AMERICAN THUMB-PRINTS, by KATE STEPHENS
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AMERICAN THUMB-PRINTS
METTLE OF OUR MEN AND WOMEN
BY
KATE STEPHENS
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY J.B. LIPPENCOTT COMPANY
Published April, 1905
IN MOST LOVING MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
NELSON TIMOTHY STEPHENS
WHOSE RARE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN AND OF LAW
WHOSE SENSITIVENESS TO JUSTICE
HUMAN KINDLINESS
AND FINE DISDAIN FOR SELF-ADVERTISEMENT
ARE STILL CHERISHED BY THE NOBLE FOLK
AMONG WHOM HE SPENT
THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE
AT WHOSE INSTANCE IN GREAT MEASURE
AND UPON WHOSE ADVICE
THE LAW SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY
SKETCHED IN THIS BOOK
WAS IN 1878
FOUNDED
IN shorter form "The New England
Woman" appeared in _The Atlantic
Monthly_, and under other title and
form "Up-to-Date Misogyny" and
"Plagiarizing Humors of Benjamin
Franklin" in _The Bookman_, which
periodicals have courteously allowed
republication.
CONTENTS
PURITANS OF THE WEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS . . . . . . . . . . . .
TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED . . . . . . . .
UP TO DATE MISOGYNY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"THE GULLET SCIENCE" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN . . . . .
PURITANS OF THE WEST
Let nouther lufe of friend nor feir of fais,
mufe zow to mank zour Message, or hald bak
Ane iot of zour Commission, ony wayis
Call ay quhite, quhite, an blak, that quhilk is blak
First he descendit bot of linage small.
As comonly God usis for to call,
The sempill sort his summoundis til expres.
JOHN DAVIDSON
If it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
OF local phases of the American spirit, none has incited more
discussion than that developed in Kansas. The notion that the
citizens of the State are somewhat phrenetic in experimental
meliorism; that they more than others fall into abnormal sympathies
and are led by aberrations of the crowd--intoxications the mind
receives in a congregation of men pitched to an emotional key--this
notion long ago startled peoples more phlegmatic and less prone to
social vagaries.
Closer consideration shows the Kansas populace distinctly simple in
mental habit and independent in judgment. Yet their old-time
grangerism and Greenbackism, and their still later Prohibitionism,
Populism, and stay law have caused that part of the world not so
inclined to rainbow-chasing to ask who they as a people really are,
and what psychopathy they suffer--to assert that they are dull,
unthinking, or, at best, doctrinaire.
This judgment antedates our day, as we said. It was even so far
back as in the time of Abraham Lincoln, when Kansas was not near
the force, nor the promise of the force, it has since become. And
it was in that earlier and poorer age of our country when folks
queried a man's suitability and preparedness for the senatorial
office. Then when Senatorship fell to general James Lane, and some
one questioned the Free-State fighter's fitness for his duties,
President Lincoln is said to have hit off the new Senator and the
new State with "good enough for Kansas!" and a shrug of his bony
shoulders. Derogatory catchwords have had a knack at persisting
since men first tried to get the upper hand of one another by
ridicule, and the terse unsympathy and curl of the lip of Lincoln's
sayings have kept their use to our day.
One outsider, in explaining any new vagary of the Kansans,
suggests, with sophomore ease, "The foreign element." Another
tells you, convicting himself of his own charge, "It is ignorance
away out there in the back woods." "Bad laws," another conclusively
sets down. Opposed to all these surmises and guesses are the facts
that in number and efficiency of schools Kansas ranks beyond many
States, and that in illiteracy the commonwealth in the last census
showed a percentage of 2.9--a figure below certain older States,
say Massachusetts, with an illiterate percentage of 5.9, or New
York, with 5.5. As to its early laws, they were framed in good
measure by men and women[13-1]* of New England blood--of that blood
although their forebears may have pushed westward from the thin
soil of New England three generations before the present Kansans
were born. Again its citizens, except an inconsiderable and
ineffective minority, are Americans in blood and tradition.
It is in truth in the fact last named, in the American birth of the
people who gave, and still give, the State its fundamental key,
that we are to find the causes of Kansas neologism and desire for
experiment in every line that promises human betterment. It is a
case of spiritual heir-at-law--the persistence of what the great
ecclesiastical reactionist of our day has anathematized as "the
American Spirit." For each new ism the Kansans have pursued has
been but another form and working in the popular brain of the
amicus humani generis of the eighteenth-century Revolutionists, or,
as the people of their time and since have put it, "liberty,
equality, fraternity."
Kansas was settled by Americans, American men and American women
possessed by the one dominating idea of holding its territory and
its wealth to themselves and their opinions. They went in first in
the fifties with bayonets packed in Bible boxes. All along railways
running towards their destination they had boarded trains with the
future grasped close in hand, and sometimes they were singing
Whittier's lines:
"We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom's southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree
The rugged Northern pine!
. . . . . . . . .
"Upbearing, like the Ark of old,
The Bible in our van,
We go to test the truth of God
Against the fraud of man."
In exalted mood they had chanted this hymn as their trains pulled
into stations farther on in their journey, and the lengthening of
the day told them they were daily westering with the sun. They had
carried it in their hearts with Puritan aggressiveness, with
Anglo-Saxon tenacity and sincerity, as their steamers paddled up
the muddy current of the Missouri and their canvas-covered wagons
creaked and rumbled over the sod, concealing then its motherhood of
mighty crops of corn and wheat, upon which they were to build their
home. They were enthusiasts even on a road beset with hostiles of
the slave State to the east. Their enthusiasm worked out in two
general lines, one the self-interest of building themselves a
home--towns, schools, churches,--the other the idealism of the
anti-slavery faith. They were founding a State which was within a
few years to afford to northern forces in the struggle centring
about slavery the highest percentage of soldiers of any
commonwealth; and their spirit forecast the sequent fact that
troops from the midst of their self-immolation would also record
the highest percentage of deaths.
They came from many quarters to that territorial settlement of
theirs, but the radical, recalcitrant stock which had nested in and
peopled the northeastern coast of our country was in the notable
majorities from Western States--from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and
Iowa; and from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania also. Some
came, indeed, who could trace no descent from Puritan or Quaker or
Huguenot forebear. But there was still the potent heirship of spirit.
To these men nature gave the gift of seeing their side of the then
universal question. She added a living sympathy with workers, and
an acute sense of the poverty and oppression which humanity at
large is always suffering from those who take because they have
power. A free discussion of slavery and their opposition to
slave-holding had put this deep down in their hearts.
Each man of them--and each woman also--was in fixed principle and
earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not
yet before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the
spirit--the ideal the pioneer must ever see and holding the present
and actual as but a mote in the beam from that central light.
From a more humorous point of view, each man was clearly a Knight
of La Mancha stripped of the medieval and Spanish trapping of his
prototype. His Dulcinea--an unexampled combination of idealism and
practicality--his much enduring wife, upon whose frame and
anxious-eyed face were stamped a yearning for the graces of life.
Her fervor, with true woman strength, was ever persistent. "I
always compose my poems best," said one of the haler of these dames
whose verses piped from a corner of the University town's morning
journal, "on wash-day and over the tub."
These were the conditions of those men and women of the fifties and
early sixties to less lifted, more fleshly souls. The old
enthusiasm that lighted our race in 1620 and many sequent years in
Massachusetts Bay, and the old devotion that led the Huguenots and
other oppressed peoples to our Southern coasts and on "over the
mountains," were kindled afresh. And the old exaltation of the
descendants of these many peoples--the uplifting that made way for
and supported the act of the Fourth of July in 1776--rose anew. The
flame of an idea was in the air heating and refining the grossest
spirits--and the subtle forces of the Kansans, vanguard were far
from the grossest.
Once in their new home these men and women lived under
circumstances a people has almost never thriven under--circumstances
which would prey upon every fibre of calmness, repose, and
sober-mindedness, and possibly in the end deprive their folk of
consideration for the past and its judgments. "Govern the Kansas of
1855 and '56!" exclaimed governor Shannon years after that time.
"You might as well have attempted to govern the devil in hell."
"Shall the Sabbath never immigrate," cried a Massachusetts woman in
1855 in a letter to friends at home, "and the commandments too?"
Among this people was little presence of what men had wrought. As
in the early settlements of our Atlantic seaboard, all was to be
made, everything to be done, even to the hewing of logs for houses
and digging of wells for water; and in Kansas pressure for energy
and time was vastly increased over those earlier years by the
seaboard. The draughting of laws for controlling a mixed
population, with elements in it confessedly there for turbulence
and bloodshed, was for a time secondary to shingle-making.
Such primitive efforts were more than a generation ago--in fact,
fifty years. But the spirit with which those early comers
inaugurated and carried on their settlement did not perish when the
daily need of its support had passed away. It still abode as a
descent of spirit, meaning an inheritance of spirit, a contagion of
spirit, and to its characteristic features we can to-day as easily
point--to its human sympathies and willingness for experiment--as to
the persistence of a physical mark--the Bourbon nose in royal
portraits, say, or the "Austrian lips" of the Hapsburg mouth. Its
evidences are all about you when you are within the confines of the
present-day Kansans, and you are reminded of the Puritanism which
still subordinates to itself much that is alien in Massachusetts;
or you think of the sturdy practicality of the early Dutch which
still modifies New York; or you may go farther afield and recall
the most persistent spirit of the gauls of Caesar, novis plerumque
rebus student, which to our time has been the spirit of the gauls
of the Empire and of President Loubet.
The Kansan has still his human-heartedness and his willingness to
experiment for better things. Exploded hypotheses in manufacture,
farming, and other interests scattered in startling frequency over
the vast acreage of his State, testify to these traits.
