Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2

NELLY M. McAFEE

Mrs. Nelly (Nichol) Marshall McAfee, novelist and verse writer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, May 8, 1845, the daughter of Humphrey Marshall, the younger. When but eighteen years of age she embarked upon a literary career. Her verse and short-stories appeared in many of the best American newspapers and magazines, and they brought her a wide reputation. On February 13, 1871, after a romantic courtship of some years, Miss Marshall was married to Captain John J. McAfee, a former Confederate soldier, then a member of the Kentucky legislature. Mrs. McAfee published two volumes of verse, entitled A Bunch of Violets, and Leaves From the Book of My Heart. Her novels include Eleanor Morton, or Life in Dixie (New York, 1865); Sodom Apples (1866); Fireside Gleamings (Chicago, 1866); Dead Under the Roses (1867); Wearing the Cross (Cincinnati, 1868); As by Fire (New York, 1869); Passion, or Bartered and Sold (Louisville, 1876); and A Criminal Through Love (Louisville, 1882). Mrs. McAfee died at Washington, D. C., about 1895.

Bibliography. Woods-McAfee Memorial History, by N. M. Woods (Louisville, 1905); Dictionary of American Authors, by O. F. Adams (Boston, 1905).

FINALE

[From A Criminal Through Love (Louisville, Kentucky, 1882)]

Many years have been gathered to the illimitable past, and we find ourselves, with undiminished interest, seeking to learn all we can in regard to the positions and attainments of the characters who have been with us for so long.

This is the gist of what we have learned about them.

Walter Floor's firm has grown and flourished; the dark cloud of sorrow that so long overshadowed his sky, has rolled away, and he is nevermore melancholy or oppressed. His home is the resting-place and haven for everybody who chooses to enjoy shelter and repose. Constant and Valentine are standing guests at the Floor mansion; the talented painter has no longer any need to work for money. The mention of his name opens every door to him, and Fortune and Fame await him with their arms laden with golden sheaves and shining laurel wreaths. His greatest work of art—his masterpiece—was taken from Mozart's Opera of Don Juan. At a glance any one could tell that the artist painted the portrait con amore, for Donna Anna was nothing more than a portrait of Margarethe Heinold—whom we must ever after this moment remember only as Margarethe Hendrik. More happiness than came with this name to her could scarcely be enjoyed by mortal. Great sums were offered again and again to Constant for this picture, but he refused to sell it; it now graces the elegant Salon of Julian Hendrik in his magnificent villa, which stands on the banks of the Rhine.

Margarethe, after the night of her brilliant debut, never stepped upon the boards. She was often urged to let the world hear her splendid voice, which returned to her in all its volume and beauty after she regained her health, but she refused to entertain the proposition for an instant, declaring that public life, however glorious, had no charms for her; that she lived only for her husband, to whom she becomes ever more tenderly attached the better she became acquainted with his noble heart, elevated mind, and peerless character as a man and a gentleman.

Didier Mametin is still in Paris; at the death of old Vincent he became his heir, and was at last able to open such a photographer's Atelier as other artists pronounced perfect in every detail. The lighthearted Frenchman, never accustomed to an extravagant mode of living, is just as merry in humor and abstemious in diet as of yore. Henriette often declares that he acts as if he were afraid of starving—he is such a hoarder for "rainy days." But Didier had a varied experience, and the lessons he learned were not easily forgotten. One happy fact remains: He and Henriette love each other dearly, and would not exchange their places or give up their home to be a king and queen and live in a palace.

Roderick Martens attends to the ship-building interests of Jyphoven, in Amsterdam, and occupies the old Jyphoven mansion. Herr and Madame Jyphoven continue to reside in Paris. Bella is enchanted with life in the French city, and declares that to be mistress of the whole world—if she would go but for a day—could be no inducement to her to set her foot in the old Holland fishery, as she now describes it to be. She is entirely reconciled to Francisca. The beauty and happiness of the young wife would captivate the most callous heart.

