[In the following essay, originally published in the July 14, 1900 issue of the periodical Library, Cather records her personal impressions of Bryan.]

When I first knew William Jennings Bryan he was the Democratic nominee for the First Congressional district of Nebraska, a district in which the Republican majority had never fallen below 3,000. I was a student at the State University when Mr. Bryan was stumping the State, which he had stumped two years before for J. Sterling Morton, now his bitterest political enemy. My first meeting with him was on a street car. He was returning from some hall in the suburbs of Lincoln where he had been making an address, and carried a most unsightly floral offering of large dimensions, the tribute of some of his devoted constituents, half concealed by a clumsy wrapping of tissue paper. The car was crowded, and the candidate had some difficulty in keeping his “set piece” out of the way of the passengers. A sympathetic and talkative old lady who sat next him looked up and enquired sympathetically:

“Is it for a funeral?”

Mr. Bryan looked quizzically at his encumbrance and replied politely:

“Well, I hope not, madam.”

It certainly was not, for that fall he carried the Republican district by a majority of 7,000. Before that time Mr. Bryan had been a rather inconspicuous lawyer in Lincoln, by no means ranking among the ablest members of the bar. He had come there in 1887, I think, bringing with him little more than his family and law books, for his practice in Illinois had not been particularly remunerative. He came at the solicitation of his old college chum, A. R. Talbot, with whom he went into partnership. He was never a man who frequented ward caucuses, for he was an idealist pure and simple, then as now, and he had practically nothing to do with Nebraska politics until he stumped the State for Morton. Then he began to make a stir. His oratory “took hold,” just as it did at the Chicago convention, and his own nomination came to him entirely unsought. In those days Mr. Bryan used to have leisure to offer occasional good advice to university students, and I believe he drilled several for oratorical contests. He wrote occasionally for the college paper of which I was editor, and was always at home to students in his library in the evening. The man's whole inner life was typefied in that library. The walls were hung with very bad old-fashioned engravings of early statesmen, and those pictures were there because Mr. Bryan liked them. Of books there were many, but of the kind of books that are written for art's sake there were few. There were many of the old classics, and many Latin and French books, much worn, for he read them constantly. There were many lives of American statesmen, which were marked and annotated, schoolboy fashion. The works on political economy were mostly by quacks—men who were mentally one-sided, and who never rose to any true scientific eminence. There was much poetry of a didactic or declamatory nature, which is the only kind that Mr. Bryan has any taste for. In the line of fiction there was little more recent than Thackeray. Mr. Bryan used always to be urging us to read Les Miserables if we hadn't, and to reread it if we had. He declared that it was the greatest novel written, yet I think he had never considered its merits or demerits as a novel at all. It was Hugo's vague hyperbolic generalizations on sociological questions that he marked and quoted. In short, he read Hugo, the orator and impractical politician, not Hugo, the novelist.

The last ten years have changed Mr. Bryan very little personally. He is now, as he was then, a big, well-planted man, standing firmly on the soil as though he belonged there and were rooted to it, with powerful shoulders, exhilarating freedom of motion, and a smile that won him more votes than his logic ever did. His prominent nose and set mouth might have belonged to any of the early statesmen he emulates. His hair is rather too thin on top and rather too long behind. His eyes are as sharp and clear as cut steel, and his glance as penetrating as a searchlight. He dressed then very much like a Kentucky judge, and I believe he still clings to the low collar and black string tie. He was never anything but a hero to his valet—too much of a hero for comfort. I have seen him without his coat, but never without a high moral purpose. It was a physical impossibility for him to loaf or dawdle, or talk nonsense. His dining room was a forum. I do not mean that he talked incessantly, but that when he did talk it was in a manner forensic. He chipped his eggs to the accompaniment of maxims, sometimes strikingly original, sometimes trite enough. He buttered his toast with an epigram, and when he made jokes they were of the manifest kind that the crowd catch quickly and applaud wildly. When he was at his best, his conversation was absolutely overwhelming in its richness and novelty and power, in the force and aptness of his illustrations. Yet one always felt that it was meant for the many, not the few, that it was addressed to humanity, and that there should be a stenographer present to take it down.

There is nothing of familiarity or adroitness in the man; you never come any closer to him than just within the range of his voice. The breakfast room was always too small for him; he exhausted the air; he gave other people no chance to breathe. His dynamic magnetism either exhausted you or overstimulated you. He needs a platform, and a large perspective and resounding domes; and he needs the enthusiasm of applauding thousands to balance his own. Living near him is like living near Niagara. The almighty, ever-renewed force of the man drives one to distraction; his everlasting high seriousness makes one want to play marbles. He was never fond of athletics. He takes no care of himself. After his own fashion he studies incessantly, yet his vitality comes up with the sun and outburns the street are lights. He has the physique of the dominant few.

