet play, up 
 to lofty drama and opera. Nor has the outcome been 
 lacking in all its sanguinary horrors ; an old Faust 
 book more than four centuries ago written in red 
 German shiveringly sums up how in the final bat- 
 tle Faust is torn to pieces by his own Devil: "his
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 465 
 
 eyes, teeth and brains with much blood spirted 
 about" were found scattered on the field of con- 
 flict while the rest of his carcass was invisibly tossed 
 on a dung heap. Such was the old barbaric legend 
 uncannily suggestive of to-day. I have often asked 
 myself: "Must not Goethe's Faust be now not 
 only re-read but re-written, in the light of this new 
 world-experience — the individual Faust being up- 
 risen to the national Faust, with his contract still 
 signed in blood only yesterday on a hundred fields 
 of battle?" 
 
 So I seem to myself to have lived through an- 
 other significant stage in the Teutonic evolution of 
 that still creative, self-reproducing Faust Mythus, 
 which again comes knocking on my brain-pan for 
 a fresh utterance. But alas! the ever-young Muse 
 now flouts her aged lover, smiling him a teaseful 
 good-bye. 
 
 Hark ! the moment has struck twice already, ad- 
 monishing me to hurry on to Dante, the other 
 Literary Bible, the Romanic or medieval Latin 
 representative, who imparted for years his stern, 
 deep discipline to the St. Louis Movement in several 
 surprising ways. Let us take to mind at the start 
 the fundamental contrast between the other-world- 
 liness of Divine Comedy and the this-worldliness of 
 Faust. Responsibility and punishment in the fu- 
 ture for the deed done here and now reveal the 
 stress of Dante's soul, since he throws the action 
 of his whole poem into that retributive day (dies 
 ilia) over the border, while Faust in the sweep of
 
 466 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 his negation obliterates the Begond and its Judg- 
 ment from his faith and life : 
 
 Das Driiben can mich wenig kiimmern. 
 
 So Dante led our St. Louis Movement down 
 through his justice-fraught Inferno up into his 
 hope-winning Mount of Purgatory, though few 
 were able completely to overarch even with his 
 guiding spirit all his celestial Paradise, especially 
 that final bloom of it in the White Rose of Heaven. 
 But the remarkable thing was the creative, or 
 rather recreative power which this study of Dante 
 inspired in our city. No other Literary Bible called 
 forth so much, or half so much written produc- 
 tivity of our own as did the present cult of the 
 Divine Comedy. This local literature shot up from 
 all directions, inside our Movement and also out- 
 side. Homer and Shakespeare begat practically 
 not a distinctive word in our St. Louis Movement, 
 if I may dare from excess of modesty to leave out 
 myself. Faiist, however, showed its reproductive 
 strength in us by some scattered essays of merit, 
 especially those of Brockmeyer and Harris. But 
 Dante provoked authorship everywhere around us 
 and from us, indicating the depth and creative 
 energy of his appeal in the human soul. I main- 
 tain that this Dantean work was not a mere in- 
 tellectual exercise or fashionable quirk, but a pro- 
 found spiritual discipline for our St. Louis Move- 
 ment. Accordingly I intend to give a brief sum-
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 467 
 
 mary of its literary productions, though I prob- 
 ably do not remember them all. 
 
 I. The first person in the city, as far as my mem- 
 ory now can reach, to form a private class for the 
 study of Dante was a woman, Miss Mary E. Beedy, 
 a teacher of the High School. As a result of these 
 lessons she wrote a considerable essay, which I once 
 heard her read to her assembled friends in the 
 earlier seventies. She went to England and took 
 the essay along; there she showed it to one of the 
 Rossettis (W. M. Rossetti, I think) who, she re- 
 ported to St. Louis, praised especially its origi- 
 nality. Never printed, as far as I can now dis- 
 cover. A second essay by a St. Louis woman, Mrs. 
 Rebecca N. Hazard, containing a new theory of the 
 Divine Comedy, was put in type, and is still cata- 
 logued under the title of A View of Dante. Pro- 
 fessor L. F. Soldan, later Superintendent of the 
 St. Louis Public Schools, wrote and lectured a good 
 deal on Dante during this peculiarly Dantean 
 renascence, but I have not been able to find any of 
 his work in print to-day, though it may exist some- 
 where. All the foregoing authors stood in some 
 lax connection with the St. Louis Movement, though 
 none of them perhaps could be listed as its special 
 followers. Quite outside of its influence doubtless 
 would be placed a course of lectures on Dante from 
 the Catholic viewpoint at the St. Louis University 
 by Mr. Pallen. The same would be said of Mr. 
 Sheldon's Dante lectures given much later before 
 the Ethical Society. The last two courses are in-
 
 468 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 teresting from the fact that they represent quite 
 the extreme poles of religion — each opposite being 
 inspired to make its own interpretation of the 
 Italian poem. In Italy a similar fact is observable : 
 the radical free-thinker and the strict churchman 
 mutually touch their tips through love of their 
 great poet, for each has claimed Dante as his own, 
 and each has commented upon him with partisan 
 unction. 
 
 The foregoing instances may be taken to indicate 
 something of a popular Dante vogue, which, in my 
 own case and seemingly in that of the public, rose 
 up to its height after the Faust wave had begun to 
 subside. But there were larger and more distin- 
 guished manifestations of this Dante cult in our 
 St. Louis Movement, of which the record has the 
 right never to be forgotten by our St. Louis Con- 
 stituency. 
 
 II. The surprising fact must now be given its 
 due stress that three of the ablest and most re- 
 nowned participants in our St. Louis Movement 
 became not only earnest propagators of Dante, but 
 devout believers, saintly in act and speech, at times 
 quite seraphic in look, when they discoursed on 
 their canonized master. His influence took the 
 nature of a religious conversion. They no longer 
 seemed to treat him as the author of one of the 
 great secular books of mankind, but his words be- 
 came a sort of sacred text, different in kind from 
 the other Literary Bibles. It was a psychological 
 phenomenon which puzzled me extremely, yea wor-
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 469 
 
 ried me, and I groped in all directions, trying to 
 account for it, inasmuch the strange spell raged 
 right in the heart of our St. Louis Movement, and 
 seized its most prominent members. The names of 
 the three persons alluded to I even now write down 
 with a sort of bewildered gasp : Doctor W. T. Har- 
 ris, Professor Thomas Davidson and Miss S. E. 
 Blow. 
 
 The three did not form a single interbound 
 group of friends co-operating for a common end; 
 Davidson personally was rather an outsider, cer- 
 tainly to Miss Blow, and partially to Harris. Still 
 they were all touched alike with this peculiar Dan- 
 tean spell and showed similar symptoms quite in- 
 dependently of one another. Remember that this 
 spell lasted several years with incipience, culmina- 
 tion, and decline. I heard these people speak a 
 number of times, first in St. Louis, and then in 
 Chicago ; my interest, both literary and psychologi- 
 cal, bade me watch closely and remember. More- 
 over they were all greater personages than I was, 
 all three may be said to have won a world-fame 
 to which of course I could lay no claim. I shall 
 try to set down several matters in which their 
 similarity may be observed, stressing their com- 
 munity of Dantean spirit, though they could be 
 violently different in other respects. 
 
 In the first place they all wrote books on Dante, 
 and put the same into printed circulation so that 
 their writings, or some of them, are still to be found 
 in libraries. The work of Harris, called The Spir-
 
 470 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 itual Sense of the Divine Comedy, stands doubtless 
 at the top of these productions, and has not yet 
 dropped into cold storage, as the trade says. There 
 have been several editions of it in somewhat dif- 
 ferent forms. Miss Blow's Book, A Study of 
 Dante (1886) shows her ability, but is tinged with 
 the peculiar re-actionary mood dominating her 
 when it was written, whereof enough has been told 
 in a former section. The Dante work of Davidson 
 was like the man, very multifarious, reaching all 
 the way from his often painfully meticulous erudi- 
 tion to lofty religious insight. I engaged him as 
 lecturer in three of our Western Dante Schools, and 
 had occasion to hear his best and also his worst, both 
 of which he never failed to serve up to us in doses, 
 little and large. Still he was unique in his field, 
 and had to be endured. His best publication on 
 Dante, in my judgment, was contained in his Dante 
 Year-Book, the Annual of the American Dante So- 
 ciety, the latter being one of his numerous ephem- 
 eral experiments. I read to-day that a good deal 
 of Davidson's Dante work is still in manuscript. 
 The three persons here mentioned struck, in my 
 opinion, a peculiar, even if vanishing note in Dante 
 Literature, which took its start from St. Louis, 
 though at first I heard Davidson make merry over 
 the Inferno "which has damned my Aristotle." 
 His decisive conversion to the poet seems to have 
 taken place during his protracted stay in Italy. 
 
 All three put far more stress upon the spiritual 
 element of Dante than upon the poetical, amd
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 471 
 
 showed distinctly the tendency to fraternize with 
 his theology and even with his church. In other 
 words all three Catholicized through the influence 
 of the great Catholic poet, each in his own way. 
 None of them, however, went entirely over and be- 
 came open converts, though public rumor repeat- 
 edly whispered that some such occurrence was 
 about to happen. Several times I was greeted on 
 the streets with a friendly sarcastic jeer over the 
 outlook, and even twitted somehow thus: "Well, 
 I hear that your infidel philosophic set are going 
 to turn Catholic under the lead of Harris and Miss 
 Blow." I could only give a nondescript answer, 
 though true: "You know as much about it as I 
 do." Once and only once in my private room I 
 spoke to Harris upon the matter, I suppose with 
 some warmth, for I shall never forget his tone, his 
 look, and his words which he underbreathed : ' ' Have 
 patience with me." Half imploringly, almost dole- 
 fully he turned his demure face to mine — an atti- 
 tude which he never took toward me before or 
 since, for he was my superior in years, authority, 
 and distinction, and he never failed to assert his 
 right of primacy, which I freely acknowledged even 
 when I stoutly maintained my own liberty of evolu- 
 tion. I said to him no more on that topic, for I 
 felt that he was passing through some deep internal 
 struggle, probably religious, which had rent his 
 spirit in twain and weakened him to a broken man 
 for a time, quite incapable of any vigorous embat- 
 tled discussion. I never saw those meek angelic
 
 472 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 lines, which now would stream through his brow 
 and over his face, in former years when he philoso- 
 phized with fight in his glow ; it is my theory that 
 Dante wrote them there, and sent him back to his 
 New England church when he went to Concord. 
 
 Such was the peculiar religious upburst which 
 Dante caused in our St. Louis Movement. I had ex- 
 perienced somewhat similar excitements as a stu- 
 dent at Oberlin where President Finney, then the 
 greatest living revivalist, had made revivalism a 
 part of our College course — doubtless the most 
 unique and powerful part of it, as he was the one 
 genius there. And back in my boyhood I had seen 
 Methodist camp-meetings quite uncontrollable with 
 wild shouts and frenzied prayers: all of which 
 showed strong physical reactions of the natural 
 man, even up to the dead eye of catalepsy. 
 
 But just think of it! Dante's poem, now more 
 than five hundred years old, belonging to a differ- 
 ent state of society and to a different faith, re- 
 vealed the rapturous power, not through the living 
 voice of some magnetic preacher, but through cold 
 dead type, to grip the first intellects of our philo- 
 sophic group and to call forth in them a real 
 religious revival not only of his spirit but of his 
 dogmatic doctrine ! I am sure I saw the mentioned 
 three, at different times when speaking under his 
 or similar inspiration, roll their eyes heavenward,' 
 change to a saintly tone their native voice, and 
 transfigure their features, so that they brought 
 vividly to my mind the glorified faces of Fra An-
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 473 
 
 gelico's pictured Saints, up to which I once gazed 
 for hours in the Cathedral of Orvieto. But when 
 Tom Davidson, lecturing on the Paradiso, assumed 
 the paradisaical mien and intonation, I could not 
 help recalling, for the contrast grilled me some- 
 what, his blue strabismic Mephistophelian leer and 
 sneer at Christianism compared with Hellenism as 
 was his wont in his earlier St. Louis days. But 
 Davidson was honest even in his manifold muta- 
 bilities; he was no hypocrite, rather the contrary, 
 being often too imprudent in letting his ever-spout- 
 ing tongue pump out the bottom of his heart. 
 
 What is the cause of such an occurrence, or per- 
 chance dispensation? What may be the psychlogy 
 of the human Psyche in this episode? The answer 
 we shall have to wait for at present. Meanwhile I 
 hear from the reader another interrogation to which 
 a response is now due : What was your part in this 
 strangest phasis of the St. Louis Movement? 
 
 III. I can say at the start that I escaped from 
 the described contagion, if such it may be called, 
 though I had my own deep and lasting experience 
 with Dante in my distinctive way. But why should 
 I be immune ? That is indeed something of a prob- 
 lem, with different possible answers. My own view 
 is that Dante was for me but one book in the total 
 canon of the Literary Bibles, being the last one by 
 me biblically studied and wrought out, so that it 
 did not in my case usurp the place of the others. 
 It was for me of equal worth and authority with 
 the rest, all four forming together the Summa
 
 474 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Literaturae of Europe, the grand Literary Organon 
 probably of the race. But the three very capable 
 people above mentioned were spiritually moulded 
 by that one book of Dante though they read and 
 studied likewise Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe. 
 Still this was with them more, I believe, a learning 
 from the outside, even if deep and sympathetic. 
 
 Now they naturally were not going to acknowl- 
 edge any such distinction against themselves. So 
 they turned the tables on me, saying that I had 
 not religion enough to understand the supremely 
 religious poet. Harris gently intimated some such 
 notion to me ; at any rate he did not invite me to 
 take part in the Dante programme of the Concord 
 School, which task, however, I did not wish, inas- 
 much as I had already enough to do in preparing 
 for the Milwaukee enterprise of that same summer. 
 Moreover it was my opinion that the Concord 
 School of Philosophy had delivered its freshest and 
 best message during its past seven years of active 
 existence, and had begun to show signs of decline. 
 Be this as it may, I had conceived the ambition to 
 transplant it in its literary development to the 
 spiritual soil of the West, whence it had largely 
 originated. 
 
 In St. Louis, however, Miss Blow chose to enter 
 upon an active campaign against my supposed 
 religious shortcomings, and openly declared that I 
 could not be allowed to teach her class in Dante 
 the coming season. She gave out that she was going 
 to take it herself, and intimated that she would
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 475 
 
 henceforth have charge of the other literary books 
 — a decision to which I felt no objection, for it 
 seemed to indicate a continuance of the work. So 
 far she was within her right, even if somewhat in- 
 quisitorial, which native gift she could not help 
 exercising. But in her reaction she intensified her 
 damnation almost to a curse, proclaiming to her 
 pupils, who had been also mine for several years, 
 that I had nothing more to give, being totally 
 drained out, exhausted to the dregs, and that she, to 
 employ her own contemptuous image repeated to me 
 by several of her friendly hearers, had squeezed 
 the orange dry and now proposed to fling the empty 
 hull into the slop-pail, which was her wont in such 
 cases. As I have already indicated, I had made 
 preparations for quitting the city anyhow, and 
 starting on my new limit-overleaping trial. But 
 why recall these past irritations? Assuredly not 
 to satisfy old grudges — that were both unworthy 
 and resultless. Miss Blow was our greatest, but 
 our f atef ullest woman ; both her greatness and her 
 fate are livingly intergrown in the St. Louis Move- 
 ment and cannot be left out of its history without 
 making it fragmentary, if not false. Not alone to- 
 ward me personally, but toward all who happened 
 to fall under her ban, did she show this fatuity of 
 excess, I might say now of autocracy, which was 
 sure to come back impartially to herself with the 
 all-rounding years. I repeat that in her more than 
 in any other person centered the literary primacy 
 of the city, at least as far as the St. Louis Move-
 
 476 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ment and all its ramifications were concerned. Dic- 
 tatorship, backed up by undoubted ability, lay in 
 her nature; a distinguished lecturer of the East 
 acclaimed her from the hustings the Kindergarten 
 Pope. I have heard her friend Harris attribute 
 this strain of personal arrogance to her aristocratic 
 Virginia ancestry, wherein he may have shown his 
 New England prejudice. I stayed away from St. 
 Louis about four years at this time; then I came 
 back in response to an urgent call, of course not 
 hers. And what a cataclysmic overturn did I wit- 
 ness all around me, a seeming Kindergarten Rag- 
 narok, amid whose ruins lay prostrate the fateful 
 Miss Blow ! But that is ahead of us, let us go 
 back. 
 
 These unfavorable opinions concerning my Dante 
 instruction were well dispersed through the city, 
 and I found them also borne outside — they were 
 flung into my face by a person in Chicago when I 
 was working up Dante there. The general sum- 
 mary ran that I was too much of a Heathen to 
 teach a Christian poet to Christians. The intention 
 was probably to discourage me from tackling a sub- 
 ject for which I was supposed to be constitutionally 
 unfitted. For it was known from my talks that 
 Dante was one of my Literary Bibles, all of which 
 I designed to co-ordinate, to interpret anew, and to 
 propagate by word, deed, and writ. Now this 
 critical counterblast, instead of cooling me off, 
 heated all the mettle in me white-hot with new 
 resolution and even defiance. Secretly I thought
 
 GOETHE AND DANTE. 477 
 
 too that there might be some jealousy on the part 
 of those of our St. Louis Movement who had al- 
 ready written on Dante and so regarded me as an 
 intruder. Moreover my studies soon uncovered the 
 fact that there were rich mines still in Dante which 
 had never yet been uncovered in all the literature 
 which I could find on the subject. I explored the 
 accessible comments in English, German and Ital- 
 ian. Particularly I poured over the two most 
 widely read and most highly praised Dante inter- 
 pretations of that time written in English, those 
 of James Russell Lowell and of Dean Church. 
 Finely worded, suggestive, morally and religiously 
 edifying were these essays and many others after 
 their pattern ; the best of this sort that I ever read 
 came from the pen of the Italian-writing Perez, 
 name otherwise unknown to me but still treasured 
 by my grateful memory. I may here say that our 
 St. Louis interpreters above mentioned belonged to 
 the same general class: they were ethical and reli- 
 gious, though each took his or her own way — the 
 three women and the three men — more or less. 
 
 Now this aspect of Dante is not to be neglected, 
 and I by no means overlooked it, being the most 
 obvious and outwardly impressive lesson of his 
 book. Still there lay in him for me a deeper prob- 
 lem : that peculiar unearthly symbolism — not so 
 much the what of it, as the whence and the why of 
 it. How did it come to be, and how can I probe to 
 the source of these marvelous metamorphoses, espe- 
 cially of the Inferno? For that beautiful Greek
 
 478 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 world of mine is here put through the medieval 
 Dantean alembic, and turns to a frightful monster. 
 I, just because of my previous classic proclivities, 
 felt the greater shock of it, and was desperately de- 
 termined to find the reason — the reason why that 
 upper serene existence of the old Gods should by 
 a penstroke of time be horribleized into this nether- 
 most Pandemonium. So I worked away till I too 
 along with Dante could see bright plastic forms of 
 Heathen Hellas transmuting themselves through a 
 new world-consciousness into the dark monstrous 
 shapes of Christian Hell. Such indeed was Dante's 
 deepest poetic problem and its solution, wherein is 
 revealed the essence of the medieval spirit. Thus 
 the sunny this-worldly Mythus of antique Greece 
 moves through Dante and his age into the brooding 
 other-worldly Mythus of the Apocalypse, which is 
 the whole storied frame-work of his poem. Like- 
 wise the subtle but colossal architectonic of the 
 Divine Comedy had never been satisfactorily 
 wrought out and correlated with the inner soul of 
 the work. Upon these pivotal facts of the poet 
 Dante, I put my decisive stress, not omitting text, 
 history, ethics, and theology, and other important 
 adjuncts. 
 
 But enough ! I cannot spur my egotism, great as 
 it may be, and also much-provoked, to write any 
 further praise of my Dante oblation, allowing my- 
 self only to say that finally — for this was the last 
 one finished of my biblical interpretations of Great 
 Literature — I printed the two volumes titled
 
 THE SIGMA PUBLISHING COMPANY. 479 
 
 Dante's Divine Comedy, a Commentary, extending 
 to more than one thousand pages, in 1892-3, again 
 without ever asking that sovereign dispenser of all 
 book-pay and all book-fame, the Eastern publisher. 
 And let the reader now note : At the bottom of the 
 title page of each of these volumes stands the new 
 device or signal to the future : The Sigma Publish- 
 ing Company, St. Louis, Missouri, which little 
 challenge has persisted in holding its obscure but 
 rather defiant position down to the present date. 
 This fact likewise runs a small historic strand 
 through the St. Louis Movement, whereof next may 
 be jotted down a few straggling items. 
 
 VI 
 
 The Sigma Publishing Company 
 
 Accordingly my generous reader will here give 
 enough of his time to turn to the front page of this 
 book, at the foot of which he will see the above 
 inscription whose first appearance reaches back 
 more than thirty years, and has been appended to 
 a goodly number of volumes. The Sigma Publishing 
 Company has made a little life-history of its own, 
 whose fortunes are interwoven with the St. Louis 
 Movement, of which it may be deemed the business 
 counterpart, or perhaps the traveling salesman. 
 Another word for its function is self-publication; 
 all the books which bear its impress were written, 
 printed and published by the author himself; that
 
 480 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 is, he had to be his own publisher, to win his own 
 audience, and to make largely his own channels of 
 distribution. On this side likewise his action has 
 been often censured as rashly unwise, as crippling 
 his influence and lessening his financial recompense 
 for his labor. But he soon found that among his 
 other defiances of prescribed ways, he had also to 
 defy the way of trade, if he would fulfill his mission 
 and complete his task. Commerce justly expects for 
 its effort an ample cash return, which soon showed 
 itself impossible in the present enterprise. 
 
 Moreover self-publication began to mean to me 
 and perhaps to others of us the crowning act of 
 self-expression, rounding to its last completion the 
 work of impartation, which refused to be handed 
 over to an outsider for a price. Naturally the out- 
 sider on his part refused his co-operation without 
 a price. Still to the true believer, or to the fanatic, 
 if you will, the thing had to be done. 
 
 Herein I deem Harris the forerunner and the 
 early daring protagonist, when he started the 
 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, in 1867, to pub- 
 lish his own work rejected in the East. I remember 
 it as one of his supreme moments when I saw him 
 bring down his clenched fist before a group of his 
 friends, affirming with vehemence : ' ' Now I am 
 going to start a Journal myself." That was the 
 primal creative act of self-publication in the St. 
 Louis Movement years before my first dash in the 
 same direction. Still the chief practical object of 
 the St. Louis Philosophical Society at its founda-
 
 THE SIGMA PUBLISHING COMPANY. 481 
 
 tion was to publish its own generating book, the 
 masterpiece of Hegel. But it never did its real task. 
 And our president, Brockmeyer, could not be 
 brought to do the finishing deed of self-publication 
 — a failure not the least of his fatalities, to my 
 mind. I urged him often, both early and late in 
 life; he would promise, but he never achieved. 
 Herein Harris again seized the initiative and set 
 the example. Several of his early books were also 
 self-published and distributed to his constituency, 
 where they helped lay the foundation of his future 
 influence and name. t 
 
 But in this early challenge Harris did not hold 
 out ; for him, when he rose to be the most famous 
 educationist in the United States, the temptation 
 or the pressure became too great. Accordingly he 
 dropped to a writer of competing school-books for 
 a publisher — certainly no dishonorable employment 
 though a surrender of the independence of self- 
 publication. Then he went East and was editor of 
 a series of pedagogical books, to which he was re- 
 quired to write introductions, many of which are 
 excellent, better than the books themselves. But 
 sometimes it was perhaps otherwise, for he did not 
 always approve of the book, and so he had, for the 
 sake of the publisher, to make his introductory re- 
 marks, if not directly favorable, at least quite neu- 
 tral and shy of the main point. So I heard once 
 from his own lips, with a decidedly displeased twist 
 in his nose, whereat I must have made a wry face 
 in response, for he began to talk at it without my
 
 482 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ever saying a word, answering seemingly my facial 
 disapproval. 
 
 My publishing destiny turned the opposite way, 
 since I kept up and unified my business of self- 
 publication. Still my earliest book (The System of 
 Shakespeare, 1877) bore the imprint of a St. Louis 
 publishing firm (G. I. Jones & Co.) long since 
 vanished. But when I returned from abroad, I set 
 out on my distinctive career of self-publication, of 
 which the first book was printed in 1880 (Delphic 
 Days), and the last one is the present volume, 
 forty years later. Thus among my other wander- 
 ings, I have kept up this long publisher's zigzag 
 journey, going "alone and afoot," somewhat after 
 the model of my Walk in Hellas. I must add, how- 
 ever, that during the first ten years of this period 
 there were numerous variations of the publisher's 
 imprint on the title page; two or three editions 
 bore the name of an Eastern firm, but not for any 
 length of time; the real distribution always fell 
 back upon me, so that I had to take the whole bur- 
 den in person. Several times I put at the bottom 
 of the title page "privately printed" or "published 
 by the author", which was not a good business 
 method, as it led to uncertainty and confusion even 
 in my little public. 
 
 So after a time of fluctuation I settled definitely 
 and permanently upon the above designation : The 
 Sigma Publishing Company — an impersonal name 
 for publisher. The Greek word may hint somewhat 
 of my Classic time and its productions ; the corre-
 
 THE SIGMA PUBLISHING COMPANY. 483 
 
 sponding English S is the first letter of Shakes- 
 peare and of St. Louis, and finally of Snider. 
 Rather whimsical is all this, but, I suppose, of no 
 great moment ; the true significance of the title is 
 that it stands for self-publication, in my case the 
 necessary counterpart and completion of self- 
 expression. 
 