And Von Kluyden? This man who devoted himself to intrigue and rascality for so long, knew not, while he lived, how otherwise to occupy his time. He was never satisfied. Nemesis held him fast in her cruel clutches. When the time came for Hendrik to assert and prove his rights, he did so most successfully; and that for which Isabella bartered her honor, and beauty, and youth, passed like sand through the fingers, and was hers no more. Von Kluyden was successful in nothing that he undertook to accomplish; the ghost of the murdered Horst followed him day and night;—he finally died in a madhouse! Isabella had, a little while before his dementia, entrusted herself and her million of money into the hands of a young man of the titled nobility—who in his turn did not love the young widow even for her marvelous beauty—but for the thalers and gulden that brought plenty to his empty coffers and luxury to his impoverished home. In this marriage Isabella did not find the happiness she expected to find, and for which she had so long waited. The Prince squandered her enormous fortune, as Princes are usually supposed to squander fortunes, in about the half of a year's duration, and by that time, having found out and enjoyed all that life held for him of pleasure or excitement, he closed his career by putting a pistol-ball through his head, early one morning, while the sun was shining, and the birds were singing, and flowers were blooming on every side.

So it has come to pass that Isabella—although not yet twenty-five years of age, has been twice a widow—(and a very charming one she is!) not likely now ever to be aught else! The sale of her beauty, her honor, her peace of mind, has brought to her, as a recompense for what she has lost, a varied and rich experience, which will save her forever hereafter from the chance of being deceived and betrayed through the tenderest and noblest impulses of the human heart.

And so the curtain goes down forever between us and those with whom we have whiled away some pleasant hours, and gathered, it may be, profit or amusement from their acting on the stage of life.

Voila tout.

MARY F. CHILDS

Mrs. Mary Fairfax Childs, maker of dialect verse, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, May 25, 1846. She is the daughter of the Rev. Edward Fairfax Berkley (1813-1897), who was rector of Christ Church, Lexington, for nineteen years. Dr. Berkley baptized Henry Clay, in 1847, and buried him five years later. Miss Berkley was a pupil at the Misses Jackson's Seminary for young ladies until her thirteenth year, or, in 1858, when her father accepted a call to St. Louis, in which city he labored for the following forty years. In St. Louis, she continued her studies at a private school for girls, when she left prior to her graduation in order to devote herself more especially to music, Latin, and French. Miss Berkley was married, in 1870, to William Ward Childs, a returned Confederate soldier; and in 1884 they removed to Clinton, Missouri, where they resided for seven years, when business called them to New York, their home until Mr. Child's death in 1911. Mrs. Childs's life in New York was a very busy one. She was prominent in several social and literary groups; and for many years she was corresponding secretary of the New York Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Her first poem that attracted wide attention was entitled De Namin' ob de Twins, which originally appeared in The Century Magazine for December, 1903. It was the second in a group of Eleven Negro Songs, written by Joel Chandler Harris, Grace MacGowan Cooke, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and one or two other poets. That Mrs. Childs's masterpiece was the flower of the flock admits of little question: it is one of the best negro dialect poems yet written by a Southern woman. Exactly a year later the same periodical published her A Christmas Warning, with the well-known refrain, Roos' high, chicken—roos' high. These, with many others, were brought together in an attractive volume, entitled De Namin' ob de Twins, and Other Sketches from the Cotton Land (New York, 1908). This collection is highly esteemed by that rather small company of lovers of dialect verse. Mrs. Childs's poem, The Boys Who Wore the Gray, has been printed, and is well-known throughout the South. She has recently completed another collection of sketches, called Absolute Monarchy, which will appear in 1913. At the present time Mrs. Childs is historian of the Society of Kentucky Women of New York, although she is residing at Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Louis.

Bibliography. Letters from Mrs. Childs to the present writer; The Century Magazine (January, 1906).

