It was about this time that Sam Davis mentioned to President Roosevelt that he knew Bierce. The President was immediately interested and expressed a desire to meet him. A formal invitation was sent at once. Bierce replied that he was exceedingly sorry to decline the invitation, but that it so happened that he had a previous engagement with an old friend from San Francisco, and that he never “neglected old friends to make new.” Roosevelt was delighted and sent another note, saying, “I quite agree with you. Come to-night, and let us be old friends.” The loyal Sam Davis was present at the meeting, and, true to Virginia City form, introduced the President to Bierce. Later in the evening the three inspected the White House, and Roosevelt showed them the famous painting of San Juan Hill with the Rough Rider, well in the foreground, leading the charge. He asked Bierce what he thought of the picture, and was informed that it was inaccurate since it depicted Roosevelt at San Juan when in truth he hadn’t been there!
In the fall of 1903, Bierce went to Aurora, in West Virginia, and there spent most of the autumn. It chanced to be the scene of his early soldiering, and it was during this vacation that he gathered the information contained in the letter written to the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Association. He took long walks through the woods and inspected the Grafton Cemetery with fascinated attention. He was actually walking around in the woods near Belington! Wasn’t there a fellow — what was his name? — Corporal Dyson Boothroyd! And Capt. Madden! It did not seem but yesterday, and now he walked through the cemetery, gray-haired and haunted with memories, while a bright and childish sunlight smiled and laughed with delight. He discovered the fallen Confederates only by accident. They were not housed in a national cemetery. “As nearly as I could make out there were from eight to a hundred sunken graves, overgrown with moss and full of rotting leaves. Fewer than a dozen had headstones, fashioned from native slate of the county, with barely decipherable inscriptions rudely carved by comrades of the dead. These had mostly fallen into the excavations.”
The swift and changing habits of time! The black ashes grown into the green freshness of spring and this new life itself already moldy with decay. It suggested the order of a vegetable kingdom that mocked, by its silence and passivity, the thought of dreams and ideals. What did all this idealism amount to, this “lashing rascals through the world,” had it any greater significance than the valor he had shown that morning at Belington so many years ago? They had fought around here for several days; the gentlemen over at Grafton and these fellows beneath the unmarked slabs of slate, and the struggle was rumored to have had something to do with slavery. Back in Washington the great world was shocked with accounts of race riots at Atlanta, and he stood in the quietness of Grafton and counted the graves of fallen comrades. It was like Hamlet entering the grave. A sleepy feeling of indifference pervaded the valley, and nothing seemed to matter: rotting logs of breastworks; scarred timbers; a few unmarked graves. But he was still “romantic” about the old scenes; he was still capable of self-deception, and he wrote in his letter to those of his comrades:
“But the whole region is wild and grand, and if any one of the men who in his golden youth soldiered through its valleys of sleep and over its gracious mountains will revisit it in the hazy season when it is all aflame with the autumn foliage, I promise him sentiments that he will willingly entertain and emotions that he will care to feel. Among them, I fear, will be a haunting envy of those of his comrades whose fall and burial in that enchanted land he once bewailed.”
On his return to Washington he wrote George Sterling: “They found a Confederate soldier the other day with his rifle alongside. I’m going over to beg his pardon.”
In the winter of 1904, Mary E. Bierce commenced an action in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County against Ambrose G. Bierce for divorce on the ground of desertion. It was a simple complaint: the statutory allegations with the statement that the “defendant” was a journalist who resided in Washington. The interlocutory decree was granted a few months later, and on April 27, 1905, Mary E. Bierce died of “heart failure.” Both happenings were a great shock to her husband and daughter. No one knew that Mrs. Bierce intended to sue for a divorce, and for many years her motives remained a mystery. But her counsel, who still lives in Los Angeles, remembers that she filed the action because she had “heard that Mr. Bierce wanted his freedom but was too proud to ask for it.” It was another tragedy of misunderstanding, as Bierce had made no such request, and the word that had reached his wife was untrue. He never remarried and never had any intention of doing so.
