Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/406

 of mockery and exaggeration. Woodrow Wilson once said, "Character, gentlemen, is a by-product." Literature isn't that, the way it is generally practiced, by professionals who resent such amateur competition and complain of lowered standards if men who have lived literature want to set it down themselves. In this there is much truth, and the conspicuous and distinctive merit of these five books comes from their being such a notable exception. In them there is a closer conjunction of experience and art without the standard of presentation being lowered.

These five pioneer authors lived and saw and felt before they wrote and without meaning to write; and then, by an unusual combination of gifts, they found themselves possessed of the substance of literature and a sure instinct for its form. One was captain of an emigrant wagon-train, one a lawyer, one a miner and freighter, one a governor of Oregon and one a famous cartoonist—Jesse Applegate, Thomas Nelson Strong, George A. Waggoner, T. T. Geer and Homer Davenport. The books are A Day With the Cow-Column, Cathlamet on the Columbia, Stories of Old Oregon, Fifty Years in Oregon and The Country Boy.

The first public lecture heard in Oregon by the writer of this book was a student assembly talk in Villard Hall at Eugene on Jesse Applegate. It was illustrated by one stereopticon lantern slide, in which, though more beetle-browed and shown in profile, the face bore some resemblance to the strong face of Rameses given in the history books. Though there is now another picture, a photograph, with lineaments softened