DE NAMIN' OB DE TWINS[32]

[From De Namin' ob de Twins, and Other Sketches from the Cotton Land (New York, 1908)]

WILLIAM T. PRICE

William Thompson Price, dramatic critic, creator of playwrights, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, December 17, 1846. He was educated in the private schools of Louisville, but the Civil War proved more interesting than text-books, so he ran away with Colonel E. P. Clay, whom he left, in turn, for John H. Morgan, and Generals Forrest and Wheeler. He was finally captured and imprisoned but he, of course, escaped. After the war Mr. Price went to Germany and studied for three years at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin. From 1875 to 1880 he was dramatic critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal; and the following five years he devoted to editorial work for various newspapers, and to collecting material for his enormous biography of the Rev. George O. Barnes, a noted and eccentric Kentucky evangelist, which appeared under the title of Without Scrip or Purse (Louisville, 1883). Mr. Price went to New York in the early eighties, and that city has remained his home to this day. In 1885 he was dramatic critic for the now defunct New York Star, which he left after a year to become a reader of new plays for A. M. Palmer, the leading manager of his time, whom he was associated with for more than twenty years. Mr. Price's The Technique of the Drama (New York, 1892), gave him a high position among the dramatic writers of the country. A new edition of it was called for in 1911, and it seems destined to remain the chief authority in its field for many years. In 1901 Mr. Price became playreader for Harrison Grey Fiske; and in the same year he founded the American School of Playwriting, in which men and women, whom the gods forgot, are transformed into great dramatists—perhaps! His second volume upon the stage, The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle (New York, 1908), is the text-book of his school. At the present time Mr. Price is editor of The American Playwright, a monthly magazine of dramatic discussion.

Bibliography. Letters from Mr. Price to the present writer; Who's Who in America (1912-1913).

THE OFFENBACH AND GILBERT OPERAS[33]

[From The Technique of the Drama (New York, 1892)]

The light-hearted genius of Paris composed a new style of opera for the general merriment of the world. Who can describe the surprises, the quaintness of song, the drolleries of action of the Offenbach school? It was the intoxicating wine of music. Gladstone, when premier of England, found time to say that the world owed as much in its civilization to the discovery of the fiddle as it did to steam.

This cannot be applied in its whole sense to Offenbach, but this master of satire and the sensuous certainly expressed his times. He set laughter to song. It was democratic. It spared not king, courtier, or the rabble. It was wisdom and sentiment in disguise. It was born among despotisms, and jested when kingdoms fell. It was the stalking horse behind which Offenbach hunted the follies of the day and bagged the absurdities of the hour. If it had double entendre, its existence had a double meaning. Its music and purpose defied national prejudices. Under its laughter-compelling notes the sober bass-viol put on a merry disposition, and your cornet-a-piston became a wag. It was flippant, the glorification of youthful mirth and feelings, and it made many a melancholy Jacques sing again the song of Beranger,

It is not the purpose here to commend its delirious dances, but to admit that there was genius in it. In a technical sense the dramatic part of them are models compared with the inane and vague compositions of a later school.

The opera bouffe is in a stage beyond decadence, and no longer regards consistency, even of nonsense, in its dramatic elements. Some of the conventionalisms of its technique remain.

We hear again and again the old choruses, the drinking songs, the letter songs, the wine songs, the conspirators' songs, the departure for the war, the lovers' duets, and what-not, with the old goblets, the old helmets and all in use; but order is lost, and the topical song often saves the public patience, apart from the disjecta membra, upon which are fed the eye and the ear.

