Arts and Letters

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century two important citizens of Indiana were the most boyish looking men in the state, James Whitcomb Riley and Albert Beveridge; and of the two the Senator looked even younger than the poet. In those days, when it was still a great thing to be a Senator of the United States, people who saw Mr. Beveridge for the first time were startled by what seemed a miracle of precocity; it was incredible that he should have attained to such an office at his age. But what is best in youthfulness marked him all his life; he was ever elastic, buoyant, generous, unfailingly ready with a leaping and ardent enthusiasm.

It was always impossible for him to imagine the failure of anything in which he believed; but he never made a cause his own because he believed in its success. He was simply and profoundly honest in all his faiths; he was, in fact, a man of complete belief in what he conceived to be right, and so, seeing a thing as right, he could never doubt that it would prevail. When he became a Progressive in politics, and thus lost his place in the Republican party, and, in the end, his due reward as a partisan leader, he was convinced that the Progressive movement led straight toward triumph; but that was not why he believed in it. He believed in the triumph after he believed in the cause. That was his way; and he remained with the cause when triumph was no longer possible; he remained with it until the cause no longer existed. For he had a quality not commonly allied with the habit of vehement enthusiasm, and this was steadfastness. He was no more able to be an opportunist than he was to practise in politics the art of trimming sail to the wind.

The strongest partisan mechanism of his state was against him; he could not be part of it, for it accomplished nothing except what was personally selfish; that is to say, it contrived to remain in power for the sake of being in power; but Beveridge, in or out of power, was a man of heart. He cared about children's labor, for instance, and not because what he did for the alleviation of poverty-stricken children would make more votes for him at home. As a matter of fact, his service to humanity gained few votes for him; precinct committeemen are usually somewhat indifferent to that type of service.

He was a man who did difficult things thoroughly. He had a furious energy for work; but the fire never flashed in the pan. For all his hearty, swift impulsiveness, he had the unremitting persistence of the slower, dogged type of worker. He had always been a tireless bookman, a haunter of libraries, and his oratory was backed by an accurate memory of encyclopedic range. It was natural, then, that once out of politics and free, he should have sat down to the work that enriched American biography. He mastered an historical period; and "mastered" is the only word: he worked upon his exhaustive manuscript as few men have had the power and devotion to work upon anything. When his John Marshall was finished, there was a man, his life and his times, complete upon paper.

Then, after a little time, Albert Beveridge set the same energy, the same persistence and power and devotion, the same exhaustive thoroughness of research for the truth, to work upon his life of Abraham Lincoln; and while he was still in the midst of that absorbing toil of his, suddenly, one day, he was gone—a thing difficult to believe of him, he was a man always so vividly alive.

He was so alive, as we say, that we can never believe him anything else. I was his neighbor, and sometimes I would meet him, of a winter afternoon, in the hour of the exercise that he took to fit him for work far into the night, and when I saw him tramping through deep snow with the same driving vigor that he did everything, I marveled at his aliveness. The snow would melt from branches of the trees quickly enough; the trees themselves would some day fall; but it seemed to me that such a man must be imperishable.

He was above personal rancor, not only because intellectually he disdained it, but because his nature was incapable of it. He could neither cherish wrath nor keep any man his enemy. He was kind. He was, indeed, indomitably kind. He had learning; he had scholarship; he had, too, what is called sophistication, yet had faith in the goodness of men and in the goodness of life. His head was as high when he led a forlorn hope as it was in victory; and that was because no good hope ever seemed to him a forlorn one. His statue is to stand in the capital of his State; for the man, like his work, indeed does not perish.