Ralph Keeler

“His memory scarce can make me sad.”

IN this number of The Atlantic we print a very remarkable contribution by the writer whose tragical death is so out of keeping with his character, that one still takes refuge in the mystery involving it, and half refuses to accept it as a fact. He had survived so much that it can hardly be but he escaped that last danger, and will come back yet to tell the public of his adventure, and make his friends laugh with him at those best points that can never get into print. His friends will each imagine how he would do it, with just what humorous consciousness, what accent and what gesture, — a hand gayly flirted in the air, a dramatic touch on the listener’s shoulder,—for Ralph Keeler was too vivid a presence in every way not to have left a most distinct impression of himself in the minds of all his acquaintance.

But if he is really gone — if he fell overboard from that Spanish steamer on the coast of Cuba, or, as is more likely, was stabbed and thrown into the sea by the Spanish officer who doubtless believed himself dangerously compromised in his confidences to him, when he found that he was not a Frenchman but an American newspaper correspondent—if we must accept this as the last of him, still it is not easy to think of him with other than a smiling regret, the whole cheerful tenor of his life so prevails over any single fact of his career. He and fortune, as the readers of his autobiographical sketches know, were never great friends, but he took hardship and privation so lightly, that they scarcely seemed adversity in their relation to him; he espoused poverty with such bravery that you half believed her prosperity in disguise.

The salient facts of his adventurous career were these. He was born in Northern Ohio, and was early left an orphan in the family of a relation in Western New York, from whom he ran away while still very young, and went to seek his fortune as cabin-boy on the lake steamers. A little later, he became the attraction of a band of negro minstrels, appearing now as dancer and now as danseuse in the burnt-cork ballet of the period. He was rescued from this sad celebrity by the good Jesuit fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri, and invited to enter their school. Afterwards he went to Kenyon College in Ohio, and graduating there, he rested from his studies long enough to earn one hundred and eighty-one dollars, on which he spent two years in Europe, chiefly at Heidelberg University. In his wanderings and his necessities he began to write for the magazines and newspapers, succeeding at once with Chambers’s Journal. He found himself next in California, where he taught school, and made his first appearance as a lecturer. In 1867 he came to Boston with a sufficiently poor novel, which, being duly rejected by various editors, he courageously printed at his own cost, out of the proceeds of his lecturing and other industries; and witnessed its failure with philosophic calm.

In the mean time he had written out his experience of a very curious sort of real life in the sketch Three Years as a Negro Minstrel, which appeared in these pages, as did afterwards his Two Years in Europe on $181 Greenbacks. These sketches, with an account of his boyish escapade printed in Old and New, were made into a little book called Vagabond Adventures, which met with fair success and merited greater, though it lacked somewhat in simplicity and other prime qualities of good literature. However, it showed growth, and I hoped that it would prove the germ of an American novel in the manner of Gil Blas, for writing which its author gave distinct promise. He often talked of such a work, and he confirmed belief in his powers in this direction, by a study called Confessions of a Patent Medicine Man, which got little notice in the magazine, and yet, so far as it went, was of the best kind, racy, graphic, and realistic in singular degree, though the author was not altogether able to forget the magazinist in working out his dramatically conceived personage.

He went abroad again and was at Geneva during the sittings of the Alabama Conference, and wrote some very clever papers about the Genevan neighborhoods, for Harper’s Magazine. In December last he went to Cuba as correspondent of the New York Tribune, and so came to his end.

Of course, he did nothing of permanent value, unless his Three Years as a Negro Minstrel is to remain in some sort as a memoir of the only species of histrionic art, the only drama, that America has invented. He never quite released himself from those early influences; something of the End Man clung about him still, and tempted him into a flourishing expression where he easily saw himself that a simpler utterance would have been better. We are ready to speak too largely and hopefully of the dead; but it does not seem too much to say of Ralph Keeler that he seemed in a fair way at last to outgrow not only the evils of his early want of schooling, but the more serious evils of the subsequent conditions of it. He bad been a hard student, and he could not hold lightly what had cost him years of hunger and cold. But even his error in this direction is pathetic and respectable ; his later sketches showed that he was correcting it, and betray little of his earlier anxiety to get in all that he knew, all the time. His letters from Cuba to the Tribune, hastily and interruptedly written, fairly rose from the level of journalism to that of literature. He was getting rid of that inartistic uneasiness of which he was comically aware, and which sometimes seemed to present itself as anxiety to know what were the feelings of men who had not been negro minstrels in their youth. Not that he was ever meanly ashamed of that part of his past. He accepted it, laughed at it, let it go. He never was meanly proud of it, either, or of any of the squalor and suffering that he had survived.

He was not a perfect character; but he had qualities that, in better adjustment, go to form the highest character, as good-will, kind-heartedness, sensitiveness, and a sort of Oriental submission and American amiability under the strokes of fate. He had a gay philosophy, not new but newly formulated, of which he was full when I saw him last, a few days before he went to his death, and which he expounded joyously: “Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it; it’s the only one you’ve got or ever will have!” It is imaginable of one so subtile as he that in his extremity, to come so miserably soon, the sad irony lurking in this creed might receive an instant’s recognition.

In many ways his life seems to me heroical — more heroical than he was; which is apt to be the case with men and their lives; and though it is not an example, it is full of lessons of patience, perseverance, and honorable aspiration. He had done everything for himself; he had even made the friends who helped him; and he accomplished a good deal more than most men who succeed more spectacularly.

Peace to his most kindly spirit!

W. D. H.