He has to this day kept his receptivity of mind. Even now he scorns
a consideration for fine distinctions. He still loves a buoyant
optimism. And for all these reasons he often and readily grants
faith to the fellow who amuses him, who can talk loud and fast, who
promises much, and who gets the most notices in his local dailies.
He is like the author of Don Juan, inasmuch as he "wants a hero,"
and at times he is willing to put up with as grievous a one as was
foisted upon the poet. In the end, however, he has native bed-rock
sense, and as his politics in their finality show, he commonly
measures rascals aright. But in his active pursuit and process of
finding them out he has offered himself a spectacle to less
simple-minded, more sophisticated men.
Some years ago, in a grove of primeval oaks, elms, and
black-walnuts neighboring the yellow Kaw and their University town,
those settlers of early days held an old-time barbecue. The meeting
fell in the gold and translucence of the September that glorifies
that land. Great crowds of men and women came by rail and by wagon,
and walking about in the shade, or in the purple clouds that
rose from the trampings of many feet and stood gleaming
in the sunshine, they were stretching hands to one another
and crying each to some new-discovered, old acquaintance,
"Is this you?" "How long is it now?" "Thirty-five years?"
"You've prospered?" and such words as old soldiers would use
having fought a great fight together--not for pelf or loot but
for moral outcome--and had then lost one another for many a year.
Moving among them you would readily see signs of that "possession
of the god" the greeks meant when they said GREEK. Characteristic
marks of it were at every turn. There was the mobile
body--nervous, angular, expressive--and a skin of fine grain.
There was the longish hair, matted, if very fine, in broad
locks; if coarse, standing about the head in electric stiffness
and confusion--the hair shown in the print of John Brown, in
fact. There were eyes often saddened by the sleeplessness of the
idealist--eyes with an uneasy glitter and a vision directed far
away, as if not noting life, nor death, nor daily things near
by, but fixed rather upon some startling shape on the horizon.
The teeth were inclined to wedge-shape and set far apart. There
was a firmly shut and finely curved mouth. "We make our own
mouths," says Dr. Holmes. About this people was smouldering fire
which might leap into flame at any gust of mischance or oppression.
This describes the appearance in later decades of the corporate
man of the fifties and early sixties--
"to whom was given
So much of earth, so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood."
A sky whose mystery and melancholy, whose solitary calm and
elemental rage stimulate and depress even his penned and grazing
cattle, has spread over him for more than a generation. With his
intensity and his predisposition to a new contrat social he and
his descendants have been subjected to Kansas heat, which at
times marks more than one hundred in the shade, and to a frost
that leaves the check of the thermometer far below zero. He and
his children, cultivators of their rich soil, have been subject
to off-years in wheat and corn. They have endured a period of
agricultural depression prolonged because world-wide. They have
been subject, too, to the manipulation of boomers.
Most lymphatic men--any Boeotian, in fact, but it is long before
his fat bottom lands will make a Boeotian out of a Kansan--most
lymphatic men ploughing, planting, and simply and honestly living
would be affected to discontent by the thunder of booms and their
kaleidoscopic deceit. Clever and sometimes unprincipled promoters
representing more clever and unprincipled bond-sellers in Eastern
counting-houses sought to incite speculation and lead the natural
idealist by the glamour of town-building, and county-forming booms,
railway and irrigation booms, and countless other projects.
They played with his virtuous foibles and fired his imagination. He
gave himself, his time, his men, his horses, his implements for
construction; his lands for right of way. He hewed his black
walnuts and elms into sleepers, and sawed his bulky oaks for
bridges. He called special elections and voted aid in bonds. He
gave perpetual exemption from taxes. Rugged enthusiast that he was
he gave whatever he had to give,--but first he gave faith and
altruistic looking-out for the interests of the other man. Great
popular works still abiding--cathedrals in Europe are perhaps the
most noted--were put up by like kindling of the human spirit.
His road was made ready for sleepers, and funds for purchasing iron
he formally handed the promoters,--since which day purslane and
smartweed and golden sunflowers have cloaked the serpentine grades
which his own hands had advanced at the rate of more than a mile
between each dawn and sunset.
One direct relation and force of these inflated plans to the Kansan
have been that they often swerved and controlled the values of his
land, and the prices of those commodities from which a soil-worker
supports a family hungry, growing, and in need of his
commonwealth's great schools. And the man himself, poor futurist
and striver after the idea, with a soul soaring heavenward and
hands stained and torn with weed-pulling and corn-husking!--his
ready faith, his tendency to seek a hero, his brushing aside of
conservative intuition, his meliorism, his optimism, his
receptivity to ideas, his dear humanness--in other words, his charm,
his grace, his individuality, his Americanism--wrought him harm.
Our corporate man, loving, aspiring, working, waiting, started out
with a nervous excitability already given. He was a man with a bee
in his bonnet. He was seeking ideal conditions. Originally he was
a reactionist against feudal bondage, the old bondage of human to
human and of human to land. Later his soul took fire at the new
bondage of human to wage and job. He would have every man and woman
about him as free in person as he was in idea.
What wonder then that he or his descendent spirit in the midst of
agricultural distress enacted a mortgage equity or stay law, and
determined that that law should apply to mortgages in existence at
the passage of the act! He it is of the all-embracing Populism, the
out-reaching Prohibitionism, the husbandman--defensive Grangerism.
Shall we not humanly expect him, and those suffering the contagion
of his noble singleness, to clutch at plans for a social
millennium? "Heaven is as easily reached from Kansas," wrote an
immigrant of 1855, "as from any other point."
He values openly what the world in its heart knows is best, and
like all idealists foreruns his time. The legend is always about
him of how the men and women of the early fifties hitched their
wagon to a star--and the stars in his infinity above are divinely
luminous and clear. His meliorism--which would lead his fellows and
then the whole world aright--is nothing if not magnificent.
But although he grubs up the wild rose and morning-glory, ploughing
his mellow soil deep for settings of peach and grape, and supplants
the beauty of the purple iris and prairie verbena with the
practicalities of corn and wheat, he has yet to learn the moral
effect of time and aggregation--that a moon's cycle is not a
millennium, a June wind fragrant with the honey of his white clover
not all of his fair climate, and that a political colossus cannot
stand when it has no more substantial feet than the yellow clay
which washes and swirls in the river that waters his great State.
In reality his excess of faith hinders the way to conditions his
idealism has ever been seeking.
The Kansan is, after all, but a phase--a magnificent present-day
example and striving--of the mighty democratic spirit which has
been groping forward through centuries towards its ideal, the human
race's ideal of ideals. In his setting forth of the genius of his
people for democracy and the tendency of his blood for experiment
and reform--according to that advice to the Thessalonians of an
avaunt courier of democracy, to prove all things and hold fast to
that which is good--he is led at times upon miry, quaggy places and
by the very largeness of his sympathies enticed upon quicksands
which the social plummet of our day has not yet sounded.
THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
No university has anywhere ever become a great
influence, or anything but a school for children, which
was not wholly or almost wholly in the hands of the
faculty or teaching body. _The faculty is the teaching
body_. If you have the right sort of faculty, you have a
university though you have only a tent to lecture in. If,
on the other hand, you try to make a university out of a
board of sagacious business men acting as trustees, and
treat the professors simply as "hired men," bound to give
the college so many hours a week, you may have a good
school for youths, but you will get no enlightening
influence or force out of it for the community at large.
A writer in _The Nation_, 1889
DURING a great national struggle for human rights, Laurel Town was
touched by the high seriousness which rises from sincerity to the
idea of human liberty and the laying down of lives in defence of that
idea. Its baptism and its early years were thus purely of the spirit.
A miniature burg, it snuggles upon broad, fat lands, semicircling
the height that rises to the west. From the hilltop the tiny city
is half-buried in green leaves. Looking beyond and to the middle
distance of the landscape, you find rich bottoms of orchard and of
corn, and the Tiber-yellow waters of a broad river running through
their plenty.
First immigrants to this country--those who came in back in the
fifties--discovered the hill's likeness to the great Acropolis of
Athens, and determined that upon it, as upon the heights of the
ancient city of the golden grasshopper, the State's most sacred
temple should be built. Thus were inspired library and museum,
laboratories and lecture-rooms, of the University of Hesperus,
whose roofs are gleaming in the vivid air to-day just as in some
ancient gem a diamond lying upon clustering gold sends shafts of
light through foliations of red metal.
The brow of this hill beetles toward the south, but instead of the
blue waters of the Saronic Gulf which Sophocles in jocund youth saw
dancing far at sea, Hesperus students sight hills rolling to the
horizon, and thickets of elms and poplars fringing Indian Creek,
and instead of the Pentelic mountains in the northeast they catch
the shimmering light of the green ledges and limestone crests of
the northern edge of the valley the river has chiselled.
But how, you ask--thinking of the fervor of the immigrants of 1854
and '55--how did this university come into being? In stirring and
tentative times. The institution was first organized by
Presbyterians, who later accepted a fate clearly foreordained, and
sold to the Episcopalians. This branch of the church universal
christened the educational infant Lawrence University, after a
Boston merchant, who sent ten thousand dollars conditioned as a
gift on a like subscription. The institution to this time was "on
paper," as these founders said of early towns--that is, a plan, a
scheme, a possibility. It finally became the kernel of the
University of Hesperus when the State accepted from Congress a
grant of seventy-two square miles of land.
"There shall be two branches of the University," the charter
reads, "a male and a female branch." In clearer English, the
institution was to be open to men and women.
