Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next Home
The Charlotte Sunday Observer, March 11, 1917
by W.E. ChristianWhen a painter sits before a strong man whose soul and purpose he is trying to put upon canvas, he is, if he feels deeply and sincerely, passive as well as active. He watches his subject grow of its own force into its own image, albeit, under his deft guidance of understanding and of sympathy. Then, when his man comes forth as if having been created the second time through the fashioning of his own hand, he stands away and looks upon his work, and sees that it is good. Then, taking his way carefully about from one angle point
to another, he discerns here and, then, there, perhaps a touch of kindness that may not have been sufficiently emphasized to be entirely true to the real man before him; or a touch of decision, or a touch of tolerance, or a touch of wisdom, or a touch of prudence, or foresight, or action or what not. He breathes breath after breath of his nostrils into the deadness of oil and brush, until with eyes illuminated he exclaims: “Behold, here is a living soul of my strong man there!”
When a man of great results has reached the age of three score and ten, there are written in the story of his heart many-colored pages. This friend, or that, may have been privileged to read a page or maybe more of this story. But when the whole must be told together— these pages must be assembled as they are gathered one by one, here and there, from the lips of those who lived afterward. Thus the story like the portrait proceeds toward its own proper conclusion. Then the viewpoints are taken from this angle and that until revision has crowned the work.
“...I have undertaken at the behest of those who love his memory to tell the story of the life of Raleigh Rutherford Haynes.”
With such thoughts in my mind I have undertaken at the behest of those who love his memory to tell the story of the life of Raleigh Rutherford Haynes. The more I scanned the pages that were supplied to me by old friends and new, the more I felt the carefulness which was forced upon me in putting the pages together, and the necessary inadequacy of the result when all would have been written.
The children of the father, who so recently has been taken from the fine working forces of the State and county, have been silenced by the sudden blow of his death.
This then, not from them, is a passive reception on my part from those who have seen and known him. The results will have come together of itself, the writer being rather the editor that the fashioner of all that will have been forthcoming.
Great steel structures of this day are begun from the top where long ago the building was wont to end. In undertaking the putting together of the structure of this strong man's life and work, it is hard to know whether to begin February 6, 1917 that golden day in Florida on the Manatee, where in St. Petersburg, he died in an instant with a smile that lingered even after death, or June 30, 1851, at the scant settlement of Ferry, Rutherford County, North Carolina, where one of eight children, Raleigh Rutherford Haynes first came face to face with the struggles that were to follow.
Copyright © 2008 The Cliffside Historical Society