For many years it has been bruited about San Francisco that Mrs. Bierce filed suit for divorce because she was going to inherit a large estate and wanted to eliminate any possible claim of her husband. As a matter of fact, the estate of Captain H. — H. Day was probated in San Bernardino County, California, in January of 1891, thirteen years before she applied for a divorce. Moreover, both she and her mother were in straitened circumstances at the time the divorce action was filed. The devotion of Mrs. Bierce to her husband is unquestionable: a perfect record of unbroken care and faith. For years she had lived in Los Angeles nursing an aged and demented parent, uncomplaining, cheerful and indifferent to a sad fate. But the last years had been too much: the death of Leigh, the condition of her mother, and the memories that were so unnecessarily stirred into poignancy by that divorce action, these sorrows were more than even this brave and admirable woman could stand. In the final reckoning of things it will be hers and not her husband’s fate that will probably be written of as tragic. There is something about the story of her life that is too tragic to write about in the casual manner of narration. In the words of her school-girl friends, now wizened old ladies in St. Helena, “Mollie Day was beautiful and kind.”
Again the lot of attending to the details of the funeral fell to the daughter. Bierce had left for the South on a military survey with General Ainsworth shortly after his wife was taken ill, so the daughter had to rush to Los Angeles and care for her mother. And it was the daughter, too, who took the ashes of her mother and the ashes of her brother, Leigh, to St. Helena for burial.
Bierce wrote George Sterling about this time: “Death has been striking pretty close to me again, and you know how that upsets a fellow.” If there had been a semblance of vitality about his work in Washington previous to the death of his wife, it disappeared with remarkable swiftness afterwards. He seemed to be numb with cold. He tried frantically to regain the sense of vivid emotions, even if experienced vicariously in the perspective of memory, but it was of no avail. Events did not seem to touch him; he was encased in death’s antechamber. Even his work ceased to bring him pleasure. He wrote to Howes, “Alas, my dreadful inertia!” and so it was, for he could not feel keenly and knew that he had been deceived and that he was fast approaching the final mystery which would perhaps turn out to be another empty vault. His days were full of echoes and shadows; the troubling half-reality of pale reflections; the memory of vital sensations. His imagination could not sustain him. He was still looking about him in the world for the revealing magic. That early shock which had paralyzed his imagination had also bred an irremediable distrust of all mysticism. But he had missed so much!
“So, too,” Mr. George Santayana writes of Hamlet and he might better have been writing of Bierce, “his sardonic humor and nonsensical verbiage at the most tragic junctures, may justify themselves ideally and seem to be deeply inspired. These wild starts suggest a mind inwardly rent asunder, a delicate genius disordered, a mind with infinite sensibility possessing no mastery over itself or things.... The clouded will which plays with all these artifices of thought would fain break its way to light and self-knowledge through the magic circle of sophistication. It is the tragedy of a soul buzzing in the glass prison of a world which it can neither escape or understand, in which it flutters about without direction, without clear hope, and yet with many a keen pang, many a dire imaginary doubt, and much exquisite music.”
He came to feel that something shou
ld be done; it was imperative that he overcome that “dreadful inertia” which left him “weak and will-less.” He would “go away” and perhaps he could capture again that feeling of “enormous revelry,” of which William Blake once wrote.
CHAPTER XVII. “A MAGNIFICENT CRYSTALLIZATION”
DURING the first years that he was in Washington, Bierce’s journalism appeared under the caption “The Passing Show” in the various Hearst papers. But Mr. Hearst had written him: “I will have enough magazines pretty soon to keep you busy in the magazine field, and then you won’t have to bother with newspapers. I imagine the magazine field will please you better anyway, as it is an opportunity for fuller discussion.” (June 24, 1906.) It became quite apparent that it was the policy of Mr. Hearst to keep Bierce anchored to the magazines and that he should write as little as possible for the newspapers. But 1905 “The Passing Show” was transferred from the newspapers into the files of The Cosmopolitan, which Mr. Hearst had purchased, and there it appeared until 1909, when Bierce ceased to write for current publication altogether.