Seeds of the convictions which admitted women to instruction had
long been germinating, even before the independence of women was
practically denied by the great Reformation. The idea was in the
mind of our race when we were north-of-Europe barbarians. It found
sporadic expression all through our literature. It is back of
Chaucer in annals of the people and later in such chroniclers as
Holinshed. Bishop Burnet, historian of his "Own Time," and also
Fuller, he of the human, "Worthies," determined that "the sharpness
of the wit and the suddenness of the conceits of women needed
she-schools." Later Mary Woolstonecraft wrote: "But I still insist
that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes should
be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered
not only as moral but rational creatures, ought to endeavor to
acquire human virtues by the same means as men, instead of being
educated like a fanciful kind of half-being. "And that moral and
prudent sampler, Hannah More, declared: "I call education not that
which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends
to confirm a firm and regular system of character.
"A score of the names of these fore-workers for human liberty are
known to us. But the names that are not known!--the pathos of it!
that we cannot, looking below from our rung in the ladder, tell the
countless who have striven, and fallen striving, that we are here
because they were there, and that to them, often unrecognized and
unthanked, our opportunities are due. They foreran their times, and
their struggle made ours possible.
"'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!"
But the immediate thought or impulse to make our Western State
institutions co-educational, to give to the daughters the
collegiate leisure and learning of the sons--to whom or to what
shall we trace this idea? They used to explain it in Hesperus by
telling you, "The people about us are for the most part New
Englanders in blood, you know, perhaps not one, certainly not more
than two generations removed to more genial lands, and still
retaining the rigor and tenacity and devotion to principle of that
stock." But one naturally answered this by saying, "In New England
they did not in the fifties and sixties give their daughters the
educational opportunities they gave their sons. In those decades
there were attempts at women's colleges outside New England, but
none in the neighborhood of Williams, Dartmouth, Amherst, Harvard,
or Yale."
The better reason is the historic--noted in every movement of our
Aryan race. In this is found what New England civilization has
done, not in Hesperus alone, but in Wisconsin, in California, in
Minnesota, and wherever else it has united with other forces, and
lost the self-consciousness and self-complacency which in our
generation are distinguishing and abiding traits upon its own
granitic soil. Prejudices which eat energy and dwarf activity
colonists have commonly left behind, whether they have entered the
swift black ship of the sea or the canvas-covered wagon of the
prairie. This was said of those who sailed westward and built up
ancient Syracuse some twenty-six centuries agone, and it is true
also of the colonists of these later days.
The drawing up of the charter of the University of Hesperus shows
how humanly, simply, and freely State building may be done. Judge
Chadwick, of Laurel Town, gives the candid narrative:
"In the spring of 1864 the Misses Chapin and Miss Elizabeth Watson,
who had established a school here, and who were anxious that the
University should be organized, besought governor Robinson to see
that it was done. He, or they (or perhaps but one of them), came to
me and insisted that I should go to the capital and secure the
passage of an act organizing the University. The session of the
Legislature was near its close. I went to the capital. In the State
library I hunted up the various charters of similar institutions,
and taking the Michigan University charter for my guide, drafted
the act to organize the University of the State. . . . Judge Emery
was the member of the House. . . . I do not remember who was the
Senator. . . . I gave the draft to Judge Emery, who introduced it
into the house, and by suspension of the rules got it through. It
went through the Senate in the same way, and was approved by the
governor--Carney"
But the seed of fire from which this University sprang in the days
when men were fighting for unity, for an idea--this you cannot
understand without a word about the brilliant essence that enwraps
you in that land--Hesperus air and light. This ether no man can
describe. It is as clear as a diamond of finest quality, and each
infinitesimal particle has a thousand radiant facets. You think to
take it in your hand. It is as intangible as a perfume, as illusive
as the hopes of man's ultimate perfection. The colors of liquid
rose are hidden in it and the glow of gold, and it gives flame to
the dullest matter. It glances upon a gray tree-trunk, and the
trunk glitters in purple and silver-white. It is so limpid and dry
that a hill or a bush, or a grazing sheep far away, stands out in
clear relief. It vitalizes. It whispers of the infinite life of
life. Like the sea, it presses upon you a consciousness of
illimitability and immeasurable strength. It is "most pellucid
air," like that in which the chorus of the "Medea" says the
Athenians were "ever delicately marching."
It is as like the atmosphere of Italy as the sturdy peach-blossoms
which redden Hesperus boughs in March are like the softer
almond-flowers. The same indescribable grace and radiance are in
both essences. But there are the Hesperus blizzards--vast rivers of
icy air which sweep from upper currents and ensphere the softness
and translucent loveliness of the earth with such frosts as are
said to fill all heaven between the stars.
Under such dynamic skies young men and women have been gathering
now these forty years--before the September equinox has fairly
quenched the glow of summer heat. During a long estivation a sun
burning in an almost cloudless heaven has beaten upon them day by
day. The glow has purified and expanded their skin, has loosened
their joints, and clothed them in the supple body of the south.
Through the darkness of the night ten thousand stars have shone
above their slumbers, and wind voices out of space have
phu-phy-phispered through secretive pines and rolled tz-tz-tz upon
the leathery leaves of oaks. Such days and nights have been over
them since the wild grape tossed its fragrant blossoms in damp
ravines in the passion of May.
These students have come from all kinds of homes, from meagre town
houses, from the plainest and most forlorn farm-houses, and from
other houses laden and bursting with plenty--and plenty in Hesperus
is always more plenty than plenty anywhere else. Many of these
young people have been nurtured delicately, but a large number have
doubtless tasted the bitterness of overwork and the struggle of
life before their teens.
Perhaps their parents came to Hesperus newly wedded, or in the
early years of married life with a brood of little children. If
their coming was not in the stridulous cars of some Pacific or
Santa Fe railway, then it was over the hard-packed soil in most
picturesque of pioneer fashions--a huge canvas-covered wagon
carrying the family cookstove, beds, and apparel, and, under its
creaking sides, kettles for boilers, pails for fetching water from
the nearest run, and axes to cut wood for evening fires. Every
article the family carried must answer some requirement or use. The
horses, too, have their appointed tasks, for, the journey once
accomplished, they will mark off the eighty acres the family are
going to pre-empt, and afterwards pull the plough through the heavy
malarious sod.
On the seat of the wagon the wife and mother, wrapped in extremes
of cold in a patchwork quilt, at times nursed the baby, and in any
case drove with a workmanlike hand. John goodman was sometimes back
with the collie, snapping his blacksnake at the cattle and urging
them on. But oftenest father and mother were up in the seat, and
boy and girl trooping behind in barefooted and bareheaded
innocence, enjoying happy equality and that intimate contact with
the cows which milky udders invite.
Now this, or some way like this, was the introduction of a quota of
Hesperus men and women to their fat earth and electric atmosphere.
It is therefore not to be wondered at that these young people come
to their University with little of the glamour nourished by
delicate environment and the graces of life. Their earliest years
have been spent upon the bed-rock of nature wrestling with the
hardest facts and barest realities. They have suffered the
deprivations and the unutterable trials of patience and faith which
the world over are the lot of pioneers; and they have had the
returns of their courage. Every self-respecting man and boy has
been, perhaps still is, expected to do the work of two men. Every
woman and girl to whom the god of circumstance had not been kind
must be ready to perform, alike and equally well, the duties of man
or woman--whichever the hour dictated. "Hesperus," says an
unblushing old adage of the fifties--"Hesperus is heaven to men
and dogs and hell to women and horses."
But from whatever part of the State the students come to their
University, he and she commonly come--they are not sent. The
distinction is trite, but there is in it a vast difference. In many
cases they have made the choice and way for themselves. They have
earned money to pay their living while at school, and they expect,
during the three, four, or five years they are in their
intellectual Canaan, to spend vacations in work--in harvesting
great wheat-fields of Philistia, or in some other honest
bread-winning. They are so close to nature, and so radiantly strong
in individuality, that no one of them, so far as rumor goes, has
ever resorted to the commonest method of the Eastern impecunious
collegian for filling his cobwebbed purse with gold. The nearest
approach I know to such zeal was the instance of the student who
slept (brave fellow) scot-free in an undertaker's establishment. He
answered that functionary's night-bell. Then he earned half-dollars
in rubbing up a coffin or washing the hearse; adding to these
duties the care of a church, milking of cows, tending of furnaces,
digging of flower-beds, beating of carpets, and any other job by
which a strong and independent hand could win honest money for
books and clothing and food. It was as true for him now as when
Dekker, fellow-player with Shakespeare and "a high-flier of wit
even against Ben Jonson himself"--to use Anthony a Wood's phrase
when Dekker sang--
"Then he that patiently want's burden bears,
No burden bears, but is a king, a king.
O sweet content, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace,
Honest labor bears a lovely face,
Then hey nonny, nonny; hey nonny, nonny."
To one young man, whose course was preparing him for studies of
Knox's theology upon Knox's own heath, a harvest of forty acres of
wheat brought a competence, as this arithmetic will show: 40 X 50
X $0.50 = $1000. He planted, he said, in the early days of
September, before leaving for college, and cut the grain after
commencement in June. The blue-green blades barely peeped through
the glebe during winter. When springtime came, and the hot sun
shone upon the steaming earth, and the spirit of growth crept into
the roots, an invalid father--the young planter being still in
academic cassock--kept the fences up and vagrant cows from mowing
the crop under their sweet breath. Other men often told of like
ways of earning not only college bread but also college skittles.
Women students had commonly not so good a chance at wresting german
lyrics or Plato's idealism from a wheatfurrow. Report of such
advantages at least never reached my ear. But this may be due to
the fact that women are reticent about the means of their success,
while men delight to dwell upon their former narrow circumstances
and triumphant exit from such conditions.