 A book never was primarily a commercial bant- 
 ling with me, but a legitimate child of my brain, to 
 whom I owed a duty ; I was to endow my spiritual 
 offspring with the best outfit for life that I might 
 be able to furnish. The right of being printed and 
 imparted every worthy book may well claim for 
 its own sake, and even for the sake of its reader. 
 Then I found that when a conceived work had 
 really finished itself in my life, it must be gotten 
 rid of, as it were, must be disentangled from the 
 mind and put into the world as a real object, such 
 as is the book printed, bound, and sent forth to 
 make its own way through its own worth. The 
 manuscript was to me but a half reality, not yet 
 fully existent outside of me, and not yet possessed 
 of its own complete individuality. I at least was 
 in danger of tinkering with the mere writ seldom 
 to its betterment, till it was fixed in the hard metal. 
 To be sure I was not to print till the fruit was ripe ; 
 I often had to wait for years, and not a few works 
 never would mature for me, and so remain to this 
 day in their crude sere state of scribbled fragments. 
 
 Thus it resulted that each of my books became 
 a true incarnation of my best self at the time of
 
 484 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 its type-set embodiment, and revealed a given 
 stage of my development. For its supreme object 
 was self-expression, even when other aims may have 
 played in ; first of all I was to live my own life at 
 its highest, and then record it for myself and for 
 any similar wayfarer. Hence every book of mine 
 is a chapter of a life-lasting autobiography of many 
 volumes, which now toward the close I am trying 
 to condense into this one volume, whereof some 
 readers may think there is already too much. 
 
 Here I should add that another fact of the time 
 may have more or less unconsciously pushed me to 
 self-publication, namely the steady decadence of 
 the book business during the whole course of my 
 active life. No doubt the trade in books has in- 
 creased enormously in bulk, but has decidedly 
 sunken in character. Take our own city for in- 
 stance. I have before stated that when I first came 
 to St. Louis, at the close of the Civil War, I found 
 three well-stocked independent bookstores in the 
 heart of town and quite on a par with other mer- 
 cantile establishments. At the present year (1919) 
 there is not a single fairly equipped independent 
 book store in the city; all are annexed and sub- 
 ordinate to the so-called department stores, essen- 
 tially the sellers of dry goods and of other passing 
 necessaries and conveniences of our ephemeral ex- 
 istence. Thus the original bookstore has lost its 
 freedom, its independent selfhood as an integral 
 part of the community, and has become a kind of 
 slave, subject to a purely commercial business. To
 
 THE SIGMA PUBLISHING COMPANY. 485 
 
 me that means a sad decadence in character. Now 
 I am not blaming the department stores, I believe 
 in them and in their evolution, and in the present 
 case they doubtless gave a little additional life to 
 what was already very sick if not dying. The source 
 of this decline lies deeper. 
 
 Thus St. Louis with its million of people, urban 
 and surburban, has utterly degraded and put out 
 of business its former independent booksellers. 
 But this city stands not alone in such action; we 
 hear of the same thing occurring throughout the 
 West and even in the East. Today we read a state- 
 ment in a Boston Magazine that New Bedford, 
 Massachusetts, located in the most bookish State 
 of the Union, has fewer and poorer bookstores now 
 with 100,000 inhabitants that it had fifty years 
 ago with 25,000. The same fact is noted of other 
 cities. Thus St. Louis is perhaps only the worst 
 case in what seems to be a general epidemic. 
 
 Who, what is to blame? Numerous external 
 causes are assigned, such as the Carnegie libraries, 
 the Movies, the Magazines and Newspapers, the 
 Department Stores. But the trouble ultimately 
 must reach back to the shortage of brain power in 
 the business at its very head, for it can show no 
 supreme man, no great organizer, no pre-eminent 
 captain of the book-industry. Inferior leadership 
 appears stamped everywhere upon the American 
 book-trade. 
 
 Hence we dare the prediction that self-publica- 
 tion is likely to increase in the future, especially
 
 486 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 over the West. The Eastern publisher will con- 
 tinue to devote himself largely to reprints, to the 
 vast mass of text books and school books, to en- 
 cyclopedias, dictionaries, compilations and series of 
 many kinds, in general to the printed reproduction 
 and distribution of past culture, out of which es- 
 pecially is minted good money without requiring 
 any great outlay of genius. But he will prudently 
 keep shy of the new book with a new idea which 
 has yet to fight its way in the world. So we prem- 
 ise that the author of such books will more and 
 more have to publish himself, or remain drowned 
 in his own ink-bottle. Especially is this the case if 
 he lives in the West outside the sphere of the 
 Eastern literary centralization, which seems to be- 
 come more tyrannical and grasping every day. 
 
 But under any circumstance I had the combative 
 feeling that I never would let my vocation in life, 
 verily my spirit's deepest development, be deter- 
 mined by a publisher or his taster. So one of the 
 persistent small undercurents flowing through the 
 St. Louis Movement, and helping to make it more 
 fertile and extended, has been this little stream 
 of self-publication which bears the not very lumi- 
 nous title of Sigma Publishing Company. 
 
 VII 
 
 Social Chicago 
 
 Now I am going to pass with some suddenness to 
 the reverse side of Chicago life; I might broaden
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 487 
 
 this and say, to the inverted or perverted phase 
 of humanity itself. For I had also my daily con- 
 tact with the negative element of associated man, 
 with the underworld of a great city, seemingly the 
 necessary obverse half of it, turned down, even 
 submerged in part. Mostly I resided in Lodging 
 House Quarter, home of the riff-raff generally, 
 who were always my next neighbors; indeed I 
 was myself a drop in this vast floating Niagara of 
 mortality which ever appeared on the rush to pitch 
 over and vanish in the cataract below. Still I 
 found my anchorage. 
 
 By way of contrast let me add that I at the same 
 time was living and holding converse with the 
 best spirits of all ages, the makers of the Literary 
 Bibles aforesaid — the most choice, ideal set of men 
 that our race has yet evolved. Such company I 
 never failed to have with me in my little room at 
 Hotel Goodenough, to whom I could flee for relief 
 from that maelstrom of the unchosen mass swirling 
 down the streets under my window. So I too had 
 my ideal boon companions; but I must not forget 
 that I likewise was associated in real life with the 
 best people of Chicago, for such I deemed my Kin- 
 dergartners and my little band of co-workers in 
 what they and I regarded as a great cause. 
 
 Thus after my limited way I met with and con- 
 joined in myself the uppermost and the nethermost 
 layers of mankind — the ever-warring extremes of 
 the vast social organism. Or I may analogize them 
 as the positive, and negative poles of total human
 
 488 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 existence, which somehow I felt called or com- 
 pelled to take into my individual existence. 
 
 Social Chicago is the rubric which I write over 
 this section, since I wish now to give some inkling 
 of my sociological life, in contrast with my preva- 
 lent literary bent, as well as a glimpse of its coun- 
 terpart in the community. For in the realm of 
 sociology Chicago was as full of new experiments 
 as it was full of new religions, whereof a word has 
 been said on a former page. Indeed from this 
 present viewpoint Chicago itself may be looked 
 upon as one huge social experiment, the most preg- 
 nant and original that has yet been attempted on 
 our globe. Other cities may have vaster masses of 
 population, with their special problems, but none, 
 I believe, have the human diversity, the popular 
 initiative, the social originality of Chicago. Of 
 course I do not mean here ordinary society, made 
 up of pretty sportive bubbles of fashionable life, 
 with which I had little or nothing to do, and which 
 always bored me when I through some require- 
 ment had to be present at one of its functions. 
 
 The deeply negative phases of this social stream 
 which surged around me were what first compelled 
 attention. Those three demons in the form of 
 rebellious human appetites, drink, sex, hunger, 
 could be seen in their destructive energy on all 
 sides; back to them in some form the social ques- 
 tion always penetrates. A dozen drinking saloons 
 within two or three blocks of me were charged in 
 one year with seven murders, not to speak of rob-
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 489 
 
 berks and seductions. The drunken victim usually 
 from the country I have seen lying on the curb- 
 stone bespattered with his own blood, and rifled of 
 his watch and money. He thought he was equal to 
 the venture, went on a frolic to see the sights, and 
 such was the outcome of his ignorant challenge. And 
 so on by the thousands. Prohibition just now is seek- 
 ing to solve this problem, negatively I think, by the 
 utter annihilation of the whole drink-world and its 
 far-ramified organization. But much deeper and 
 subtler ran the cancerous filaments of the sex-life 
 of a great city, with its never-ending supply from 
 the very heart of society. One may sometimes see 
 the first fling of the desperate woman into this 
 "Witches' Cauldron of the social system. Here 
 comes the young girl from a suburban town, who 
 asks me on my evening walk the way through the 
 streets. A little inquiry develops the fact that she 
 is a fugitive from a step-mother, re-enacting a 
 world-old tragedy. I beg her to wait and see what 
 can be done by consulting her father. No, no; 
 she picks up her skirts and off she skips, saying in 
 substance that she would rather be a white slave 
 than the slave to that step-mother. Only one mo- 
 tive among millions for the vast underflow of nega- 
 tive womanhood in society 's whirlpool ; what is to 
 be done with it? Reached it can hardly be by ex- 
 ternal law, or only in a very limited external way ; 
 its hidden tentacles, often quite microscopic, coil 
 in the very germ of life itself. 
 But the most open and virulent form of the
 
 490 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 social struggle lay in the furious greed-world of 
 Chicago, probably more bitter, more energetic, and 
 more pitiless here than anywhere else, though it now 
 belts the earth. This struggle centered then as it 
 still centers, in the world-feud between Capital and 
 Labor, so its popular terms run; the two grand 
 greeds — undoubtedly sprung of human needs, but 
 to-day degenerated largely into human greeds — 
 seem to be in a life-and-death battle, which, some 
 people think, threatens us with Armageddon. The 
 one side, the Capitalists, having the purse and in 
 the main the talents, employ brain power ; the other 
 side, the Laborites, having the physical preponder- 
 ance, tend to the use of brawn power ; thus rises the 
 social antimony between secret craft and open vio- 
 lence, which rends the social organism to-day. This 
 human dualism was pictured mythically long ago 
 by the old Greeks in the strife between crafty 
 Ulysses and brawny Ajax, in which contest the 
 latter turns tragic — a forecast often repeated and 
 verified in modern times. And the ancient Romans 
 have left their little fable on the same subject, 
 usually known as the strife between the Belly and 
 the Members, a petty squib told to the revolting 
 plebs of Rome by that old humorist Menenius 
 Agrippa, and after him redacted and amplified for 
 all time by William Shakespeare. But in our mod- 
 ern era the Belly and the Members have formed a 
 coalition and have a common antagonist in the 
 Brain, which, in its turn often plays tyrant and 
 even destroyer of its brother in the social organism.
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 491 
 
 Such is, then, our real Gigantomachia, the re- 
 volt of the suppressed nether Powers against the 
 upper Olympian rule of Zeus; or more prosaically 
 we may see here a phase of the timeless conflict be- 
 tween Brawn and Brain. The present domination 
 of the Russian Proletariat tends to turn on some 
 such conflict, though our information is still hazy, 
 and not infrequently seems doctored by the Press. 
 
 After a mild way I participated in this war of 
 the two opposing human Greeds which cleft the 
 social body like some avenging sword of Nemesis. 
 I attended the meetings of both sides, read their 
 literature, heard their orators on the street corners 
 and in the halls. I recollect that during this time 
 I grappled with Karl Marx's big yet unfinished and 
 unfinishable book on ' ' Capital, ' ' searching not alone 
 for its explicit doctrine but for its deeper spirit 
 both in the original German and in the English 
 translation. For however we may regard him, Marx 
 has written the Bible of theWorld's Proletariat, 
 which is getting to be not merely the economic but 
 the political problem of the age. 
 
 On the whole, I sided with both, and yet with 
 neither, for I thought I saw something above both, 
 of which they were but the present conflicting 
 halves. Moreover, I had neither of the two Greeds, 
 and in fact had neither of the two Needs which 
 propelled them into conflict. In general, I had my 
 very simple dinner paid for before it was eaten, 
 so that I really felt no money-hunger, and no 
 stomach-hunger, the two original sources of the
 
 492 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 two warring social Greeds. But all the deeper and 
 more impressive and more insistent became the 
 lesson, which compelled me to construe for thought 
 and to put together in one supreme totality the 
 five great Social Institutions of man, in order that 
 I might not get lost mentally in the infinite mazes 
 of one anchorless Institution like the economic, 
 wherein I deemed lay the dilemma of Marx and his 
 followers. Slowly evolving out of this chaos rose 
 my own book on this subject, which after many 
 years of incubation got itself organized and 
 printed. Whereof later. 
 
 Thus I traversed, day in day out, Chicago 's huge 
 Pandemonium, whose acridly negative phases I 
 classify for myself under the three foregoing heads : 
 the drink-world, the sex-world, and the greed- 
 world. They all rest upon native human appe- 
 tites which exist originally for life-saving, yet be- 
 come life-destroying, if turned loose to their law- 
 less liberty. So in my mind's eye I saw them as 
 the three new Furies of Man's associated life, pur- 
 suing not now the individual so much as society it- 
 self, which seems at present to have taken the 
 place of the guilty Orestes in the doom of the 
 avenging Eumenides. • 
 
 In such manner I stood on the edge of the dark 
 infernal river Styx of Chicago as it poured down 
 through her streets, and I watched its multitudin- 
 ous wrecks float by without descending into the 
 stream myself in order to help save them as my 
 life's dearest task, though on occasion I would
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 493 
 
 reach out a hand to the one happening to dash up 
 at my feet. I was not missionary enough, not 
 good enough if you wish, not Christian enough as 
 Miss Blow might perhaps say, and as more than one 
 excellent church-member did tell me to my face in 
 a kind of unctuously savage reproach, which I 
 tried not to imitate. Still I had my own divinely 
 allotted chore running through the years, which 
 was to plant, up to the limit of my power, the 
 Eternal Word of the Literary Bibles in the over- 
 whelming ephemeral culture of the city, for as I 
 construed her, Chicago 's Brain was even in might- 
 ier need of salvation than her Brawn. 
 
 Still I could not live in this environment without 
 having my own little personal charities, at least for 
 my hours of recreation, if there was no better mo- 
 tive. Let these hundredfold petty experiences of 
 the passing days drop into the pool of oblivion; 
 but I would select three of the more important and 
 enduring strands of my social discipline in Chi- 
 cago as leaving a lasting impress upon my memory, 
 and as having a permanent influence upon my life 
 and work. These I shall entitle (1) The Greeks of 
 Chicago, (2) The Hull House Experiment, and 
 (3) The Hay market Bomb. All three had for me 
 a sociological character and warning which I sought 
 to understand, to appropriate, and to express after 
 my way. Hence they all have stamped an auto- 
 biographic mark upon the writ of this Writer of 
 Books. 
 
 I. The Greeks of Chicago. The name already
 
 494 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 whispers me affectionately a deep emotional con- 
 nection with a former stage of my life previously 
 set forth as my Classical Epoch. I have sometimes 
 thought that I was born with an inherited need of 
 Greek expression ; the antique speech had found in 
 me a kind of re-incarnation. The very utterance 
 of it gave me not only delight but relief. Ever 
 since I had returned from my trip in Hellas I had 
 felt the strange longing to let a few Greek words 
 trickle off my tongue every day in response to some 
 far-away unconscious urge of my nature, possibly 
 of my heredity. In St. Louis I hunted around a 
 good deal for some stray natives of that land, and 
 found two or three, but they could all talk English. 
 The great migration from the countries around the 
 Egean had not yet taken place, and certainly had 
 not yet reached St. Louis. 
 
 It must have been my first year in Chicago 
 (1884-5), when, as I was taking a stroll one Sun- 
 day afternoon in the suburbs of the city, I noticed 
 two men trundling a fruit-cart and offering its con- 
 tents to the wayfarers. I took them to be Italians, 
 who had at that time a monopoly of such business 
 quite everywhere, and I addressed them in their 
 supposed mother-tongue. But they shook thleir 
 heads, and said they did not understand. ""Who 
 are you then?" "Greeks," came the reply in Eng- 
 lish. It was a great surprise, for I had accidently 
 stumbled upon two considerable facts: the begin- 
 ning of the large migration of the Greeks to the 
 United States, and the kind of occupation which
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 495 
 
 they had chosen, having already started to sup- 
 plant the Italians. I lost no time in flinging at 
 them several of my Greek vocables, whereby they 
 too were much astonished. Responding to my in- 
 quiries they gave me information concerning their 
 quarters, their employments, and their people. At 
 that time there may have been a hundred or two in 
 the city, but more and more kept rapidly coming, 
 till now their population sums up many thousands. 
 Everywhere around my hale old Hotel Good- 
 enough I found by trial the Greeks to have quietly 
 crept in and taken possession of the little businesses 
 of a crowded thoroughfare, becoming the fruiterers, 
 restaurateurs, barbers, candy-venders, shoe-shiners, 
 in general the small caterers to the vast transient 
 multitude surging in and through and out of the 
 great city's roaring streets. I noted that these 
 men, quite all of them young fellows, had come 
 from rural Greece ; not a few were Arcadian peas- 
 ants, and thus had been precipitated from the 
 most idyllic, backward country of all antiquity, 
 famed in old poetry for its rustic pastoral inno- 
 cence, into the very center of the world's mad mael- 
 strom, quitting their pastoral panspipe of Arcadia 
 for yelling and hawking peanuts and bananas to 
 Chicago's Pandemonium. But the most of these 
 Greeks still proudly called themselves Spartans, 
 and knew at least of their land's ancient "Worthies, 
 Leonidas and Lycurgus, whose names occasionally 
 they themselves bore, with a faint echo of hoary 
 greatness tinkling through thousands cf years.
 
 496 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Thus old Greece had in a measure followed me 
 across the Ocean to the West, and found me at the 
 very heart of all modernity, where I saluted her in 
 her native speech every day as I stepped across my 
 threshold on Wabash Avenue. The language was 
 still practically that of Plato and Demosthenes, 
 though with many new turns, meanings, and in- 
 flections. Also these Peloponnesian peasants spoke 
 their own dialect, often hard for me to understand, 
 though they always understood me. Well, some- 
 how so it was in antiquity with their Doric brogue. 
 But again I ordered my dinner in Greek at Chi- 
 cago as at Athens, and exchanged daily greetings 
 as I used to do in Parnassian Arachoba, when I 
 tarried there during my Classic Itinerary. So I 
 kept up a small continuous underflow of living 
 Hellenism far away from its home on the other 
 side of the earth, in some deepest need of my 
 spirit. 
 
 But now starts the question, what can I do, what 
 must I do to help these people for their own bless- 
 ing as well as in requital of the gift of their par- 
 ents? Of all the many foreigners I felt toward 
 them specially a certain ancestral affection and per- 
 chance kinship, which called up a feeling not only 
 of gratitude, but of duty. As far as I knew, I was 
 the only American then in Chicago who could con- 
 verse somewhat in modern Greek. This time was 
 about ten years before the establishment of the 
 University with its learned Hellenists, and before 
 the custom of sending our Greek professors to
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 497 
 
 Greece for the purpose of learning the modern 
 tongue. With my pedagogical bent I resolved to 
 bring them together and to train them in English. 
 I went to George Howland, Superintendent pf 
 Schools, who after his usual gruff greeting con- 
 sented to let me have the use of a room in the 
 Jones School for certain evenings. This building 
 was then not far from the center of the great Chi 
 cago rookery, in which my Greeks were packed 
 away, commingled in a common mess with their 
 bunks, bananas, and cookery. I went to these 
 rather dark cave-like habitations, preaching my 
 little gospel, and saying: No money asked, in- 
 struction free, no room-rent, no books required. I 
 succeeded in forming a class of about a dozen of 
 the more aspiring, and was ready to open work on 
 a given evening at the given place. So I dreamed 
 myself an antique scholarch of another Athenian 
 Academe, blooming anew right in the heart of mod- 
 ernest Chicago. 
 
 But the whole scheme flashed in the pan; I was 
 on hand, but not a Greek appeared. I hastened to 
 their quarters and found them all moodily silent, 
 and eyeing me with a snaky leer of suspicion. Fin- 
 ally I wormed out of them that they believed me to 
 be a secret missionary, Protestant or Roman Catho- 
 lic, who had been sent to undermine their Greek 
 Orthodox faith, and make them guilty of the awful 
 sin of apostasy. In vain I explained that I had no 
 such design, that I belonged to no church (which 
 fact may have shocked them still more), and I
 
 498 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 begged them to make trial of me once or twice. I 
 simply wished to impart to them the first condition 
 of our civic life — the ability to read the daily news- 
 paper, and then to use the Public Library, in which 
 I planned to place a number of books in modern 
 Greek. But I saw that I could do nothing, and I 
 uncannily fled from the basilisk glare of that old 
 serpent of religious hate suddenly shot at me in 
 newest Chicago. I was at once classed with much- 
 bedamned Kalopothakes at Athens and other Greek- 
 American Protestant missionaries there, who were 
 probably the most unpopular men in all Greece, as 
 I found in my journeys through some of the remote 
 rural districts of that land. Still I kept up my 
 daily festival of linguistic delight in letting gush 
 up in conversation a few words of that old-new 
 Greek speech eternally expressing what is eternal, 
 even if it was originally heathen. I dreamed at 
 least that it gave me a daily sip of its own youth 
 and immortality. 
 
 II. The Hull House Experiment. Otherwise well 
 known as the Chicago Social Settlement — essen- 
 tially a place for mediating or at least mitigating 
 the furious conflict between the needy and the 
 greedy, raging with peculiar virulence in a great 
 commercial city. Or we may deem it a kind of ex- 
 periment station set down in the middle between 
 the two warring sides of that supreme social feud, 
 which it would somehow help assuage — the feud be- 
 tween Labor and Capital. I watched it with sym- 
 pathy at its beginning, and took a little part in it
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 499 
 
 from the inside for a testing while. In the huge 
 Chicago cataract of rushing humanity it might be- 
 come a last islet to which a few could cling before 
 being driven to the final plunge. The newspapers 
 had announced the coming project, as a sort of 
 Chicago duplicate of the famous Toynbee Hall in 
 London. 
 
 One day in January, 1889, as I remember, an in- 
 vitation was received by me from Mrs. Mary Wil- 
 marth to attend a meeting at her house on Michi- 
 gan Avenue for the purpose of listening to Miss 
 Jane Addams, who had recently arrived in the 
 city, and who was to set forth her new plan of 
 social betterment. The lady gave her talk and 
 others were called upon for a word or two. David- 
 son was there, remaining over from our Literary 
 School of the preceding holidays. He claimed per- 
 sonal knowledge of the original Toynbee plan, and 
 proceeded to disparage the whole design of intro- 
 ducing it into this country. Moreover he belittled 
 the co-operative life of such a Settlement as clan- 
 nish, in spite of his own Scotch tartan, which he 
 sometimes proudly wore outside and always inside, 
 and he declared the entire scheme "unnatural." 
 Thus he gave to that meeting and to the hopeful 
 foundress of Hull House his usual Davidsonian 
 kick. Yet Davidson of all men was clannish 
 and cliquey by nature; he seldom failed to form 
 his own inner set in any work for which he had 
 been engaged. So he had acted at Concord, and so he 
 treated our. Chicago Literary School, for really he
 
 500 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 could not help it. Then what were his Glenmore 
 and his Farmington and his New Life? Still he 
 was always interesting and stimulating, though not 
 very convincing ; certainly he did not convince Miss 
 Addams, nor did he succeed in deflecting into his 
 course our Literary School. 
 
 After Davidson had finished, I being called on, 
 rose and gave a little address in emphatic approval 
 of the enterprise. Such was our peculiar destiny : 
 again we locked horns in that Chicago parlor, as 
 we had done some twenty and more years before 
 this time in the St. Louis Philosophical Society and 
 also in the High School. Our last tilt had taken 
 place in the recent Chicago Literary School over 
 Goethe, to which I as director had invited him as 
 lecturer. My argument now was that associated 
 work can be stronger and better than individual 
 effort, and I cited my own case with the Chicago 
 Greeks as a failure, because I did not have the 
 power of enlisting companions and organizing a 
 settlement. So I bade Miss Addams go on with her 
 worthy undertaking, in which I thought I saw a 
 need of the city and of the time. 
 
 Still I failed not to signal to her my warning. I 
 knew somewhat of the Hull House quarter, for I 
 had lived around its edges for several years, and 
 had brushed against its folk, most of them immi- 
 grants from Southern and South-Eastern Europe, 
 and mainly of three different confessions, very old 
 but very obstinate — Roman-Catholic, Greek-Catho- 
 lic, and Jewish. I told her that she would find
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 501 
 
 this humble and ignorant mass of humanity most 
 suspicious and most sensitive in regard to their 
 religion, over which they knew that their ancestors 
 had fought for many centuries. It was likely she 
 would be suspected of being one of those insidious 
 American missionaries whom they knew and dis- 
 liked from the old country, and who, their priest- 
 hood had taught them, were emissaries of the in- 
 fernal Serpent sent from far over the Great Sea 
 to rob them of their last and best hope, their faith. 
 She must avoid this first and deepest danger, and 
 make her enterprise as non-sectarian as possible. 
 
 Miss Addams rejoined that she was a Christian, 
 with a slight satiric thrust possibly, and that her 
 object was christian, though it was not denomina- 
 tional. I think, but am not now certain, that she 
 also said she was herself a good Presbyterian. But 
 time has shown that she really is the greatest 
 Quaker that America has produced, certainly not 
 excepting Elias Hicks, and overtopping Whittier, 
 if we leave out his poetry, with which Miss Addams, 
 as far as I know, did not try to compete. 
 
