Part 1 (1/2)
Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.
by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
I
_I Start on My Walk_
As some of the readers of this account are aware, I took a walk last summer from my home town, Springfield, Illinois, across Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, up and down Colorado and into New Mexico. One of the most vivid little episodes of the trip, that came after two months of walking, I would like to tell at this point. It was in southern Colorado. It was early morning. Around the cliff, with a boom, a rattle and a bang, appeared a gypsy wagon. On the front seat was a Romany, himself dressed inconspicuously, but with his woman more bedecked than Carmen. She wore the bangles and spangles of her Hindu progenitors. The woman began to shout at me, I could not distinguish just what. The two seemed to think this was the gayest morning the sun ever shone upon. They came faster and faster, then, suddenly, at the woman's suggestion, pulled up short. And she asked me with a fraternal, confidential air, ”What you sellin', what you sellin', boy?”
If we had met on the first of June, when I had just started, she would have pretended to know all about me, she would have asked to tell my fortune. On the first of June I wore about the same costume I wear on the streets of Springfield. I was white as paper from two years of writing poetry indoors. Now, on the first of August I was sunburned a quarter of an inch deep. My costume, once so respectable, I had gradually transformed till it looked like that of a show-man. I wore very yellow corduroys, a fancy sombrero and an oriflamme tie. So Mrs.
Gypsy hailed me as a brother. She eyed my little worn-out oil-cloth pack. It was a delightful professional mystery to her.
I handed up a sample of what it contained--my _Gospel of Beauty_ (a little one-page formula for making America lovelier), and my little booklet, _Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread_.
The impatient horses went charging on. In an instant came more noises.
Four more happy gypsy wagons pa.s.sed. Each time the interview was repeated in identical language, and with the same stage business. The men were so silent and masterful-looking, the girls such brilliant, inquisitive cats! I never before saw anything so like high-cla.s.s comic opera off the stage, and in fancy I still see it all:--those brown, braceleted arms still waving, and those provocative siren cries:--”What you sellin', boy? What you sellin'?”
I hope my Gospel did them good. Its essential principle is that one should not be a gypsy forever. He should return home. Having returned, he should plant the seeds of Art and of Beauty. He should tend them till they grow. There is something essentially humorous about a man walking rapidly away from his home town to tell all men they should go back to their birthplaces. It is still more humorous that, when I finally did return home, it was sooner than I intended, all through a temporary loss of nerve. But once home I have taken my own advice to heart. I have addressed four mothers' clubs, one literary club, two missionary societies and one High School Debating Society upon the Gospel of Beauty. And the end is not yet. No, not by any means. As John Paul Jones once said, ”I have not yet begun to fight.”
I had set certain rules of travel, evolved and proved practicable in previous expeditions in the East and South. These rules had been published in various periodicals before my start. The home town newspapers, my puzzled but faithful friends in good times and in bad, went the magazines one better and added a rule or so. To promote the gala character of the occasion, a certain paper announced that I was to walk in a Roman toga with bare feet encased in sandals. Another added that I had travelled through most of the countries of Europe in this manner. It made delightful reading. Scores of mere acquaintances crossed the street to shake hands with me on the strength of it.
The actual rules were to have nothing to do with cities, railroads, money, baggage or fellow tramps. I was to begin to ask for dinner about a quarter of eleven and for supper, lodging and breakfast about a quarter of five. I was to be neat, truthful, civil and on the square. I was to preach the Gospel of Beauty. How did these rules work out?
The cities were easy to let alone. I pa.s.sed quickly through Hannibal and Jefferson City. Then, straight West, it was nothing but villages and farms till the three main cities of Colorado. Then nothing but desert to central New Mexico. I did not take the train till I reached central New Mexico, nor did I write to Springfield for money till I quit the whole game at that point.
Such wages as I made I sent home, starting out broke again, first spending just enough for one day's recuperation out of each pile, and, in the first case, rehabilitating my costume considerably. I always walked penniless. My baggage was practically nil. It was mainly printed matter, renewed by mail. Sometimes I carried reproductions of drawings of mine, _The Village Improvement Parade_, a series of picture-cartoons with many morals.
I pinned this on the farmers' walls, explaining the mottoes on the banners, and exhorting them to study it at their leisure. My little pack had a supply of the aforesaid _Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread_.
And it contained the following Gospel of Beauty:
_THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY_
_Being the new ”creed of a beggar” by that vain and foolish mendicant Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, printed for his personal friends in his home village--Springfield, Illinois. It is his intention to carry this gospel across the country beginning June, 1912, returning in due time._
_I_
_I come to you penniless and afoot, to bring a message. I am starting a new religious idea. The idea does not say ”no” to any creed that you have heard.... After this, let the denomination to which you now belong be called in your heart ”the church of beauty” or ”the church of the open sky.” ...
The church of beauty has two sides: the love of beauty and the love of G.o.d._
_II_
_THE NEW LOCALISM_
_The things most worth while are one's own hearth and neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in the world. The children now growing up should become devout gardeners or architects or park architects or teachers of dancing in the Greek spirit or musicians or novelists or poets or story-writers or craftsmen or wood-carvers or dramatists or actors or singers. They should find their talent and nurse it industriously. They should believe in every possible application to art-theory of the thoughts of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. They should, if led by the spirit, wander over the whole nation in search of the secret of democratic beauty with their hearts at the same time filled to overflowing with the righteousness of G.o.d. Then they should come back to their own hearth and neighborhood and gather a little circle of their own sort of workers about them and strive to make the neighborhood and home more beautiful and democratic and holy with their special art.... They should labor in their little circle expecting neither reward nor honors.... In their darkest hours they should be made strong by the vision of a completely beautiful neighborhood and the pa.s.sion for a completely democratic art. Their reason for living should be that joy in beauty which no wounds can take away, and that joy in the love of G.o.d which no crucifixion can end._
The kindly reader at this point clutches his brow and asks, ”But why carry this paper around? Why, in Heaven's name, do it as a beggar? Why do it at all?”
Let me make haste to say that there has been as yet no accredited, accepted way for establis.h.i.+ng Beauty in the heart of the average American. _Until such a way has been determined upon by a competent committee_, I must be pardoned for taking my own course and trying any experiment I please.