Some Hesperus girl may have made money in hay, and indeed have made
the hay as charmingly as Madame de Sevigne reports herself to have
done and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of
the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sevigne relates. Now and
then a young woman did say that she was living during her studies
on funds she herself had earned. One doughty maiden, "a vary
parfit, gentil knight," her face ruddy with healthy blood, her
muscles firm and active such a girl said one day, in extenuation of
her lack of greek composition, that "her duties had not permitted
her to prepare it."
"But that is your duty, to prepare it," I answered. "Are you one
of those students who never allow studies to interfere with
`business'?"
"No," she said, quickly; "but let me tell you how it happened. The
boarding-house where I stay is kept by a friend of my mother. She
offers me board if I will help her. So I get up at five in the
morning and cook breakfast, and after I have cleaned up I come up
here. In the afternoon I sweep and dust, and it takes me till nearly
dark. The evening is the only time I have for preparing four studies."
What became of this girl, you ask? She married a professor in an
Eastern college.
It is well to reiterate, however, in order to convey no false
impression of Hesperus sturdiness and self-reliance, that many,
probably a majority, of the students were supported by their
natural protectors. But it is clear that there is more
self-maintenance self-reliance in money matters--at the Hesperus
University than in any college generally known in the East, and
that the methods of obtaining self-succor are at times novel and
resultant from an agricultural environment. In evidence that there
are students more fortunate one should rather say more moneyed, for
the blessings of money are not always apparent to the inner eye are
the secret societies which flourish among both men and women. The
club or society houses, for the furnishing of which carte blanche
has been given the individual humanely known as interior decorator,
see not infrequently courtesies from one greek letter society to
another, then and there kindly wives of the professors
matronizing.[54-2]*
An early introduction into the battle of life breeds in us humans
practicality and utilitarianism. Most unfortunately it
disillusions. It takes from the imaginativeness which charms and
transfigures the early years of life. In the University of Hesperus
one found the immediate fruit of this experience in the desire of
the student, expressed before he was thoroughly within the college
gates, of obtaining that which would be of immediate practical
advantage to himself. He demanded what the germans call
brodstudien, and sometimes very little beyond the knowledge which
he could convert into Minnesota wheat or some other iota of the
material prosperity which surges from east to west and waxes on
every side of our land. How strenuously one had to fight this great
impulse! and against what overwhelming odds! It was a reacting of
King Canute's forbiddance to the sea, and, like that famous defeat,
it had its humors.
You could see so plainly that this demon of practicality had been
implanted by want, and privation, and a knowledge drunk with the
mother's milk, that the struggle of life on that untested soil was
a struggle to live; you could see this so plainly that you often
felt constrained to yield to its cry and urgency.
And the weapons at hand to fight it were so few! Materialism on
every hand. And it was plain, also, that here was but an eddy in
the wave that the impulse toward brodstudien was undoubtedly but a
groping forward in the great movement of the half-century that has
endowed realschulen from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, and is
perhaps but the beginning of the industrial conquest of the
world--in its first endeavors necessarily crippled, over-zealous
and impotent of best works.
Yet in the face of every concession there came anew to your
conscience the conviction, haunting unceasingly, of the need of the
idea in academic life, of the need of the love of study for its own
sake, of a broader education of the sympathies, of greater activity
in the intangible world of thought and feeling--desires of souls
"hydroptic with a sacred thirst." To these alone did it behoove us
to concede, for through the spirit alone could the "high man"
sustainedly lift up his heart--
"Still before living he'd learn how to live--
No end to learning.
Earn the means first--God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.
Others mistrust and say, `But time escapes,--
Live now or never!'
He said, `What's Time? leave Now for dogs
and apes, Man has Forever.'"
The ratio of Hesperus students who chose the old form of scholastic
training, called through long centuries the Humanities, was some
little time ago not more than one-fifth of those in the department
of literature and arts. Since the number was so small--all departments
would then hardly count five hundred students--the growth was
favored of that most delightful feature of small-college life,
friendship between instructor and undergraduate. Such offices often
grew to significant proportions during a student's four collegiate
years. All genialities aided them; and nothing sinister hindered.
The young folks, hearts were as warm as may be found upon any
generous soil, and they held a sentiment of personal loyalty which
one needed never to question. They went to their University, after
such longing and eagerness, so thoroughly convinced that there was
to be found the open sesame to whatever in their lives had been
most unattainable, that their first attitude was not the critical,
negative, which one notices in some universities deemed more
fortunate, but the positive and receptive. If they did not find
that which to their minds seemed best, had they not the inheritance
of hope?--a devise which Hesperus earth and air entail upon all
their children, and upon which all are most liberally nurtured.
Then the Hesperus youth had a defect, if one may so put it, that
aided him materially to a friendly attitude with his instructors.
He was, with rare exceptions, as devoid of reverence for
conventional distinctions as a meadow-lark nesting in last year's
tumble-weed and thinking only of soaring and singing. In this,
perhaps, is the main-spring of the reason why nearly every student,
either through some inborn affinity or by election of studies,
drifted into genial relations with some member of the faculty.
The pleasantest part of my day's work used to be in the retirement
of the Greek study and from eight to nine in the morning. Never a
student of mine who did not come at that hour for some occasion or
need. One man snatched the opportunity to read at sight a good part
of the Odyssey. Another took up and discussed certain dialogues of
Plato. Another who aimed at theological learning studied the Greek
Testament and the "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." Others came
in to block out courses of work. Still others were preparing papers
and gathering arguments, authorities, and data for debating
societies and clubs.
In that hour, too, a sympathetic ear would hear many a personal
history told with entire frankness and naivete. One poor fellow had
that defect of will which is mated at times with the humorous
warmth which the Germans call gemuth, and the added pain of
consciousness of his own weakness. Another clear-headed,
muscular-handed, and ready youth measured his chances of getting
wood to saw,--"just the exercise he needed, out of doors,"--horses
to groom, and the city lamps to light, to earn the simple fare
which he himself cooked. Many a pathetic story found tongue in
that morning air, and times were when fate dropped no cap of
recognition and granted no final victory. In hearing the details of
hope deferred, of narrow estate and expansive ambition, you longed
for the fabled Croesus touch which turned want to plenty, or, more
rationally, you projected a social order where the young and inapt
should not suffer for the sins of others, but be within the
sheltering arms of some sympathetic power.
There was the mildness of the chinook to this social blizzard,
however, for groups moved even in the dewy hour of half-past eight
toward the open door of the greek lecture-room, laughing at the
last college joke or secret society escapade, and forecasting who
would be the next penitent before the council. Also certain youths
and maids, between whom lay the engagement announced by a ring on
the heart-finger--these one might see hanging over and fingering--
"Vor Liebe und Liebesweh"--
volumes lying upon my table, and in their eagerness and absorption
of the world in two, dog-earing the golden edges of ever-living
Theocritus. And why not? Such entanglements in the web of love
oftenest differed in no way from the innocence and simplicity of
the pristine Daphnes and Coras. They were living again, the
Sicilian shepherd and shepherdess, and wandering in the eternally
virid fields of youth. The skies and trees and waters were merely
not of Trinacria. But Hesperus heavens omitted no degree of ardor.
And had you seen her, you would never have blamed the youth for
loving the college maid. She has the charm abloom in the girlhood
of every land, and most of all in this of ours. Physically she
differs little from her sister in Eastern States. Her form is as
willowy. She has, except in the case of foreign-born parents, the
same elongated head and bright-glancing eye. Her skin sometimes
lacks in fairness owing to the desiccating winds of the interior;
but there is the same fineness of texture.
Power of minute observation and a vivacious self-reliance are
characteristics of the girl of the University of Hesperus--and,
indeed, of the girl throughout the West. She sees everything within
her horizon. Nothing escapes her eye or disturbs her animated
self-poise. She has not the Buddhistic self-contemplation the New
England girl is apt to cultivate; nor is she given to talking about
her sensations of body and moods of mind. I never heard her say she
wanted to fall in love in order to study her sensations--as a Smith
College alumna studying at Barnard once declared. She rarely
pursues fads. Neither is she a fatalist. And she never thinks of
doubting her capacity of correct conclusions upon data which she
gathers with her own experience of eye and ear. From early years
she has been a reasoner by the inductive method, and a believer in
the equality and unsimilarity of men and women. Undeniably her
mental tone is a result of the greater friction with the world
which the girl of the West experiences in her fuller freedom.
Conventionalism does not commonly overpower the individual--social
lines are not so closely defined--in those States where people
count by decades instead of by centuries.
And what is said of this University girl's observing faculties is
in nowise untrue of her brother's. Nature, the most Socratic of all
instructors and the pedagogue of least apparent method, seems actually
to have taught him more than his sister, as, in fact, the physical
universe is apt to teach its laws more clearly to the man than to
the woman, even if she hath a clearer vision of the moral order.
Perhaps the man's duties knit him more closely to physical things.
With clear, far-seeing eyes--for plenty of oxygen has saved them
from near-sightedness--a Hesperus boy will distinguish the species
of hawk flying yonder in the sky, forming his judgment by the
length of wing and color-bars across the tail. I have heard him
comment on the tarsi of falcons which whirled over the roadway as
he was driving, and from their appearance determine genus and
species. He knows the note and flight of every bird. He will tell
you what months the scarlet tanager whistles in the woods, why
leaves curl into cups during droughts, and a thousand delicate
facts which one who has never had the liberty of the bird and
squirrel in nowise dreams of.
And why should he not? All beasts of the prairie and insects of the
air are known to him as intimately as were the rising and setting
stars to the old seafaring, star-led greeks. During his summer the
whip-poor-will has whistled in the shadow of the distant timber,
and the hoot-owl has ghosted his sleep. He has wakened to the carol
of the brown thrush and the yearning call of the mourning dove, as
the dawn reached rosy fingers up the eastern sky.