 Hull House was soon started, and I failed not to 
 pay an occasional visit, and once or twice talked 
 there to a little group about Shakespeare, for the 
 scheme had also its cultural appendage. It was 
 soon evident that the work had struck a deep note 
 in accord with the spirit of the time; through the 
 ability of Miss Addams, her Social Settlement soon 
 became one of Chicago's unique and much-inter- 
 viewed institutions, whose fame from that first
 
 502 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 little germ had grown to be national and had even 
 crossed the Ocean. All that in the course of three 
 or four years; assuredly both her personality and 
 the phenomenon itself were worthy of a deeper 
 study than I had given them hitherto. Accordingly 
 in the fall of 1893 I resolved to leave my little nook 
 in the Goodenough Tenement, and to become a resi- 
 dent of Hull House itself, when I found I could, 
 after inquiry. I promised of course to pay my dues, 
 and to perform the part of the charitable work as- 
 signed me. I wished to live the enterprise in my 
 own experience from the inside of it, and to dis- 
 cover what it meant generally, if I could, and to 
 hearken what response to it my own nature might 
 give. Three main objects lay in my mind : first, to 
 find the bearing and place of such an establish- 
 ment in the total Social Order ; secondly to scan the 
 considerable number of people who had gathered 
 there to devote themselves to this work — my very 
 human fellow-residents, men and women; thirdly 
 and specially, to catch the spiritual outlines, if I 
 were able, of Miss Addams herself, the heroine of 
 this Hull House Iliad, who had already approved 
 herself the Great Soul of the enterprise, its creative 
 and organizing Woman-Demiurge. 
 
 The first operation in which I had a small part 
 was the plan to furnish to the poor people of the 
 district coal at cost price per ton; the male mem- 
 bers of the Settlement were to be the volunteer coal- 
 carriers. Thus, however, we, begriming ourselves 
 frightfully for charity, took away from a number
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 503 
 
 of other poor sooty fellows their scant means of 
 livelihood during the winter. I felt the counter- 
 stroke, when a needy darky, from whom I used to 
 buy baskets of coal, stopped me on the street for 
 alms, saying that our charitable arrangement had 
 stolen the bread out of his mouth. Not much time 
 elapsed before this benevolent enterprise had com- 
 pletely undone itself, causing apparently as much 
 poverty as it cured, and so it was dropped, letting 
 the poor world lapse back again under the old piti- 
 less law of supply and demand. 
 
 The next duty assigned me by the Settlement 
 was to look up those who on written request had 
 handed to us their names, declaring that they were 
 out of work and in pinching destitution. Foreign 
 immigrants ignorant of our tongue were quite all 
 of them, and, as I had some knowledge of their 
 dialects, I was chosen to visit them in their haunts, 
 thirty or perhaps forty of them at the start. The 
 first experience may be taken as an example : One 
 evening I knocked at the door where two jobless and 
 hungering Italians were reported to be suifering, 
 and I found about twenty compatriots at a long 
 table enjoying a bounteous meal. I stated the ob- 
 ject of my visit in my best Italian, and called out 
 the two names. In response a couple men jumped 
 up from the edibles and wiped on their sleeves 
 their well-fed chaps, affirming that they were in 
 great distress and even hungry for want of work 
 and especially for want of money. I questioned 
 them a little and came to the conclusion, that here
 
 504 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 was a fine-spun Italian scheme of beggary to get 
 some free contributions from charity's overflowing 
 heart. But mine did not overflow in that way. My 
 parting advice to the twain was that on the morrow 
 they too should go to work with their companions 
 who had openly shown me labor's plenitude, and 
 earn their share of the macaroni. Next I found that 
 I had one Greek name on my list, so I went hunting 
 for him through the Hellenic colony and talking 
 Demosthenic Attic, but the Greeks disowned him, 
 saying that they had no mendicants, and would per- 
 mit none, nor any Black Hand. Such was the new 
 contrast I found between Greece and Rome in Chi- 
 cago. To round out this visit to the modern repre- 
 sentatives of the great nations of antiquity, I went 
 to a neat looking house where a stranded Jew had 
 reported himself workless. Judge my surprise when 
 a fine Hebrew lady, well-gowned and somewhat be- 
 spangled with jewels received me graciously in the 
 well-appointed parlor, and asked me the object of 
 my errand. I told her and gave her the name of the 
 applicant, when he himself appeared in person and 
 recounted his pitiful story, at the same time stating 
 that he was here living with a prosperous relative. 
 My answer was that his kin and his fellow-religion- 
 ists could surely do more for him than the Hull 
 House. So I kept up the quest, being employed in 
 it a number of days. At last I did find one case 
 deserving help — a poor French mother with two 
 small children was bravely facing the battle of life 
 under the burden of a drunken husband. At once
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 505 
 
 she got a little lift. Such was the outcome of my 
 first itinerary of charity under the auspices of the 
 Social Settlement, by whose assistance I had the 
 happiness to see something of those old cultural 
 stocks of Greece, Rome, and Judea without leaving 
 Chicago. 
 
 But the chief interest of Hull House for me arose 
 when all the residents met together once a day and 
 dined at a common table. Miss Addams sat at the 
 head; good-luck assigned me the third plate from 
 hers, so that I could see her and hear her in her 
 most spontaneous movements and sayings. Exceed- 
 ingly well-poised she looked as she sat there, show- 
 ing the mistress of the situation; to me her fea- 
 tures and her actions were inscribed with one dom- 
 inating word: Will. Not intellect so much, not 
 even emotion in any considerable overflow, but 
 resolution. I must confess that the great pacifist 
 impressed me as a good deal of fighter in her line. 
 The physical trait which still remains most deeply 
 graven in my memory was a peculiar hang of her 
 head to one side so that she seemed slightly wry- 
 necked. Moreover this lineament would change 
 more than her rather impassive face in the play of 
 her conversation; I noticed that it would visibly 
 stiffen as the argument grew tenser. I had occa- 
 sion more than once to see it wax in rigidity at some 
 unpacific utterance of mine, for instance in regard 
 to the punishment of individuals and of nations. 
 Thus it became to me the outer bodily signal of her 
 Will; especially it would rise to strong resistance
 
 506 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 in defense of her doctrine of non-resistance, and in- 
 stantly fling at any foe the gage of war against 
 war.- 
 
 Some two dozen people in my time sat around 
 that table, and in conversation and action told on 
 themselves something every day, for they could not 
 help it nor could I. Only four or five men, young 
 sprigs of something or other, were present, here al- 
 together the weaker sex; I hope they were worthy 
 of greater remembrance than I can now find re- 
 corded in my brain concerning their wisdom. But 
 the women were in the decided majority as well as 
 considerably fuller of years, and they showed 
 stronger character and deeper experience of life. 
 Indeed I thought I could read on the faces of a 
 good half of them that they had gone through one 
 supreme trial of soul and of heart, which they had 
 bravely endured, but which had sent them to Hull 
 House for complete restoration through works of 
 Charity. Now I was altogether the oldest person 
 present, over fifty-two, getting gray and bald, bear- 
 ing in my wrinkles the flow of life's vicissitudes 
 pictured in this present book. My age could have 
 fathered the oldest lady at that table. Miss Ad- 
 dams was nearly twenty years younger than my- 
 self, which fact I may dare infer from the pub- 
 lished date of her birth in her autobiography. 
 
 The hottest argument, with the whole set against 
 me headed by Miss Addams, flared up concerning 
 corporeal punishment in the Public Schools, which 
 I held could not be wholly dispensed with, though
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 507 
 
 the abuse of it should be carefully guarded against. 
 Miss Addams turned on me a look of sour severity, 
 so I thought, as she propounded : ' ' Then you hold 
 that the child has not a moral nature. " " Most cer- 
 tainly it has," I replied, "and the best way to 
 bring that out is to let the child feel from the 
 start the penalty for transgression. I know it, I 
 have tested the principle a hundred times on my 
 pupils, and even on my own babes, and, I may add, 
 especially on myself. Furthermore I believe that 
 the chief discipline of the World's History is the 
 bringing home to the guilty nation its wrongful 
 deed through war. ' ' 
 
 That was enough for the great pacifist, if I may 
 use a word more common now than it was then. 
 Her sideling neck stiffened stronger than I ever 
 saw it do before, as she uttered her new Isaian 
 prophecy of universal peace, which has not been 
 fulfilling itself in these recent years. I as an old 
 Union soldier could hardly confess to having done 
 wrong in what I deemed the best deed of my life, 
 nor was I yet ready to promise that I would never 
 do so again in response to a similar call of my 
 country. 
 
 Thus Hull House had given me about as much of 
 its experience as I could swallow for once, and I be- 
 gan to feel ready to quit. Still I believe in it 
 within its sphere, it has its place, and scatters its 
 blessing to many poor souls otherwise unblest. But 
 it is not all of the world, not indeed all of society. 
 Miss Addams, if I construe her word, writ, and
 
 508 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 deed correctly, would turn the whole universe into 
 one vast Hull House for the grand betterment of 
 God's creation. With the overmastering but one- 
 sided zeal of the great reformer, she thinks to 
 transform the entire institutional order of man, as 
 it has evolved through the long ages, into one all- 
 embracing Social Settlement, of which she naturally 
 would have to be the head, for no man could run 
 it. Thus ought to be realized the grand panecea 
 for all war, poverty, social wrong, and the rest of 
 human ills. Very charitable is all this, so much so 
 that it leaves out justice and its institution, the 
 State. In fact she seemingly prefers the lame 
 ducks of society to its self-supporting promoters, 
 and in more than one passage she appears to main- 
 tain that they are the real source of all the great 
 movements of civilization past and present. And in- 
 deed what would this Hull House be without them, 
 and perchance Miss Addams herself? Now I be- 
 lieve in helping the lame ducks of the Social Sys- 
 tem, and loving them, if you can; still I have to 
 confess that to me a lame duck is still a lame duck, 
 though one of the Lord's own creatures, and not to 
 be neglected. 
 
 So about the holidays 1893-4, I gave up my resi- 
 dence in the Settlement, and went back to my little 
 corner in Rookery Square, carrying my valise and 
 also a bran-new casket of valuable experiences. A 
 good deal of the Russian consciousness with its anti- 
 institutional drive westward I had felt or rather 
 iorefelt in the bud, which later put forth some as-
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 509 
 
 tonishing flowers at Hull House. More than 
 enough of Tolstoy, and altogether too much of 
 Kropotkin, and others of his countrymen aflame 
 with the grand Slavic negation which now is burn- 
 ing up Russia and threatens Europe with conflagra- 
 tion if not America, singed me then a little in ad- 
 vance, and bade me hasten away. Indeed I have 
 sometimes thought, that Miss Addams herself, at 
 the deepest well-head of her spirit is more Russian 
 than American, which she has God's right to be, 
 such being her own birthright. 
 
 Still I continued to go back to Hull House now 
 and then, and to give little chats on literary themes, 
 for it had cultural sides which appealed to me 
 strongly. Sometimes a discussion would spring up ; 
 the last tilt was, as I remember, over the Haymar- 
 ket anarchists, whose punishment I deemed to have 
 already shown itself a great social blessing. But 
 Hull House was not of that mind, nor was Gov- 
 ernor Altgeld. But let this pass. 
 
 Hull House gave me an impressive living lesson 
 in what I may call Institutional Science, chiefly by 
 way of question marks. For I felt there under- 
 neath all its open charity the secret continual chal- 
 lenge of the whole established Social Order. Such 
 a challenge drove me to think out and finally to 
 write out the significance of that World of Institu- 
 tions in which I had to live, and which mankind 
 in its ages-long troubled history had evolved for 
 me and for itself. To be sure the subject was not 
 new even in my case, for I had inherited a wrestle
 
 510 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 with the right of Institutions practically from my 
 College days of Oberlin and from the Civil War, 
 and theoretically from the Hegelian philosophic 
 epoch of St. Louis. But Hull House brought back 
 and vivified to me the problem for a renewed grap- 
 ple, especially in its economic aspect. Thus it wove 
 its strand of experience into this "Writer of Books 
 for some future self-expression. And very sugges- 
 tive of the time is the astonishing career of Miss 
 Addams herself, who has shown the insight and the 
 capacity to seize the universal psychologic conjunc- 
 ture to make herself a world-character, and her 
 work a world-cause. She, most militant pacifist and 
 bravest battling peace-maker rises up the female 
 embodiment of to-day's deepest inner, even bleed- 
 ing self-contradiction. 
 
 Still pacific Hull House, starting its work some 
 few years after furious Haymarket, where the two 
 hostile opposites of social Chicago clinched in down- 
 right warfare, and shed each other's blood, may 
 well seem a mediator worthily attempting to soften 
 if not to solve the bitter strife between Greed and 
 Need, or more deeply between Brain and Brawn. 
 In this earlier more violent and sanguinary contest 
 I too had my living experience for many months, 
 and labored to take to heart and head its lesson. 
 A brief note of this occurrence also cannot be left 
 out of the history of the present autobiographic 
 chameleon whose nature is to reflect in writ all the 
 shifting hues of its changeful environment. 
 
 III. The Haymarket Bomb. Just one little bomb,
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 511 
 
 yet most famous of all, whose explosion still keeps 
 echoing through Time ! I heard ominous rumblings 
 underneath the social fabric, when I first became 
 acquainted with Chicago in 1884-5. Undoubtedly 
 murmurs are everywhere and at all times bubbling 
 up out of some discontented souls; but in these 
 sounds of which I speak lurked a threat which al- 
 ways seemed to be getting louder and more menac- 
 ing. Accordingly I started to probe for the source, 
 and found what may be called a spiritual bomb- 
 factory, which I inspected and watched a number 
 of months, till finally a literal bomb exploded one 
 evening in the Hay market. 
 
 There was, at this time, an unrestrained propa- 
 gandism of violence against the existent Social 
 Order carried on by the spoken and written word as 
 well as by action in the way of strikes. As far as I 
 could discover, the movement was then chiefly con- 
 fined to one class of workmen, the German foreign- 
 ers, who always came to the fore as leaders. The 
 intellectual center was a newspaper in German, the 
 Arbeiter Zeitung, or the Laborers Journal, which 
 I read diligently for its record of daily doings as 
 well as for its doctrine. Its appeal was to the pre- 
 vailing social discontent, largely imported from 
 Germany, and its argument ran with manifold dis- 
 cordant variations : You, poor fellows, are not to 
 blame for your condition, but society is — rise ! Also 
 could be found in that sheet new interpretations 
 and applications of Karl Marx, author of the last 
 German Bible, the economic, and the grand organ-
 
 512 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 izer of Labor 's Gigantomaehia against the so-called 
 Capitalistic World-Order. Of course I started at 
 once to search this new Scripture. Moreover there 
 was one strong prominent character at the center 
 of the agitation here in Chicago, a speaker and 
 writer of massive vehemence and soul-corroding bit- 
 terness, August Spies, chief editor of the aforesaid 
 newspaper, and the outstanding figure of anar- 
 chistic Far-West. I pondered his articles and 
 speeches, which reeked with hate of American so- 
 cial and political institutions. Especially the pop- 
 ular vote, or the sovereignty of the people he as- 
 sailed with his whole deluge of venom. Under- 
 neath all his negations which constituted his chief 
 mental outfit, I tried to dig up what he was really 
 after, to find his positive aim, if he had any, to 
 reach down to his ultimate psychology. As far as I 
 could make out, he still possessed the German im- 
 perial consciousness, perhaps more imperial he was 
 than the German Emperor himself; only he was 
 himself to be the dictator, the true Kaiser. I 
 thought I had noticed quite the same underlying 
 tendency in Marx, though the autocracy was to be 
 that of the Proletariat, not that of Junkerdom, of 
 the lowest social class, not of the supposedly high- 
 est. But class-rule it was, and with a vengeance, 
 headed by its own autocrat, who in the present 
 case was to be none other than Herr August Spies 
 himself, the panarchic hero of the anarchic uni- 
 verse. 
 Once more I began going to German beer houses,
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 513 
 
 dance halls, singing societies, which were strown 
 particularly along Milwaukee Avenue, where I 
 might commune again with the present German 
 spirit, and drink down its freshest outpourings 
 along with a glass of fluid Gambrinus, the only God 
 of the otherwise godless. I tried to penetrate into 
 the most secret organizations of this latest Teu- 
 tonic movement on American soil; especially I, as 
 pedagogue, sought to catch an inner glimpse of the 
 new educative institute of anarchy, known as the 
 Lehr-und-Wehr-Verein, but I never succeeded in 
 passing the suspicious guard, often composed of 
 mere children, who at the presence of any stranger 
 would run to headquarters and shout the signal : a 
 spy, a spy. Report further said that this institute 
 was composed of groups of revolutionaries banded 
 together for the purpose of training not only in 
 military drill for the coming overturn, but also in 
 the true doctrine of the Marxian faith. So indeed 
 its name hints. And everywhere in that locality I 
 seemed to breathe an atmosphere of suspicion, 
 which as I construed it, arose from some unspoken 
 but meditated dark deed which lurked in the soul 
 of that community, and which, though subtly se- 
 creted, gave this outer indication of what lay in- 
 side the heart, in spite of all its self-suppression. 
 A single typical experience may be set down. I had 
 observed furtive eye-shots darting at me with a 
 distrustful leer once when I was sitting at a table 
 on which a glass of beer foamed before me as I 
 picked up a newspaper ; Graef e 's hall, I think, was
 
 514 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 the name of the place, a famous resort of anar- 
 chists in those days. A rather savage heavy Ger- 
 man moustache approached me, out of whose hid- 
 den depths flowed the brogued English words with 
 a note of authority: "What are you doing here?" 
 I took a sip of beer and held up before my censor 
 the Arbeiter Zeitung, making answer in German: 
 "I am reading this leading article by Spies; good 
 stuff, is it not ? ' ' Then I turned back to the printed 
 page. The man moved off foiled but still watch- 
 ful, whereupon I threw down the paper and quit 
 the place, having gotten a fair lesson in the thing I 
 came for. 
 
 But what a contrast between this present Chicago 
 German experience and that former St. Louis Ger- 
 man experience of twenty years since, when I be- 
 came Germanized for a decade or so along with 
 the city itself! The difference stood forth to me 
 very significant, perchance prophetic. I saw and 
 felt now negative Germany, not simply in theory, 
 but in practice, or at least the deeply destructive 
 element in German spirit. Through the articles of 
 Spies I seemed to hear chiefly variations on those 
 all-telling words of Mephistopheles, in which the 
 new Destroyer defines himself: 
 
 let bin der Geist der steis verneint. 
 
 But in the St. Louis time Germany was seen and 
 realized more in her positive character; even her 
 rather negative Forty-Eighters had fought vali- 
 antly for the Union, and thus had helped do the
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 515 
 
 great constructive deed of the age. And the pro- 
 nounced German strain in our St. Louis Movement 
 was decidedly affirmative in its studies of Philos- 
 ophy and Literature, represented chiefly by Hegel 
 and Goethe, both of whom show the Destroyer in- 
 deed, but show him also undone, yea self-undone. 
 But at Chicago I came into living contact with the 
 furious German world-negation, which now some 
 thirty years later in its own Teutonic home has 
 wrought itself out to an awful culminant catas- 
 trophe, a kind of national Ragnarok, of which I at 
 present deem that I felt the early possibility, and 
 even saw the presaging foreshow in that Haymar- 
 ket explosion. 
 
 It was a little before midnight May 3rd, 1886, as 
 I lay awake in bed, somewhat worried over the 
 dread social menace of the time, when I heard a 
 newsboy on the street cry out: "Extra! big riot! 
 bomb thrown ! many cops killed ! " I at once sprang 
 up, jumped into some clothes, and hurried to the 
 scene of the disaster, where I found the excitement 
 already simmering down and the police in control; 
 once or twice an ambulance dashed by, taking some 
 wounded man to the hospital. I walked back to my 
 room a mile or so distant, with no little meditation 
 on what seemed the new duty suddenly risen before 
 me. Not since the attack on Fort Sumter, twenty 
 years before, had I felt such a seething crisis in my- 
 self and in my environment. No sleep for me that 
 night, till I had found my resolution, and had pre- 
 pared to carry it out.
 
 516 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 In the morning I hastened to a foster-brother of 
 mine, then a lawyer of Chicago, John S. Cooper, 
 who had fought through the Civil War and from 
 a private had risen to be a Colonel, winning great 
 credit for himself and bringing honor to his 
 friends and relatives. Patriotic soul he was, that 
 John Snider Cooper, named, I must add, after my 
 grandfather. I found him ready, and my first 
 words were : ' ' Cooper, we must again enlist. You, 
 as superior officer, must take command of the regi- 
 ment." "Yes," says he, "the old war feeling is 
 throbbing within me, something must be done at 
 once." A brief talk over a plan we had, when I 
 left to inspect further the situation. I hastened to 
 the central scene of action ; especially I took a sur- 
 vey of the locality of the Arbeiter Zeitung, where 
 I heard that Spies and a number of anarchists had 
 been arrested, without any resistance from them or 
 their supporters. 
 
 A little inquiry brought out another fact. I 
 found that many veterans had come down town 
 that morning with the same feeling which I had — - 
 perhaps 20,000 of us were then living in Chicago. 
 As the Civil War had been largely fought by young 
 men and boys, these veterans were mostly in the 
 middle forties at this time, well-drilled and still 
 ready to fall into line; experienced officers, indeed 
 just our own old ones, were also on the spot. Thus 
 a kind of standing army sprang to arms, or was 
 on the run to spring at the call of the moment. But 
 there was no need; the roused military spirit had
 
 SOCIAL CHICAGO. 517 
 
 already done its work. I once more made the tour 
 of the beerhouses of the anarchistic quarter; they 
 had lost their loud aggressive tone, being quite re- 
 duced to a whisper around the tables ; to me there 
 seemed everywhere in that locality a cowed atmos- 
 phere which was oppressive. No danger of any out- 
 break or violence could arise from such people; 
 moreover their leaders were in jail, to whom the 
 law was now to measure out guilt and punishment. 
 The great trial of the anarchists started and 
 roused an interest all round the earth. What will 
 free America do with such a class of offenders? 
 What autocratic Russia and Germany had done, 
 was well known. The trial was open and not hur- 
 ried, though it was not allowed to lag. It lasted 
 some eighteen months and passed through the whole 
 scale of the organized Judiciary of the land, from 
 humblest to highest — through the City's, the 
 State's and the Nation's tribunals of justice, cul- 
 minating in the Supreme Court of the United 
 States. Such was the hardest blow that ever struck 
 anarchism, though of course it was not killed, for it 
 is still alive and at work to-day, being continually 
 imported. But in Chicago from now on the Social- 
 ists sharply discriminated themselves from the An- 
 archists, which distinction had not been clearly 
 drawn before in the minds of these people. Some 
 time after this event I heard Tommy Morgan, chief 
 Socialist orator of the city, declare in a speech with 
 emphasis: "it was wrong to throw that bomb!" 
 Whereupon loud applause from his socialistic au-
 
 518 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 dience, mingled, it is true, with some hisses, to 
 which he replied by a still stronger iteration of his 
 damnatory judgment. 
 
 1S0 the Anarchists were tried, condemned and 
 executed — truly a world-historical act, at which in 
 an onlooking way I was present from start to finish, 
 and went through its numerous ups and downs al- 
 ways with some nervously responsive excitation. At 
 last came with a bright Sunday the funeral of 
 Spies and his companions, which was to be the 
 occasion of a public demonstration. Again I went 
 up Milwaukee Avenue to the place of the coffins, and 
 watched the processions of various German so- 
 cieties forming behind the hearses to the tune of 
 the Marseillaise. All moved orderly, solemn, taci- 
 turn; I marched alongside on the pavement. As 
 we approached the center of the city, I saw an old 
 grizzled soldier in Grand Army uniform leap to 
 the front of the whole procession, carrying and 
 waving an American flag, the only one in sight; I 
 think all banners and mottoes had been forbidden 
 by the police. The grand marshal rode up to the 
 old soldier and bade him put away his flag, where- 
 upon fully fifty young fellows sprang from the 
 sidewalks around him, shouting "Hold fast to Old 
 Glory, we'll protect you." It looked like a squall 
 at first, but the marshal seeing that resolute band 
 and hearing also the hand-clapping and bravos from 
 the pavements and from the windows of the near- 
 by buildings, turned his horse about, and let the 
 old soldier with his flag head the procession.
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 519 
 
 Such was the deepest, bloodiest, most tragical 
 drama in the life of social Chicago during my time 
 or her time up to date, revealing in its massive, 
 resistless, ever-advancing sweep the fatal round of 
 deadly social Guilt and equally deadly Retribution. 
 As I pondered the onward march of its varied 
 scenes and acts from prologue till exit, I could 
 not help saying to myself in accord with my liter- 
 ary bent: "This real dramatic cycle is as com- 
 plete as a Shakespearian tragedy, to whose truth 
 for all times and lands it bears eternal witness, and 
 writes me the most convincing commentary." 
 
