Robert Love Taylor, the twenty-seventh and thirtieth
governor of Tennessee, was born in 1850, and died in 1912.
He was the greatest State governor America has ever had, to
me, a great statesman, indeed. This oration is dedicated to
the boys and girls of Tennessee. It is intended to be read to
a big crowd, out of doors, presumably July 1, Bob Taylor's
birthday. If it is read while you sit down, in the house, it
means nothing. Please, citizens of Tennessee, and others, assemble
a concourse of neighbors with the children at a basket-picnic, on the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the Clinch or the
Cumberland rivers, and read it so they all can hear, preferably
after it is memorized, and every cadence adjusted and understood,
as though they were all syllables of one musical word.
After this kind of memorizing, it may be read slowly, as an
oration, but not before. At natural intervals in the song,
when finally given, let there be good tunes by a good picnic
fiddler;—an old-fashioned, barn-dance, log cabin jig fiddler.
At the proper moments solemn tunes, like “Old Hundred,”
and famous dances like “Money-Musk!” Then, after a moment's
pause, let the orator resume, paraphrasing and improving
on the poem, as he gets the swing. Please let the
production be understood by the crowd as oratorical, to be
cheerfully filled with local allusions, in the spirit of Taylor's
own political speeches, and improvisations on his own
fiddle.
We are so choked by the old arts. We need to improvise,
but in the opposite of jazz. Watch Taylor again in fancy,
running for governor against his brother, in that famous
good-humored campaign, with the Democrats under Bob,
using the white rose of York as their emblem, and the Republicans,
under Alfred, the red rose of Lancaster, the boys
fiddling on the big pine platform draped with flags and
bunting. Think of the days when red or white roses were
worn by every soul of Tennessee. Those were the days of
improvisation.
So this is likewise, of all my productions, the one least
intended for cold print. I urge all my friends to amend it
as they read it. It is only in this way one can get much out
of Bob Taylor's most famous oration—the basis of this
poem:—Taylor's own reminiscent “lecture,” “The Fiddle
and the Bow,” delivered from every Chautauqua platform in
the United States and printed in his collected works: “The
Lectures and Best Literary Productions of Bob Taylor,”
The Boy Taylor Publishing Co., Nashville, Tenn.
“Practical” people hated Orpheus, Homer, Milton.
Taylor is the livest and greatest new legend in America.
As to his charms for “practical” people, I have no doubt some
of them foam as they read this. How bankers do hate a
poet in office! As to Taylor's actual appearance, mannerisms
and quality, I refer you to Taylor's book, the very adequate
pictures therein, and several charming school histories
of Tennessee, where the tale is told as marvelously as one in
any Gilbert and Sullivan libretto. But to this is added an
inventive and epic earnestness that is a tremendous sane
prophecy for American domestic art and religion and power.
Ask the Chautauqua man who met him in his very last days,
when he became a national figure in that fashion, and any
veteran senator, who met him in Washington, when he became
a national figure in that fashion (presumably the
supreme fashion). The element hardest to record is the
village apocalypse quality, this inventive, epic earnestness.
Some of us are beginning to see him the livest and greatest
new prophet in America, an unconscious prophet, far closer
to the future than Whitman, because actually elected to office
again and again. Whitman was a thwarted Tammany brave.
My friend Frank Waller Allen, of Los Angeles, a man of
great Chatauqua experience, has talked to me about Taylor
at great length, the last few years. And I remember one very
pleasant evening with Bishop Gailor of Memphis, and the
poet Will Percy, talking about Bob Taylor. This summer
while visiting a charming Tennessee county seat, I carried
the manuscript of this poem with me, and I heard much gossip
of Taylor from fellow-politicians who helped him toward the
governor's chair. The ideal aspects of a fiddling governor
took stronger hold of me. They are now, frankly, the main
theme of this song, the ideal aspects of the conception of a
Fiddling Governor of a state of this Union. We certainly
have had enough of utterly sordid “practical” governors, of
late. The more Frank Waller Allen tells me about Taylor,
the more I feel that the Taylor ideal is a gigantic piece of
democratic genius and initiative and, for that mere initiative,
that costs so much in vitality—the everlasting glory of his
state. Tennessee, and the Union, should, in the end, be held
tranced by the ideal. It is as though Tennessee said to the
world: “You have business managers. But we have an Orpheus.
Unless you also get the immortal soul of a musician, as a
governor to rule you, we have put you everlastingly in the
wrong. Your business-managers seem to be going to jail,
fast.” As I read in a Tennessee school-history, a mere
primer, the outline of the pretty story, I see the beautiful
children of Tennessee huddled together, listening entranced,
being made over into artists, poets, musicians, architects.
