What Is Man? and Other Essays eBook

If the stranger hadn’t been there!  But he was.  And Caesar crossed.  With such results!  Such vast events—­each a link in the human race’s life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next one, and so on:  the destruction of the republic; the founding of the empire; the breaking up of the empire; the rise of Christianity upon its ruins; the spread of the religion to other lands—­and so on; link by link took its appointed place at its appointed time, the discovery of America being one of them; our Revolution another; the inflow of English and other immigrants another; their drift westward (my ancestors among them) another; the settlement of certain of them in Missouri, which resulted in me.  For I was one of the unavoidable results of the crossing of the Rubicon.  If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away (which he couldn’t, for he was the appointed link) Caesar would not have crossed.  What would have happened, in that case, we can never guess.  We only know that the things that did happen would not have happened.  They might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course, but their nature and results are beyond our guessing.  But the matter that interests me personally is that I would not be here now, but somewhere else; and probably black—­there is no telling.  Very well, I am glad he crossed.  And very really and thankfully glad, too, though I never cared anything about it before.

II

To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary feature.  I have been professionally literary something more than forty years.  There have been many turning-points in my life, but the one that was the link in the chain appointed to conduct me to the literary guild is the most conspicuous link in that chain.  Because it was the last one.  It was not any more important than its predecessors.  All the other links have an inconspicuous look, except the crossing of the Rubicon; but as factors in making me literary they are all of the one size, the crossing of the Rubicon included.

I know how I came to be literary, and I will tell the steps that lead up to it and brought it about.

The crossing of the Rubicon was not the first one, it was hardly even a recent one; I should have to go back ages before Caesar’s day to find the first one.  To save space I will go back only a couple of generations and start with an incident of my boyhood.  When I was twelve and a half years old, my father died.  It was in the spring.  The summer came, and brought with it an epidemic of measles.  For a time a child died almost every day.  The village was paralyzed with fright, distress, despair.  Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in their homes to save them from the infection.  In the homes there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no