 So from this immediate, actual, desperate life of 
 social Chicago written in literal blood and anguish, 
 I turn for relief and for hope 's renewal to the ideal 
 presentment of man's entire institutional order of 
 the ages, as revealed in the Literary Bibles, whose 
 spirit helps heal the riven heart to wholeness again. 
 And these my own Self's restoratives I now follow 
 up with my supreme attempt to impart their eternal 
 worth as well as their spiritual anchorage to clash- 
 ing vortical Chicago, right in the heart of her 
 furious maelstrom. Of which work I hope to be 
 able to chalk down some perceptible even if faint 
 outlines in what follows. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Chicago Literaey Schools 
 
 If I can only make this section worthy of ife 
 theme, or equal to my conception of it, I shall not
 
 520 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 fail still to grow in the good graces of myself de- 
 spite my age and other frailties. For we are now 
 to have not merely one but eight successive Liter- 
 ary Schools in Chicago, one for each year between 
 1887 and 1895. I may in confidence whisper to my 
 reader that personally I deem this the greatest 
 practical single achievement of my life, as I look 
 back at it now through the intervening and pos- 
 sibly magnifying lenses of three decades. Mark, I 
 say practical, since it was my deed not only in 
 plan but also in execution, though I had the most 
 loyal assistance of my pupils, without whom I 
 could have done nothing. Moreover it was the de- 
 cided culmination of this Epoch of the Literary 
 Bibles, to which I had devoted such a considerable 
 fragment of my terrestrial existence. I hold, too, 
 that our St. Louis Movement, in so far as it flowered 
 along my life's path, found its supreme fruitage in 
 these Chicago Literary Schools, even if it had to 
 leave its native soil to attain its last growth and 
 ripeness. To be sure theoretically, or in the line 
 of Thought, I was destined to move forward to a 
 new and doubtless higher fulfilment — much to my 
 suprise, I can say, for I considered that my Book 
 of Life would be closed and sealed when I had 
 written and printed and planted my volumes of 
 Commentaries, or that which was for me, in the 
 way of self-expression, my new Literary Bible. But 
 how that illusion was undermined and blown up, 
 is to be told as a part of my future's battle. 
 What, then, was this Literary School which
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 521 
 
 bulks so tyrannically huge in my retrospect and 
 perchance in my self-esteem? Let my reader not 
 be disappointed at my small description of it, 
 since it was only a course of ten lectures confined to 
 one week, but repeated year after year eight times, 
 beginning usually Monday evening and concluding 
 Saturday morning during the holidays, with an 
 hour's discussion after an hour's lecture — time- 
 limit not rigidly adhered to. The subject was al- 
 ways one of the four Literary Bibles illustrated by 
 the best expounders obtainable as our lecturers. 
 My idea was to focus intense concentration upon 
 one great theme, upon one Great Man for one brief 
 week, with illumination flashing upon the one cen- 
 ter from diverse masterful minds. My experience 
 of Concord had told me that the sessions lasting 
 several weeks were too long, the subjects too dis- 
 cursive, though the leading theme may have re- 
 mained Philosophy. Hence toward the close there 
 was always a letting down from the excessive ten- 
 sion; we fagged out and then we dragged out. It 
 was a prime point accordingly to keep that Chi- 
 cago audience keyed up while the School lasted, 
 but it must not last too long. 
 
 Still the chief shortcoming of the Concord pro- 
 gram, which I watched with no little care, sprang 
 from the lack of previous preparation in its stu- 
 dents and listeners. For instance, I felt certain that 
 half of the audience during the Concord Goethe 
 School had never read Faust, or at most only 
 in a very desultory way. Indeed when I lectured
 
 522 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 on Shakespeare, using some of the incidents of 
 Love's Labors Lost for my purpose, I found reason 
 to believe that not one in four of my hearers had 
 ever grappled with that somewhat difficult and less 
 known play. And when Harris talked his unmixed 
 Hegel to that mixed crowd, though he tried to 
 popularize his ponderous nomenclature, and did to 
 a certain extent, I could see by the corrugated 
 foreheads and tensely shutting eyelids, not to men- 
 tion faces of relaxed despair, that quite everybody 
 there needed some preliminary training to the hard 
 language and to the still harder thought. Accord- 
 ingly I determined through my classes to prepare 
 the way for the Chicago School so that its lec- 
 turers would have a body of listeners who had not 
 only read but had studied the masterpieces which 
 were the subject-matter under consideration. Thus 
 I had actually drilled some one or two hundred 
 good people in the manual of the Literary Bibles, 
 so that they seemed to me like a company of sol- 
 diers ready for the onset when the hour struck. 
 
 And the hour did strike when I resolved to hold 
 a Literary School in Chicago during Christmas 
 holiday week, 1887. The subject chosen was Dante, 
 for a number of excellent reasons. I had my little 
 army sufficiently trained and well in hand; I saw 
 that they knew enough to make themselves not 
 only appreciative hearers, but even fair judges of 
 all that might be said. And they had at least the 
 Sniderian standard by which they could test all 
 the speakers. In fact, I wished to give them a
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 523 
 
 chance just through this School to break over the 
 bounds of my doctrine if they found anything bet- 
 ter. And a few did. I have sometimes wondered 
 at myself in this role of disciplinarian. Was it the 
 result of my being a schoolmaster? But the other 
 lecturers were also pedagogues by profession. Now, 
 as far as I know, I was the only man among them 
 who had been a soldier, who had drilled and com- 
 manded fighters in the tussle of war. That may 
 have impressed its lasting lesson upon me, so that 
 when I surveyed the mighty fortress of ignorance 
 and of philistinism called Chicago, I knew that I 
 must have a disciplined soldiery to assault even any 
 little outwork or bastion of it with the least hope 
 of success. Let the pre-cautious reader not neglect 
 my dates, recalling that I first appeared in Chi- 
 cago in 1884, and hence had been training my peo- 
 ple off and on for three years before the first Liter- 
 ary School. 
 
 1 must by no means forget to mention that the 
 active center of my following was composed chiefly 
 of Kindergartners, who had been more or less 
 directly connected with our St. Louis Movement 
 through Miss Blow. About this time we had 
 started a new Kindergarten College in Chicago, 
 which remained the inspiring sustainer as well as 
 the pushing financial promoter of all these eight 
 Literary Schools, while developing with zeal and 
 ability its own special work. The official heads of 
 this Kindergarten work were Miss Elizabeth Har- 
 rison and Mrs. J. N. Crouse.
 
 524 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 The Director of the Literary Schools I titled my- 
 self, for I knew from experience that they had to 
 be directed and stabilized by a single hand not 
 shaky. The Milwaukee affair had vividly lessoned 
 me that one captain must take charge; or more 
 particularly stated, that I must make the program, 
 select the speakers, and preside over the sessions. 
 At the same time my trained auxiliaries must let 
 themselves be felt in support as the very soul of 
 the audience. I knew Davidson's tendency to de- 
 flect the established course aside to his own ends, 
 he being by nature a breacher and always knowing 
 better than the authority at the helm. His part, 
 however, could not be filled by any other lecturer, 
 and I took a kind of pleasure in trying on him my 
 new well-bitted bridle. Of course I did not ex- 
 pect at the start that the School would acquire a 
 momentum so imperious that it would insist on re- 
 peating itself eight times before stopping, or even 
 four times. I only wished to get through the one 
 time in safety. 
 
 But why choose Dante as the starter ? Foremost 
 rose the reason that the old Florentine poet would 
 furnish in advance the best material for making 
 the best School, and the least hazard could we dare 
 take at the opening plunge. Harris and Davidson, 
 I knew, had excellent work in manuscript on 
 Dante, which they could draw on, and which they 
 had already tested at Concord. Moreover the psy- 
 chological condition of the two men was not to be 
 neglected: both had strongly Danteized, had even
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 525 
 
 Catholicized almost to the stepping off edge, but 
 had refused to take the last leap. This signifies 
 that both looked on their favorite poet as a kind of 
 Bible, in fact as their one Literary Bible ; they were 
 not merely profound and learned expositors of the 
 text, but were believers with the faith and love of 
 disciples for their master. Such were the men I 
 wanted to give tone to the task. I cared not for 
 the usual sleek-groomed literateur who could write 
 upon call a well-worded essay for the magazine. A 
 far deeper requirement I exacted for the Literary 
 School, a biblical test. These two men had, each 
 in his own way, loved and lived Dante for years, 
 and showed the fact in their writ. To be sure, 
 from my point of view they both were a little nar- 
 row; they had realized only one Literary Bible, 
 while the consensus of the best judges of all time 
 had stamped upon four their canonical seal of 
 approval. 
 
 To these two male eminences, I wished to add 
 the eminent woman of our St. Louis Movement, 
 Miss Blow, also a strong religious Danteizer, who 
 had written and published her book on Italy's su- 
 preme poem. I sent her an urgent invitation beg- 
 ging her to be present, and I especially stressed the 
 fact that Dr. Harris, her tutelary, would be on 
 hand to help give character to the School. But the 
 reply came back to me that she was too unwell to 
 take the journey. I was eager to secure Miss 
 Blow's presence for another reason: the rank and 
 file of my fighting army were mainly Kindergart-
 
 526 THE ST- LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ners, all of them Miss Blow's pupils, or pupils of 
 her pupils. Hence her name was a familiar word of 
 magic to them, and also in her the woman-soul 
 would be transcendently represented on the pro- 
 gram. She had done the great educational deed of 
 the time, and she desterved all the recognition 
 which the School might be able to give. If I recol- 
 lect aright, I wrote her a second letter, asking 
 simply for a paper, even an old one, to be read in 
 her name and honor at one of the sessions. But to 
 this repeated request she gave no response. 
 
 I shall, however, acknowledge that I had my own 
 little personal satisfaction in sending this friendly 
 missive to Miss Blow, inviting her to take part in a 
 Dante School under my supervision. I thought that 
 it might do her some good to find out that I would 
 not stay in the petty pigeon-hole into which she. 
 during her autocracy had tried to thrust me at St. 
 Louis. She would also see my enthusiastic band of 
 soldiery largely composed of her own Kindergarten 
 followers. Even Dr. Harris would now do his good 
 share under the new Director, whom she had once 
 tabooed, forbidding him her Dante class. To be 
 sure the experience might be a little Purgatory for 
 that pride which I had heard her denounce as the 
 basic human sin, in a kind of self-confession I 
 thought, though fulmined with a Dantean vehe- 
 mence of damnation. Moreover she would see on 
 the program practically the whole St. Louis Move- 
 ment gathered up from its dispersion and trans- 
 ferred to Chicago, as it starts on a new stage of its
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 527 
 
 evolution in a new locality under a new helmsman. 
 To have seen and shared in all that, ought to have 
 widened her horizon a little somewhat, wherein 
 might have lain for her a blessing. 
 
 Thus I sought to collect the scattered members 
 of the former St. Louis Movement as they lay be- 
 strown in every direction over the land, and to 
 unite them in a second growth and restoration of 
 our cause. "We could not go back to our starting 
 place and try St. Louis again with any hope, for 
 her city-soul, quite collapsed, seemed to lie pros- 
 trate in a kind of benumbed mental lethargy, the 
 reaction, as I construe the case, from her Great 
 Disillusion. Still I could find here and there on 
 my occasional visits to the fast-ageing town, some 
 lingering sparks of the old fire which might, after 
 the smouldering years, be once more kindled into 
 a fresh flame of her spirit's revival. But at present 
 she had not recovered from that volcanic explo- 
 sion which, among its other effects, had torn our 
 St. Louis group to very tatters, and had hurled us 
 piecemeal to the four winds of heaven. 
 
 Let me here confess that I indulged in some quiet, 
 harmless self-gratulation at the fact that I stead- 
 fastly refused to flee backwards to earlier, less ad- 
 vanced forms of associated life after the St. Louis 
 cataclysm. Quite the opposite was the trend of my 
 associates. For instance, Harris betook himself to 
 idyllic Concord and homed there ; Davidson turned 
 first to small rural Farmington, and then escaped 
 to the remoter woody mountain of Glenmore in the
 
 528 T HE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Adirondacks for the purpose of forming his ideal 
 fellowship away from civilization ; Miss Blow cut 
 loose from all her St. Louis prestige, social, educa- 
 tional, literary, and retired to her secluded nook at 
 Cazenovia, New York, where she also in time will 
 hold sessions for her disciples; and my dear giant 
 Brockmeyer made the completest, most gigantically 
 uncivilized retreat of all, when he fled to the Red- 
 men of Indian Territory, going back as it were into 
 the very cave of primordial Polyphemus. But it 
 lay in me somehow to speed the other way, along 
 with or perchance ahead of civilization ; so I flung 
 myself into the Chicago maelstrom, the dizzying, 
 still crude human vortex in the forefront of the 
 World's History. That was my fascination and 
 remained so during many years. For the problem 
 to my mind ran : how can I establish a little solid 
 isle of eternity in this roaring, raging, ever chang- 
 ing time-stream, which might dash and foam about 
 the same in vain. As already recounted, I sought 
 to plant right in this topmost frothing tide of all 
 ephemerality the most permanent immortal thing 
 hitherto evolved by our race, namely its Literary 
 Bibles. But I needed the best help of these very 
 people who had run away from civilization, who 
 had felt its sharp backstroke and had fled from its 
 trying ordeal to places of safety. To use our 
 familiar American soldier-slang, coined and often 
 needed during the Civil "War, they had all ske- 
 daddled from that first fight, each to his own 
 separate cover.
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 529 
 
 Thus I rallied these fugitives, so let me call 
 them in my conceited simile, all of them skilled in 
 my work, and specially capable of performing 
 their new allotted task. They had been themselves 
 leaders, and they were still to lead, but under 
 orders. I may summarize the muster in the fol- 
 lowing soldierly nomenclature: (1) The Captain, 
 otherwise called the Director; (2) The subordinate 
 officers, that is, the lecturers; (3) The rank and 
 file, that is, the trained company of hearers in the 
 audience: (4) The objective of the campaign — 
 Chicago and its dependencies, or some fragment of 
 the same. 
 
 Under some such arrangement, destiny decreed 
 that we were to have eight Literary Schools in 
 yearly succession at Chicago, as before said. This 
 half-military organization showed itself strong 
 enough to uphold and even to propagate its form 
 and its matter, or the How and the "What of it- 
 self. Some attempts were made to change it and 
 to undermine it, still it held its ground, till its 
 task was accomplished. It remains to give some 
 condensed account of these separate Schools, since 
 each had its own outer circumstances as well as 
 inner character. Necessarily the manner of execu- 
 tion in each case would be different, and also the 
 success. 
 
 The reasons have already been given for making 
 our start with Dante. I had been tentatively whis- 
 pering my design perhaps a year beforehand in 
 order to test and to inflame if possible, the zeal of
 
 550 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 my classes. But early in the fall before the School, 
 I issued the first public announcement, and let it 
 appear as a local item in the newspapers. 
 
 I. The Dante School. Before me lies the old pro- 
 gram, tattered and yellowed by age, and still it 
 seems to look up at me with a wrinkled twinkle of 
 triumph. It recalls, however, the many obstacles, 
 vexations, anxieties of the encounter, for even well- 
 wishers were everywhere nodding no with their 
 looks and often piteously smiling at me as a 
 fatuous visionary, hinting ' ' ahead of the age ; your 
 fine Literary Bibles will not do for this crass pork- 
 packing Chicago, the world's greatest business 
 hustler." It should be remembered in the present 
 connection that this was years in advance of the 
 Chicago "World's Fair, and long before to-day's 
 Chicago University had been thought of. But the 
 vast majority of our unintentional friends were the 
 scoffers headed by the newspapers, who screeched 
 the opposite note: "Altogether behind the times; 
 your old musty books of the past are not fit eveo 
 for the commonest Chicago wrapping-stuff. Away 
 with you, miserable idealist ! ' ' All the more deter- 
 mined charged forward our small battalion of sol- 
 diers, and massed themselves in military array for 
 the fight, just because of the opposition, which 
 thus had the effect of uniting more intensively our 
 little army for the attack. 
 
 Here the heralded program and my curious 
 reader may be brought face to face for a little look 
 at each other.
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 531 
 
 Literary School. 
 TEN LECTURES ON DANTE. 
 
 Will be given in the Lecture Hall of the Art Institute, 
 
 corner Van Buren St. and Michigan Ave., during 
 
 the Holidays, 1887, by Dr. W. T. Harris, of 
 
 Concord, Mass.; Prof. Thomas Davidson, 
 
 of Orange, N. J.; Prof. L. P. Soldan, 
 
 of St. Louis; Miss M. E. Beedy, 
 
 of Chicago, and Mr. D. J. 
 
 Snider, of Chicago. 
 
 Monday Evening, December 26th Mr. D. J. Snider 
 
 Dante's Place in the World's Literature 
 
 Tuesday Morning, December 27th Dr. W. T. Harris 
 
 Dante's Inferno 
 
 Tuesday Evening, December 27th 
 
 — Prof. Thomas Davidson 
 The Teachers of Dante 
 Wednesday Morning, December 28th. . .Miss M. E. Beedy 
 The Symbols of Punishment in Dante's Inferno 
 
 Wednesday Evening, December 28th Dr. W. T. Harris 
 
 The Mythology of Dante 
 
 Thursday Morning, December 29th 
 
 — Prof. Thomas Davidson 
 Virgil and Beatrice as Guides 
 
 Thursday Evening, December 29th 
 
 — Prof. Louis P. Soldan 
 
 Friday Morning, December 30th Dr. W. T. Harris 
 
 The Purgatorio and the Paradiso 
 
 Friday Evening, December 30th. .Prof. Thomas Davidson 
 
 The Vision of God — Interpretation of the Last Canto 
 
 of Paradiso 
 
 Saturday Morning, December 31st Mr. D. J. Snider 
 
 Discipline of the Purgatorio 
 
 D. J. Snider, Director of the School, Palmer House, 
 Chicago, Ills.
 
 532 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Let my circumspect reader take due note of 
 what is here announced. All these people set down 
 as lecturers were in one way or other connected 
 with the old St. Louis Movement, which was thus 
 celebrating in another city a kind of reunion or in- 
 deed a re-natal day of second birth, after some 
 twenty years of changeful destinies. Likewise we 
 all had been at first teachers in the Public Schools 
 of St. Louis ; in fact every one of us except Harris 
 had belonged to the High School, then the only 
 one in the city with a dozen to fifteen in the fac- 
 ulty. Uplifting days were those for our Public 
 School System, furnishing instruction not only to 
 the youth in charge, but to the grown people of 
 the community, indeed of the whole country. These 
 teachers pursued with zeal their regular vocation, 
 to which however, they added their cultural Super- 
 vocation, and through this service they were con- 
 secrated as members of the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 Now we are ready for the second fact indicated 
 in the above program, if we scrutinize it with care ; 
 none of these five St. Louis speakers hailed at this 
 time from St. Louis itself except Soldan, who had 
 only one lecture. Harris, Davidson, and myself 
 had alighted in very different spots after the St. 
 Louis upheaval ; Miss Beedy, a globe-rounder, mak- 
 ing a long detour especially through England, had 
 returned to America and had dropped down on 
 Chicago, where one day I was surprised to find her 
 teaching in a private school of the North Side. 
 Accordingly I summoned from the points of the
 
 TEE CEICAGO LITERARY 8CE00LS. 533 
 
 compass my trained lieutenants (so I may call 
 them for the nonce) to help me in this fresh onset 
 of our Movement, which now seemed about to per- 
 form the as yet highest achievement of its exist- 
 ence. 
 
 But my difficulties lay not alone with sodden 
 Chicago philistinism, which was an outside obstacle 
 and one to be expected. Right at the start I ran 
 against a snag on the inside with a sudden shock. 
 I sent an invitation to Harris first of all, as my 
 right-hand man, telling him also that Davidson 
 was to be his fellow-lecturer. Judge my astonish- 
 ment when his answer showed unwillingness, hesi- 
 tation, though not exactly downright refusal. He 
 balked at co-operating again with Davidson, whose 
 conduct had been so disloyal during the Concord 
 Dante School of the previous year, in starting a 
 little school of his own outside the regular lecture 
 course at his boarding-house. There were other 
 complaints against him, which Harris did not ex- 
 pand in detail, but of which I knew vaguely by 
 rumor. Still I never dreamed the snarl to be so 
 serious, though I was aware that it lay in David- 
 son's original make-up of nature to play such 
 tricks; he could not help starting a breach against 
 his own employers, and forming his own coterie of 
 admirers in opposition. 
 
 I wrote back to Harris that he must overcome 
 himself and come by all means; that a great op- 
 portunity had dropped on us all to get a new au- 
 dience in Chicago, which had always seemed for
 
 534 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 us, in our old St. Louis days, the city impossible; 
 that he would be welcomed by an eager and intelli- 
 gent band of listeners who knew of him and his 
 works, for I had not failed to tell them; that he 
 would be entertained at the house of a fine appre- 
 ciative lady, Mrs. J. N. Crouse, who was also deeply 
 interested in the Kindergarten. Moreover with 
 some emphasis I told him that I was Director of 
 the School, and would preside at every session, and 
 open every debate; that I believed I could keep 
 Davidson within limits, inasmuch as he was some- 
 what used to my authority, since I had been his 
 superior in the St. Louis High School, and had 
 frequently there set him to rights. I was aware 
 that he did not like me very well, chiefly on account 
 of these old memories; still I felt assured that he 
 would avoid a collision with me, who had invited 
 him and given him along with a fair recompense a 
 new field for propagating his ideas about his fa- 
 vorite book. To Harris I repeated that Davidson 
 filled a place in my program, and in the Dante 
 work generally, and also in the St. Louis Move- 
 ment, which could not be taken by any other per- 
 son. And may I breathe here an autobiographic 
 whisper that I took my secret pleasure in thus giv- 
 ing validity to a man not very congenial to me. 
 
 The happy response of Harris was his appear- 
 ance in person the day before the School opened. 
 I had a long talk with him about various subjects 
 of mutual interest; only once I touched upon the 
 Davidson matter, when he still showed the heat of
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 535 
 
 offense, but at the same time shut it off with his 
 strong self-suppression. Nothing further was said 
 on that sensitive point. I felt in his talk that he 
 deemed the Concord School to have done its work 
 and delivered its message, and that he was glad to 
 greet and to help its successor in the West. 
 
 A word about pay. I was determined not to be- 
 gin till the School could give a reasonable recom- 
 pense to its lecturers. Harris and Davidson com- 
 ing from a distance, received each one-hundred and 
 fifty dollars with free entertainment for their serv- 
 ices, and the other speakers in proportion. Cer- 
 tainly not a large sum for such a grade of brain- 
 work; still it was fair, and both expressed them- 
 selves as amply repaid. And I think they were. 
 They both gave generously of their time and men- 
 tality ; they had to earn a good share of their liveli- 
 hood, yet they also imparted their best without 
 price. I believe they would have come for noth- 
 ing, if I had asked them ; for both had along with 
 their moneyed vocation a moneyless Super-vocation 
 quite beyond all finance. But such alms from them 
 we could not afford to take — not I, not the School, 
 not Chicago. On this point likewise we were de- 
 termined to surpass Concord. Thus we preserved 
 our economic freedom, which also gave to me as 
 Director an added right of authority, which I felt 
 to be needed. 
 
 Finally the anxious moment arrived for the 
 opening of the School. Of course my faithful sol- 
 diery lined up on hand and took general charge;
 
 536 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 the seats of the limited hall were soon all taken, 
 and the crowd began to overflow at the door. Peo- 
 ple came whom none of us knew; several intro- 
 duced themselves who lived at a distance out of 
 town. The auspicious start kept on repeating us 
 good luck from day to day. The previous program 
 of lecturers with their subjects will give some no- 
 tion of the sweep of the course. 
 
 Both Harris and Davidson came fully prepared, 
 and were at their best. They carried the audience 
 along with themselves, and even more, I hold, the 
 audience carried them along with itself through its 
 appreciation and enthusiasm and unity of spirit. 
 The discussions were fully as instructive as the lec- 
 tures and perhaps more animated, for all three 
 of us (Harris, Davidson and myself) took occasion 
 to speak our minds upon one another's productions 
 with due recognition, but with unhesitating frank- 
 ness. Yet everything was said and done in the hap- 
 piest humor. No one man took possession of the 
 School, as I had seen Harris do at Concord and 
 also at Milwaukee, and rightly too, for he was the 
 best. But now the School as a whole was sovereign 
 enough over all its parts to dominate its strongest 
 men, while giving to each his due of worth. The 
 School felt itself to be the master of itself, and 
 every individual present had the same feeling. 
 The lectures which Harris then gave are essentially 
 what may be still found in his book, The Spiritual 
 Sense of Dante's Divine Comedy. This was doubt- 
 less the most enduring literary product of the
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 537 
 
 School, as it remains in to-day's book-market, hav- 
 ing passed through several editions. Davidson has 
 left no such printed work ; his fatality was that he 
 never gathered up and organized his much-scat- 
 tered Dante writings. Well, could he? 
 
