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Along with his theological and ecclesiastical researches, Elmer applied himself to more worldly literature. He borrowed books from Cleo and from the tiny village library, housed in the public school; and on his occasional trips to Sparta, the nearest sizable city, he even bought a volume or two, when he could find good editions secondhand.
He began with Browning.
He had heard a lot about Browning. He had heard that he was a stylish poet and an inspiring thinker. But personally he did not find that he cared so much for Browning. There were so many lines that he had to read three or four times before they made sense, and there was so much stuff about Italy and all those Wop countries.
But Browning did give him a number of new words for the notebook of polysyllables and phrases which he was to keep for years, and which was to secrete material for some of his most rotund public utterances. There has been preserved a page from it:
incinerate—burn up
Merovingian—French tribe about AD 500
rem Golgotha was scene crucifixn
Leigh Hunt—poet—1840—n.g.
lupin—blue flower
defeasance—making nix
chanson (pro. Shan-song)—French kind of song
Rem: Man worth while is m. who can smile when ev thing goes dead wrong
Sermon on man that says other planets inhabited—nix. cause Bible says o of Xt trying to save them.
Tennyson, Elmer found more elevating then Browning. He liked “Maud”—she resembled Cleo, only not so friendly; and he delighted in the homicides and morality of “Idylls of the King.” He tried Fitzgerald’s Omar, which had been recommended by the literary set at Terwillinger, and he made a discovery which he thought of communicating through the press.
He had heard it said that Omar was non-religious, but when he read:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went,
he perceived that in this quatrain Omar obviously meant that though teachers might do a whole lot of arguing, Omar himself stuck to his belief in Jesus.
In Dickens Elmer had a revelation.
He had not known that any literature published previous to the Saturday Evening Post could be thrilling. He did not care so much for the humor—it seemed to him that Mr. Dickens was vulgar and almost immoral when he got Pickwick drunk and caused Mantalini to contemplate suicide—but he loved the sentiment. When Paul Dombey died, Elmer could have wept; when Miss Nickleby protected her virtue against Sir Mulberry Hawk, Elmer would have liked to have been there, both as a parson and as an athlete, to save her from the accursed society man, so typical of his class in debauching youth and innocence.
“Yes, sir, you bet, that’s great stuff!” exulted Elmer. “There’s a writer that goes right down to the depths of human nature. Great stuff. I’ll preach on him when I get these hicks educated up to literary sermons.”
But his artistic pursuits could not be all play. He had to master philosophy as well; and he plunged into Carlyle and Elbert Hubbard. He terminated the first plunge, very icy, with haste; but in the biographies by Mr. Hubbard, at that time dominating America, Elmer found inspiration. He learned that Rockefeller had not come to be head of Standard Oil by chance, but by labor, genius, and early Baptist training. He learned that there are sermons in stones, edification in farmers, beatitude in bankers, and style in adjectives.
Elmer, who had always lived as publicly as a sparrow, could not endure keeping his literary treasures to himself. But for once Cleo Benham was not an adequate mate. He felt that she had read more of such belles-lettres as “The Message to Garcia” than even himself, so his companion in artistic adventure was Clyde Tippey, the Reverend Clyde Tippey, pastor of the United Brethren Church of Banjo Crossing.
Clyde was not, like Elmer, educated. He had left high school after his second year, and since then he had had only one year in a United Brethren seminary. Elmer didn’t think much, he decided, of all this associating and fellowshiping with a lot of rival preachers—it was his job, wasn’t it, to get their parishioners away from them? But it was an ecstasy to have, for once, a cleric to whom he could talk down.
He called frequently on the Reverend Mr. Tippey in the modest cottage which (at the age of twenty-six) Clyde occupied with his fat wife and four children. Mr. Tippey had pale blue eyes and he wore a fourteen-and-a-half collar encircling a thirteen neck.
“Clyde,” crowed Elmer, “if you’re going to reach the greatest number and not merely satisfy their spiritual needs but give ’em a rich, full, joyous life, you gotta explain great literature to ’em.”
“Yes. Maybe that’s so. Haven’t had time to read much, but I guess there’s lot of fine lessons to be learned out of literature,” said the Reverend Mr. Tippey.
“Is there! Say, listen to this! From Longfellow. The poet.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal,
and this—just get the dandy swing to it:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
I read that way back in school-reader, but I never had anybody to show me what it meant, like I’m going to do with my congregation. Just think! ‘The grave is not its goal!’ Why, say, Longfellow is just as much of a preacher as you or I are! Eh?”
“Yes, that’s so. I’ll have to read some of his poetry. Could you lend me the book?”
“You bet I will, Clyde! Be a fine thing for you. A young preacher like you has got to remember, if you’ll allow an older hand to say so, that our education isn’t finished when we start preaching. We got to go on enlarging our mental horizons. See how I mean? Now I’m going to start you off reading David Copperfield. Say, that’s full of fine passages. There’s this scene where—This David, he had an aunt that everybody thought she was simply an old crab, but the poor little fellow, his father-in-law—I hope it won’t shock you to hear a preacher say it, but he was an old son of a gun, that’s what he was, and he treated David terribly, simply terribly, and David ran away, and found his aunt’s house, and then it proved she was fine and dandy to him! Say, ’ll just make the tears come to your eyes, the place where he finds her house and she don’t recognize him and he tells her who he is, and then she kneels right down beside him—And shows how none of us are justified in thinking other folks are mean just because we don’t understand ’em. You bet! Yes, sir. David Copperfield. You sure can’t go wrong reading that book!”
“David Copperfield. I’ve heard the name. It’s mighty nice of you to come and tell me about it, Brother.”
“Oh, that’s nothing, nothing at all! Mighty glad to help you in any way I can, Clyde.”
Elmer’s success as a literary and moral evangel to Mr. Clyde Tippey sent him back to his excavations with new fervor. He would lead the world not only to virtue but to beauty.
Considering everything, Longfellow seemed the best news to carry to this surprised and waiting world, and Elmer managed to get through many, many pages, solemnly marking the passages which he was willing to sanction, and which did not mention wine.
Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years.
Elmer did not, perhaps, know very much about Simonides, but with these instructive lines he was able to decorate a sermon in each of the pulpits he was henceforth to hold.
He worked his way with equal triumph through James Russell Lowell, Whittier, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. He gave up Kipling because he found that he really enjoyed reading Kipling, and concluded that he could not be a good poet. But he was magnificent in discovering Robert Burns.
Then he collided with Josiah Royce.