He has risen to look upon endless rows of corn earing its milky
kernels, and upon fields golden with nodding wheat-heads. And from
the impenetrable centre of the tillage, when the brown stubble has
stood like needles to his bare feet, he has heard the whiz of the
cicada quivering in the heated air. The steam-thresher has then
come panting and rumbling over the highway, and in the affairs of
men the boy has made his first essay. He cuts the wires that bind
the sheaves, or feeds the hopper, or catches the wheat, or forks
away the yellow straw, or ties the golden kernels in sacks, or
brings water to the choked and dusty men. He runs here and there
for all industries.
Perhaps it is because of his association with such fundamentals of
life that this boy has great grasp upon the physical world. In his
very appearance one sees a life untaught in the schools of men. In
looking at him there is nothing of which you are so often reminded
as of a young cottonwood-tree. The tree and the boy somehow seem to
have a kinship in structure, and to have been built by the same
feeling upward of matter. And this perhaps he is--a broad-limbed,
white-skinned, animalized, great-souled poplar, which in ages long
past dreamed of red blood and a beating heart and power of moving
over that fair earth--after the way that Heine's fir-tree dreamed
of the palm--and finally through this yearning became the honest
boysoul and body which leaps from pure luxuriance of vigor, and
runs and rides and breathes the vital air of Hesperus to-day.
But even with the strong-limbed physique which open-air life
upbuilds, the Hesperus students have their full quota of
nervousness. Elements in their lives induce it. First there is the
almost infinite possibility of accomplishment for the ambitious and
energetic--so little is done, so much needs to be. Again,
temperature changes of their climate are most sudden and extreme.
A third incentive to nervous excitation is the stimulant of their
wonderful atmosphere, which is so exhilarating that dwellers upon
the Hesperus plateau suffer somnolence under the air-pressure and
equilibrium of the seaboard.
Unfortunately the students have until lately had nothing that could
be called a gymnasium, in which they might counterpoise nerve-work
with muscular action. At one time they endeavored to equip a modest
building. In the Legislature, however, the average representative,
the man who voted supplies, looked back upon his own boyhood, and,
recalling that he never suffered indigestion while following the
plough down the brown furrow, set his head against granting one
dollar of the State's supplies for the deed fool athletics; in
fact, he lapsed for the moment into the mental condition of, say, a
Tory of Tom Jones's time or a hater of the oppressed races of to-day.
This one instance will possibly give a shadow of impression of the
power base politics--reversions to conditions our race is evolving
from--have had in Hesperus University life. The power was obtained
in the beginning chiefly because of the University's sources of
financial support--appropriations by biennial Legislatures in which
every item, the salary of each individual professor, was scanned,
and talked over, and cut down to the lowest bread-and-water figure,
first by the committee in charge of the budget and afterwards by
the Legislature in full session. One instance alone illustrates. In
the early spring of 1897, when the University estimate was before
the Legislature for discussion and the dominating Populists were
endeavoring to reduce its figure, a legislator sturdily insisted:
"They're too stingy down there at the University. They're getting
good salaries, and could spare a sum to some one who would
undertake to put the appropriations through." One thousand dollars
was said to be "about the size of the job." A cut of twenty per
cent., generally speaking, upon already meagre salaries resulted to
a faculty too blear-eyed politically and unbusiness-like to see its
financial advantage. After two or three years the stipends were
restored to their former humility, the Legislature possibly having
become ashamed.
And in the make-up of the senatus academicus, or board of regents,
thereby hangs, or there used to hang, much of doubt and many a
political trick and quibble. It was a variation of the dream of the
Texas delegate to the nominating convention--"The offices! That's
what we're here for." For if a Democratic governor were elected,
he appointed from his party men to whom he was beholden in small
favors. The members of the board were Democrats, that is, and were
expected to guard the interests of their party. Or if the voters of
Hesperus chose a Republican executive, he in turn had his abettors
whom he wanted to dignify with an academic course for which there
were no entrance examinations beyond faithfulness to party lines
and party whips. It thus happened that the fitness of the man has
not always been a prime consideration in his appointment. More
often because he was somebody's henchman, or somebody's friend, the
executive delighted to honor him.
These political features in the board of regents materially
affected the faculty. For instance, if there were among the
professors one who illustrated his lectures or class-room work by
examples of the justice and reasonableness of free trade, he acted
advisedly for his tenure if he lapsed into silence when the
Republicans were in power. But if, on the other hand, he advocated
protection instead of free trade, while the Democrats held State
offices--which happened only by unusual fate--it was prudent for
the professor to hold his tongue.
Upon every question of the day, and even in presenting conditions
of life in ancient days, as, for instance, in greece, the faculty
were restrained, or at least threats were rendered. The petty
politics of an agricultural democracy acted upon academic life in
precisely the same way that autocracy and clericalism in Germany
have affected its university faculties. In Hesperus professors have
been dismissed without any excuse, apparent reason, or apology,
because of a change of administration at the State capital and a
hungry party's coming into power. In various callings, or lines of
life, the individual may be, nay, often is, wantonly sacrificed,
but surely one of the saddest results of political shystering is
the cheapening of the professor's chair, and rendering that
insecure for the permanence of which active life and its plums have
been yielded.
Hinging immediately upon the political machine are the rights of
and recognition of women in university government and pedagogic
work. The fact that two or three women were the strenuous
initiators of the institution has been forgotten, and no longer is
there faith that
"The women's cause is man's; they rise or sink Together."
With all its coeducation, Hesperus has not yet evolved--as have New
York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin--to
women regents or trustees. The people have not yet awakened to the
justice of demanding that, in a State institution open to young
women as well as to young men, women as well as men shall be in its
government and direction.
And within the brown walls of the institution a woman may not carry
her learning to the supreme pedagogic end. "People ridicule
learned women," said clear-eyed Goethe, speaking for his world, the
confines of which at times extend to and overlap our own, "and
dislike even women who are well informed, probably because it is
considered impolite to put so many ignorant men to shame." Such a
man--an ignorant man, one of the party appointees just now spoken
of--when a woman was dismissed from the Greek chair some years ago,
declared, "The place of women is naturally subordinate; we shall
have no more women professors." It was a pitiful aping of dead and
gone academic prejudices. To this day, however, but one act--that
rather an enforced one--has gainsaid his dictum. A woman has been
appointed to the chair of French. It remains to be seen whether her
salary is the same as that of the men doing work of equal grade and
weight with her own.
"We cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free"--
sang the men and women of the fifties as their train pulled out of
Eastern stations and their steamboats paddled up the waters of the
Big Muddy. But how often it happens that what one generation will
die for, the next will hold of little value, or even in derision!
Not wholly independent of politics, not without the uses and abuses
of politics, is a great corporation which one of necessity mentions
because it has played no small part in Hesperus University life. In
those portions of our country where the units of the Methodist
church are segregate few know the gigantic secular power it
possesses in the South and in the West. The perfection of its
organization is like that of the Roman Catholic Church where it is
longest at home, or like the unity of the Latter Day Saints in
their centre, Utah. The Methodists in Hesperus far outnumber in
membership and money any other denomination. They are tenacious of
their power, as religious denominations have ever been, and
aggressive in upbuilding schools of their own voice and foundation.
The question, "What shall we do to keep on the good side of the
Methodists?" was, therefore, not frequently asked in Hesperus
University politics. The answer was practical: "Make us
Methodists. Bring Methodism to us to stop the antagonism of a
powerful body." Such a solving of the problem--for these
reasons--was not high-minded; it was not moral courage. But it was
thought politic--and it was done.
Some of the best elements of our day have been profoundly at work
among the Methodists. Many of the denomination have been in the
vanguard of the march to better things. But it is fair to the
course of Hesperus University, which has sometimes halted, to say
that sagacious vigor and a knowledge of the best--GREEK--were
not in every case the claim to distinction of its Methodist
head. "Aus Nichts," says Fichte, "wird nimmer Etwas." But
mediocrity--or worse did not always prevail. Under absolutely
pure and true conditions a man would be chosen for his fitness to
fill the office of Chancellor, no matter what his religious bias,
unless, indeed, that bias marred his scholarship and access to men,
and thus really became an element in his unfitness.
In a perspective of the University of Hesperus it is necessary to
consider these various controlling forces as well as the spiritual
light of its students. And yet to those who have faith in its
growth in righteousness there is an ever-present fear. The
greatness of the institution will be in inverse proportion to the
reign of politics, materialism, and denominationalism in its
councils, and the fear is that the people may not think straight
and see clear in regard to this great fact. Upon spiritual lines
alone can its spirit grow, and if an institution of the spirit is
not great in the spirit, it is great in nothing.
Its vigor and vitality are of truth in its young men and women. One
boy or one girl may differ from another in glory, but each comes
trailing clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stoutheartedness
and courage for taking life in hand too many peans cannot be
chanted, or too many triumphant GREEK raised. They have been
the reason for the existence of the institution now more than a
generation. Their spiritual content is its strength, and is to be
more clearly its strength when guidance of its affairs shall have
come to their hands.
Their spiritual content, we say--it should reflect that life of
theirs when heaven seems dropping from above to their earth
underfoot--in addition to the labors and loves of men and women, a
procession of joys from the February morning the cardinal first
whistles "what cheer."
While dog-tooth violets swing their bells in winds of early March
bluebirds are singing. The red-bud blossoms, and robins carol from
its branches. Then the mandrake, long honored in enchantment, opens
its sour-sweet petals of wax. Crimson-capped woodpeckers test
tree-trunks and chisel their round house with skilful carpentry. The
meadow-lark whistles in mating joy. Purple violets carpet the open
woods. Trees chlorophyl their leaves in the warm sun. The wild crab
bursts in sea-shell pink, and sober orchards shake out ambrosial
perfume. Soft, slumberous airs puff clouds across the sky, and
daylight lingers long upon the western horizon. Summer is come in.