 But undoubtedly the weakest lecture of the 
 School was that of our St. Louisan, Soldan, not then 
 Superintendent of Schools, but Principal of the 
 City Normal. I had invited him because I wished 
 St. Louis to have at least one local representative 
 on our program, for sake of contrast if nothing 
 else. And I knew that Soldan had in former years 
 given some study to Dante ; in the olden time of the 
 St. Louis Movement I had heard him read a brief 
 paper on the Divine Comedy to a little group of 
 us, one of whom was Davidson, who then and there 
 made fun of it, since he had not yet experienced 
 his grand conversion to and through Dante. Sol- 
 dan arrived in the morning of the day on whose 
 evening he was to lecture ; he came over to the Hall 
 to see what was going on, and panicky became his 
 surprise when he caught sight of that audience. I 
 met him at the door, and greeted him, inviting him 
 to take his seat on the platform with the other lec- 
 turers. His ruddy complexion took a flaming 
 glow, his quick breath jerked quicker, and his 
 gray-blue eyes scintillated and bulged from their 
 sockets, as he exclaimed: "Well, I never expected 
 this!" He listened to the lecture which was by 
 Davidson ; very uneasy and excited I noticed him 
 twitching about, as he looked into that mass of up-
 
 538 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 turned and discriminating faces, and caught their 
 response and felt the surge-like uplift of their 
 spirit. As soon as he could he slipped away with- 
 out hearing the discussion, and declined to be the 
 guest of one of our entertainers. He must have 
 pushed straightway for his hotel and have gone 
 to work with a kind of desperation. For he had 
 come without his manuscript and without much 
 preparation ; now he was to stand before that large 
 critical audience in competition with those emin- 
 ent rivals of his, Harris and Davidson, both well- 
 shotted to the very muzzle, and wrought up to 
 their highest by the School's spirit. In the even- 
 ing he read the hurried disjointed jottings which 
 he had evidently scribbled down at the hotel, and 
 added comments extempore to fill out the hour 
 allotted. Soldan came to this country from Ger- 
 many a young but grown man; he spoke English 
 with a perceptible accent at his best; on the whole 
 he wrote our language correctly, if not very idio- 
 matically. But now he was upset and flustered, 
 his foreign gutturals became more uncontrollable, 
 and he stammered and spoke thick, hesitating for 
 the right word; then his Germanisms in his Eng- 
 lish increased almost laughably with his excite- 
 ment, for naturally his mother-tongue rose first to 
 mind in his emergency. He had asked me in his 
 reply to my letter of invitation to wait for the 
 title of his subject, but he never sent it, and so the 
 program had to leave his theme a blank. He could 
 not quite push through to the close of his hour, but
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 539 
 
 gave up after some forty-five minutes or so, when 
 we all sprang to the discussion with a zest which I 
 hope relieved the speaker's embarrassment. The 
 fact is Soldan imagined the School to be like one 
 of our little St. Louis knots of philosophic duffers, 
 before whom he could at ease indulge in a desultory 
 zigzag chat — a bad mistake on his part. I pitied 
 him, for he was ambitious, if not a little jealous 
 of his two successful competitors. I resolved to 
 give him another chance that he might redeem 
 himself, for he had the ability. The next year at 
 Chicago we were to have Goethe ; I intended to as- 
 sign him a place on the program, with a gentle 
 hint that he must not let himself get caught again. 
 Something interfered with his coming, I do not 
 now remember what. But in the later Literary 
 Schools at St. Louis, I took pleasure in offering 
 him a part which he performed with distinction, 
 evidencing both thought and careful preparation. 
 So he showed the strength to retrieve himself com- 
 pletely. 
 
 The newspapers reported us fairly, with some 
 lapses as might be expected on such a subject. 
 Harris was the wise man here again, and looked 
 after his own report, making an abstract of his 
 lecture beforehand, and giving copies of it to the 
 reporters. The result was the press even in the 
 East took note of the marvelous fact that Chicago 
 had held a large and successful Dante School. The 
 tone on the whole was that of surprise and of 
 satirical raillery. But the New York Sun had an
 
 540 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 editorial on Chicago as the reformed gambler, hav- 
 ing been converted from maddest stock speculation 
 to the penitential journey through the Inferno, thus 
 viewing a panorama of all its sins. Somehow thus, 
 as I remember, ran the tirade, touched up with 
 contemptuous flings at the very idea of a Literary 
 School in such a literal hog-pen as Chicago. At 
 once our local newspapers took up the challenge 
 and tusked back with even greater swinishness, 
 while defending their city as the very home of the 
 higher culture of which the Dante School was only 
 a slight manifestation. Thus our venture won 
 fame all over the country, and obtained in our own 
 city a very warm laudatory defense which we 
 could never get before. In this way Dame Chi- 
 cago showed her civic trait of upholding her own 
 against outside attack, though otherwise ready to 
 tear the same to pieces. Somebody has said that 
 Dame St. Louis is endowed with the opposite ten- 
 dency: she will help the foreign assailant calum- 
 nate and harass her Great Man till the latter takes 
 to flight. The number of her famous people whom 
 she has persuaded to quit her has been sometimes 
 regarded as her most successful achievement. 
 
 The current of the School ran strong but har- 
 monious, both our protagonists doing their 
 worthiest and keeping the peace with each other — 
 for me a somewhat ticklish point, in view of their 
 past history. At last, however, during the eighth 
 lecture a little clash began to start over the meaning 
 of a philosophic term in Aristotle — an echo of one
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 541 
 
 of their hot Concord disputes about a word. Both 
 had been talking paradisaically upon the poet's 
 Paradiso, and had specially emphasized the grand 
 reconciliation in Heaven between the two famous 
 saintly Doctors of the Church, St. Thomas and St. 
 Bonaventura, canonized as the Doctor Angelicus 
 and the Doctor Seraphicus respectively. But with 
 a breath suddenly the waters began to get roiled. 
 I could see Harris turning a little whiter in the 
 lip at some challenging passionate assertion of red- 
 faced Davidson, now getting redder, when I, as 
 presiding officer, rose in the minute's lull and be- 
 gan to fantasy: "This is the auspicious moment, 
 and I propose that we re-enact the upper celestial 
 harmony here below, and that we now turn our 
 School into a kind of Paradiso by celebrating a 
 grand reconciliation between our St. Thomas (here 
 I pointed at Davidson) and our St. Bonaventura 
 (here I pointed at Harris) ; and I further propose 
 that our Angelic Doctor and our Seraphic Doctor 
 become followers of their great prototypes in 
 Heaven above, and sing each other's praises now in 
 our little earthly Paradise down here in Chicago." 
 The audience tittered a brief ripple, when David- 
 son jumped up exclaiming, "Well turned; still I 
 am not worthy of being called St. Thomas in spite 
 of my name, but our Doctor Harris is just St. Bona- 
 ventura, the Seraphic Doctor." 
 
 At this happy conclusion I dismissed the meeting, 
 for the time was up ; in the nick I made the an- 
 nouncement that this evening St. Thomas, our own
 
 542 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 new Angelic Doctor, would interpret for us that 
 most wonderful chapter of angelology, "the Vision 
 of God," in the last Canto of the Paradiso (see 
 program). The lecture was given, when Harris 
 rose and expressed the most unstinted absolute 
 praise for the performance I ever heard him utter. 
 Davidson replied in a similar vein of personal ad- 
 miration. We were all struck by the strange, quite 
 prophetic re-enactment and fulfilment of that old 
 saintly reconciliation, and went home wondering 
 in a half-startled spell. I believe that both after- 
 wards remained friends to life's close, with some 
 little tilts thrown in by the way to diversify old 
 Time's noiselessly monotonous footfalls. 
 
 The last lecture, which happened to be one of 
 mine, and the last discussion were over, and the 
 School felt itself somehow to have just begun. "It 
 cannot stop, we must have another," was the gen- 
 eral cry which focused into the ear of the Director. 
 A larger hall was also demanded. The little army, 
 conscious of its discipline, and having won its first 
 victory, declared itself not only willing but eager 
 for another campaign. The money and the effort 
 were pledged, and the spirit was at high tide. Ac- 
 cordingly I adjourned the audience with the words : 
 "Next season we shall have a Goethe School. But 
 remember, we must prepare for it better than ever 
 during the intervening year. A Literary Bible has 
 to be studied, taken to heart and mind, not merely 
 perused like the newspaper; indeed it should be 
 lived, if we wish to assimilate its true meaning and
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 543 
 
 worth. And now I shall give a parting compliment 
 to our distinguished lecturers, Dr. Harris and Prof. 
 Davidson, propounding to them this question : 
 "Will you come to us again next year? Tell us 
 on the spot." Both spoke up a hearty Yes, Yes, 
 and the first Dante School became a memory. 
 
 II. The Goethe School. I foreboded the hazard 
 of the enterprise, for I had already harvested a 
 goodly crop of experience through conducting 
 study-classes in the German poet. The deep-rooted 
 prejudice against him on the part of many culti- 
 vated people was well known to me personally as 
 well as by much printed damnation. Of the four 
 Literary Bibles that of Goethe was the most diffi- 
 cult in form, and the most questionable on account 
 of its content. Then it was the most recent of them 
 all ; Goethe himself had been dead only a little more 
 than fifty years when our Literary School opened. 
 Had there been time enough for his Last Judg- 
 ment ? Accordingly the problem was not yet fully 
 settled whether the High Literary Tribunal of the 
 Ages had conferred final canonization upon his 
 book as a Literary Bible. But I believed in him, 
 and our St. Louis Movement headed by Brockmeyer 
 had distinctively acclaimed Goethe's poetical su- 
 premacy. To be sure, in his cause the labor became 
 a kind of new apostolate, for Homer, Dante, and 
 Shakespeare were all accepted in the traditional 
 canon, but the battle for Goethe had not yet been 
 completely won, especially in our Anglo-Saxondom, 
 despite all the hot preachments of Thomas Carlyle,
 
 544 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 who, by the way, never tackled — I doubt if he ever 
 fully knew — Goethe's greatest book, Faust, as a 
 whole with its two Parts. In fact, the Second Part 
 of Faust was not published (excepting the Helena 
 episode) till the German literary Epoch of Carlyle 
 was on the decided decline into a very different 
 stage of his life 's evolution. 
 
 So it came about that the Goethe School fur- 
 nished to me the peculiar fascination of helping to 
 establish, or, if you will, to canonize the very last 
 Literary Bible of the centuries far out on the Chi- 
 cago frontier of civilization. I would hardly have 
 dared the trial, if it had not been for the all- 
 conquering energy generated by the Dante School, 
 somewhat in the community but specially in my 
 valiant little army. So I felt the courage to give to 
 these soldiers their hardest task, though I was well 
 aware that some of our best ladies, who were also 
 our most active campaigners and purse-holders, did 
 not like Goethe, questioned his life's worth, felt 
 shocked at his multitudinous love-affairs, particu- 
 larly at his treatment of Frederika, and at his rela- 
 tion to Christiane. Not a few had read the life of 
 Goethe by Lewes, then a common but damnable 
 book, in which lurks the author's bent to impress 
 the reader how much greater Lewes is than Goethe, 
 and that by right Goethe the lesser ought to be the 
 biographer of Lewes the Hero. 
 
 Still there can be no denying that Goethe ha* 
 the gift of begetting an unconquerable repugnance 
 in certain female natures. I have had ladies quit
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 545 
 
 my Faust class in a kind of horror, declaring that 
 they did not wish to come into such close touch with 
 the very Devil — perchance with their special Devil, 
 Goethe's Mephistopheles, who even in dead type was 
 altogether too living for them, too real and, indeed, 
 too overpowering. They could not stand him, or 
 perchance withstand him, so that their only hope 
 was in running away from his inky presence, though 
 limned only in printer's lampblack. That awful 
 Negative, deepest world-theme of Faust, and more 
 real just now than ever, was not even to be looked 
 upon when incorporate, else like antique serpent- 
 haired Medusa it would turn us all to stone. My 
 view was that this our own Fiend must be grappled 
 with, for here he is, the most modern creation in 
 our most modern Chicago ; I held that I could often 
 read the latest words of Mephistopheles in to-day's 
 Chicago newspaper. Better get acquainted with 
 your own cacodemon through Goethe's transfigured 
 poetry, which bears in itself, if rightly understood 
 and assimilated, a kind of vicarious redemption 
 from the wiles of old Splay-foot. Such is the true 
 function of all Great Literature — mediatorial, re- 
 demptive, yea vicarious. 
 
 Chicago had the New-England conscience, insofar 
 as it had any at all — and there were many conscien- 
 tious people in that rather conscienceless commu- 
 nity. Now, I had not only read in books but had 
 seen at Concord how the New-England mind can- 
 not exactly stomach Goethe even when desperately 
 trying to swallow him. The reader may remember
 
 546 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 we had held a Goethe School already at Concord, 
 not quite four years before our present one. The 
 recently published diary of Emerson shows the 
 typical and the greatest New-Englander trying his 
 best to overcome his disgust at Goethe, and recur- 
 ring to the attack again and again, incited thereto 
 by the repeated praises of his friend Carlyle; all 
 to no final victory, it would seem. Emerson felt 
 and rightly felt that there was something in Goethe 
 which he had never quite gotten, even though he 
 had placed the German poet among his Representa- 
 tive Men — again following probably Carlyle 's opin- 
 ion more than his own. Now the strange, riddle- 
 some fact turns uppermost that the deepest, most 
 sympathetic appreciation of Goethe in all New- 
 England, as far as I can find the record, was that 
 of a woman, Margaret Fuller, who herein consider- 
 ably outreached her eminent friend and sponsor, 
 Emerson. It still remains something of a psycho- 
 logical problem how this New-England woman, in 
 all the grandeur of her supreme defiance of furious 
 Puritanic tradition, could stand forth the single 
 challenger of her own past training, indeed of the 
 whole New-England consciousness. At least only 
 one other case of this kind, that is, of this woman- 
 kind, is known to me a little. 
 
 Such, then, was the prime spiritual obstacle 
 which the Goethe School had to meet in its own set 
 as well as in its communal environment, and had 
 to transform this alien spirit into something like a 
 new world-view in accord with the last supreme
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 547 
 
 world-poem. The trial had to be made, if my work 
 was ever to get complete, for to my mind the grand 
 literary biblical procession of all civilized time up 
 to date would be maimed and would remain quite 
 unfinished without its grand final rounding-up in 
 Goethe. 
 
 But woe is me again and still more ! "With these 
 inner hindrances were now conjoined two external 
 counterstrokes of pure ill-fortune coming from our 
 two protagonists, Harris and Davidson, each of 
 whom delivered us a slap in the face, not consciously 
 intended I think, but very real in its sting, and 
 calling our little army to start a new desperate pull 
 that we overcome the damage. Of this fact also let 
 there be a brief account. 
 
 Harris had done so well in the Dante School that 
 a very natural desire arose in our public to hear 
 him again, and to commune with his charming per- 
 sonality. The result was he allowed himself to be 
 advertised for a course of lectures on the Philosophy 
 of History. As soon as I heard of it, for I was out 
 of town when the arrangement was made, I thought 
 to myself : ' ' There ! Harris is again going to dare 
 his stars ! He will once more embroil himself in 
 that Hegel's Philosophy of History, especially in 
 the mazy Oriental portion of it, as I have seen him 
 do a dozen times without ever being able to dis- 
 entangle himself or his hearers from that Egyptian 
 Labyrinth." The result was Harris whizzed rap- 
 idly in the turn of a few months from loftiest 
 success down to dismalest failure. Such was his
 
 548 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 fatality. I had watched him make the same rockety 
 rise and fall more than once in St. Louis ; he could 
 be the unequalest of men. In the present case he 
 was practically unprepared, holding in his hand 
 only an incongruous mass of disparate fluttering 
 papers of all sizes, from mere scraps to large folio 
 sheets, in which he would fumble and then read and 
 ramble about, quite as if he were talking to himself 
 instead of an audience of hundreds. Indeed, that 
 was just what he was doing : brooding over his sub- 
 ject and some random jottings scribbled upon it — 
 the first rudimentary stage of composition, not the 
 third and completed one, such as he gave us in his 
 Dante work. So I heard, for I could not be pres- 
 ent, his procedure described by half a dozen wit- 
 nesses not unfriendly to the man or his thought. 
 Naturally, his failure, for such it must be declared, 
 reacted on himself and also on our coming School. 
 In fact, I doubt if Harris ever regained among us 
 that first prestige of his won at our Dante School. 
 Moreover, I never thought Harris showed much 
 historical bent of mind, such as he had for Philos- 
 ophy, Pedagogics, Literature ; he held no deep inner 
 communion with the Spirit of History, as he did 
 with the Spirit of the Divine Comedy. 
 
 Davidson also delivered his counterstroke after 
 the peculiar Davidsonian manner. He, too, had 
 acquired deserved distinction from his lectures and 
 discussions at our Dante School. Accordingly we 
 sought eagerly to engage him for our coming Goethe 
 session. Davidson had his attraction for everybody,
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 549 
 
 I think, for me I know, and also his repulsion. 
 Moreover, he possessed the weird Scotch charm 
 which works a singular fascination upon a certain 
 class of minds; especially he flung his spell over 
 youths and women of congenial temperament. This 
 unique power became one of his banes as a teacher, 
 leading him to a distinct favoritism in the school- 
 room toward his own like, with unhappy conse- 
 quences both for order and study. These special 
 devotees of his he would sooner or later get together 
 to start them on a line of his own, usually in some 
 sort of opposition. For as soon as he found him- 
 self working in any established order or institution, 
 he would feel himself ill at ease and begin to plan 
 revolt. To me Davidson always seemed to have the 
 Celtic temperament, as regards his abilities as well 
 as his shortcomings, both very considerable ; at bot- 
 tom he was a Scotch Celt, in spite of his asserted 
 old-Norse kinship, which I have heard him proudly 
 read into himself and also into his name. Similar 
 I construe to be the case of another distinguished 
 Scotchman (rather than Scotsman), Thomas Car- 
 lyle, who was Celtic both in his power and in his 
 weakness, though he shunned and hated the Celt, 
 and acclaimed the old Scandinavian gods for his 
 heroes in a sort of feigned ancestral worship. 
 
 Imagine our surprise when we read one morning 
 in the newspapers that Mr. Thomas Davidson had 
 been engaged to deliver a course of lectures in Chi- 
 cago chiefly on Literature (as far as I now recol- 
 lect) , only a few weeks before the date of our Goethe
 
 550 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 School. Moreover, it was advertised that he in- 
 tended to make a start in founding a great Catholic 
 University here in Chicago — a unique but truly 
 Davidsonian appendix to a lecture-course. So, 
 without my knowledge and escaping the close scru- 
 tiny of any of my band of workers, Davidson had 
 gotten together his little coterie of lady admirers 
 during our Dante School and formed his new inde- 
 pendent scheme of opposition which apparently was 
 to side-track our work and to carry off into his own 
 camp our supporters. His chief sponsor seems to 
 have been a Catholic lady, who was connected with 
 the city's Press and who therefore was able to give 
 a wide publicity to the new enterprise. Later the 
 report flew about that Davidson had been taken up 
 and specially entertained during our Dante School 
 with dinners and receptions, of which the rest of us 
 knew nothing, by a disgruntled clique of important 
 women who deemed themselves neglected in the 
 administration of the Literary Schools. I had no 
 knowledge of this matter, which was anyhow of 
 rather small significance. But that which did chal- 
 lenge my best guidance, and with which I did have 
 to deal in person, was the hot excitement and the 
 extreme resentment among my own people, who 
 proposed immediate vengeance upon what they 
 deemed an act of treachery right in the heat of 
 battle. At least he was to be dismissed in a kind 
 of disgrace from our program, which had been 
 already published and scattered broadcast. 
 At an indignation meeting of our leading work-
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 551 
 
 ers I appeared and advised them about as follows : 
 "You have just cause for your wrath, but do not let 
 it turn you to instruments of your own undoing. 
 There must be no split in our ranks before the 
 public. I wish you all to attend in a body Mr. 
 Davidson 's first lecture, paying your money ; I shall 
 be there to see you. It is on Savonarola — a good 
 lecture on a good subject, and well worth your 
 hearing. You need not go a second time unless 
 you desire. We cannot put him off the program; 
 there is nobody to take his place. As to his Catho- 
 lic University, it seems to me a joke, since Davidson 
 is not a Catholic ; anyhow the watchful Irish priest- 
 hood of the city, from the top of their hierarchy 
 down to its bottom, will dutifully look after that 
 scheme. Then you must learn to take Davidson as 
 he is, and utilize his good, which is not small. He 
 has played such pranks as this before, I doubt if 
 he can help it. He did the same at Concord to a 
 degree that once estranged Harris. It will bless 
 the cause and yourselves also to perform such an 
 act of self-denial. So go to his lecture once at least, 
 and greet him too in person." 
 
 When I went to the hall I found my soldierly 
 band seated pacifically but solidly together in a 
 group along with some friends whom they had per- 
 suaded to attend. As soon as the lecture was over 
 I went up and saluted Mr. Davidson, who turned 
 on me his peculiar strabismic cock-eye with a sort 
 of quizzing leer, I thought. We had furnished him 
 a large part of his audience that one time ; rumor
 
 552 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 says the rest of his course was very thinly attended. 
 At any rate, he never tried his scheme again in 
 Chicago. 
 
 Thus I kept up during the whole year, which em- 
 braced all the time between the two Schools, the 
 Goethe battle, with varying results. Classes spe- 
 cially studying Faust, Wilhelm Meister, Elective 
 Affinities, I held in various localities of the city 
 and suburbs. Then lecture courses on Goethe for 
 a more general audience I undertook, animated and 
 loyally supported by my cohort of Kindergarten 
 soldiery. A program lying before me shows the 
 scope of these courses, announcing in its head-lines : 
 "Ten Lectures on Goethe will be given in the Lec- 
 ture Hall of the Art Institute, beginning Saturday, 
 October 13th, 1888, and continuing one a week for 
 ten weeks." The list of subjects shows the attempt 
 to get a view of the entire Goethe, and has in my 
 own development a certain biographic value, for I 
 had already meditated much upon his total human 
 achievement. So I insert it : 
 
 PROGRAMME. 
 
 Oct. 13th. Goethe's Biography.— The Poet's Life as a 
 Poem. 
 
 Oct. 20th. The Youth of Goethe.— The Poet as Titan, 
 "Prometheus," "Faust," "Mahomet," "Wer- 
 ther." 
 
 Oct. 27th. Goethe as Lyrical Poet. — The Song Writer 
 and Balladist. 
 
 Nov. 3rd. Goethe as Scientist. — Botany. "The Meta- 
 morphosis of Plants."
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 553 
 
 Nov. 10th. Goethe as Scientist.— To what extent the pre- 
 cursor of Darwin. Osteology. Theory of 
 Color. 
 
 Nov. 17th. Goethe in Italy.— The Classical Renascence. 
 Epigrams, Xenia, Elegies, Epics. 
 
 Nov. 24th. Goethe as Classical Dramatist. — "Iphigenia," 
 "Tasso." 
 
 Dec. 1st. Goethe as Novelist. — "Elective Affinities," 
 "Wilhelm Meister." 
 
 Dec. 8th. Goethe as Writer of the Fairy Tale.— "Das 
 Marchen." "The New Melusina." 
 
 Dec. 15th. Goethe as Letter Writer and Conversationist. 
 
 It may be seen from the foregoing program that 
 I was already making a strong effort to master 
 Goethe's life, that wonderfully diversified, subtly 
 interelated, universally productive life, probably 
 the most comprehensive of all lives ever lived — also 
 the poet's greatest poetic work. I can find no com- 
 plete manuscript of these lectures, only some ram- 
 bling, inorganic notes. And I may here add that 
 it took more than a quarter of a century longer 
 before I could fully mature and write out my com- 
 plete biographic conception of the poet, and print 
 the same under the title "Goethe's Life-Poem" 
 (1915). Thus my Goethe has kept at my side 
 through a long line of years reaching from youth 
 to old-age. Sometimes I dream that I am not done 
 with him yet, for I see him now revealing his 
 people's chief spiritually redemptive power from 
 the mighty German cataclysm of to-day. 
 
 Goethe, as our recent greatest poet, has incar- 
 nated the spirit 's Denier and Destroyer in the most
 
 554 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 modern form, but has also shown him overmastered 
 after furious conflict and made to serve. But many 
 people, and, if I may hazard the word of my expe- 
 rience, most women do not wish to view this modern 
 Inferno with its highly educated Devil, but prefer 
 the old, more sensuous, and externally more hor- 
 rible Inferno of Dante. They prefer Satan to 
 Mephistopheles, from whom they would run away. 
 Very well, if that be the last of the matter ; but the 
 Devil has just the insidious power of flight over- 
 head, and can place himself right in front of the 
 poor, weak mortal who is fleeing from his presence. 
 Thus Dante has the advantage of portraying this old 
 traditional Hell and Heaven — the great medieval 
 Christian solution of the problem of antique 
 Heathendom and its Fall of Man. Hence Dante 
 transmutes the beautiful Classical world of Greece 
 into his Infernal monstrosities. But Goethe sets 
 forth our latest Hell, and also our Purgatorial trial 
 and redemption, in a very real, untraditional way, 
 and hence very shocking. But is not that just 
 our right medicine? Moreover, Hell and Heaven 
 are put under evolution — another uncomfortable 
 thought. And we feel that Goethe is his own In- 
 ferno and Purgatory, yea his own Mephistopheles, 
 and does not merely pass through and look on and 
 then describe, as does Dante, even if we know that 
 the latter is also a part of what he sees. 
 
 Another disappointment was the failure of the 
 educated German population of Chicago to give 
 any pronounced help, or to feel any active interest
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 555 
 
 which would further the influence of their greatest 
 poet, or rather their greatest modern man, in their 
 new American home. This made a noticeable con- 
 trast with St. Louis, which always had its German 
 contingent, not very large perhaps, in the activities 
 of the St. Louis Movement. 
 
 Finally, in the face of all frowns of Dame For- 
 tune, the Goethe School opened during the Holi- 
 days, 1888, at the Madison Street Theater, whose 
 auditorium had been hired to meet, by its larger 
 capacity, the grand overflowing audience, which, 
 however, did not come. Still it did not seriously 
 fall away from that of the previous Dante year. 
 Eight of the lectures were given by the same old 
 three of us (Harris, Davidson, and myself), but 
 there were two new ones. The first of these was our 
 lady representative on the program, Mrs. Caroline 
 K. Sherman, of Chicago, the only woman, I think 
 I may say, I ever personally knew who had sympa- 
 thetically taken up, assimilated, and actually loved 
 Goethe. And she was by birth a New-Englander, 
 and thus to me suggests in this respect Margaret 
 Fuller, and more remotely Varnhagen's Rahel. 
 Very appropriately and congenially she chose as 
 her theme Goethe 's Portraits of Women. Our other 
 lecturer was a regular University Professor, a good 
 man but a misfit for our work, in truth a double 
 misfit — we did not fit him, nor he us who were 
 studying Goethe as a Literary Bible, not so much 
 philologically, or textually, or even historically, all 
 of which methods have their due place in the Uni-
 
 556 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 versity proper. It was the first and last time I 
 made such a selection for our Schools, since Pro- 
 fessor R. G. Moulton, who gave us excellent and 
 sympathetic help in our later courses, belonged to 
 the so-called University Extension Movement. 
 