The Gilbert opera. The delicate foolery of Gilbert and the interpreting melody of Sullivan created an inimitable form of opera that delighted its generations. In its way perfection marks it. There is much in it that ministers to inward quiet and enjoyment. "Pinafore," "The Mikado," and all the list, are products of genius. "Ruddygore" is structurally weak, proving that even nonsense must have a logical treatment. Successful in a manner as "Ruddygore" was, it was filled with characteristic quaintness. We accept Rose Maybud as a piece of good luck, from the moment her modest slippers demurely patter to the front; and it is a sober statement to say that our generation has seen nothing more charming than her artful artlessness and innocence. She is worthy of Gilbert. His taste is refined beyond the point of vulgarity in essence or by way of expediency. His fancy is not tainted with the corruption of flesh-tight limbs, and he holds fast only to such physical allurements as the "three little maids just from school" in the "Mikado" or the impossibly good and dainty Rose Maybud may tempt us with. In the dance there is no lasciviousness, only joy. Gilbert and Sullivan have called a halt to the can-can and bid the world be decent. The whole history of comic opera is filled with proof that music first consented to lend itself to foolery on condition that there should be some heart in it; and even Offenbach, the patriarch of libidinous absurdities, could not get along without stopping by the wayside to make his sinners sing love-songs filled with pure emotion.

Rose Maybud is a piece of delicate coquetry with the mysterious simplicity of maidenhood, giving offense in no way. These authors are satirists, not burlesquers and fakirs.

GEORGE M. DAVIE

George Montgomery Davie, a verse-maker of cleverness and charm, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, March 16, 1848. He began his collegiate career at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, but he later went to Princeton, from which institution he was graduated in 1868. Two years later he established himself as a lawyer at Louisville. Davie rose rapidly in his profession, and he was soon recognized as one of the ablest lawyers in Kentucky. Though busy with his practice, he found time to write verse and short prose papers for periodicals that were appreciated by many persons. Davie was a Latinist of decided ability, and he often employed himself in turning the odes of Horace into English. His original work, however, is very charming and clever, a smile being concealed in almost every line he wrote, though it is a very quiet and dignified smile, never boisterous. He was one of the founders of the now celebrated Filson Club, of Louisville. He died at New York, February 22, 1900, but he sleeps to-day in Louisville's beautiful Cave Hill cemetery. Verses (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.), a broadside, contains Davie's best original poems and translations and it is a very scarce item at this time.

Bibliography. The Courier-Journal (February 23, 1900); Kentucky Eloquence (Louisville, 1907).

"FRATER, AVE ATQUE VALE!"

(Catullus, Car. CI.)

[From Verses (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.)]

HADRIAN, DYING, TO HIS SOUL

[From the same]

JOHN URI LLOYD

John Uri Lloyd, novelist and scientist, was born at West Bloomfield, New York, April 19, 1849. He is the son of a civil engineer who came West, in 1853, for the purpose of surveying a railroad between Covington and Louisville, known as the "River Route." Mr. Lloyd was thus four years old when his father settled at Burlington, Boone county, Kentucky, near the line of the road. The panic of 1854 came and the railroad company failed, but his parents preferred their new Kentucky home to the old home in the East, and they decided to remain, taking up their first vocations, that of teaching. For several years they taught in the village schools of the three little Kentucky towns of Burlington, Petersburg, and Florence. Mr. Lloyd lived at Florence until he was fourteen years of age, when he was apprenticed to a Cincinnati druggist, but he continued to be a resident of Kentucky until 1876, since which time he has lived at Cincinnati. In 1878 he became connected with the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy, and this connection has continued to the present day. In 1880 he was married to a Kentucky woman. Mr. Lloyd is one of the most distinguished pharmaceutical chemists in the United States. He has a magnificent library and museum upon his subjects; and he is generally conceded to be the world's highest authority on puff-balls. Mr. Lloyd's scientific works include The Chemistry of Medicines (1881); Drugs and Medicines of North America (1884); King's American Dispensatory (1885); Elixirs, their History and Preparation (1892); and he, as president, has edited the publications of the Lloyd Library, as follows: Dr. B. S. Barton's Collections (1900); Dr. Peter Smith's Indian Doctor's Dispensatory (1901); A Study in Pharmacy (1902); Dr. David Schopf's Materia Medica Americana (1903); Dr. Manasseh Cutler's Vegetable Productions (1903); Reproductions from the Works of William Downey, John Carver, and Anthony St. Storck (1907); Hydrastis Canadensis (1908); Samuel Thomson and Thomsonian Materia Medica (1909). Dr. Lloyd has won his general reputation as a writer of novels descriptive of life in northern Kentucky. His first work to attract wide attention was entitled Etidorpha, or the End of Earth (New York, 1895), a work which involved speculative philosophy. This was followed by a little story, The Right Side of the Car (Boston, 1897). Then came the Stringtown stories, which made his reputation. "Stringtown" is the fictional name for the Kentucky Florence of his boyhood. There are four of them: Stringtown on the Pike (New York, 1900); Warwick of the Knobs (New York, 1901); Red Head (New York, 1903); and Scroggins (New York, 1904). In these stories the author's aim was not to be engaged solely as a novelist, "but to portray to outsiders a phase of life unknown to the world at large, and to establish a folk-lore picture in which the scenes that occurred in times gone by, would be paralleled in the events therein narrated." Stringtown on the Pike is Mr. Lloyd's best known book, but Warwick of the Knobs is far and way the finest of the four.