The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert.
Doves, whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under
leaves of grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover
bloom in red and white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with
honey swarm and flit in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in
soft whirls and stand to sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves
of growing corn.
Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less
satyr and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where
some fallen cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts
his buried shagbarks.
There "life is sweet, brother. There's day and night, brother, both
sweet things; sun and moon and stars" brother, all sweet things.
There's likewise a wind on the heath."
They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent
ether. They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts
in summer so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the
recess of branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky
trees, while slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the
earth, murmur in antiphonal chorus.
And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces
of light upon our earth awhirl in the dear God's Arms.
The West is large. That which would be true of a university in one
part of its broad expanse might not be true of another institution
of like foundation some distance away. And what might be said of a
college or university independent of politics, would in nowise be
averable of one pretty well controlled by that perplexing monitor.
Again, a fact which might be asserted of a college built up by some
religious denomination might be radically false if claimed for one
supported by the taxpayers of a great commonwealth, and hedged by
sentiment and statute from the predominance of any ecclesiasticism.
You speak of the general characteristics of the University of
Michigan, but these characteristics are not true of the little
college down in Missouri, or Kentucky, or Ohio. Neither would the
facts of life in some institutions in Chicago be at one with those
of a thriving school where conditions are markedly kleinstadtisch.
In speaking of the West we must realize its vast territory and the
varying characteristics of its people. Of what is here set down I
am positive of its entire truth only so far as one institution is
concerned, namely, the titulary--that is, the University of
Hesperus--which recalleth the city bespoken in the Gospel according
to Matthew--that it is set upon a hill and cannot be hid.
TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS
There was never in any age more money
stirring, nor never more stir to get money.
"The Great Frost of January, 1608"
Women have seldom sufficient serious
employment to silence their feelings: a round
of little cares, or vain pursuits, frittering
away all strength of mind and organs, they
become naturally only objects of sense.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
You have too much respect upon the world:
They lose it that do buy it with much care.
SHAKESPEARE
THE Big Muddy built the fertile regions near its course. Dropping
in warm low tides mellow soil gathered from upper lands, it pushed
the flood of the sea farther and farther to the south. Non palma
sine pulvere has been the song of its waters--no green will grow
here without my mould.
It was at its wonder-work those millions of suns ago when the tiny
three-toed horse browsed among the grasses of what is now Kansas.
Its great years can be measured only by the dial of God. All the
monstrosities of the eld of its birth it has survived, and like a
knowing, sentient thing--a thinking, feeling thing--it has been
expanding and contracting, doubling up and straightening out its
tawny body, each one of its numberless centuries pushing its
uncounted mouths farther toward the submerged mountains of the Antilles.
In its thaumaturgy it formed vast prairies and rolling lands. Upon
its gently-packed earth forests shot up. Subterranean streams
jetted limpid springs, which joined and grew to rivers open to the
light of day. Above the heavens were broad and the horizon far
away--as far as you outlook at sea when sky and earth melt to a
gray, and you stand wondering where the bar of heaven begins and
where the restless waters below.
Indians, autochthons, or, perchance, wanderers from Iberia, or
Babylon, were here. Then white men came to the flat brown lands,
and that they brought wives showed they meant to stay and build a
commonwealth. The two raised hearth-stones for their family, and
barns for herds and flocks. They marked off fields and knotted them
with fruit trees, and blanketed them with growing wheat, and
embossed them in days of ripeness with haystacks such as the race
of giants long since foregone might have built. In their rich
cornfields they set up shocks which leaned wearily with their
weight of golden kernels, or stood torn and troubled by cattle
nosing for the sugary pulp. Such works their heaven saw and to-day
sees, their air above entirely bright, beading and sparkling in its
inverted cup through every moment of sunshine.
Over this land and its constant people icy northers, victorious in
elemental conflicts far above the Rockies, rush swirling and
sweeping. They snap tense, sapless branches and roll dried leaves
and other ghosts of dead summer before their force. They pile their
snows in the angles of the rail fence and upon the southern banks
of ravines, and whistle for warmth through the key-holes and under
the shrunken doors of farm-houses.
But winds and snows disappear, and again life leaps into
pasture-land. A yellow light glowing between branches foreruns the
green on brown stalk and tree. The meadow-lark lifts his buoyant
note in the air, and the farmer clears his field and manures his
furrow with sleepy bonfires and the ashes of dead stalks. Earth
springs to vital show in slender grasses and rose-red verbena, and
the pale canary of the bastard indigo.
In this great folkland of the Big Muddy, which is beyond praise in
the ordinary phrase of men, there live alongside many other types,
a peculiar man and woman. They are--to repeat, for clearness'
sake--only two of many types there indwelling, for it is true of
these parts as was said of England in 1755: "You see more people in
the roads than in all Europe, and more uneasy countenances than are
to be found in the world besides."
The man is seen in all our longitudes; the woman is rarely in any
other milieu. She is a product of her city and town. The women of
the country have ever before them queryings of the facts of life,
the great lessons and slow processes of nature, the depth and
feeling of country dwelling. But this city-woman suffers from
shallowness and warp through her unknowledge of nature and the
unsympathy with fellow humans that protection in bourgeois comfort
engenders. She is inexperienced in the instructive adventure of the
rich and the instructive suffering of the poor. The basis of her
life is conventional.
The dollar to her eyes is apt to measure every value. Let us not
forget that in the history of the world this is no new estimate. It
was the ancient Sabine poet who advised "make money--honestly if
we can, if not, dishonestly--only, make money." "This is the
money-got mechanic age," cried Ben Jonson in Elizabeth's day. And
the poet of the "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard" more than
one hundred and fifty years ago wrote to his friend Wharton: "It is
a foolish Thing that one can't only not live as one pleases, but
where and with whom one pleases, without Money. . . . Money is
Liberty, and I fear money is Friendship too and Society, and almost
every external Blessing."
Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and
false conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and
curled in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs
above a countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her
well-formed hands, even in daily comings and goings, are flashing
with rings. She loves to turn the precious stones and watch them
divide the light. These jewels are her first expression of
accumulating wealth--these and the pelts of animals difficult to
capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining these insignia of
opulence she begins to long for a third--the gentle, inept riot and
solitary Phorcides's eye for seeing life which she calls "society."
The voice is an unconscious index of one's spiritual tone; hers is
metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The
gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of
inheritance of every American--she is at times of the old American
stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,--she is apt to wrap
in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life,
formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved,
commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the
greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has
not the instinct of attention to her mother tongue which marks
women of fine breeding.
The best thing made by man--good books--she has little love for.
The newspaper and to-day's flimsy novel of adventure stand in their
stead. There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm
of Milton's "Penseroso" and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare's
comedies. But that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on
the mountain-top of school-girl idealism and looked not at things
near by, but afar--a period not long when compared to the jaded
vacuity of later years.
To this shapely woman a writer is presented as "the highest paid
lady-writer in the world." The highest paid! Where, then, is
literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for "Paradise Lost," and
eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal
writer of the simplicities of Wakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty
to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns!
"Learning," says Thomas Fuller, in his "Holy States," "learning
hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost."
This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how
full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the
mother of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she
moves--a result of her freedom and a sign of her strength--and she
is mistress of the occasion always. In this domination (the right
of the domina) she has, even when unmarried and as early as in her
teens, the poise and solidity of the matron. She scorns your
supposition that she is not informed in every worldly line, and
that the wavering hesitancy of the one who does not know could be
hers. She rarely blushes, and is therefore a negative witness to
Swift's hard-cut apophthegm--
"A virtue but at second-hand;
They blush because they understand."
Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty
distinctions and laws which of late more and more growingly have
manacled the hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our
democracy; and which threaten that plasticity which, it is
claimed, is the great characteristic of life. "It is quite
possible," says Clifford in his "Conditions of Mental Development"
"for conventional rules of action and conventional habits of
thought to get such power that progress is impossible. . . . In the
face of such danger _it is not right to be proper_."
Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to
"the chill dread sneer
Conventional, the abject fear
Of form-transgressing freedom."
Openly she often passes it by and remarks, rocking her chair a
trifle uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some
unspoken reason you never ask her if every one else is as good as
she. You recall what de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: "If I
were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of
that [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should
reply--to the superiority of their women."
Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation
in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex.
Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what
she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her
husband she analyzes to their friends--herein is a fertile source
of divorce. Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic,
rattling, and uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving the
peccant humors of her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems
a man's estimate of women--to please the sex she is not of. To men
she is pert, flippant, witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At
times she amuses them and herself by slurring upon other women. She
seems to leave it to the man to establish the spirit upon which the
two shall meet; and by deft hand and turn and movement she is
constantly suggesting her eternal variation from him. The woman is
always chaste. It follows that marriages are many.
A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for
divorce, which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that
you would hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence.
"Has she applied, do you know?"
"Oh! they've separated. "
"On what grounds is she going to get it?"
"If she isn't careful she'll lose her case by seeing him too often."
These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in
public places.
Nothing higher than what an ordinary civil contract seeks seems to
be sought in her marital affairs. She undoes the decree of old Pope
Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a
function of his church and the claim of its sanctified
indissolubility. In the light of her action marriage is truly and
purely a civil contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation,
forbearance, patience, tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make
it truly religious.
She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and
her power--that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The
divine beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. In
her midst Fra Angelico would find few sitters. Her religion,
commonly that which in other ages passed from a propulsive, burning
spirit to frozen formalism, is the crystallized precept of
theologue and priest, the fundamental ecstasy and informing soul
having long since departed. If she had a real religion she could
not be what she is.