 On the whole, our Goethe School had not the 
 success of our Dante School. Somehow outer ill- 
 luck was inclined to smite it vengefully; then it 
 had not the same inner upspring of the spirit. 
 Davidson was, in the main, critical of Goethe, and 
 never got to the soul of him, I think. Harris 
 worked hard in appreciation of the poet, whom he 
 failed not to praise and to philosophize profoundly 
 and even warmly. But I cannot help feeling that 
 far down in the secret substrate of his being lurked 
 still the Puritanic protest. He took his Goethe 
 more from Brockmeyer than from himself, quite as 
 Emerson adopted the poet from Carlyle. At any 
 rate, our two protagonists showed by no means the 
 same spiritual exaltation, the same devoted apostle- 
 ship, the same radiant love for this Literary Bible 
 as they did for Dante. And in the audience our 
 female fore-fighters embattled, fought bravely and 
 grimly rather than whole-heartedly, for the Teu- 
 tonic poet; they obeyed, like good soldiers in the 
 tug of onslaught, but could not be brought to charge 
 with the old shout of enthusiasm. 
 
 Something of the sort I had forecast, but I could 
 not help myself. The only man I knew to whom 
 Goethe was the one supreme Literary Bible was 
 Brockmeyer, but I dared not summon him, espe-
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 557 
 
 cially after the Milwaukee experience. There was 
 no foretelling what twist he might take. As it 
 turned out, I had trouble enough in guiding my 
 two forespanned careening recalcitrant steeds har- 
 nessed to my sun-chariot; if I had taken a third 
 courser and him Brockmeyer most defiant of all 
 defiers, and hitched him in front of the team, poor 
 weak Phaethon, the charioteer, would have had a 
 runaway which would have tumbled him and his 
 Goethe School and all his future Literary Schools 
 into the deep Icarian sea of total annihilation. As 
 it was, Brockmeyer came near capsizing us all into 
 Lake Michigan at the Milwaukee School. 
 
 So our Goethe School at last came duly to port 
 mid a halcyon spell without any grand overturn 
 in spite of some ominous moments. I doubt if I 
 ever felt a greater relief in my life than when I 
 concluded the last lecture of the course and an- 
 nounced from the platform: "This School is now 
 at an end, and we can all go home. ' ' 
 
 But to my surprise, the bulk of the audience 
 refused to budge, and from its center rose a voice : 
 "What about next year? We haven't had Shakes- 
 peare yet." Then another voice spoke up: "We 
 want Homer, too; let us make the entire round of 
 the Literary Bibles before we disband." The re- 
 mark was received not only with general approval 
 but with a perceptible, soldierly will to push ahead 
 on the fighting line till the whole fortress be taken. 
 My little army really showed a tougher fibre than 
 the captain, who, however, did not fail to seal his
 
 558 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PABT SECOND. 
 
 own work with that final appeal, exclaiming : ' ' Let 
 me go along — forward, then, to the next outpost." 
 
 III. The Shakespeare and Homer Schools. So 
 we had a Shakespeare Year (1889) and after it a 
 Homer year (1890), each of them culminating in 
 its special Literary School at which during one 
 week ten lectures were given with supplementary 
 discussions by speakers of distinction. In both 
 cases a year's preparation was made in study 
 classes throughout the city for the final event, 
 which thus became the main lever for working up 
 the interest. All these Literary Schools were built 
 after the same general model, each of which, how- 
 ever had its particular variation. 
 
 Objection had been made to the two previous 
 Schools that Chicago was not sufficiently repre- 
 sented on the program, the lecturers being chiefly 
 of the St. Louis Movement. Also the demand was 
 heard that the course should be popularized, hav- 
 ing been hitherto darkened by the presence of too 
 many philosophers. Perhaps still more deeply 
 lurked the religious suspicions concerning the very 
 idea of a Literary Bible. As our next subject was 
 Shakespeare, a popular poet and favorite with 
 many divines of very different creeds, I concluded 
 to construct a program to meet the occasion. Ac- 
 cordingly we (the ladies more than I) succeeded 
 in getting no less than four clergymen of Chicago 
 as lecturers for our third Literary School, on 
 Shakespeare — one woman and three men. To be 
 sure I summoned to my aid Harris and also David-
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 559 
 
 son, but they with myself were to keep somewhat 
 in the background this time, ready, however, to fill 
 any gap in the list of speakers or to meet emer- 
 gencies, should they occur. For I was almost 
 afraid of my good-luck, when I printed on my 
 program the names of the three most popular and 
 distinguished preachers of Chicago — Drs. Swing, 
 Gunsaulus, and Lorimer — with the subjects of their 
 lectures. So was fairly met the request for more 
 of Chicago, more of popularity, and more of reli- 
 gion in our course. 
 
 Davidson again took his part of the devil's ad- 
 cocate, and amused us all by his' lampoons against 
 Shakespeare in general. But especially he grew 
 almost frantic in denunciation of the poet's master- 
 piece, Hamlet, whom he crowned with a garland of 
 many mal-odorous epithets. At the top of his fer- 
 vor he steadied his glance on me, who was presiding 
 as director of the School, when he proclaimed that 
 he was going to throw a bomb into this whole 
 Shakespeare propaganda, which according to his 
 word had turned to rancid idolatry. When he 
 had taken his seat, I rose and laughingly replied, 
 as Davidson's menace was never serious: "I hope 
 our friend's missile will do us no harm for his own 
 sake; he must have heard with all the rest of the 
 world what Chicago does to its bomb-throwers." 
 Whereat a little burst of applause ran round the 
 room, which I tried to suppress by a wave of the 
 hand; for the soul of Chicago would still start to 
 thrill at the memory of the deed, trial, and execu-
 
 560 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 tion of the anarchists then some two years past in 
 its final act. And everybody thought of them 
 when even the word bomb was mentioned. "Meet- 
 ing now adjourned" I cried, "but let us all go up 
 and shake hands with that jolly good-fellow, Tom 
 Davidson." And I started from the platform to be , 
 the first one to greet him. 
 
 Thus the old set of us stood back and listened to 
 what the new speakers, five of them all told, would 
 say to us about Shakespeare in lecture and in dis- 
 cussion. My single contribution on the program 
 was a poem in blank verse called Shakespeare at 
 Stratford, which sought to construe what the poet 
 did with himself after retiring from London to 
 Stratford during the .last four or five years of his 
 life. That poem was written thirty years ago, and 
 I must have read a dozen poetic performances on 
 the same subject in the last decade, which show a 
 wide divergence of conception, making Shakes- 
 peare on the one hand a pessimist, sensualist, gen- 
 eral debauchee in his life's close, or placing him, on 
 the other hand at the opposite extreme as an 
 humble penitent for his past sins, even to the ex- 
 tent of being received secretly into the Roman 
 Catholic Church by an itinerant Jesuit priest. 
 None of these presentments show me my Shakes- 
 peare, whose spirit has the power of evolving with 
 the years. (The poem is printed in the Appendix 
 to the Writer of Books.) 
 
 Our Homer year (1890) was chiefly spent in 
 studying the Iliad and the Odyssey, not only in
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 561 
 
 beautiful passages but specially as grand totalities 
 whose massive architecture had defied the years by 
 the thousand. "When our Literary School was get- 
 ting under way, I looked around for lecturers and 
 tested some regular Professors of Greek, but had at 
 last mainly to fall back again upon Harris and 
 Davidson as fore-fronters on the battle-line. Both 
 performed their tasks faithfully, but dropped 
 short of their best, for neither of them had taken 
 Homer to heart and in a manner lived him, as they 
 had Dante, for instance. Rev. Dr. Swing encour- 
 aged us with his presence, doubtless the most in- 
 fluential in Chicago, and in his lecture gave many 
 humorous touches to the old Greek poet. 
 
 Perhaps the most distinctive turn in this School 
 lay in the two Homeric readings of English hexa- 
 meters. I somehow got wind of the fact that 
 George Howland, Superintendent of the Public 
 Schools had made a new translation of Homer's 
 Iliad, preserving the original meter. After several 
 visits I succeeded in persuading him to read a 
 couple of extracts from his version at our School, 
 stressing the point before the public that Chicago 
 also had its own translation of Homer. Howland 
 gave his hexameters in a rather monotonous sing- 
 song, whereupon Dr. Swing arose from the au- 
 dience and deprecated the use of hexameters in 
 English verse, touching up his remarks with little 
 bits of his peculiar humor. Howland of course de- 
 fended his work, showing some warmth against his 
 own minister, who was Dr. Swing, and otherwise
 
 562 THE & T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 he was wrought to a good deal of excitement, for I 
 noticed his profuse perspiration. Thus flashed 
 into our Homer School a little blaze of that old 
 controversy about English hexameters, in which 
 not only critics but eminent poets have taken part 
 on both sides. 
 
 I kept rather quiet during the debate, only 
 throwing in a word here and there for Howland. 
 Still I felt deeply concerned in the argument, for I 
 had been guilty of many thousand hexameters (in 
 their elegiac form) which simply overflowed me in- 
 to self-expression during my Classical Journey 
 some ten years or so before this time. But there 
 was a much closer and deeper reason for my 
 present interest: I had spent a goodly number of 
 my best moments of this Homer year in elaborating 
 and completing a long cherished plan of mine to 
 versify in hexameters the entire cultural evolution 
 of old Homer and his environing world. Prac- 
 tically no facts had come down to us concerning 
 the life of the poet, still I had been so long and 
 so intimately associated with his two poems, that 
 I felt I knew his personality and also the lines of 
 his spiritual development. The outcome was a 
 book which I named Homer in Chios, and in which 
 I have the poet chant the epic of his own heroic 
 career, far greater in import than that of any of 
 his heroes. This work I would make the singing 
 harvest-home of all my protracted Homeric 
 studies. 
 
 The hour for closing the discussion had arrived
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 563 
 
 when I took the word. Dr. Swing in his clerical 
 way had familiarly given other speakers and my- 
 self the name of Brother So-and-so ; accordingly I 
 addressed him in reply: "Brother Swing, you 
 have called the hexameter unnatural in English, 
 yea, quite impossible. But I have found it gushing 
 up spontaneously, as if by some inner need of ex- 
 pression in a book which I daresay you have often 
 read with deep appreciation, namely the Psalms 
 of David. In fact many musical staves of that 
 book fall upon my ear as right hexametral rhythms, 
 especially on account of the sonorous dactyls in 
 their rolling cadences. Now I have a theory that 
 the very soul of David had some inborn kinship 
 with the hexameter's harmonies (though I do not 
 know his Hebrew), and that Homer and David, the 
 Greek and the Semite, had this peculiar melodious 
 gift in common, as their abodes were not so very 
 far apart and they might possibly have been con- 
 temporaries; indeed under a little stretch of con- 
 jecture they might have personally known each 
 other. Now let me tell you what I am going to do : 
 at the last meeting of this present School here in 
 Chicago I shall bring David and Homer together in 
 a tournament of song, during which both poets 
 shall chant in English hexameters the Hellenic and 
 the Hebrew worlds united in a kind of marriage 
 festival for all future time. So I hope our city's 
 first preacher (turning to Swing) and our city's 
 first teacher (turning to Howland) will be present 
 and say us their blessing in unison. ' '
 
 564 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 But neither of them appeared and the School 
 devoted its last meting to listening to the mutual 
 strains of Homer and David lilted through the lips 
 of a Chicago rhapsode, none other than our direc- 
 tor himself. A distinguished Rabbi was present 
 and gave a sympathetic address which bore a note 
 of benediction to Jew, Greek and Christian, some- 
 what of each being there represented in our mixed 
 audience. 
 
 Thus terminated the first quadrennium of the 
 Chicago Literary Schools, to each of which was 
 given a year not only of intellectual study, but of 
 living appropriation as far as this was possible. 
 We had sought to realize in ourselves the cultural 
 epochs of our race's development through their 
 noblest productions. Specially our endeavor had 
 been to establish a little point of fixity and per- 
 manence in the everchanging vortical swirl of Chi- 
 cago life. To this end we had interpreted the 
 greatest books of Literature as the eternal record 
 of the Eternal. 
 
 Naturally before the termination of this last 
 School, the question often came up : Shall we now 
 quit for good and let the work make its own way 
 hereafter? The proposition was much discussed 
 among us, and evoked some variety of opinion. 
 Finally the decided majority settled down to this 
 view: "We must have not only one or two Schools 
 more, but our cause summons us to repeat the en- 
 tire cycle of the Four Literary Bibles. Several 
 reasons were given but mainly three. The zealous
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 555 
 
 learners wished to go over the whole series again 
 for their own behoof in a kind of review. Others 
 deemed the work a needful institution in Chicago 
 as a counterpoise to its dominant ephemeral ten- 
 dencies in character and in writing. Then again 
 the School was vindicating its right of existence 
 by becoming a center or propagation, since it was 
 being reproduced in other cities. 
 
 Thus with a genuine soldierly determination our 
 little army, even after this long and fairly success- 
 ful campaign of four years, felt that the war was 
 not yet fully won, and resolved to finish their work 
 though it took another quadrennium. 
 
 IV. The Second Cycle of Four Literary Schools. 
 So we start with fresh courage our new circum- 
 navigation of the World's Literature as revealed 
 supremely in its four Literary Bibles. Again we 
 began with Dante, seeking to repeat the triumph 
 of our first School, which had been our grand over- 
 ture four years since. But the conditions were 
 very different. 
 
 In the first place, Harris would not come, as- 
 signing as ground of refusal the press of business in 
 his Bureau of Education at "Washington. That 
 made an ominous chasm at the entrance, still we 
 sprang over it and pushed onward. Harris, how- 
 ever, repented afterwards, and actually asked to be 
 present at the remaining three Schols, writing me 
 that "he could not afford to stay away." It had 
 come home to him that this was the right successor
 
 566 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 
 
 of his Concord School of Philosophy, which could 
 not be held up even by his absence. 
 
 Then I had my little trouble over Davidson 
 again, this time not with him personally, but con- 
 cerning him with others. For he had offended my 
 Kindergarten supporters, the chief fighting cohort 
 of the cause, by his continual kicking in the traces, 
 by his outside attempts to deflect the School from 
 its purpose, and now finally by his open disparag- 
 ment of the Kindergarten itself and its educational 
 value. Decided was the protest, almost a revolt, 
 whereupon I argued with leaders about as follows : 
 "Let me make a compromise with you. I agree 
 that it is best not to invite Mr. Davidson after this 
 one time ; we have heard him upon Homer, Shakes- 
 peare, and Goethe, and we have found out that in 
 our sense he has no message to deliver us concern- 
 ing these great poets. Hence we may well drop 
 him from our future Schools. But his Dante work 
 is unique of its kind ; he not only reads but lives the 
 Italian master's book as gospel of a Bible. Such 
 a man we need not merely as lecturer but as per- 
 sonality. Moreover, despite all my urgency Harris 
 refuses to come, and Miss Blow is not obtainable. 
 Accordingly Davidson is a necessity this time more 
 than before. But let it be the last," I added, in 
 regret deeper than resentment. 
 
 So Davidson's name was placed on the program 
 of the Fifth Literary School of Chicago which was 
 held Easter week, 1892. It was his final appear- 
 ance among us as lecturer, indeed, I never saw him
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY SCHOOLS. 567 
 
 again. He survived some eight years longer, having 
 established his own School during the summer 
 at Glenmore in the Adirondacks, whither I never 
 ventured. His last activity was a benevolent cul- 
 tural work for the young Jews of New York City — 
 reported to be the crowning labor of his life. 
 Strangely our careers, in spite of a certain mu- 
 tual repulsion, kept interweaving for quite twenty- 
 five years (from 1867 till 1892) and insisting upon 
 some kind of co-operation despite many a con- 
 trariety. I did not go to Glenmore where he was 
 autocrat, as I could not feel sure of him nor of my- 
 self. Hot moments were not wanting there with- 
 out me, if rumor have any veracity. But at Chi- 
 cago I was director and felt equal to his possible 
 clash. So we revolved about each other separate 
 yet inseparable, like two little luminaries, in St. 
 Louis, in Eome, in Concord, and finally in Chi- 
 cago. 
 
 I ought to add that underneath all these open 
 differences, Davidson and I were conscious of many 
 secret concordances. He would not dwell and wal- 
 low in tradition, he loved the free life of the 
 scholar errant, he disliked the arid ways of 
 academicism, he cared little for money or high liv- 
 ing, though he would do his part in a small 
 carousal; he declared once that he lived on a dol- 
 lar a day. Especially his knowledge and love of 
 the Greek world fascinated me in my earlier St. 
 Louis time. But when it came to his literary and 
 institutional negations, to his world-view generally,
 
 568 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 and also to his temperament, we flew asunder and 
 then at times flew back again for a tournament. 
 Still Davidson evolved, as already indicated; he 
 had his stages of development, with the rest of us ; 
 I saw him in what may be called his first period at 
 St. Louis, then watched him pass out of it in his 
 flight Eastward; finally I could not help remark 
 him at Chicago as an ageing man who was entering 
 the last act of his life-drama, which, however, lies 
 outside of my personal knowledge. 
 
 Our greatest stroke of good fortune during this 
 time I deem to have been the help of Dr. David 
 Swing, the most winning and pre-eminent per- 
 sonality in the city, who always took the trouble to 
 give us one of his happiest lectures, as well as to 
 add the full weight of his name to our rather light- 
 ballasted argosy. More than any other man, he 
 held the intellectual primacy of Chicago, and in 
 the opinion of many observers he has had no suc- 
 cessor to his position. He was engaged to assist us 
 in giving a suitable conclusion to our last School, 
 but he passed away before it came off. His sad de- 
 parture tinged more deeply the farewell mood of 
 our closing session. 
 
 Necessarily there was a considerable change in 
 the program of lecturers, whose names and merits 
 in detail cannot be here recorded. One person, 
 however, I must single out: Mr. Hamilton W. 
 Mabie of the New York Outlook who assisted us not 
 only in the exercises of our Literary School, but 
 made its work known throughout the East by means
 
 TEE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 569 
 
 of his influence with important people and with 
 the Press. Personally I owe to his memory a debt 
 of gratitude. 
 
 We carried through with fair success (not too 
 great) our Second Shakespeare School and our 
 Second Goethe School in due order, but they must 
 now be passed over, though each of them had its 
 own special history and character. At last was an- 
 nounced the Eighth Annual Literary School for 
 1895, the subject of which was mainly Homer, 
 though it was broadened so as to include all My- 
 thology, whose cultural aspects were then much 
 discussed in Chicago educational circles, especially 
 in the Kindergarten. I presided at the last lec- 
 ture, and dismissed the audience with a sort of 
 benediction, feeling that an old Epoch had fruited 
 but that underneath it a new Epoch was secretly 
 budding. The last leaf of all our long Literary 
 Bibles was turned over and the lid shut down for 
 the nonce, while another quite different Book 
 seemed to be opening at its first page. And my 
 little Kindergarten army still stood embattled there 
 before me, ready for another campaign in a fresh 
 and strange territory. 
 
 Winding up the account, I may here re-affirm 
 autobiographically that I deem this succession of 
 eight Literary Schools in Chicago as the greatest 
 and most will-powerful single practical achieve- 
 ment of my life. And in regard to the St. Louis 
 Movement on its literary side, as distinct from its 
 philosophical, educational and psychological ele-
 
 570 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 ments, I deem this to have been its most fully real- 
 ized and successful work. And I find it yet remem- 
 bered in that ever-obliterating, vortical swash of a 
 community, since I still come upon various re- 
 minders of it, at times quite unexpectedly. Only a 
 couple of months ago (1919) as I was passing into 
 the Chicago Public Library, a somewhat aged gray- 
 framed, angelic lady-face placed itself before me, 
 and began to move its lips thus: ''You do not re- 
 call me, but I attended your Literary Schools thirty 
 years ago. I have off and on reviewed that time 
 ever since, and have spoken of it to my friends. 
 When are you going to have another School ? Name 
 the date. I would like to come again and hear you 
 and the rest of the lecturers with your hot discus- 
 sions. " " Madam, ' ' I replied, ' ' those speakers have 
 all passed beyond but me, who am now on another 
 job. Consequently the next Literary School will be 
 held in Heaven when I get there, if I ever do. 
 Still I may here give myself the pleasure of ex- 
 tending to you a hearty invitation to that happy 
 re-union, for I know you will be up there." 
 
 IX 
 
 Backflow to St. Louis 
 
 Very naturally from this active outpushing cen- 
 ter of disturbance at Chicago started a wave of re- 
 surgence toward St. Louis, a backflow we may call
 
 BACKFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 571 
 
 it to the original fountain head, now quiescent, but 
 possibly capable of another creative upburst. That 
 is indeed the trial now to be made. 
 
 Accordingly, before I proceed on that grand new 
 adventure of mine which looms up in the future 
 with larger proportions than even those of the 
 Literary Bibles in the past, I must record an event 
 of some significance in the history of our far-dis- 
 persed but still dynamic St. Louis Movement. This 
 was the endeavor to turn the current of these 
 Literary Schools from Chicago back to their primal 
 genetic source, which was St. Louis. Can there be 
 at present any such revival in the old deeply dis- 
 illusioned town now sunning itself reposefully on 
 the banks of its dreamily murmuring River ? 
 
 !No sooner had our first Chicago Dante School 
 passed into history, with a good deal of newspaper 
 hullaballoo about itself, than the echoes reached 
 St. Louis and woke it up to a little spirt of its an- 
 cient rivalry. I began to receive letters thence 
 from former members of my classes who proposed 
 to transfer the Chicago program with its leading 
 lecturers, bodily as it were, to their old home, and 
 to establish there also a Literary School, into which 
 St. Louis had never been quite able to evolve itself 
 during its previous cultural epoch. I was asked to 
 act as director, while some ladies of wealth and 
 social position guaranteed the expenses and even 
 the audience. The Rev. Dr. R. A. Holland was 
 specially active in the project, and offered the use 
 of a suitable hall free of charge for our meetings.
 
 572 THE 8T - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Under such auspices took place the first St. Louis 
 Literary School, with a considerable flurry of soar- 
 ing enthusiasms wafted aloft on new-born hopes. 
 
 The sere, battered program, before me is headed 
 .in heavy capital letters Dante School, which is to 
 be held in St. Louis at the guild-room of St. 
 George's Church, Chestnut and Twenty-seventh 
 Streets for one week, during which ten lectures will 
 be given by the following persons : Dr. Harris, Dr. 
 Holland, Prof. Soldan, Mr. Snider, and Miss Beedy. 
 These five speakers had all belonged, directly or in- 
 directly, to the old St. Louis Philosophical Society, 
 reaching back some twenty years. Thus it seemed 
 a re-union of the prime movers, and possibly a re- 
 vival of the locally lapsed cause. Cheery words 
 were spoken to that effect, and even congratula- 
 tions exchanged. Still it had to be confessed that 
 only two of these five early protagonists had re- 
 mained residents of the city, and not long after- 
 wards one of these two, Dr. Holland, also betook 
 himself to flight. Nevertheless the Dante School 
 was pronounced a fair success, at least for St. 
 Louis ; the survivors of the old guard were on hand 
 and eager for a new campaign, though all of us 
 were turning grey and getting furrowed by Time's 
 envious plow. "When the exercises were over, and 
 Dr. Holland had delivered the last lecture, or 
 rather enraptured sermon over Dante's White Rose 
 of Heaven, the hardy promoters, nearly all of them 
 ladies, met together and resolved, to repeat, with 
 certain omissions and additions, the Chicago pro-
 
 BACKFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 573 
 
 gram of the coming year. Very delightful and hope- 
 inspiring the scene rose before me when I saw this 
 spontaneous endeavor to revive our St. Louis Move- 
 ment, especially on its literary line, at its original 
 starting-point. Will now be brought about our 
 Movement's Grand Return, with its restoration to 
 the old home out of its long estrangement? 
 
 Accordingly the second St. Louis Literary School 
 took place, but with diminished zeal, I think ; still 
 it was upheld by fair attendance and adequate 
 finance, both due to the irresistible assault on the 
 rather somnolescent public by three or four of our 
 veteran women who seemed determined to restore 
 the former intellectual primacy of the city. Even 
 the third St. Louis Literary School was essayed, 
 if I remember aright, but with ever-waning inter- 
 est, when any further repetition of Chicago was 
 given up, on account of the peculiar mental lethargy 
 then prevailing in our community. For during 
 those years St. Louis appeared to be passing 
 through the deepest benightment of her Great Dis- 
 illusion, whose counterstroke had among other no- 
 table malign consequences shivered to fragments 
 and scattered to the four winds the St. Louis 
 Movement, which by means of the present Literary 
 Schools had been seeking to piece itself together 
 again on the home-hearth of its nativity. No — 
 not— at least not yet, cry the frowning Powers. 
 