Bibliography. The Bookman (May, 1900); The Outlook (November 16, 1901); The Bookman (December, 1910).

"LET'S HAVE THE MERCY TEXT"[34]

[From Warwick of the Knobs (New York, 1901)]

Warwick made no movement; no word of greeting came from his lips, no softening touch to his furrowed brow, no sparkle to his cold, gray eye. As though gazing upon a stranger, he sat and pierced the girl through and through with a formal stare, that drove despair deeper into her heart and caused her to cling closer to her brother.

"Pap, sister's home ag'in," the youth repeated.

"I know nothing of a sister who claims a home here."

Mary would have fallen but for the strong arm of her brother, who gently, tenderly guided her to a great rocking-chair. Then he turned on his father.

"I said thet sister's home agin, and I means it, pap."

Turning the leaves of the Book to a familiar passage, Warwick read aloud:

"'The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life is not of the Father, but of the world.' This girl has no home here. She is of the world."

"Father, ef sister hes no home here, I hav'n't none, either. Ef she must go out into the world, I'll go with her."

The man of God gazed sternly at the rebellious youth. Then he turned to the girl.

"The good Book says, 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.'"

Joshua stepped between the two and hid the child from her father.

"Pap, thet book says tough things to-night. The text you preached from to-day was a better one. I remember et, and I'll leave et to you ef I am not right. 'I am merciful, saith the Lord, and I will not keep my anger forever.' Thet's a better text, and I takes et, God was in a better humor when He wrote et."

"Joshua!" spoke the father, shocked at his son's irreverence.

"Listen, pap. I hate to say et, but I must. You preached one thing this morning, and you acts another thing now. Didn't you say thet God 'retaineth not His anger forever, because He delighteth in mercy?' I may not hev the words right, but I've got the sense."

"My son!"

"Pap, I axes the question on the square. Ain't thet what you preached?"

"That was the text."

"It ain't fair to preach one text in the meetin'-house and act another text at home."

"Joshua!"

"Let's hev the mercy text to-night. Pap, sister's home ag'in. Let's act the fergivin' text out."

Joshua stepped aside and the minister, touched in spite of himself, glanced at his daughter, a softened glance, that spoke of affection, but he made no movement. Then the girl slowly rose and turned toward the door, still keeping her eyes on her father's face. She edged backward step by step toward the door by which she had entered. Her hand grasped the latch; the door moved on its hinges.

"Stop, sister," said Joshua. "Pap, ef sister opens thet door I go with her, and then you will sit alone in this room ferever. You will be the last Warwick of the Knob."

Warwick, with all his coldness and strength, could not stand the ordeal.

"Come back, my children," he said. "It is also written, 'I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.'" And then, as in former times, Mary's head rested on her father's knee.