THE OLD VIRGINIA GENTLEMAN AND OTHER SKETCHES GEORGE W. BAGBY THE OLD VIRGINIA GENTLEMAN AND OTHER SKETCHES '< PJaUC UBRXW THE OLD VIRGINIA GENTLEMAN AND OTHER SKETCHES BY GEORGE W. BAGBY T EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS NELSON PAGE • NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1911 •)•*.£ REV/ YOPK PUBLIC LIBRARY 89260 K ASTG^. LENOX A> ; 3 COPYRIGHT, 1884, 1885, BY MRS. GEORGE W. BAGBY Copyright, igio, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September, 1910 PREFACE A VIRGINIA REALIST Virginia, mother of States and statesmen, as she used to be called, has contributed many men of worth to the multitude that America can number. All her sons have loved her well, while many have reflected great honor on her. But of them all, none has known how to draw her portrait like that one who years ago, under the mild voice and quiet exterior of State Librarian and occasional contributor to the Peri- odical Press, hid the soul of a man of letters and an artist. Like many another man of letters who has en- riched the world, George W. Bagby, before he "found himself," studied for a professional career—that vesti- bule to literature. He was first educated in part at Princeton, and later took the degree of M.D. at the he set in University of Pennsylvania. After this up medicine. But Lynchburg, Virginia, as a practitioner of than the the pen was much more grateful to his hand the outer scalpel. He had the gift of seeing through shell to the heart, and he soon began seeking in the ; v PREFACE columns of the nearest newspaper the expression of his dreams. His first article to attract attention was a paper on Christmas, published as an editorial in the Lynchburg Virginian. It brought him one great re- ward. It led to a life-long friendship with the ac- complished gentleman, James MacDonald, who then edited the paper and became later the Secretary of State of Virginia. To this friendship Doctor Bagby years afterwards owed the appointment of Assistant Secretary of State and Librarian of the State Library, where, among the masters, his soul found society of its own rank. All his life, much of his work was thrown into the devouring maw of the daily press. His latest essays, as among his first, were papers which passed for letters or editorials, but were really literary essays which masked under these ephemeral names. Among these early contributions was the sketch entitled "The Sacred Furniture Warerooms," which is in- cluded in this volume. They gave him local celebrity, but nothing more. Local men of letters were not highly esteemed in in the old —at not men k Virginia days least, professional of letters who bore the traces of the soil on them. Her treasured genius ran in the direction of the forum or the tented field, where personal courage was always to be shown as the badge of honor. Thus, her men vi PREFACE of ability mainly turned to these professions, and such literary gifts as Nature bestowed were mainly applied to the advocacy of governmental problems or to the polemics of political journalism. William Wirt, who was a man of letters, concealed his passion under a pseudonym and only ventured to declare himself in a biography of one of Virginia's great orators after he had achieved fame as a noted lawyer. " Why do you waste your time on a d d thing like poetry?" demanded a neighbor of Philip Pendle- ton Cooke, the author of "Florence Vane." "A man of your position might be a useful man." Even Poe, with a genius that is acknowledged the world over and that has never been surpassed in its kind, was never able to break through the defences with which established habit bulwarked itself among the burghers of Richmond and New York, and com- pel recognition of his extraordinary powers. His story is the saddest in the long line of neglected artists whose fate it has been to achieve fame too late to save them from perishing from want, of which destitution, want of food was the least part. Next to Poe, the most original of all Virginia writers was he whose reputation in his lifetime mainly rested on humorous sketches of a mildly satirical and exceed- vn PREFACE ingly original type; but who was master of a pathos rarely excelled by any author and rarely equalled by any American author. Like Poe, his work was known among his contemporaries merely by a small coterie of friends. But these adored him. Poe was the master of the absolutely imaginative sketch or tale—so purely imaginative that to discover any local color by which to give it locality it is necessary to analyze the work for unintentional traces of his W. on the other surroundings. George— Bagby, hand, was absolutely realistic so purely realistic that no one can read, even at random, a page of his genre sketches and not at once the truth of the and recognize — picture, —if he be a Virginian point to its original. He was not a fictionist but a realist. He scarcely ever penned a line that was not inspired by his love of Virginia and his appreciation of the life lived within her borders. Nearly all he wrote was of Virginia, pure and simple. Her love had sunk into his blood. But while he pictured Virginia, he reflected the human nature of the universe. He is set down in a recent biographical encyclopaedia merely as "Physi- cian and Humorist." He was much more than this. He was a physician by profession; a humorist by the way; but God made him a man of letters. That portion of his work, indeed, which brought vm PREFACE him most note in his lifetime among those who knew him were his humorous sketches and skits written in a sort of phonetic dialect which was the fashion of the time. It borders on broad farce, and, while it was always original and entertaining, its quaint humor, local celebri- its most telling allusions, so often turned on ties or histories as to lose their point with the out- side reader. Thus, the "Mozis Addums's Letters"; "Meekinses' Twinses" and "What I Did with My the Fifty Millions," however amusing to general reader, could only be fully appreciated by those who hold the key to constant allusion to the Society of Richmond, which furnished the field of his harmless satire. "Meekinses' Twinses" brought him more immediate fame than any other of his writings; but who that did not know the author and his surroundings could appreciate the picture of "Meekins, the weevle- eatenest man, I ever see!" Often in a line he drew a that portrait so humorous, yet so exact, acquaintances laughed over it for years. But they were portraits for for the it is his private collection and not public, and on his tenderer work that his literary fame must rest in the future. the love Among all Virginia's writers few have had life as to feel and the gift to portray the Virginia Bagby had. He was the first to picture Virginia as she was. ix PREFACE Other writers had magnified her through an idealism colored by reading of other life and other times. Caru- thers, Simms, Kennedy, Cooke and other Southern writers all pictured the life of the South as reflected through the lenses of Scott, and his imitators, such as James. They dressed their gentlemen in wigs and ruffles and short clothes and their ladies in brocades and quilted stomachers and flashing jewels; housed them in palaces and often moved them on stilts with measured strut as automata strung on wires and worked, how- ever skilfully, from behind the scenes. They spoke book-English and lived, if they lived at all, in slavish imitation of men of England, mirrored from the printed page of generations gone. The scenes were painted and so were the life and the speech. It was generally well done, often admirably done, but it was not real. And our people read English books, instead of Ameri- can, to Poe's sad chagrin. In this desert of unreality came a new writer, a con- tributor to newspapers and magazines, who, discarding the stilts and the struts and the painted palaces, pictured the old Virginia homesteads set back, simple and peaceful and plain, under their immemorial oaks and locusts, with the life lived there with its sweetness and simplicity and tender charm. Like Poe he was not generally valued—he was not an historian, nor x PREFACE even a novelist—only a writer of sketches. He had no fixed occupation and probably no fixed income At least, his income must have been meagre. Had he paid attention to business, he might possibly, though not probably, have been a "Useful Man." As it was, he was rather to about the country, given wandering — writing humorous sketches of life for the press "Wasting his time on a damned thing like poetry," for he wrote poetry though not generally verse. Much of his work was lost. Other parts of it drifted into the wide main of anonymous writing, or was boldly claimed by others as their property—as for example, his description of "How Rubenstein Played," which is famous enough to be in all readers though unattributed to its author. But for all this he has his reward, for he has preserved the life of the people be loved and given it the charm that was its chief grace— simplicity. When the old life shall have completely passed away as all life of a particular kind must pass, the curious reader may find in George W.