 Still I must not fail to mention the last struggle, 
 or to speak more forthrightly the dying kick of the 
 old cause in the old town. Some years afterward
 
 574 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 when the St. Louis Movement seemed to have be- 
 come wholly deceased again, and even to be buried 
 in its ancestral mausoleum, it started mysteriously 
 to stir once more and to show signs of another re- 
 surrection. Yea, it appeared to get a spectral 
 voice, and to call to me as if from its tomb to lead 
 it, evoking me (as director) to a fresh onset. 
 "Angels and ministers of grace," I shouted when 
 I heard that ghostly cadence, "how can it be that 
 the departed spirit of the St. Louis Movement has 
 arisen again here from its native soil? What new 
 magical power is this which in these days can raise 
 the dead?" 
 
 Dropping all the other miraculous accompani- 
 ments which to me at least appeared not a few nor 
 meaningless, let the kernel of reality be at once dis- 
 criminated and set forth. Miss Mary M'Culloch, 
 superintendent of the St. Louis Kindergartens had 
 the courage and energy to work up, of her own 
 initiative, another Literary School of which the 
 subject was again Dante, the great poet of the dis- 
 embodied spirit-world, who still seemed to be here 
 the favorite singer of the four supreme ones — an 
 echo probably out of former St. Louis experiences. 
 Indeed we sought to make the School a reuniting 
 and home-coming of all the old St. Louis set of 
 spiritual Danteizers, three of them, who had writ- 
 ten books on Dante, and who had not only read and 
 studied the divine Catholic poet, but also had un- 
 dergone a kind of regeneration and religious bap- 
 tism through his writ, of which unique conversion
 
 BACKFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 575 
 
 some details have been given on a former page. 
 Three of our most eminent people — Dr. Harris, 
 Prof. Davidson, and Miss Blow — partook of this 
 peculiar effluence, and they were all still in life at 
 the time of the present School, though no longer in 
 St. Louis. But each of them, for one reason or 
 other, failed to come, though I tried every art of 
 persuasion I could command, especially upon Har- 
 ris, who in has later years seemed to me to show 
 some strange aversion even for a short St. Louis 
 visit. So it came about that I was unable to set up 
 once more to our city's gaze these three antique 
 pillars of the earlier St. Louis Movement; I re- 
 mained the solitary standing monument of the past 
 getting somewhat hoary already then, as I contem- 
 plated my half of a century and more of fading 
 and falling locks. Thus I dreamed me of that old 
 Roman who once stood mid the ruins of Carthage 
 mooning pensively on himself and his city. 
 
 But let me hasten to add that this last St. Louis 
 Literary School, despite its belatement and other 
 drawbacks, was the most pronounced success of all 
 in numbers, in spiritedness, and in a certain pro- 
 clivity it showed for a wrangle, not vicious but en- 
 tertaining. Such, however, was the finale. Not 
 since then, more than a quarter of a century ago, 
 has there been any attempt to revive here the Lit- 
 erary School, as far as I am aware ; that one some- 
 what convulsive note was its death-rattle. The 
 nearest to it probably was a course of talks given 
 by me many years later (1908) on the Literary
 
 576 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 Bibles to our St. Louis Communal University, last- 
 ing an entire season. 
 
 Thus the St. Louis Movement seemed to suffer 
 a complete lapse in its native city, while manifest- 
 ing considerable energy elsewhere. In spite of her 
 peculiar apathy during these years, I believe that 
 there was in St. Louis still vitality enough left over 
 from the old cause to keep alive and active the 
 work, if a leader had appeared and had taken hold 
 of it with the pristine strenuosity. But after the 
 departure of Miss Blow, the last one to leave, no 
 person stepped forward to organize and to teach 
 the training classes, through which the original 
 momentum of the work was to be maintained. Un- 
 doubtedly there shot up many study clubs of all 
 sorts during this time in the city; but they were 
 outside of and often away from the St. Louis 
 Movement. Moreover in the latter had arisen a 
 deep fracture which paralyzed its very soul. A 
 few words upon this cardinal and far-ramifying 
 event cannot be omitted from its history without 
 leaving in it a dark and profound chasm. 
 
 "When I was invited back to St. Louis in 1887-8 
 to give some talks after several years' absence, I 
 found in our own circle a state of personal rancour 
 and factional bitterness which simply threatened 
 its dissolution. The trouble centered in and around 
 Miss Blow along with her institution, the Kinder- 
 garten, which had become divided into two vio- 
 lently antagonistic parties, whose animosity had 
 infected to a degree the whole Public School Sys-
 
 BACKFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 577 
 
 tern — quite noticeably its Board of Directors and a 
 number of its leading Principals. I who bad been 
 absent when the epidemic broke out, happened to 
 drop into it just at its highest rage, and was dumb- 
 founded at first both by its intensity and its extent. 
 As quickly as possible I sought interviews with all 
 sides, not alone with the sets of fighting partisans, 
 but especially with impartial though interested and 
 informed onlookers. Among these the consensus of 
 opinion expressed itself with appreciation but with 
 decision that the great Kindergarten leader had 
 made a great mistake, apparently the mistake of 
 her life. 
 
 All this upheaval recalled very vividly to mind 
 the Homeric experience with Miss Blow once in 
 my classes years before, as previously recounted. 
 Verily I could not help thinking that I had already 
 forefelt some such fate lurking in her character, 
 when I quit St. Louis that I might avoid any com- 
 ing rupture inside our own circle, which even then 
 threatened, though perchance only in a small way. 
 Anyhow I at least imagined that I as a tiny individ- 
 ual had both fore-thought and likewise had pre-en- 
 acted in person this whole conflict here raging be- 
 fore my eyes, but at present outside of me. So I 
 beheld again the grand Achillean collision as an 
 actual contest being fought over anew in my very 
 presence day by day, and still driving forward in 
 its furious march to its last consequences. Not 
 the old Greek hero now, but the modern American 
 heroine of a great and beneficent work I witnessed
 
 578 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 in sharpest opposition to the established authority 
 over her, whereupon had resulted her complete es- 
 trangement from her people, from her city, and 
 from her institution ; yea, she seemed alienated for 
 a time from her own epochal Great Deed. 
 
 She was reported at her home brooding over the 
 wrong which she deemed had been done to her per- 
 sonal worth, and gnashing her heart at the ingrati- 
 tude of those whom she had fostered and esteemed 
 as her dearest own. It so happened that I was hav- 
 ing a class in Shakespeare at the house of one of 
 her lady-friends, and to my surprise one day she 
 appeared there sitting before me. In that presence 
 I dared glimpse the veiled figure of an extended 
 hand, and even hearken a faint lisp of confession. 
 Still more strangely, our lesson chanced to be King 
 Lear and his ungrateful daughters, which life-lorn 
 drama seemed to hit home now as unerringly as 
 Homer's Epic once did. Of course the part of 
 that dramatic ingratitude was not neglected, to 
 whose stress the oracular face there, which I con- 
 sulted, could not help darting brief flashes of re- 
 sponse. But more distinctively I dwelt upon the 
 issue that Lear's tragic world was largely the crea- 
 tion of his own dictatorial spirit, that his fate and 
 that of his family sprang from his pride's curse of 
 an autocratic "Will. In that somewhat startled 
 class I felt the thrill of an actual present tragedy, 
 as its members with lengthened faces filed before 
 me out of the room. Then the heroine I approached 
 and saluted with my best, to which she courteously
 
 BACKFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 579 
 
 responded, shooting a sad smile through her firmly 
 knit features. She came again. 
 
 The strifeful situation, however, would not im- 
 prove, but kept haunting me with an ever-gnawing 
 secret worry, for I felt our whole Movement 
 jeoparded. Moreover I began to hear the stern 
 call to put some of my fine theories into practice. 
 For instance, in the Iliad I had emphasized as the 
 supreme worth of the poem for all time the hero's 
 reconciliation, indeed his double reconciliation, 
 with his own people first (the Greeks), and then 
 with his enemies (the Trojans). The reflection 
 kept nagging and whispering me : "You have been 
 whelmed providentially into this mad tumult of a 
 real Homeric wrath; can you not reconcile that, 
 turning the old poem into present fact, and thus 
 vindicating anew the truth of it, which will surely 
 prove your best commentary ? Exemplify in your- 
 self what you have taught ; realize in corresponding 
 action the poet's conciliating words; transfigure 
 the beautiful image into its very life. Then you 
 need not fail to consider also what is at stake in 
 your St. Louis Movement. ' ' 
 
 Thus for days my thoughts kept prodding their 
 spurs into the withers of my unwilling Will, but I 
 Hamleted all my good resolves away, tetering be- 
 tween doing and undoing. Then I heard that Har- 
 ris was coming to town to deliver a course of lec- 
 tures; both on account of his conciliatory charac- 
 ter and his influence he seemed the right mediating 
 personality. Consequently, as soon as he arrived, I
 
 580 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 went to his quarters and begged him to be the peace- 
 maker. To my astonishment he refused with a 
 vehement No; he could not think of descending 
 alone into such a white-hot Inferno of wrath, where- 
 of he had heard a good deal by letter, doubtless 
 from Miss Blow herself. My reply was: "But 
 your Dante did, and if you will, I shall go with 
 you and act as your Virgil, though yours must now 
 be the balm of the healing word." Again he de- 
 clined peremptorily the plan, affirming it to be 
 utterly useless, and even a fresh aggravation, where- 
 upon he turned his talk to something else. Disap- 
 pointed I was soon sauntering homeward some- 
 what reproachful of what I deemed his timidity in 
 a crisis. 
 
 What was to be done next? Many schemes I 
 maundered over, but they all pushed to one point: 
 I must make the trial alone, though at first I would 
 shrivel at the thought. Still I kept up the fire-test 
 of will, till I might become temper-proof. Finally 
 I planned that my best opportunity would be at a 
 conversation (on Homer by the way) which I was 
 to hold in a neutral parlor, where the two opposing 
 sides I could bring together ; then at the close they 
 were to greet each other with a friendly word, thus 
 breaking the dam and thereupon letting the water 
 run down hill of itself. The one party, being that 
 of my special friends, was eagerly ready to be per- 
 suaded. Then I sent a request to Miss Blow for a 
 personal interview, which she granted. That was 
 the first time I had stepped across her door-sill for
 
 BACEFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 53! 
 
 years, indeed since that former flight of mine from 
 St. Louis, and from her. I advanced toward the 
 center of her drawing-room where she stood in a 
 rather tense attitude, I thought, and I prefaced my 
 address with the sentence: "I am come on an em- 
 bassy from the heroless Greeks to their Achilles." 
 The allusion caused a ripple of smiling reminis- 
 cence to break through her fixed features, after 
 which auspicious little omen I opened the whole 
 plan of reconciliation with all the tact I owned, 
 doubtles not much, and pressingly invited her to 
 be present at my coming lesson. 
 
 Miss Blow turned her look on the floor with face- 
 lines relaxed and even melting for a moment; but 
 suddenly every muscle seemed again to brace up 
 and tighten, as she sent back at me with deepening 
 flushes a piercing glance: "No, I cannot, it would 
 be too trying." I dared lisp the reply, "Better 
 try once just the trying." With head erect she 
 shot me a more determined No, looking some 
 haughtiness, as I still throbbingly remember. 
 Spoken a conventional word or two at parting, I 
 bowed myself out of her presence, thwarted per- 
 sonally but in possession of her grand refusal to be 
 reconciled with her people, with her achievement, 
 with herself. 
 
 I have dwelt in some detail upon this interview 
 for several to me co-ercive reasons. In the first 
 place, as appreciative autobiographer I claim the 
 egotistic right of adjudging this deed of mine as 
 one of the best, if not the very best of my life.
 
 582 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 I had to flagellate my recalcitrant and quailing 
 spirit for days before I could bring myself to the 
 final test. For the deed was better than I was, be- 
 ing on a higher level than my average self, which 
 also had the native bent to swoon away into those 
 Achillean sullens, and quit the thankless but ap- 
 pointed tasks of time. Whatever others might 
 think, I believed that Miss Blow in the primacy of 
 her power had shown the grand insolence and con- 
 sequent fatuity of success, ever the tragic thread 
 spun by the Fates into the heroic soul. Now her 
 overturn had come, certainly not through any act 
 of mine ; now she was down and under, and her lot 
 called for some reconciling voice. I heard and an- 
 swered at last, swallowing the mordant dose after 
 repeated regurgitations. I have too few best deeds 
 to my credit, not to write this one down with an 
 underscore among my life 's triumphs. Others may 
 make such self-conquests easily — not I. 
 
 In the second place upon this Grand Refusal (let 
 me capitalize for emphasis) of hers pivoted the 
 existence of the St. Louis Movement in its birth- 
 home. She, the heroine, held here both the intel- 
 lectual and the practical leadership, especially after 
 the flight of all of us retreating males. But now 
 she too abandons the battle-line, and lets the enemy 
 conquer. Thus she quits her native city, her crea- 
 tive work, her center of dissemination, surrender- 
 ing herself to her unreconciled mood. Of course, 
 other reasons for her withdrawal may have played 
 in, and these she would naturally stress to the pub-
 
 BACKFLOW TO ST. LOUIS. 5g3 
 
 lie. At any rate with her departure the St. Louis 
 Movement, passed henceforth into its nethermost 
 local evanishment, especially after the cessation of 
 the little revival caused by the Literary .Schools. 
 Judging from her past I hold that she, and she 
 alone, united all the gifts needful to keep alive and 
 to complete the work, if she could have been re- 
 conciled to remain at home here on its native soil 
 and hers, realizing herself in the full panoply of 
 her will-power. 
 
 But the deepest and most enduring disruption 
 sprung of this her Grand Refusal (her own Dante's 
 gran rifiuto down in the Inferno) lay in herself, 
 since it nearly turned her life into a persistent 
 tragedy. She sank away into a long physical ill- 
 ness and mental subsidence, doubtless something of 
 a purgatorial if not infernal journey. During this 
 time she underwent a great spiritual change, the 
 special stages of which I do not know. But I ob- 
 served her at the entrance and again at the exit 
 of this strangely human eclipse of her soul's sun. 
 
 First let me explain* that I watched her in St. 
 Louis as she was passing into her occultation, so I 
 think it may for our help be metaphored. That 
 Grand Refusal in her case meant not merely to re- 
 fuse my little attempt at peace-patching, but some- 
 thing far larger; indeed she made it, so to speak, 
 universal, directing it against her very self's own 
 world. I thought that she seemed willing for a 
 while to undo her sovereign work in* the Kinder- 
 garten, or at least to retire and let it perish un-
 
 584 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 mothered. The report was current that she had 
 aroused in the School Board, through her defiance 
 of its authority (Achilles again) a movement to 
 abolish the public Kindergarten — that which tow- 
 ered up her high heroic educational act, and which 
 was now becoming more national every day. But 
 authority did not proceed so far, dared not, I think, 
 in its own interest. So the power was not permitted 
 her to destroy her own Great Deed, which could no 
 longer be slain even by its own Great Doer, still 
 less by its enemies. For she had built an institu- 
 tion mightier than herself, and thus had performed 
 an action more enduring than any particular ac- 
 tion of hers, verily more eternal than her mere in- 
 dividual life. That showed her greatness, yea, her 
 immortal selfhood, even in spite of herself. 
 
 Such was my last glimpse of her as she vanished 
 into her career's eclipse, for so I construe it, 
 through her Grand Refusal at her life's central 
 node. And now for my second and more pulveriz- 
 ing stroke of amazement ! After long years I saw 
 her emerge from that dread obscuration of bodily 
 illness and seeming despair through one heroically 
 persistent, prodigious act of Will, and begin her 
 life over again — in many respects a new person- 
 ality, whom I may name the second Miss Blow. Re- 
 conciled afresh with her Institution and with her- 
 self, she sallies forth on what may be called her 
 second grand campaign quite different from her 
 first at St. Louis, and lasting many years. Behold ! 
 Here she comes to us lecturing again with young
 
 THE EPOCH'S CROSSING. 585 
 
 vigor — a kind of resurrection from what seemed 
 the grave's forewarning doom. Rather charily I 
 approached the old familiar semblance when I saw 
 her rise once at Chicago, and I greeted her to me 
 weird re-appearance as if she almost might be a 
 ghost. But one reconciliation she refused still ; she 
 would not come back to her home, her city, her 
 folk. She declined making St. Louis her second 
 center of propagation and turned from the West 
 to the East, where she stayed to the close — a mis- 
 take I think, but not fatal. 
 
 Still the second Miss Blow belonged to the St. 
 Louis Movement, indeed she, according with the 
 deepest strain of her character, could not help 
 sharing in its evolution. Again her life-stream will 
 persist somehow in intersecting, briefly and very 
 occasionally but never without a splash of energy 
 and combativeness, the autobiographic flow of this 
 book. Yes, reader, we, both you and I, may be 
 pretty certain of crossing her war-path again, if 
 we can hold out to the printed close. 
 
 X. 
 
 The Epoch's Crossing. 
 
 Already several times in the course of the fore- 
 going narrative, casual remarks have been dropped 
 along our path that the present Epoch was draw- 
 ing to an end. Even the loitering reader will have 
 observed certain prognostics of a coming change. 
 So here I may emphasize that the last Chicago 
 Literary School, in 1895, may be taken as one of
 
 586 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 life's turning-points out of an older transcended 
 stage into something new. Still let not the year's 
 limit be too rigidly fixed; old Time cannot be held 
 up by a date. 
 
 Encircling this year, however, as a kind of 
 rounding-up era seemed to gather for a conclusion 
 the main achievements of an Epoch, which I have 
 numbered the Second or Middle one of my life's 
 long central Period lasting almost a generation 
 from young-manhood to the verge of old-age. Now 
 the special work of this present expiring Epoch I 
 may here repeat once more, has centered on the 
 Literary Bibles — their evolution, elaboration, and 
 propagation, till the final act of printing and dis- 
 tributing the results of the labors of this persistent 
 "Writer of Books. But that task also is completed, 
 the nine volumes of Commentaries are all written — 
 only one belated tome remains to be typed (the 
 Commentary on the Odyssey, 1897). Strangely, 
 too, the once unresting wanderlust seems to slow 
 down, though not yet extinct. 
 
 Moreover my anchorage on Chicago was visibly 
 loosening, doubtless in part through the feeling that 
 I had there done my work and delivered my mes- 
 sage, having sped our Movement in that city for 
 more than ten of my best years. Quite a long spell 
 was that to hold out in the Chicago vortex — so I 
 titill-ated myself silently in my little nook on 
 Rookery Square, looking backwards. That once 
 dreamed ambition of mine had been in a small 
 measure fulfilled: one tiny green islet of Eternity 
 right in the heart of fleetingest modern Ephem-
 
 THE EPOCH'S CROSSING. 587 
 
 erality I had actually built, planted, and stabilized 
 for a decade. Now it must be left to itself, remain- 
 ing a stray shred of influence, or perchance only a 
 memory on a time, for already has arisen over me 
 another task pressing pitiless upon the residue of 
 my days. 
 
 There can be no doubt, however, that beyond 
 my limited range Chicago had been undergoing a 
 great intellectual transformation during these ten 
 years, as I watched her not only from the outside, 
 but also participated in her soul-life from within. 
 Already has been duly signalized her "World's Fair, 
 a globe-startling upburst not merely of elemental 
 strength, but of subtle beauty and lofty grandeur, 
 of which latter she had never been remotely sus- 
 pected. Then the new Chicago University was in 
 the process of being conceived and organized; it 
 had already risen above the horizon, just as our last 
 Literary School sank out of sight. Thus I dare 
 couple together the enormously large and the com- 
 paratively little in my autobiographic Ego, to which 
 they both made appeal, each in its own way. 
 
 The Chicago University, like every thing started 
 in that phenomenal town, had its unique phenome- 
 nal origin and character. Rockefeller's millions, 
 aided by the naturally purchasing spirit of the 
 community, had practically bought a complete 
 German University, somewhat as if it were a valu- 
 able European book or picture or piece of mer- 
 chandise, with its full equipment of men, material, 
 and libraries, then had lifted it out of its home- 
 soil, sailed with it "across the Atlantic, and set it
 
 588 THE ST - LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 down here in the West along the Michigan lakeside. 
 A marvelous achievement, and I hold, the best 
 medicine for the time and the place. It was indeed 
 the hugest sudden dose of old-world traditionalism 
 that was ever administered to any mundane patient. 
 To me it seemed just the antidote needed to hu- 
 manize and to steady crude ephemeral vortical Chi- 
 cago — a far mightier and more drastic remedy than 
 my single easy homeopathic pillules of brief indi- 
 vidual prescription, which moreover had now ex- 
 hausted its service. 
 
 In this connection I may be privileged to jot 
 down a small personal point. The Chicago Uni- 
 versity, though liberal, declared itself a Baptist In- 
 stitution, and therein followed the religious denomi- 
 nation of its founder. In my classes I had several 
 friendly Baptist ladies, one of whom, very influen- 
 tial with her fellow-members, caught the ambition 
 of making me, without my knowledge, a Professor 
 in the new University. She went so far as to sound 
 President Harper, with neutral result, I imagine, 
 and then she proceeded to sound me. I had already 
 known two or three such opportunities in the past, 
 and so my answer was prompt : "No — I am unfitted 
 for any position of that sort. I have been a free 
 lance too long, with my own University, the com- 
 munal, fermenting in my head and in my heart. 
 That would not well comport with the present over- 
 mastering tradition which is now to be schooled 
 into Chicago and ought to be, very emphatically. 
 Well do I know myself not the man for that task,
 
 THE EPOCH'S CROSSING. 589 
 
 however necessary. Moreover I can glimpse a big 
 fight developing with time inside this imported 
 University and inside its most aspiring Professors 
 concerning just this tradition and its external 
 authority. Much obliged, my very appreciative 
 friend; but permit me now to resign the position 
 to which I have never been elected — not by the 
 University regents and not by myself." 
 
 Verily the appointed Professor, who is deter- 
 mined to be self-determined in his academic career, 
 has become to-day a shrilling problem of our higher 
 education. From such a worried conflict I held 
 aloof both through temperament and conceived 
 duty. Besides, when I saw Prof. Richard G. Moul- 
 ton established in the Professorship of what he 
 called "Literature in English," I felt that the 
 Literary Bibles would have a worthy promulgator 
 in the Chicago University. At any rate, I realized 
 I was done with them, and, what was more decisive, 
 they were done with me. 
 
 Still, underneath all these outer conjunctures, 
 lay fermenting the deeper ultimate motive: my 
 spirit's evolution, or my Super- vocation was de- 
 manding a new and more adequate self-expression. 
 I had outgrown my long-cherished literary Orga- 
 non, and another more internal and intensive one 
 was throbbing for birth. And that completely free 
 utterance (my dearest libertas philosophandt) re- 
 quired for its play the Universe, not the university. 
 Accordingly another Renascence with its renewal 
 and re-creation starts a fresh Epoch of development.
 
 CHAPTER THIRD. 
 
 The Psychological Renascence. 
 
 First of all, let it be said that this was a Return 
 locally to the old home-town after a long separa- 
 tion — a circling back to the original starting-point 
 of the St. Louis Movement. Such an outer Return 
 had its inner spiritual side, otherwise it would be 
 of very evanescent significance. 
 
 Look back from here, my forgiving reader, over 
 a good many leaves of this ever-lengthening book 
 (see page 229), and you will find a brief forecast 
 and ordering of the stage at which we have arrived, 
 and which we label anew the Pyschological Rena- 
 scence as distinct from that old Classical Rena- 
 scence, whose long discipline we have hitherto tra- 
 versed and transcended. You may recall the quest 
 as I followed backward our race's European line 
 of civilization till I reached what I deemed the 
 historic germ, or the primordial cell of our early 
 evolution in Parnassian Hellas. But now we are 
 to undertake not an outer spatial Itinerary, but an 
 inner selfful one, not a journey to the Castalian 
 spring but to the fountain-head of Mind itself, of 
 our very Consciousness, whose original elementary 
 unit or germ we are to find, to name, and to unfold 
 into its completely ordered System. This is still a 
 Renascence, but of the Self, of the Soul or Psyche, 
 hence is called psychological. Such is the general 
 
 590
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RENASCENCE. 591 
 
 idea of this new transition in the Self's own evolu- 
 tion, which for some time had lain secretly brood- 
 ing in my underworld, when an incident of the 
 moment awakened it to daylight and sudden 
 activity. 
 
 One day early in 1894, as I time my memory, I 
 happened to pay a visit to the lady principal, Miss 
 Elizabeth Harrison, of our Kindergarten College, 
 when I found her pacing the parlor floor in some 
 perturbation, and repeating not so much to me as 
 to herself: "Our teacher of Psychology is sick in 
 a distant sanitarium, and cannot take his classes. 
 I have sought everywhere and can find no instruc- 
 tor. The work ought to begin at once. "Well, well, 
 what next?" Thereupon she stopped and looked 
 off into silent vacancy, as if for some unknown far- 
 away hand of the Invisible. 
 
 Now it so co-incided that just this subject of 
 Psychology had been recently knocking at my 
 spirit's door for a fresh renewal of ancient ties of 
 acquaintanceship. Some twenty-five years before 
 the preceding incident I was teaching the old Psy- 
 chology, then called Mental Philosophy, in the St. 
 Louis High School, and had wrought it over and 
 organized it pretty thoroughly according to Hegel, 
 who was at that time the master-mind of our St. 
 Louis Philosophical Society, and who had saturated 
 our practical pedagogy, especially through the in- 
 fluence of Superintendent Harris. I still could 
 recall the whole course and its details, as I had often 
 given it to classes in the High School and outside
 
 592 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 in the Community. Moreover I had kept a pretty- 
 full manuscript of it in cold storage during a quar- 
 ter of a century, inasmuch as the European Journey 
 and the Literary Bibles had wholly banned it from 
 my active life, and even from my mind's presence. 
 But this Epoch, as I have already indicated, showed 
 numerous signs of drawing to a close, having indeed 
 quite spent itself. Besides I had been watching 
 the rise of Psychology to the fore-front of the New 
 Education, ever since I heard Professor James at 
 Concord in 1883. In fact I had unconsciously felt 
 its pulse-beat as the coming world-discipline. I did 
 not know it, but I was getting ready and even 
 praying silently for the new epiphany. 
 