Those questions of our day that shove their gaunt visages into
sympathetic minds she has little knowledge of, and little of that
curiosity which leads to knowledge. The fashion of her gown and the
weekly relays at the theatre are nearer to her heart, and to her
thinking touch her more personally, than the moral miasmata and
physical typhoids of her neighboring Poverty Flat. Both pests the
adjustment of her household relations brings within her door. For
her dwelling is commonly domesticked by dusky shapes upon whom also
the real things of life sit lightly, to whom permanence and serious
thought and work are rare. Their engagement is by the week, like
that of pitiful vaudeville associates, and their performance as
surpassingly shallow. They come upon their stage of work, veneer
their little task with clever sleight of hand, and roll off to the
supine inertness and inanity of their cabin.
This woman has therefore in her hands no feeling of the real
relation and friendship that grow between mistress and maid who
live the joys and sorrows of years together. By the less fortunate
themselves, as well as by her own shallow skimming, her sympathies
with the less fortunate are dwarfed. She looks upon her domestic as
a serving sub-human animal, infinitely below herself, tolerated
because of its menial performance, and barely possessed of the soul
which her ecclesiastical tradition says is in every human form. In
this deflection of her moral sense, can the hand of secular justice
be punishing the wrong-doing of past centuries--the bringing in
putrid slave-ships the captured, dazed, Eden-minded,
animal-man--"the blameless Ethiopian"--to our shores?
She is born of fine material. When her nature is awry it is because
of lack of right incentive. Old measures and life estimates are
absurd to her quick senses, and none of the best of our modern
values are put in their place. Her creed is wholly at variance with
the facts of life to-day. If substantial instruction had entered
the formative period of her life, there would have been no
substance to project the darker parts of her shadow. Her nature is
now ill-formed because of the misdirection of its elemental forces.
She knows the tenor of her empire, and in truth and secretly she
wonders how long her reign will endure.
"And therefore," says Aristotle, in his Politics, "women and
children must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if
the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference
in the virtue of the state. And they must make a difference, for
children grow up to be citizens, and half the persons in a state
are women."
Abiding beside this overdressed woman is an underdressed man. His
first striking quality is a certain sweet-natured patience a result
of his optimistic dwelling in the future. Not content with the
present, and having forgotten the values of present-day simple
life, he lives in a future of fictitious money values. "All human
power," he thinks, with Balzac, "is a compound of time and patience.
Powerful beings will and wait." He knows his power and he waits.
"It's going to be worth a good deal."
"In a few years, that'll be a good thing."
"Fifteen years from now it'll sell for ten times its present value."
People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old
greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget
of our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old
Hellenes has there been such an idealistic people as that of which
he is a part. In Elizabeth's time, indeed, there was imaginative
vigor similar to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in
their hands and standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.
Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he
bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing
land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or
railway ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues;
schemes for building and controlling transcontinental railways and
interoceanic fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million
bushels and fattening cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for
compressing air, gas, cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign
mining; for, irrigation; for oil borings--he brings his dynamic
energy and resourcefulness to the evolution of all things but the
human who is to be yoked to work out his plan.
In theory he is democratic and humane for the future, after his
interests in dividends shall have ceased. But his reckless
exploiting of human life for the present, now growing more and more
common by means of impersonal agents, is distinctly at war with our
foundation, democratic ideas which hold one man's life as good as
another's and which made his existence possible.
An essentially material basis of life turns his natural idealism
into practical values and activities. He is an ideal practician, or
rather a practical idealist.
His unnatural attitude toward to-day--that is, his futurity--and
his inconsiderateness for to-day's sunshine, put him in a false
position, which bears the fruit of self-consciousness. Nature is
not self-conscious. The primal man was not self-conscious.
Self-consciousness implies pain; it means that a fellow-being is not
at one with his surroundings; that extraneous, false, or hostile
things are pushing him from his native status. If his pain, whether
physical or spiritual, is eased, morbidness disappears.
In this man's self-conscious habit he jumps at once to the
conclusion that if you do not like his town you do not like him.
Your taste is a personal affront. There is no logical connection,
but he has a certain "defect of heat" which Dean Swift avers lies
in men of the Anglo-Saxon type. The cordiality and open-handedness
with which he first met you wanes. That he has one of the best of
hearts, and one of the strongest of heads, you are sure. He
inwardly has the same faith. He knows it as Achilles knew his own
strength, and the knowledge gives him sometimes the leonine front
which the son of silver-footed Thetis boasted. But your not
recognizing the superiority of his physical and spiritual
environment over all the world causes an irritation deeper than the
epidermis--to the nerve-centres, in fact.
"What do you think!" he laughed, shaking burlily and plunging
hands in pockets. "What do you think! The other day in Washington
I met an Englishman, and when I told him the United States was the
best country in the world, and the State I lived in the best State
in the best country, and the town I lived in the best town in the
best State, and the block my office was in the best block in the
best town, and my office the best office in the best block----"
"And you the best man in the best office", I interjected, to which
he laughed a hearty affirmative.
"What do you think he said? Why, `Comfohtaable, awh! comfohtaable!'
I told him it _was_ comfortable,--damned comfortable."
This very Englishman, with that condescension of manner which at
times we see foreigners assume, declared such mental
individualization to be purely American. Vanity, audacity, and
self-appreciation exist among all peoples, and even from the banks
of the Isis we hear how the late Dr. Jowett averred, "I am the
Master of Baliol College; Baliol is the first college in Oxford;
Oxford is the first city in England; England is the first country
in the world."
United with the feeling of personal worth and independence in this
citizen by the Big Muddy is, paradoxically, another
characteristic--namely, a great tolerance. He could hardly expect
tolerance himself if he did not extend it to another who may have
opinions diametrically opposed to his own, is probably his attitude
of mind. He is in his way a sort of embodiment of the spirit of our
national constitution.
But this largess of broad tolerance leaves him lacking a gift of
the discriminating or critical judgment. The sense or feeling of
quality--that which measures accurately spiritual and artistic
values--his very breadth and practical largeness, his democracy,
allow no growth to. A sensitive discrimination, the power of
differentiation, is no natural endowment, but a result of training,
mental elimination, comparison, association, and a dwelling in
inherent spiritual values.
Through his worth and capacity in other directions he would have
this quality if he "had time" and seclusion for thought. But his
life makes it possible for an explosive and heated talker, a
mouther of platitudinous phrase, to stand cheek by jowl in his
esteem with a seer of elevation and limpid thoughtfulness. His
estimate of even lighter publicities is tinctured by this
defect--the theatrical, for instance, where a verdant girl,
lavishing upon her ambition for the stage the money she inherited
from a father's patent syrup or pills, and an actress of genius and
experience fall in his mind in the same category because a
theatrical syndicate has equally advertised each.
What the result to politics of this indiscriminating and
non-sagacious judgment, this lack of feeling for finer lines in
character--mark, peculiar nature, as Plato means when he uses the
word in the Phedrus--would be hard to estimate.
Although for the most part a private citizen absorbed in his own
affairs, the holder of an office has to him a peculiar glamour. He
is apt to fall into the thinking lines of writers of nameless
editorials, who, forgetful of their own hidden effulgence, fillip
at quiet folk as "parochial celebrities" and "small deer." And
yet he knows that he lives in an age of reclame, and that by the
expenditure of a few dollars in direct or indirect advertisement a
name may be set before more people than our forefathers numbered on
the first Independence Day.
In his midst is a certain publicity of spirit, and in his
estimation work undertaken in the sight of men is of a higher order
than that done in the privacy of one's closet. The active life is
everything; the contemplative, nothing. Talking is better than
writing--it so easily gives opportunity for the aggressive
personality. For a young woman looking to support herself he
advocated type-writing in a public office in preference to the
retirement of nursery governess. When the girl drew back with the
dread of publicity which results from the retired life of women, he
exclaimed, "It's all a question of whether you've got the courage
to take the higher thing."
If he is a fruit of self-cultivation, he enjoys talking of the
viridity of his growth as well as these now purpler days. During
early struggles he may have undergone suffering and privation. In
that event, if his nature is narrow and hard, he has become
narrower and harder, and his presence, like Quilp's, shrivels and
deadens every accretion save his interest. But when he is of the
better sort of soil, adversity discovers the true metal, and
misfortune gives him a sympathy, depth, and tenderness that charm
you to all defects. You would migrate to his neighborhood to live
in the light of his genial warmth. You think of the beautiful
encomium Menelaus pronounced upon Patroclus--"He knew how to be
kind to all men."
Beyond all, he is open-eyed and open-eared. And above all he is
affirmative; never negative. His intuition tells him it is
affirmation that builds, and that Bacon says right--"it is the
peculiar trait of the human intellect to be more moved and excited
by affirmatives than by negatives."
"Why do people buy and read such fool stuff as `Treasure Island'?
I can't see."
"They read it for its story of adventure, and for its
rare way of telling the story," I ventured, in answer.
"They read it for its style."
"Style! gemini! Style! I should smile! I can write a better book
than that myself!. "
"Then it might pay you as a business venture to set yourself about it."
"It's by a man named Stevenson, and he's written other stories. Are
they all as bad?"
Strange he should make such a criticism of Louis Stevenson, in
literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the
abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete the word
success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to
material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development--he
worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,--to have returns
greater than one's effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with
the author of Lorna Doone, "the excess of price over value is the
true test of success in life." None of us would think of saying
Shakespeare was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin
Luther. But Pope, with his clever money-making, we might call a
success, as did Swift in 1728: "God bless you, whose great genius
has not so transported you as to leave you to the constancy of
mankind, for wealth is liberty, and liberty is a blessing fittest
for a philosopher"
The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a
matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile
not to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been.