But, if Bierce was out of sympathy with the editors of the Hearst newspapers, he was even more at war with the editors of The Cosmopolitan. The radicalism of the late nineties began to find expression, about this time, in the sensational muckraking which Mr. Hearst fostered. It was the era of the “progressive,” and “reform” agitation. The movement doubtless had a genuine causation but its expression was weak, futile and ineffective. It took the form of emotionalized propaganda. The Cosmopolitan soon became a hotbed of excited and hysterical prose. The muck-rakers were a querulous and nervous lot, full of accusations and charges, but suffering from the phobia of reform, shouting without reason and writing without grace. It was during this period that David Graham Phillips wrote a sensational series of articles on “The Treason of the Senate.” Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Alfred Henry Lewis, and Emerson Hough, began to chronicle the lives of the industrial barons evolved out of a capitalistic society. Maxim Gorki published his memoirs, which added color to the movement, and Jack London’s hastily concocted stories of the road began to hymn the lowly proletariat in flattering terms. It was the decade of Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair and Robert Herrick. Radicalism was unquestionably making enormous gains throughout the country, and “social unrest” was the favorite subject of the Chautauqua platform. By 1914 the movement had dissipated all its fine energies and it collapsed with the first intimation of war. But the first years of the century were rampant with unphilosophic radicalism.
It was quite predictable that Bierce should war with his fellow contributors. He was entirely out of place in The Cosmopolitan. He knew instinctively that there was too much sensationalism about the muck-rakers, who were, for the most part, mere youngsters in the ironies. Their radicalism was in essence but an unidentified itch for front page publicity. One need but point to Mr. Lincoln Steffens’ relation to the McNamara case in Los Angeles in 1910 to realize the basic inadequacy of such propaganda. Bierce quickly acquired a reputation with these men as a reactionary, because he was skeptical about the efficacy of reform and dubious of unthinking propaganda. Hence there was something quite significant about the roundtable debate that Mr. Hearst sponsored between Morris Hillquit, Bierce and John Hunter, for the discussion of the “Social Unrest” at a New York hotel. There is evidence that the meeting was arranged as a deliberate plot to “get” Bierce, by matching him against two agile minded leaders of the unrest. It was heralded as quite a significant debate and Bierce was announced as “a strenuous challenger of the optimists, a thinker whose views are the despair of the social reformer.”
John Hunter, who had just published his widely read “Poverty,” opened the discussion with some statistics about poverty. Mr. Hunter was then actually concerned with an important problem: this was before he came to live at Pebble Beach, and before he had forgotten that poverty was other than the title he had once given a book. Mr. Bierce immediately challenged his statistics, but then passed them over, admitting with Hunter that there was a great deal of poverty in the country. Hillquit joined in with an “Amen” and for a moment they were in accord. But soon the reformers became excited about a remedy, and socialism was proposed. Immediately Bierce became skeptical: “I don’t see,” he remarked, “that there is any remedy for this condition which consists in the rich being on top, or rather, the strongest being on top. They always will be. The reason that men are poor — this is not a rule without exception — is that they are incapable. The rich become rich because they have brains.”
Hunter then proceeded to review the thesis of his new book, but Mr. Bierce immediately rejoined: “Now don’t understand me as defending that system,” referring to the evils of an unregulated industrialism. “I wish I could abolish it. I only say it is inevitable and incurable. Nothing touches me more than poverty; I have been poor myself. I was one of those poor devils born to work as a peasant in the field; but I found no difficulty in getting out of it.” The debate continued.
HUNTER: “Well, sir, how important do you conceive William Waldorf Astor to be to the City of New York? He lives in London; but he and his family extract from the people of New York interest on, let us say, four hundred million a year. Is he that valuable to the community? Is this because of his extraordinary brains?” (How immature this sounds to-day!)
BIERCE: “Let us admit that he is not important and ought to be eliminated. Now, why don’t they eliminate him? What I — mean is this: If the oppressed workingmen—”
HUNTER: “Don’t consider only the oppressed workingmen, but say all workingmen, brain workers as well as manual workers.”