In his business relations, in his civic relations, in his domestic relations, Mr. Bryan is always a statesman, large-minded, clean and a trifle unwieldy. If all this were not so absolutely natural to the man, so inseparable from him, it might be called theatric.

Mrs. Bryan's life is simply a record of hard work. She first met Mr. Bryan in Illinois when he was a college student, and she was attending the “annex” of the institution. He graduated a valedictorian and she achieved a like honor in her class. Two such brilliant and earnest young people were naturally drawn to each other. Then from the very outset there was between them a mutual enthusiasm and a great common purpose. It was a serious wooing. The days of their courtship were spent among books and often passed in conversations upon dry subjects that would terrify most women. They were both voracious readers, readers of everything: history, fiction, philosophy, poetry. From the outset their minds and tastes kept pace with each other, as they have done to this day. Bryan never read a new book, never was seized by a new idea that she did not share. Their minds seemed made for each other. Away out West, where there are no traditions, no precedents, where men meet nature singlehanded and think life out for themselves, those two young people looked about them for the meaning of things. Together they read Victor Hugo, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and had all those sacred aspirations that we can know but once. And the strange thing about these two people is that neither of them has lost that faith, and fervor, and sincerity which so often dies with youth. It is not wholly practical, perhaps, but it is a beautiful thing to see.

Mr. and Mrs. Bryan were engaged when she was nineteen and he twenty, but they were not married until four years afterwards. They lived in Illinois a little time, then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. There, Mr. Bryan, a young man and a poor one, began to practice law in a country none too rich. In order to be better able to help him, Mrs. Bryan studied law and was admitted to the bar. She has never practiced law, but when her husband began to mingle in politics many of the duties of the law office fell upon her. To society she paid little or no attention. For there is such a thing as society, even in Nebraska. There are good dancing clubs and whist clubs, but she never found time for them. Except at political meetings and University lectures, and occasionally at the theatre, she was seldom seen in public. Into one social feature, however, Mrs. Bryan has always entered with all her characteristic enthusiasm. She is a most devout club woman. She organized the Lincoln Sorosis, and has been an active worker in the State Federation of Woman's Clubs. She and Mrs. Peattie, of Omaha, the gifted authoress of A Mountain Woman, were probably the most influential club women in Nebraska. There is in Lincoln as in all university towns, a distinct college clique, and in this Mrs. Bryan has always figured prominently. Mrs. Bryan is a wheelwoman, but she has never gone wild over it or made any “century” runs. She is an expert swimmer, and Wednesday mornings she and her friends used to go down to the plunge in the sanitarium and spend the morning in the water. But she carried none of these things to excess. Mrs. William Jennings Bryan has but two “fads,” the Honorable William Jennings Bryan, and the political doctrines which she believes will be the salvation of the people of the West.

Decidedly the strongest and most characteristic side of this woman is the mental one. Before all else she is a woman of intellect, not so by affectation or even by choice, but by necessity, by nature. Eastern newspapers have devoted a great deal of space criticizing Mrs. Bryan's dress. It is doubtful if she ever spent ten minutes planning the construction of a gown. But many and many an hour have she and her husband spent by their library fire talking over the future of the West and those political beliefs which may call in question their judgment, but never their sincerity. In Washington they worked out that celebrated tariff speech together, line by line. When the speech was delivered she sat unobserved in the gallery and by signals regulated the pitch of her husband's voice, until it reached just the proper volume to fill the house. She knew every word of that speech by heart, and at the finest passages her lips moved as she repeated them under her breath. Much of the reading, searching for historical references and verification fell upon her. She spent days in the National Library. Several days before the speech which made Bryan famous was delivered, he was called upon to make a eulogy upon a dead comrade. Mrs. Bryan sat in the gallery and carefully noted what tones and gestures were most effective in that hall. They prepared that speech and its delivery as quietly and considerately as an actor makes out his interpretation of a rôle. At the reception given the Bryans, Mrs. Bryan did not appear in evening dress, and the couple stood about ill at ease until the affair was over. The people who work most earnestly do not always play the most skilfully, and the peculiar inability of the Bryans to carry off social honors gracefully reminds people of that great gentleman of history who rode down to the White House and tied his horse to the palings. Mrs. Bryan held aloof from Washington society, and neither accepted nor gave invitations. She dressed plainly and stopped at a quiet hotel. She most sensibly lived within her husband's salary and helped him do his work, and this is just what she is doing now.

