affair.

During the four and a half months that I have served under your kind father I had learned to esteem him dearly, and he had shown me great kindness and also friendship to my family and self."

Here is suggested the personal Nast we know—the man who on a train would take a sick baby to relieve its jaded mother, who was always ready to hold out a helping hand, to make easier a toilsome way.

And now once more the press throughout the land echoed the name and deeds of the "Father of the American Cartoon." Old enmities were put aside and old injuries forgotten. North and South he was honored and his name linked with the nation's heroes. Once more he held his old place in the "Journal of Civilization"-his portrait on the front page, with reproductions of his famous cartoons within. Colonel Watterson, his ancient antagonist and friend, paid him a noble editorial tribute. He spoke of him as a man of "surpassing genius and private worth," and added:

"He was a sturdy, undoubting positivist, was Thomas Nast. To him a spade was a spade and he never hesitated to call it so. He had the simple, childlike faith of the artist, crossed upon the full-confident spirit of the self-made man. To the younger generations the name of Thomas Nast is but a shade. Yet a century hence his work will be sought as an essential sidelight upon the public life in the United States during the two decades succeeding the great sectional war. His satire flashed upon a rogue and discovered a rascal like a policeman's lantern. Always unsparing and direct, sometimes cruel, he was the old Saxon warrior over again. Yet to those who knew him with his armor off and his battle axe hung upon the wall, one of the heartiest and healthiest of men; quick to requite the proven wrong; ready to give and take, to live and let live, an ideal comrade and a model of the domestic virtues."

CHAPTER LXV

AT THE END OF THE LONG JOURNEY

In the making of this book, the writer has not attempted to prepare a minute personal biography, or essayed to compile a complete catalogue of events. In the main, the effort has been to tell the story of a series of pictures which became an important part in this nation's history. Also to present such episodes and conditions as would make clear their meaning to a younger generation, with the moral reason of existence which lies behind them all.

For primarily, and before all, Thomas Nast was a moralist. One may be a warrior and a patriot, a statesman, even an agitator of reform, without being wholly free of self-interestready to lay down life and fortune for a principle, asking for no return beyond the earning of his hands. The life of Thomas Nast was lived throughout with an unselfishness of purpose and a moral purity seldom equalled. He was in the fullest sense the arch enemy of evil in every form, never letting pass an opportunity to strike it down. He saw in a straight line and aimed accordingly. He never lost sight of the end in view, and it was to his great singleness of purpose and the increasing fierceness of blow after blow landed on the same spot that his startling achievements were due.

It was natural that such a man should make enemies as well

as friends. Men concerned in political intrigue and the practices of corruption, men seeking to ride down and disregard the rights of their fellow men, those who would cloak ill-doing with a mantle of righteousness-in a word, every intruder upon human privilege and the pursuit of happiness-these were his enemies.

His friends were among the heroes and the benefactors of mankind. Lincoln, Grant, Booth, Whitman, Bergh, Henry Irving, George W. Childs-such as these honored his genius and his integrity and were accounted among his friends. But there was a host of others-scores of lesser note, and all the vast multitude of burden bearers who recognized in him a champion that never failed to strike for humanity and the cause of right. Preeminently Thomas Nast was a man to be honored for the friends and loved for the enemies he had made.

His purely political opponents seldom cherished more than a brief bitterness. It was the moral offender who had been brought within range of his searchlight who never forgave him or missed the opportunity of crying down his capabilities and his deeds. Sadly enough they were upheld by a small but venomous coterie of his fellow craftsmen, who, with more of academic knowledge in the matter of mere technique, comprehended neither his genius nor his success, and hated him according to their lights. It was these who gave color and official voice to the oft and loudly repeated declaration that Nast was not an artist, that he had not the least notion of drawing, that his ideas could not be his own but were supplied by George William Curtis or Fletcher Harper. It seems hardly necessary to dwell upon this now. Throughout the pages of this book are many letters which put to ridicule any statement that Nast did not conceive his own ideas-those inventions born of fierce issues and fervent and righteous convictions. What Nast did require was the sympathy and the confidence of those about him.

Fletcher Harper understood and gratified this need, and in this peculiar and beautiful sense became his surest inspiration.

As a matter of fact he had ten ideas for every one that he used. Nature never created a more fertile brain, a keener mental vision or a more absolute individuality than were combined in the person of Thomas Nast. In a recent conversation, Mr. J. Henry Harper said to the writer:

"Nast was one of the great statesmen of his time. I have never known a man with a surer political insight. He seemed to see approaching events before most men dreamed of them as possible. His work was entirely his own, and done in his own way. He never could bear interference or even suggestion. Sometimes a good idea came in that we thought he might use, but he never did so. He always had more than enough without it. He was likely to plan a whole campaign of pictures before one was drawn. I never knew him to use an idea that was not his own."

As for Nast's ability to draw, the pictures speak for themselves. If they are not academic, they are at least the powerful embodiment of an idea and purpose-all the more powerful, it may be, for their rugged disregard of rule. It is not always the trained talker, or the fluent penman, or the perfect draughtsman who has the most to say. There is a divine heritage which rises above class-drill and curriculum-a God-given impulse which will seek instinctively and find surely the means to enter and the way to conquer and possess the foreordinated kingdom. Such a genius was that of Thomas Nast. Lacking a perfect mastery of line, he yet possessed a simplicity of treatment, an understanding of black and white color values, with a clearness of vision, a fertility of idea, and above and beyond all a supreme and unwavering purpose which made him a pictorial power such as this generation is not likely to know again. Perhaps all this is not art. Perhaps art may not be admitted without the

grace of careful training-the touch that soothes and fills the critic's eye. But if it be not art, then, at least, it is a genius of no lesser sort. There are men who will tell you that Grant was not a general. There are others who will hold that Nast was not an artist. Yet these two were mighty warriors—each in his own way and the world will honor their triumphs when the deeds of their critics have vanished from the page of memory, and their bodies have become but nameless dust.

And Nast was something more. He was a thoughtful reader, a careful student of history, a philosopher whose reasonings and deductions were rarely to be gainsaid. Research into the life and manners of the older civilizations-the uncovering of buried cities-the tracing of the way that leads from the mys tery of the past to the marvel of the present, always appealed to him, and some of his conclusions were strikingly conceived and aptly phrased. Once commenting on the statement that history repeats itself, he said:

"It does-but not quite. It travels forward like a corkscrew, never returning quite to the same place."

We need not review Nast's achievements here. The support. of the Union and of the nation's armies, the triumph over Tweed, the continuous battle for political betterment, these have all been told. He was the first of those who to-day constitute a great and worthy following. In the same spirit that the modern playwright goes back to the well-spring of the drama, so the American cartoonist turns legitimately for inspiration to the pictures of Nast. Shakespeare has said it all" is our common expression, and it was Bernhard Gillam who declared, "Nast has about done everything." Being first, it was necessary for him to establish fundamentals, to construct the alphabet of an art. The work was not arbitrarily done, nor were the results due to accident. The symbols which to-day confront us on every hand were each the inevitable expression of some

66