BIERCE: “In this country every man has a vote. If he is not satisfied with conditions as they are, why doesn’t he change them? If the workingman and the poor are in the majority, why don’t they get together? Because they haven’t sense enough. They can have any laws or any system they want.”
Mr. Hillquit then advanced the theory, so dear to the heart of every socialist, that the poor have a monopoly on all the virtues. But Mr. Bierce made neat capital of this point when he said: “The general idea among the sons of discontent is that the prosperous are dishonest and the unprosperous are honest. If that is so, abolition of poverty is a nefarious business.”
He continued: “I don’t believe in the greatest good to the greatest number — it seems to me perfect rot. I believe in the greatest good to the best men. And I would sacrifice a thousand incapable men to elevate one really great man. It is from the great men only that the world gets any good. What do we owe to the artisans who laid the stones of the Parthenon? What to the gaping Athenians who stared at Plato?’
“‘I haven’t any doubt,’ Bierce said, ‘that a revolution is coming in this country, which may or may not be suppressed. It will be a bloody one. I think that is the natural tendency of republican government. Undoubtedly we have to go over the whole Paris régime again and again.’
“‘Republican government!’ exclaimed Mr. Hunter. ‘Tsarism has brought a bloody revolution.’
“‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr. Bierce.
“‘And a dictator will bring revolution.’
“‘Sure,’ said Mr. Bierce.
“‘The people alone are unconquerable.’
“‘The people are always doing silly things,’ said Mr. Bierce. ‘They sail in and shed a lot of blood, and then they are back where they were before.’
“‘You think civilization has not accomplished anything in recent years,’ asked Mr. Hillquit, smiling. (I can see that smile!)
“‘It has accomplished everything,’ was Mr. Bierce’s ready reply; ‘but it has not made humanity any happier. Happiness is the only thing worth having. I find happiness in looking at poor men in the same way that I do in looking at the ants in an anthill. And I find happiness looking at the capitalist. I don’t care what he does, nor what the others do. It pleases me to look at them. Each man is concerned with his own happiness.’” HUNTER: “Mr. Bierce, I gather from your gray
hairs that you are a contemporary of John D. Rockefeller.” (People were always using John D. Rockefeller as a token in those days.)
BIERCE: “Yes, sir.”
HUNTER: “And I should say you were on a par with him in cleverness.”
BIERCE: “I think him a damned fool in some ways.”
At the close of the luncheon, Mr. Hunter rushed away to keep an appointment, but Hillquit and Bierce strolled out into the lobby and into the bar. Mr. Bierce proceeded to buy him a drink. Just as Hillquit lifted his glass, Mr. Bierce remarked: “You have a lovely neck, Mr. Hillquit, some day I hope to be one of those who will put a rope about it,” and he drank in somber satisfaction while Hillquit choked.
What Bierce resented was the attitude of these men, their calm assumption that the answers to life’s riddles were very simple, and that every one was absurd who did not agree with their panacea. Bierce was, to be sure, rather stupid about his arguments, but that he bettered the two young Marxians is apparent. Mr. Hunter’s subsequent career has been a long and uninterrupted refutation of the principles that he so glibly mouthed in 1906. Was he insincere then, or has he suffered a change of heart since? What happened to all these muck-rakers of 1905? One looks in vain for their indignation. Upton Sinclair still remains by his guns, but John Spargo, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell (of a later vintage, of course), Ida Tarbell, John Hunter, are they to-day in the vanguard of the liberals? What would their answer now be to the stoical indifference of Ambrose Bierce, who, at heart, felt more compassion for the weak and defenseless than they ever did? Because he would not permit his sympathies to drive reason to unwarranted conclusions, they named him an “old Tory” and raced on to calamitous pitfalls. The debate, indeed, reveals the personal superiority of Bierce as a man. He calmly refused to believe in the sophomoric panaceas of his opponents. The debate is not altogether unlike the exchange of letters that took place between Mr. Mencken and Mr. LaMotte in 1910.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 368