The distinctive feature of Mr. Bryan's career is that he began at the top. At an age when most lawyers have barely succeeded in building up a good practice, he was the leader of one of the two great political parties of America. He attained that leadership quite without financial backing or an astute political impresario; attained it singlehanded. He would not know how to manage a machine if he had one, and certainly no machine could manage him. The man himself would scorn a machine; he is by nature unfit for such campaigning methods. His constituents are controlled not by a commercial syndicate or by a political trust, but by one man's personality.

Behind this personality there is neither an invincible principle nor an unassailable logic, only melodious phrases, a convincing voice and a hypnotic sincerity. Though he is in politics, Mr. Bryan is not a politician; he has resources to fall back upon if his main position were routed. He has not built up a power; no great captains have developed under his generalship. During these last four years, instead of planting a fort here and a base of supplies there, and sealing influential allies to himself, he has been engaging in various crusades of sentiment. If he were struck dumb, he would be as helpless as a tenor without his voice. In his brilliant study of Bryan, in McClure's Magazine, Will Allen White quotes the following passage on Bryan's early oratorical flights from Mrs. Bryan's biographical sketch of her husband:

“A prize always fired William's ambition. During his first year in the academy (the preparatory department of Illinois College), he declaimed Patrick Henry's masterpiece, and ranked well down the list. Nothing daunted, the next year found him with the ‘Palmetto and the Pine’ as his subject. The next year, a freshman in college, he tried for a prize in Latin prose, and won half the second prize. Later in the year he declaimed ‘Bernardo del Carpio,’ and gained second prize. In his sophomore year he entered another contest, with an essay on ‘Labor.’ This time the first prize rewarded his work. An oration on ‘Individual Powers’ gave him a place in the intercollegiate contest held at Galesburg, where he ranked second.”

It is the elocutionary phases of political economy which have always appealed to Mr. Bryan most strongly. Had he attended a more sophisticated Eastern college, where a young man who talked of righting the wrongs of the world would be held under a pump, and where dramatic societies are more in vogue than debating societies, he might have felt that his call was for the stage and declaimed Shakespeare with a noble purpose and bad grace. He is an orator, pure and simple, certainly the greatest in America to-day. After all, it is not a crime to be an orator, and not necessarily ridiculous. It is a gift like any other gift, and not always a practical one. The Hon. William McKeighan was one of the first free silver agitators in Nebraska and had gone from a dugout to the halls of Congress. When McKeighan died, Bryan came down to the sun-scorched, dried-up, blown-away little village of Red Cloud to speak at his funeral. There, with an audience of some few hundreds of bronzed farmers who believed in him as their deliverer, the man who could lead them out of the bondage of debt, who could stay the drouth and strike water from the rock, I heard him make the greatest speech of his life. Surely that was eloquence of the old stamp that was accounted divine, eloquence that reached through the callus of ignorance and toil and found and awoke the stunted souls of men. I saw those rugged, ragged men of the soil weep like children. Six months later, at Chicago, when Bryan stampeded a convention, appropriated a party, electrified a nation, flashed his name around the planet, took the assembled thousands of that convention hall and moulded them in his hands like so much putty, one of those ragged farmers sat beside me in the gallery, and at the close of that never-to-be-forgotten speech, he leaned over the rail, the tears on his furrowed cheeks, and shouted, “The sweet singer of Israel!”

Of Mr. Bryan's great sincerity there can be no doubt. It is, indeed, the unsophisticated sort of sincerity which is the stamp of the crusader, but in a man of his native force it is a power to be reckoned with. His mental fiber is scarcely delicate enough to be susceptible to doubts. There is nothing of the Hamlet about William Jennings Bryan. Then his life has not been of a very disciplinary kind. It is failure and hope deferred that lead a man to modify, retrench, weigh evidence against himself, and Mr. Bryan's success has been uninterrupted.

It is scarcely necessary to say that he has no finesse. His book, The First Battle, is an almost unparalleled instance of bad taste. But his honesty is unquestionable. He had the courage to stick to his party when he went, a poor man, into a State where the only way to success lay through Republican influence. He favored the ratification of the treaty with Spain when his party opposed it. In the Kansas City convention he drove his party to the suicidal measure of retaining the 16 to 1 platform. He is the white elephant of his party, and yet they cannot escape the dominant influence of his personality. It is an interesting study in reactions that the most practical, and prosaic, and purely commercial people on the planet should be dazzled and half convinced by a purely picturesque figure—a knight on horseback.

Alphonse Daudet all his life made notes for a book he never wrote, a book which should be Tartarin and Numa Roumestan in one, and which should embody in the person of Napoleon the entire race of the south of France. So I think William Jennings Bryan synthesizes the entire middle West; all its newness and vigor, its magnitude and monotony, its richness and lack of variety, its inflammability and volubility, its strength and its crudeness, its high seriousness and self-confidence, its egotism and its nobility.