 Now drops down upon me with a sudden impact 
 this unique opportunity voiced by our principal. 
 I deliberated for a moment; then when I heard 
 slowly lisp from the same lips in a kind of wavering 
 revery, ""We know not what to do," my decisive 
 answer plumped out at once: "I'll take it, I can 
 teach your class in Psychology." "What! you! 
 None of your banter, this is too serious. ' ' It must 
 be remembered that I was known in Chicago chiefly 
 for my literary work and its propagation, which 
 now had been going on there for about ten years. 
 Accordingly I gave some account of my former St. 
 Louis time of philosophic Psychology. Whereupon 
 followed the question: "When can you start?" 
 "To-morrow." "Come." 
 
 Such was the little punch of destiny which as it 
 were squeezed me into a wholly new passage of
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RENASCENCE. 593 
 
 my life-work. There seemed to focus on that one 
 spot and in that one moment a triple call, as I 
 construe it now. First came the immediate press- 
 ing request of the School, which was manned, or 
 rather womanned, by my valiant Kindergartners, 
 who for a decade had fought along with me the 
 testful Chicago battle of the Literary Bibles. But 
 the second voice had also been whispering me at 
 intervals: ''The psychological age is dawning, up 
 and be a-doing!" The third summons, however, 
 was getting to be most insistent and personal of all : 
 "You must win a fresh living self-expression not 
 merely for your intellectual satisfaction and growth, 
 but for your soul's salvation. Start — start now at 
 the nick of golden opportunity ; your present voca- 
 tion has fulfilled itself — arise or be forever fallen." 
 That evening I retreated to my corner in Hotel 
 Goodenough, and began to ponder over what I had 
 so impulsively or only half consciously promised. 
 What does it all mean? But the immediate task 
 was urging me furiously, so I let the future slide 
 on and explain itself in its own way, which it always 
 will. I gave that first course of a few weeks, which 
 slowly expanded to the most intense and creative 
 Epoch of my life, lasting quite a dozen years. My 
 little psychological snow-ball, having once started 
 to rolling, would not stop with one round nor with 
 dozens of them, but kept on till it would encircle 
 the universe in its folds. It becomes not my plan 
 at present to give any account of this long desperate 
 adventure, with its multitudinous ups and downs,
 
 594 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 though it be fuller of myself (that is, of my own 
 original selfhood) than any other portion of my 
 life 's errantry. 
 
 But this autobiographic Ego of mine may here 
 succinctly state that it now, after so hot and so 
 prolonged a search for the source of all Tradition, 
 has reached back to the primal traditional form of 
 its own first genesis. It has found that itself in 
 its very birth, is a transmitted thing, which, how- 
 ever, is again to originate itself; a created object 
 it is whose ultimate essence is to recreate its own 
 creation, and thus to be self-creative. Or to use 
 more direct speech, I, through this long searchful 
 process of self -voyaging and self-discovery and also 
 self-construction, came gradually upon the primor- 
 dial unit or the original germ of universal creativ- 
 ity, which I named The Psychosis. But this em- 
 bryo of the Universe, ever reproducing its own 
 process, evolves out of itself its own creative body, 
 or complete psychical organism as the all-organizer 
 of the world and of man as well as of itself. To 
 such a worker or instrument is given the name 
 corresponding to its character: The Psychological 
 Organon. Finally this all-organizer must reveal 
 itself in the work done, or in the All as organized, 
 both externally and internally. Thus unfolds The 
 Psychological System, embracing the World and 
 the Self ordered psychically or according to the 
 Psychosis, which is the unit of Mind, distinct from 
 yet creative of the unit of Matter — the atom ; and 
 also distinct from yet creative of the unit of Life —
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RENASCENCE. 595 
 
 the cell. (Of this System and its various divisions 
 the reader will find an outline in the appendix.) 
 
 Here without delay, I must select and singly em- 
 phasize the pre-eminent conjuncture of this Epoch, 
 or rather the topmost flowering of the whole St. 
 Louis Movement, in so far as I had anything to do 
 with it. Though I deem the Chicago Literary 
 Schools my supreme personal achievement, a 
 greater deed than that was now to be done in St. 
 Louis, chiefly through the co-operative work of two 
 able and well-known teachers. Miss Amelia C. 
 Fruchte in 1906 was chosen President of the Peda- 
 gogical Society, which, from a small and seemingly 
 moribund club, at once increased under her inspir- 
 ing leadership to more than 2,000 members. For 
 this large body of students Miss Fruchte with her 
 assistants organized numerous special courses on 
 various subjects. The result was a unique Com- 
 munal University which appeared to build itself up 
 over night, and which may be acclaimed, I think, 
 the most considerable practical feat in the history 
 of the St. Louis Movement, of which Miss Fruchte 
 had long been a faithful co-worker. 
 
 IBut of these numerous courses the most distinc- 
 tive and tone-giving, as well as the most successful, 
 was that of Professor Francis E. Cook on Psychol- 
 ogy, or, more specially stated, on the Psychological 
 Organon, embracing Intellect, Will, and Feeling, 
 which he unfolded in three different courses during 
 three successive years. His regular audience for 
 such an abstruse and difficult subject was the larg-
 
 596 T HE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT— PART SECOND. 
 
 est I ever saw anywhere — in St. Louis, Concord, or 
 Chicago. The number of his hearers often rose to 
 one hundred and fifty, and never fell below a hun- 
 dred. A dozen or so was usually our old St. Louis 
 philosophical quota. Professor Cook's luminous 
 and poetically beautiful presentation of the pro- 
 foundest thought made its appeal not merely to the 
 head, but to the heart and imagination of all his 
 listeners. I regard this course of his as the crown- 
 ing act of the long line of expositors of the St. Louis 
 Movement from its earliest start ; and in like man- 
 ner I regard Miss Fruchte's aforesaid work as the 
 towering single deed of organization in the whole 
 history of our Movement, on whose summit there 
 stands at this point a woman as leader. 
 
 Such is the merest mention of what is deserving 
 a full record, which, however, cannot now be given. 
 A surprisingly sudden fresh upburst of the old St. 
 Louis Renascence into new forms — will it hold? 
 Never mind that here, for we have come to the clos- 
 ing scene of the present ascent of life, having 
 reached its happiest and highest altitude, from 
 which we shall not now make or even contemplate 
 the descent, but let it hide itself in futurity. 
 
 Accordingly this book of mine insists on winding 
 itself up and quitting just here in a manner without 
 my concurrence, since I had foreplanned a different 
 outcome for it, and a somewhat different progress. 
 But matters not intended have forced themselves 
 into its narrative; other things blocked out in ad- 
 vance have been ruthlessly pitched off along the
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RENASCENCE. 597 
 
 wayside. That is, the present book has obstinately- 
 persisted in writing itself after its own law more 
 than ever before in my history, though I had been 
 made aware of a similar over-ruling in previous 
 volumes of mine. For example, I had designed to 
 include in this final Epoch my full psychological 
 evolution, but the pen refuses, or the spirit, if you 
 can think so, presiding over this book dashes mas- 
 terfully his veto on my scheme, enjoining me "Your 
 psychological day is not yet sundown, you are living 
 it still, all harnessed and at work; it has yet to 
 finish and perchance to tell its own story." 
 
 Only one more paragraph, or possibly two, may 
 be permitted for a heart-felt obituary, as a parting 
 farewell breathed from the soul of the still living 
 and unforgetting St. Louis Movement to its first, 
 now old-aged founders as they vanish from the day 
 of life. In this same pivotal year of 1906, when 
 the Psychological Organon had completed itself as a 
 written work to face its unknown destiny of coming 
 time, when the new-born association of workers 
 headed by Miss Fruchte and Professor Cook had 
 leaped forth in multitudinous youthful energy, and 
 when the St. Louis Movement itself, after its long 
 Ulyssean wanderings of more than twenty years, 
 had gotten back to its old home by the riverside for 
 its life's renewal and rejuvenescence, Governor 
 Brockmeyer, its first President, passed away at the 
 rounding of his eightieth birth-day. In this same 
 year Doctor Harris, its first Secretary, also its 
 greatest educator and zealous promoter, retired from
 
 598 THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT—PART SECOND. 
 
 his official position as head of the National Bureau 
 of Education, still aspiring though broken by ill 
 health, to which he succumbed not long afterwards. 
 Unto both their paternal spirits the St. Louis Move- 
 ment bids a grateful last salutation — Vale et Vive. 
 So let their names be again twinned together, as 
 at the beginning of this record so now at its close, 
 in the bond of ever-living affection and memory 
 
 Henry C. Brockmeyer 
 William T. Harris
 
 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM 
 
 It has been suggested that I give in a brief appendix 
 a general outline or conspectus of my entire System of 
 Psychology, in so far as it has developed up to date 
 (1920). It now may be said to consist directly (omit- 
 ting indirect writings) of twenty-two volumes, contain- 
 ing about 12,000 pages (small octavo). So we are here 
 to pass from the biographic order which has been fol- 
 lowed hitherto in the present book, to the systematized 
 survey of the whole field of Psychology in its special 
 divisions, of which I give in advance the following 
 three leading ones: (I) The Psychological Organon — 
 the creative universal Idea and its inner Organization; 
 (II) The World psychologized — the Idea realized ex- 
 ternally or objectively — the Macrocosm; (III) The Self 
 psychologized — the Idea realized internally, or in the 
 individual mind — the Microcosm. 
 
 Such are the three grand stages of the psychological 
 Norm of the Universe, or the three basic lines in the 
 organization of Universal Psychology. The reader may 
 eompare this psychological Norm with the philosophical 
 Norm, which usually divides itself into the triplicity 
 called (1) the Absolute (God) (2) the World, and (3) 
 Man. 
 
 It may be here repeated that the main outcome or the 
 fulfilment of the St. Louis Movement has been the 
 evolution and elaboration of this System of Universal 
 Psychology, whose Norm embraces in its sweep firstly 
 the Self as universal psychologized (Organon), secondly 
 the World psychologized (Sciences), thirdly the in- 
 dividual Self psychologized (Biography). The follow- 
 ing may be taken as the System's skeleton embracing 
 the mentioned twenty-two volumes and giving their 
 order and titles. 
 
 599
 
 600 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORGANON 
 
 This sets forth the universal organizing principle, or 
 genetic center, of the entire System. It is not only 
 creative but self-creative, generating all and itself too. 
 We may call it Pure Psychology, the essential Psyche^ 
 the ideal Psychosis as it is in itself and as it orders it- 
 self purely. 
 
 Several Organons have appeared in the history of 
 Philosophy. First and best known is that of the old 
 Greek Aristotle, his so-called Logic, mainly deductive; 
 then by way of reaction comes Bacon's Novum Organum, 
 emphatically inductive; at last appears Hegel's Logic 
 which is essentially an Organon of the Universe whose 
 principle is the Dialectic. All these are European 
 philosophical Organons, distinct from the present psy- 
 chological Organon, whose working principle is the 
 Psychosis. The treatment of this subject embraces the 
 following three volumes. 
 
 (1) Feeling, With Prolegomena. This unfolds not 
 merely the Feelings of the individual as such, but 
 shows the whole universe of God, Nature, and Man 
 reflecting itself in the Feelings (pages 534). 
 
 (2) The Will and Its World. The place of the Will 
 in the Man and in the World is set forth in its various 
 processes, which form the basis of individual Freedom, 
 of Ethics and of Institutions (pages 575). 
 
 (3) Intellect (Psychology and the Psychosis). This 
 is a treatise upon the self-ordering Intellect with its 
 three fundamental stages of Sense-perception, Repre- 
 sentation, and Thought. Doubtless the best book to 
 start with in studying the system (pages 556). 
 
 Thus at the center is placed Psychology with its 
 Organon, as the science which organizes all other 
 sciences, but must first organize itself. This starts 
 with the individual Self (or Ego) as the point which 
 both surveys everything else, and is also self-surveying, 
 which knows itself and through that knows the World.
 
 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 601 
 
 II 
 
 THE WORLD PSYCHOLOGIZED 
 
 The World here means all externality as distinct 
 from the Self, hence the objective side of existence. 
 The ideal Psyche is now realized; the pure Psychosis 
 is seen at work generating its vast multiplicity of forms 
 and appearances, and at the same time co-ordinating 
 them into an ordered totality. Specially here is un- 
 folded the World as Will, as Realisation; hence this is 
 the second stage or movement of the Universe's total 
 Psychosis. 
 
 The present main division of Universal Psychology 
 embraces the following six departments of man's ob- 
 jective Universe, which are also the race's great human 
 disciplines, beginning with the first and most external 
 in Nature, and rising through Art, Literature, Philos- 
 ophy and Institutions, to the last and highest in Univer- 
 sal History with its World-Spirit. In thirteen volumes, 
 distributed and titled as follows: 
 
 I. Psychology of Nature and Natural Science. 
 This starts with the purest externality of Nature (Space 
 and Time) and unfolds it in a psychological evolution 
 to its supreme manifestation in Nature's Life. The 
 scientific method has also (like Philosophy) sought to 
 determine Psychology, and is still in vogue for this pur- 
 pose, though apparently waning,, as it has been found 
 too narrow for the subject-matter. But in this field, 
 too, Psychology has turned the tables and has organized 
 Nature and Natural Science instead of being organized 
 by them. Two works of the present system cover the 
 total domain of Nature: 
 
 (1) Cosmos and Diacosmos. These two terms em- 
 brace what is generally included under Mechanics (with 
 Mathematics), Physics, and Chemistry, all of which are 
 seen to be psychological in their final principle. Also
 
 602 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 
 
 is unfolded the genesis of Nature as the second stage 
 of the total process of the Universe (pages 578). 
 
 (2) The Biocosmos, or the Life of Nature psycholog- 
 ically treated and embracing the science of Biology in 
 its widest sense. This is the third part of Nature as 
 conceived in the present system (pages 481). 
 
 II. Psychology of Art. (Aesthetic). Art follows 
 Nature and transfigures the same with a new meaning 
 and purpose, essentially social. Art has been philoso- 
 phized in Europe, according to the various philosophical 
 systems, idealistic and realistic, but now it is to be 
 psychologized into what may be called the New 
 Aesthetic. That is, the order and interpretation of the 
 Fine Arts are to be unfolded by Universal Psychology, 
 which puts them into their place in the cycle of man's 
 activities, and also gives to each of them its inner 
 psychical organization. Art is conceived not merely as 
 a revelation of man's individual life, but also of his 
 Bocial and institutional life, and finally of the creative 
 soul of the Universe itself. Two works: 
 
 (1) Architecture. The three great styles of artistic 
 construction are shown in their psychical evolution- 
 Oriental, European and Occidental (American). That 
 unique manifestation of recent Architecture, the High 
 Building, takes its place as one of the supreme forms of 
 this Art (pages 561). 
 
 (2) Music and the Fine Arts. The stress is upon 
 Music as the most psychological of all the Fine Arts 
 and the most modern, though it be ancient too. But 
 also Sculpture, Painting and the Kinetic Arts are set 
 forth in their ultimate psychical order and significance. 
 Likewise is given a survey of the total sweep of all the 
 Fine (or Presentative) Arts (pages 588). 
 
 III. (The Psychology of Literature, as essentially 
 the Representative Art (Poetry, Novel, Belles-Lettres), 
 is to be classed here in the System, though I shall omit 
 from the present survey my works on the four Literary 
 Bibles, as they have been already considered in their 
 auto-biographic relation. Moreover, they were not for
 
 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 603 
 
 me an evolution of Psychology in its explicit form, but 
 rather Psychology was a gradual growth out of them 
 and their long discipline. So their nine volumes of 
 Commentaries have been listed already, as they were 
 evolving both in me and in themselves towards Psy- 
 chology. The student can, however, co-ordinate them 
 in the total System under the foregoing head of the 
 Psychology of Literature). 
 
 IV. Psychology of Philosophy With the Latter's 
 History. The preceding branches — Nature, Art, Litera- 
 ture — have all been philosophized in the past according 
 to the various philosophical Systems of Europe. But 
 now all these Philosophies are to be, not refuted but 
 subordinated to a new and more universal World-prin- 
 ciple, and are to be themselves psychologized. Thus 
 Philosophy in its final outcome reveals itself a part or 
 phase of Psychology, instead of the reverse as hitherto. 
 For Philosophy has been generally regarded as the ulti- 
 mate Science, as the Science of sciences. It seeks to 
 grasp and formulate the first principle of the Universe, 
 and then to apply the same to all knowledge. In Euro- 
 pean thought Philosophy has had the primacy, and has 
 on the whole determined the sciences, but in the present 
 system Psychology is seen supplanting Philosophy and 
 determining the same in turn. That is, Philosophy it- 
 self is found to be at bottom psychological and must be 
 newly ordered accordingly. 
 
 (1) Ancient European Philosophy, which gives the 
 evolution of ancient Thought from Thales to Proclus, 
 and brings to the surface the psychological movement 
 underlying and controlling the philosophical (pages 
 730). 
 
 (2) Modern European Philosophy, which does the 
 same for the modern movement from Descartes, giving 
 a full account of Hegel, who is the last European 
 philosopher in the supreme sense, and who is con- 
 ceived as transitional to Psychology (pages 829).
 
 604 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 
 
 V. Psychology op Institutions as the Forms of 
 Associated Max. At present mankind's most earnest 
 endeavor is seeking after the ways in which human 
 beings can be best associated. Hence the stress of the 
 time is upon the meaning and value of Institutions as 
 the actualized Forms of Associated Man. Especially 
 the State and the Economic Institution are just now in a 
 new conflicting evolution, each in itself and with the 
 other. Hence the most timely study for the men of 
 to-day is that of Institutions, which are being assailed 
 in so many ways, secretly and openly. Especially with 
 Americans the chief problem is to become conscious of 
 their Institutions. Moreover the relation of Institutions 
 to Art and Literature is fundamental, and furnishes the 
 deepest content to artistic and literary works. In this 
 realm are two books: 
 
 (1) Social Institutions. Under this head the five 
 main Institutions of man — domestic, economic, political, 
 religious, and educational — are here put together for 
 the first time, being treated separately and as a whole 
 (pages 615). 
 
 (2) The State in which is especially considered the 
 American State, with the psychological exposition of 
 the United States Constitution (pages 561). 
 
 (3) The Educative Institution, to which belongs two 
 specialized books on Froebel's Kindergarten: (a) Com- 
 mentary on Froeoels' Mother Play Songs (pages 439) 
 and (6) Psychology of Froebel's Play Gifts (pages 
 396). 
 
 VI. Psychology of the World's History and Its 
 Spirit. In the last half dozen years, the World has 
 made more History both national and universal, than 
 in any whole century of its previous existence. Hence 
 the World's History seems to have turned a great new 
 Period whose creative principle, here called the World- 
 Spirit, is to be specially studied and unfolded. It has 
 long been recognized that a Universal Science is re- 
 quired for grasping the ultimate processes of Universal
 
 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 605 
 
 History. Hence arose the Philosophy of History, being 
 based more or less consciously upon some philosophical 
 system. But History also, as one manifestation of the 
 Universal Spirit, must get the final organization of its 
 processes from Psychology, the Universal Science. In 
 this field are the three following works: 
 
 (1) European History. As Europe has made a large 
 part of recorded History so far, the first duty is to put 
 in order its historic processes, and to set forth its place 
 in Universal History (pages 691). 
 
 (2) The Father of History. Herodotus is the most 
 important of all Historians, recording the first great 
 historic struggle of the World's History and showing 
 the dawn of the historic consciousness (pages 538). 
 
 (3) The American Ten Years' War (1855-1865). 
 Our Civil War is set forth as a stage in the evolution 
 of Universal History, with its underlying psychological 
 element (pages 527). 
 
 Next result is that this universal World's History with 
 its Spirit embodied in time's events now passes to the 
 individual Man's Spirit embodied in time's events, or 
 in his life. That is, World's History individualizes it- 
 self in Life's History, or Biography, which is the third 
 stage of the supreme psychological Norm already 
 given. 
 
 Retrospect. Thus our World-Psychology, starting 
 with the World's uttermost externality in Nature has 
 risen to its innermost creative principle in the World- 
 Spirit. Or more directly, I, having psychologized the 
 World, must next proceed to psychologize the Self as 
 individual; or more directly still, I must psychologize 
 myself as psychologist in the process of psychologizing. 
 Or again: I having recreated the external cosmos, now. 
 I must recreate myself creating it. Only when you 
 truly psychologize, do you become your true Self and 
 fulfill your highest vocation. Preliminary steps to this 
 height are Philosophy, Art, Literature, Science, which 
 must themselves be organized psychologically, that is, 
 through the Psychological Organon.
 
 606 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. 
 
 Ill 
 THE SELF PSYCHOLOGIZED 
 
 The Psychological Organon, the first ideal, or ab- 
 stract stage of the Psychological Norm, now realizes it- 
 self in the concrete human career, or incarnates itself 
 in the individual Man and his works. The original and 
 originating Psychosis — Feeling, Will and Intellect— is 
 henceforth to be made actual in the living Person and 
 in his achievement. Such is the grand psychical in- 
 carnation of the race. If the Psychological Organon we 
 saw realize itself objectively in World-Psychology, now 
 we are to see that same creative Organon realize itself 
 subjectively in the Self, Ego, individual Psyche, which 
 is the theme of the present Self-Psychology, or 
 Biography. Under this head we put two divisions with 
 a possible glimpse of a third, all of them being stages 
 or phases of the one Biography. 
 
 I. Gexebal Biography. This is the common kind, in 
 which tbe life of the man is written by another than 
 himself. If we may coin a word needed for this species, 
 let it be called Allo-biography, that is, the other-written 
 Life, as distinct from the self-written Life, or Auto- 
 biography. 
 
 The popular reader has always shown a chief inter- 
 est in the individual lives of Great Men. But a science 
 of Biography has hardly been conceived hitherto, though 
 ancient Plutarch already thought that there was some 
 common principle in the lives of the eminent Greeks 
 and Romans. But Psychology, as the ultimate science 
 of the Self, can alone furnish the universal basis of 
 Biography, elevating it into a science, which Philosophy 
 never did, and could not. 
 
 Here are placed four books of General Biography 
 (Allo-biography) which belong by their treatment to 
 the System of Universal Psychology.
 
 APPENDIX— THE SYSTEM. ($7 
 
 (1) Abraham Lincoln, the' Statesman, whose life is 
 in this work unfolded after its underlying psychological 
 order (pages 574). 
 
 (2) Frederick Froebel, the Educator, whose career 
 repeals the inner psychological process in all Biography 
 (pages 470). 
 
 (3) Goethe's Life-Poem — the Poet's Life as a poem 
 which unfolds itself psychologically through its three 
 supreme Periods (pages 601). 
 
 (4) Emerson's Life-Essay — which reveals psychically 
 the biography of himself as his own "Standard Man." 
 (In type but not yet published). 
 
 \ Here may be mentioned, as being in preparation, 
 'hakespeare's Life-Drama psychologically treated by the 
 utlior. 
 
 II. Auto-biography, or the self-written Life of the 
 vriter narrating the events of his career in his own 
 vay, Several works of this sort have been very famous, 
 or instance, Rousseau's and Goethe's Auto-biographies. 
 )f course they are not directly psychologized. 
 
 A distinct variety of Auto-biography is seen when it 
 s written by the psychologist who psychologizes his 
 wn particular Life as a manifestation of universal 
 'sychology, which indeed every man's Life must be. 
 
 Two works of Auto-biography represent this phase 
 . f th* System: 
 
 (1) A Writer of Books, giving the main events of 
 the author's life as he unfolds during his earlier Period 
 (pages 668). 
 
 (2) The St. Louis Movement — the present book, 
 showing the author evolving into his psychological 
 world-\iew through Philosophy and Literature. Here I 
 may add, as I am alive and still writing, that there is 
 another, but unfinished part of this Auto-biography. 
 
 'Summary. The salient character of Universal Psy- 
 chology may be indicated in the fact that it is neither 
 meta-physical nor physical in method or matter, but 
 purely psychological.
 
 w 
 
 608 APPENDIX—THE SYSTEM. 
 
 Slowly the science of Psychology has been pushing td 
 the front as the Universal Science. But it has been 
 hitherto handicapped by alien methods foisted upon it; 
 so we have had chiefly two kinds: the old Rational 
 (so-called) Psychology, dominated by the metaphysical 
 system of some philosopher, and the more recent Phy 
 siological Psychology, dominated by the procedure of 
 Natural Science. The present system maintains a vie 
 opposite to, yet inclusive of both these methods. Psy 
 chology is proclaimed the master of the house, no 
 longer the subordinate; it is to organize Philosophy 
 and Natural Science, and not to be organized "by them. 
 It is the new Universal Science and openly asserts it 
 self as a System in spite of to-day's pragmatic preju 
 dice against all systems. 
 
 Here we may again emphasize that the elementary 
 principle everywhere pervading and originally creating 
 and psychically ordering all the foregoing divisions, is 
 the Psychosis. Such is the universal embryo with its 
 remoter parallel in the Atom or unit of matter, and 
 with its nearer parallel in the Cell or unit of Life, hot 
 of which however, are forms or manifestations of thi 
 ultimate universally genetic unit of Mind. The psychical 
 protoplast we may conceive it, or the embryonic arch 
 type of the Creator, of the Creation, and of me — th 
 Psychosis. 
 
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