Then I see all the children of America being made over into
these, and into statesmen, prophets, saints and sibyls, tranced
and listening to “Money-Musk,” and looking up at a gigantic
figure of Bob Taylor in a great blue rocking-chair in the sky.
Now get the map of Tennessee, and look at the eastern
counties. I was begging in East Tennessee, in the log-cabin
region about which Taylor was always so eloquent, only a
short journey from his ancestral mansion. I was between
Flagpond and Greenville. I offered “The Tree of Laughing
Bells” pamphlet, in exchange for a night's lodging to a man
on the porch of a log cabin, just the sort of cabin Taylor
pictured in his orations. The man on the porch welcomed
me that night in the name of Tennessee's Fiddling Governor.
It was the first time I had heard of Taylor. But it was like
coming to the edge of a new, tremendous, eternal tradition.
This was about 1905. Taylor had been Governor 1887 to
1891 and 1897 to 1899. In that time he had made himself
a part of the soul-fabric of the American people, like
Johnny Appleseed and, and—Roosevelt and such diverse
dreamers! Death and time were no more, and a day was as
a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. I had come for
eternity beneath the wing of Orpheus. It was there or near
there I wrote the Canticle of the Tennessee Rose, which is in
“A Handy Guide for Beggars,” page 109. The story of
“Lady Iron Heels” is an adventure in the same region.
Bob Taylor is worth reading after. He could teach
any man in the world, who would learn how to rule. Here
is a quotation from his famous lecture, “The Fiddle and
Bow”:
“It would be difficult for those reared amid the elegancies
and refinements of life in city and town to appreciate the
enjoyments of the gatherings and merrymakings of the great
masses of the people who live in the rural districts of our
country. The historian records the deeds of the great; he
consigns to fame the favored few but leaves unwritten the
‘short and simple annals of the poor,’ the lives and actions
of the millions. The modern millionaire, as he sweeps
through our valleys and around our hills in his palace car,
ought not to look with derision on the cabins of America,
for from their thresholds have come more brains, and courage,
and true greatness than ever emanated from all the
palaces in this world. The fiddle, the rifle, the ax and the
Bible, the palladium of American liberty, symbolizing music,
prowess, labor, and free religion, the four grand forces of
our civilization, were the trusty friends and faithful allies of
our pioneer ancestry in subduing the wilderness and erecting
the great commonwealths of the Republic. Wherever a son
of freedom pushed his perilous way into the savage wilds and
erected his log cabin, these were the cherished penates of his
humble domicile—the rifle in the rack above the door, the
ax in the corner, the Bible on the table, and the fiddle, with
its streamers of ribbon, hanging on the wall. Did he need
the charm of music to cheer his heart, to scatter sunshine
and drive away melancholy thoughts? He touched the responsive
strings of his fiddle and it burst into laughter. Was
he beset by skulking savages or prowling beasts of prey? He
rushed to his deadly rifle for protection and relief. Had he
the forest to fell and the fields to clear? His trusty ax was in
his stalwart grasp. Did he need the consolation, the promises
and precepts of religion to strengthen his faith, to brighten
his hope and to anchor his soul to God and heaven? He held
sweet communion with the dear old Bible.
“The glory and strength of the Republic to-day are its
plain working people.”
I like this better than Whitman's “Song of the Broad Ax”
or “I Hear America Singing.” It is far nearer democracy,
though much farther from the grand style. But it seems to
me it will take only one more generation to lift the memory
of lives like Taylor's into the real American art. It is nearer
to the true beginning.
Bob Taylor could teach any man in the world who would
learn how to rule. He had no “Bread and Circuses” to
bribe the crowd, after the manner of the Roman demagogues
who purchased the votes of the Republic. But between fiddlings,
on a thousand platforms, he told stories like this, to
people who came a hundred miles afoot to hear him:
THE CANDY-PULLING
“The sugar was boiling in the kettles, and while it boiled
the boys and girls played ‘snap,’ and ‘eleven hand,’ and ‘thimble,’
and ‘blindfold,’ and another old play which some of our
older people will remember—
‘Oh, Sister Phoebe, how merry were we
When we sat under the juniper tree,
The juniper tree Hi O.’
