Something About the Circuit Rider,
By The Circuit Rider's Wife

By Charles H. Dickey

Mrs. Corra Harris, one of the most widely known figures of contemporary literature, died Saturday afternoon, February 9, at 4 o'clock in Emory University Hospital, Atlanta, Ga., Bishop Warren A. Candler of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, conducting her funeral the following Monday afternoon at her home.

She was buried on the crest of the hill in front of her log-cabin home, in the Valley. She had selected the site and was planning to erect a memorial chapel. It is announced that this will be done.

She was the author of more than a score of books, "A Circuit Rider's Wife" being the one that made her famous. Corra Hay White was born on St. Patrick's Day at Farshill, in Elbert County, Ga., in the year 1869, the daughter of Mary Elizabeth Matthews White and Tinsley Rucker White. As a schoolgirl at the age of 15, she met and fell in love with Lundy Howard Harris, and was married to him two years later, just after he had received his license to preach in the Methodist Church. It was their life together on the Georgia circuit which she immortalized in her great book, "A Circuit Rider's Wife."

"When I arrive in heaven," Corra Harris said to me in her last lengthy and formal interview, "I shall be more anxious to know what Lundy thinks of me than what my Heavenly Father thinks, who probably never thought very highly of me anyway, and will know better how to make allowances for my infirmities. But if he still idolizes me as he did in life, it is going to be an embarrassing moment for me when he searches me with that calm, blue gaze of spirit he always had. I know I shall be full of apologies and excuses, though I really have tried to live somewhere on the rungs of Jacob's ladder."

I had journeyed down from my home in North Carolina to visit Mrs. Harris at her home, "In the Valley." She gave me a very lengthy interview which was stenographically taken. When we had finished, on the second day of my stay in her home, "which looks like a good man's heart," she and her secretary, Miss Betty Raines, said I had the best interview Mrs. Harris had ever given, and that it contained a lot of material which had never before been released to the public.

"I have outlasted all my fears, she was saying, "and I no longer fear anything--not even death--not even God. I am either the most abandoned of all creatures, or, one of those outrageously secured by faith."

"I doubt it not," I said, "but there's one question which I have hoped you would talk on at length. It is this: How did you come to write A Circuit Rider's Wife?"

"I wrote it to ease my heart," she confessed.

"Yes," I urged her, "but there is more to it than that. There's a story--a wonderful story--in the history of that book which made you famous, and opened to you a literary career which has turned out to be one of the most notable in the annals of the South. Won't you tell me that story tonight?"

"That question of yours," she began slowly, "opens the wound of the past, though it is an unavoidable question. This particular interview would have no foundation without it. Yet, as one who has discovered that we live more happily in forgetfulness than we do in our memories, as we grow older, I find that time has censored the past. I have digested its griefs and terrors as one digests the bitter bread of life. So, that now, the period covered by A Circuit Rider's Wife lies behind me like a wide and sweet tranquillity. You will permit me, therefore, to do for your readers what time has done for me, and to give as brief an explanation as possible of how I came to write that book:

"My husband, Lundy Howard Harris, was a Methodist itinerant when I married him. Before that, he had been adjunct teacher of Greek at Emory University. In a very short time he was elected to the same position in the college again. While carrying on his ministry, with other members of the faculty there, he held the chair of Greek for 10 years. Then came the failure of his health and the first symptoms of melancholia from overwork, which determined his tragic end 13 years later. He resigned from the ministry and from the chair of Greek, and the mountains and the hills fell upon us.

"In 1910 he went back into the iteneracy. In 1901 he was made assistant secretary of the Board of Education in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South--a position he held with courage and distinction until September, 1910. He was a man of such culture, gentleness and that frightfully depleting wisdom of the publican and sinner, which marked him as the victim of persecution when his integrity forced him to excite the animosity of one of the most prominent officials in the Southern Methodist Church.

"He refused to lend this man money from the funds of the Board of Education without proper security. He increased this animosity by deciding with the Board of Trustees of Vanderbilt University when the question arose as to whether the university was under the control of the church, or the trustees. All this was done in quietness, simply as a matter of conscience on the part of my husband. Yet, it resulted in such cruelty and persecution as only Christians know how to practice against another Christian of another mind and spirit.

