Page:The Phoenix Vol3 No1.djvu/3



Vol. 3

HIS text from the Preacher was often on thee lips of Elbert Hubbard in the days of our intimacy, the beginning of which was twenty years ago. It supplied the title for his novelized life of John Brown of Ossawatomie (perhaps his most ambitious attempt at book-writing). He recurred to it again and again in his essays, as if it were the ground-note of his thought. Beyond question it haunted him like a threat of Destiny, for having come a little late to his chosen work, no man was ever more wrought upon by a fury to achieve—to accomplish—to do his stint at whatever cost, and pass on!

And like a finger pointed with flame, it rose before my mind with the first rumor of his terrible fate. There, I said, is the burden of all the years the unseen menace that so often oppressed his spirit. And the Preacher's words knelled in my ear with a crushing weight of irony. For here indeed was a case, if ever there were one, in which the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.

Elbert Hubbard was a fatalist. I saw this from an early moment of our acquaintance. Many took this trait for a pose; some deduced from it a character for heartlessness, which they freely thrust upon him. Both were wrong. His fatalism was deeply rooted in his nature, and it imparted a certain melancholy Hamlet-like charm to his personality (I