“And when the sugar had boiled down into candy they
emptied it into greased saucers, or, as the mountain folks
called them, ‘greased sassers,’ and set it out to cool; and when
it had cooled each boy and girl took a saucer and they pulled
the taffy out and patted it and rolled it till it hung well together,
and then they pulled it out a foot long; they pulled it
out a yard long, and they doubled it back, and pulled it out,
and looped it over, and pulled it out, and when it began to
look like gold the sweethearts paired off and consolidated their
taffy and pulled against each other. They pulled it out, and
doubled it back, and looped it over, and pulled it out; and
sometimes a peachblow cheek touched a bronzed one and sometimes
a sweet little voice spluttered out, ‘You, Jack,’ and
there was a suspicious smack like a cow pulling her foot out
of stiff mud. They pulled the candy and laughed and
frolicked; the girls got taffy on their hair, the boys got taffy
on their chins, the girls got taffy on their waists, the boys got
taffy on their coat sleeves. They pulled it till it was as bright
as a moonbeam and then they plaited it and coiled it into
fantastic shapes and set it out in the crisp air to cool. Then
the courting began in earnest. They did not court then as
the young folks court now. The young man led his sweetheart
back into a dark corner and sat down by her, and held
her hand for an hour and never said a word. But it resulted
next year in more cabins on the hillsides and in the hollows,
and in the years that followed the cabins were full of candy-haired
children who grew up into a race of the best, the
bravest, and the noblest people the sun in heaven ever shone
upon.
“In the bright, bright hereafter, when all the joys of all
the ages are gathered up and condensed into globules of
transcendent ecstasy, I doubt whether there will be anything
half so sweet as were the candy-smeared, ruby lips of the
country maidens to the jeans-jacketed swains who tasted
them at the candy-pulling in the happy long ago.”
This was finally crystallized in his formal lecture, “The
Fiddle and Bow,” into the above form, but not until told a
thousand ways a thousand times to a thousand stump-speech
audiences.
To tell such stories well is one of what Mr. Gilbert Sedles
calls “The Seven Lively Arts.”
Bob Taylor could teach any man in the world who would
learn how to rule.
This “word-painting,” just below, was doubtless the final
climax of many a stump-speech, and amid the dancing, the
devilled eggs and fried chicken, was an outdoor tribute to
the abstract qualities of the most abstract art.
MUSIC
“The spirit of music, like an archangel, presides over mankind
and the visible creation. Her afflatus, divinely sweet,
divinely powerful, is breathed on every human heart, and
inspires every soul to some nobler sentiment, some higher
thought, some greater action.
“O music! Sweetest, sublimest ideal of omniscience—
first-born of God—fairest and loftiest seraph of the celestial
hierarchy, muse of the beautiful—daughter of the Universe!
“In the morning of eternity, when the stars were young, her
first grand oratorio burst upon raptured Deity and thrilled the
wondering angels. All heaven shouted. Ten thousand times
ten thousand jeweled harps, ten thousand times ten thousand
angel tongues caught up the song, and ever since, through all
the golden cycles, its breathing melodies, old as eternity yet
ever new as the flitting hours, have floated on the air of
heaven, lingering like the incense of its flowers on plumed
hill and shining vale, empurpled in the shadow of the
eternal throne.
“The seraph stood with outstretched wings on the horizon of
heaven clothed in light, ablaze with gems and, with voice
attuned, swept her burning harpstrings, and lo, the blue infinite
thrilled with her sweetest note. The trembling stars
heard it and flashed their joy from every flaming center.
The wheeling orbs that course the crystal paths of space were
vibrant with the strain and pealed it back into the glad ear
of God. The far-off milky way, bright gulf stream of astral
glories, spanning the ethereal deep, resounded with its harmonies,
and the star-dust isles, floating in that river of opal,
reëchoed the happy chorus from every sparking strand.”
This is what the old Southern orators used to call “sky-painting
oratory.” It is indeed that, we confess, and deny
it not.
Read indoors, this quotation is a bit flowery. But, of course,
every one hundred per cent American believes in democracy.
Let the reader take it to a county fair, mount the nearest
box, wave his hand and read it in competition with every
Cracker-Jack seller on the place. Or just read it to himself
in that setting. He will suddenly discover it taking on great
dignity and proportions.
I have tried to write my tribute to Bob Taylor in the spirit
of these three quotations. Try the above quotation in front
of the grand stand, between horse races, or imagine yourself
doing so. Then try my own piece of “sky-painting oratory”
given below. I have tried to add a bit more of the
pioneer Tennessee County Fair point of view. The third
quotation above moves in the other direction. It is a great
democratic way of saying that art has some mysterious
abstract occult qualities. It is the outdoor or “log-cabin” way
of reiterating the dogmas of Walter Pater. I have tried to
consider its meaning.