*          *          *

"Under these conditions, the symptoms of his melancholia increased, and the efforts he made to escape from the torment they had made of his life became more frequent. It was while nursing him in a sanatorium from one of these attempts at self-destruction that I wrote the first 3,000 words of the copy that became a part of A Circuit Rider's Wife. The purpose of the book, when I began it, was not entirely clear in my mind except in one particular: I was resolved to put a crown on my husband's head that would shine with dimless lustre when those who had driven him to his death were forgotten dust in their graves!

"It was not consciously that I made the book accusative of certain elements in the government of our church. I simply put everything in it that I had experienced. As life itself is full of humor, as well as pathos, so was my book. No one was more astonished than I when it was not permitted to be sold in the Methodist Publishing House book store. No one felt more innocent than I did of wrong doing during the next five years of church campaigning against me as the author of the book, and of certain reforms it forced upon the church.

"As one seeks sanctuary in times of distress, I came to this old indian cabin which stands upon the footstool of a mountain in the backwoods of North Georgia, and for the last 20 years I have slackened my gait and lived 50 years behind the times. In this tranquillity, my soul has been restored, and I have gone on writing Circuit Rider stories until the animus, inspired by the first one, has died down and I have forgotten my griefs, and, by the grace of god, escaped the martyr's crown.

"I had no expectations about the book when I wrote it. For, as I said, I wrote it to ease my heart; but I was astonished by its reception, and still am; for the book has never died, and Houghton Mifflin Company have reissued it after a quarter of a century."

I was wondering, all the while, what Dr. Harris had thought of his wife's book--depicting him so mercilessly, then, raising such a furor in the church in which he was a conspicuous and scholarly figure. So I asked her:

"What did William Thompson, in person, think about A Circuit Rider's Wife?"

*          *          *

"He was embarrassed and distressed by the light of publicity it cast upon him. I remained at home, of course, but he was in his office at the Methodist Pushlishing House, in Nashville, and was obliged to receive hundreds of people who came to call on him because he was "William Thompson" of the sensational new book. The very dignity of modesty was an inherent trait with him. He was morbidly conscientious and began to feel from the very first, that he was too much praised in this book.

"At last, one day, he took all the copies of The Saturday Evening Post, in which the serial had appeared and retired to his study to read it alone with God, which was a mistake, because Lundy's God was a fearsome deity of awful judgment; though in his ministry he always let the rest of us enjoy the comfort of having a good, kind Heavenly Father. Late in the afternoon he came out, looking sadly blessed and conscience-stricken.

"Well," I said, "you see every word of it is the truth; you remember all those incidents I related."

"Yes," he admitted, "but I can not see myself as you protrayed me."

"You never did see yourself properly," I said. "you are the least valorous worm I ever saw looking at himself. I wrote about you as I know God sees you.

"The amusing thing about this part of the situation was that my husband had a decent aversion for conceited people, and he was very anxious that I should not be puffed up over this performance and would warn me earnestly against it. But I was already deeply engaged in writing Eve's Second Husband, and did not even take time to read my fan mail which amounted to from 50 to 100 letters a day. These letters were left unopened until he would come home in the evening, when he would open them. He was inordinately proud of me and agreeably astonished at my indifference to the reception of the book.

"Once he felt that I was safe from the worldly vanity of a recently-hatched author, he let himself go. He would pace the floor, moved to tears and laughter in those letters. He could never have felt such pride in himself, but he felt justified before the Lord in being proud of me. So was he nourished by the tender love of the world for his wife, and presently went away from the world by his own hand, broken in health, really dying--no longer able to bear the pain and burden of life.

*          *          *

"As I remember my Circuit Rider he was a very handsome man, with that kind of magnetism only to be had from digested culture and from supreme scholarship in Greek and the old classics. The charm and sweetness of a learned man who was never conscious of his learning. A man who forgave every man everything, and forgave himself not the least fault. A man who walked half way to heaven on half-soled shoes and was never conscious of being poor. A man who could be the intellectual and spiritual comrade of the great men of his age and of the ages, and who was on all occasions the brother and the comrade of the humblest man. He was never obliged to lift himself up, nor to let himself down in order to fulfill the requirements of this kind of comradeship.

"We never quarreled about anything in our personal relations except what effect the Huns had on Roman civilization, and about what his young wife considered certain egotistical tendencies of St. Paul.

"He was the most wonderfull man I ever saw. He respected and loved his wife. His last written words to her were:

" 'You have been my fortress and my shelter.' "