Look at all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and
many of our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his
acts often contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman,
"gets there," it does not matter much how. "Work through a
corporation or trust," he tells you, and smiling at you with honest
eyes, adds, "A corporation can do things the individual man would
not." The one who succeeds is the model; he is to be envied; he is
the ideal the ancients sought--the happy man. Pass by noblesse
oblige, human heartedness, elevation that would not stoop to
exploit human labor, human need, and human sacrifice--that is, as
corporations pass these qualities by.
In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the
character formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee.
Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading
people that you have it. There is not so great difference in people
after all, this democrat believes. When one has every material
privilege that will allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence
his assumption about, he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and
be cried up as a man of extraordinary virtue, of taste, of
attainment. In any success, commonly so-called, he asks little of
the great marks by which a man should be judged. "He has done
this." "He has got that." "He is clever," he says. He rarely cries,
"He is honest." "He is true."
Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to
consider impermanent. This is wholly a result of convention, for
women, by their very nature and the conditions of married life,
cling more closely to the permanence of the union.
In marital relations he has more liberty. When she asks him if she
may, or in her phrase "can," do so and so, and in rehearsing the
matter says he "let her," he accepts her homage and the servile
status she voluntarily assumes. You exclaim that men for many
centuries have been apt to do this. Entirely, if offered him by
such an enchantress.
"If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?"
Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain
naivete, which renders him a most agreeable companion, and much at
the mercy of such associates.
On an express leaving St. Louis at nine of the morning and headed
toward the East, two of these men were one day riding. A stretch of
level land, encrusted in snow and flooded with sunshine glowing
warm and yellow three weeks after the winter solstice, lengthened
the way. By three in the afternoon the sight of the passengers was
strained from the pulsation of the train, and reading gave place to
lassitude.
"Say," yawned one of the men, "do you think marriage is a failure?"
"Failure! failure!" answered the other. "The biggest kind of a
success! Failure! Holy smoke! Why I've just married my third wife.
Failure! It beats electric lights all hollow."
"I don' know," answered the questioner, dyspeptically. "I don'
know. I go home every week or ten days. My wife isn't glad to see
me. I'm going home now. She won't be glad. They think more of you
when you're not home so much."
"Whee-u-u-u," whistled number two.
With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of
giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes
crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in
barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails
expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for
which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which
vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he must
scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature and
bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid
pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. It is his way of
showing superiority to the cub who has not the money-making
faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of living. Upon
such merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric laughter
over his own excess, and in tones heralds used in the days of Agamemnon.
Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested than many
men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the throat.
To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in
March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the
thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know
the quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and
hickory--all this is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell.
There is no pleasure without an end--that end being money.
The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not
another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand.
But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting
in a wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something.
He forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life
and that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is the first step
toward dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and
buoyant world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he
is too extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of
the honey of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.
This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will be
their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?
The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American
spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American
blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of
a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our
early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that
they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a
garment which is impervious to true American influences.
Our old American teachings!--for instance, the estimate of the
greatness of work, the dignity of labor of any sort whatever--that,
it was once claimed, was a great reason our republic existed to
demonstrate to the world the dignity of work, of bodily exertion
directed to some economic purpose, to produce use, adapt material
things to living. "That citizen who lives without labor, verily
how evil a man!"--'GREEK(7) and such sentiments as this of
Euripides dominated our democracy.
But in our eastern sea-coast cities, what with the development of
an idle, moneyed class, and the settling down of millions of
immigrants, the European conception of work's inherent ignobleness
has grown to strong hold.
"Work is not a disgrace, but lack of work is a disgrace,"GREEK(8).
And Hesiod's words hold to the present day among genuine Americans.
Possibly with the great Middle West and its infinite "go,"
optimism, and constructive breadth, and with such men and women as
these types by the Big Muddy, the preservation of Americanism
really lies--but it must be with their greater spiritualization and
greater moral elevation for the future.
THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN
In order to give her praises a lustre and
beauty peculiar and appropriate, I should have
to run into the history of her life--a task
requiring both more leisure and a richer vein.
Thus much I have said in few words, according
to my ability. But the truth is that the only
true commender of this lady is time, which, so
long a course as it has run, has produced
nothing in this sex like her.
BACON, OF QUEEN ELIZABETH
Die Ehelosigkeit eines Theils des
weiblichen Geschlechts ist in dem
monogamischen Gesellschaftszustande eine nicht
zu beseitigende statistische Nothwendigkeit.
GUSTAVE SCHONBERG
THROUGHOUT our fair country there has long been familiar, in
actual life and in tradition, a corporate woman known as
the New England woman.
When this woman landed upon American shores, some two hundred and
fifty years ago, she was doubtless a hearty, even-minded,
rosy-cheeked, full-fleshed English lass. Once here, however, in her
physical and mental make-up, under pioneer conditions and
influenced by our electric climate, a differentiation began, an
unconscious individualizing of herself: this was far, far back in
the time of the Pilgrim Mothers.
In this adaptation she developed certain characteristics which are
weakly human, intensely feminine, and again passing the fables of
saints in heroism and self-devotion. Just what these qualities
were, and why they grew, is worth considering before in the bustle
of the twentieth century and its elements entirely foreign to her
primitive and elevated spirit--she has passed from view and is
quite forgotten.
In the cities of to-day she is an exotic. In the small towns she is
hardly indigenous. Of her many homes, from the close-knit forests
of Maine to the hot sands of Monterey, that community of villages
which was formerly New England is her habitat. She has always been
most at home in the narrow village of her forebears, where the
church and school were in simpler days, and still at times are even
to our generation measuring only with Pactolian sands in its
hour-glasses--the powers oftenest quoted and most revered. From
these sources the larger part of herself, the part that does not
live by bread alone, has been nourished.
It was in the quiet seclusion of the white homes of these villages
that in past generations she gained her ideals of life. Such a home
imposed what to women of the world at large might be inanity. But,
with a self-limitation almost Greek, she saw within those clapboard
walls things dearest to a woman's soul,--a pure and sober family
life, a husband's protective spirit, the birth and growth of
children, neighborly service keenly dear to her--for all whose
lives should come within touch of her active hands, and an old age
guarded by the devotion of those to whom she had given her activities.
To this should be added another gift of the gods which this woman
ever bore in mind with calmness--a secluded ground, shaded by
hemlocks or willows, where should stand the headstone marking her
dust, over which violets should blossom to freshening winds, and
robin call to mate in the resurrection time of spring, and in the
dim corners of which ghostly Indian pipes should rise from velvet
mould to meet the summer's fervency.
Under such conditions and in such homes she had her growth. The
tasks that engaged her hands were many, for at all times she was
indefatigable in what Plato calls women's work, GREEK(2). She rose
while it was yet night; she looked well to the ways of her
household, and eat not the bread of idleness. In
housekeeping--which in her conservative neighborhood and among her
primary values meant, almost up to this hour, not directing nor
helping hired people in heaviest labors, but rather all that the
phrase implied in pioneer days--her energies were spent--herself
cooking; herself spinning the thread and weaving, cutting out and
sewing all family garments and household linen; herself preserving
flesh, fish, and fruits. To this she added the making of yeast,
candles, and soap for her household, their butter and
cheese--perhaps also these foods for market sale at times their
cider, and even elderberry wine for their company, of as fine a
color and distinguished a flavor as the gooseberry which the wife
of immortal Dr. Primrose offered her guests. Abigail Adams herself
testifies that she made her own soap, in her early days at
Braintree, and chopped the wood with which she kindled her fires.
In such accomplishments she was one of a great sisterhood,
thousands of whom served before and thousands after her. These
women rarely told such activities in their letters, and rarely,
too, I think, to their diaries; for their fingers fitted a quill
but awkwardly after a day with distaff or butter-moulding.
These duties were of the external world, mainly mechanical and
routine, and they would have permitted her--an untiring materialist
in all things workable by hands--to go many ways in the wanderings
of thought, if grace, flexibility, and warmth had consorted with
the Puritan idea of beauty. She had come to be an idealist in all
things having to do with the spirit. Nevertheless, as things stood,
she had but one mental path.
The powers about her were theocratic. They held in their hands her
life and death in all physical things, and her life and death per
omnia secula saeculorum. They held the right to whisper approval or
to publish condemnation. Her eager, active spirit was fed by
sermons and exhortations to self-examination. Nothing else was
offered. On Sundays and at the prayer-meetings of mid-week she was
warned by these teachers, to whom everybody yielded, to whom in her
childhood she had been taught to drop a wayside courtesy, that she
should ever be examining head and heart to escape everlasting
hell-fire, and that she should endure so as to conduct her devoted
life as to appease the anger of a god as vindictive as the very
ecclesiasts themselves. No escape or reaction was possible.
The effect of all this upon a spirit so active, pliant, and
sensitive is evident. The sole way open to her was the road to
introspection--that narrow lane hedged with the trees of
contemplative life to all suffering human kind.
Even those of the community whose life duties took them out in
their world, and who were consequently more objective than women,
even the men, under such conditions, grew self-examining to the
degree of a proverb, "The bother with the Yankee is that he rubs
badly at the juncture of the soul and body."
In such a life as this first arose the subjective characteristics
of the New England woman at which so many gibes have been written,
so many flings spoken; at which so many burly sides have shaken
with laughter GREEK. Like almost every dwarfed or distorted thing
in the active practical world, "New England subjectivity" is a
result of the shortsightedness of men, the assumption of authority
of the strong over the weak, and the wrongs they have to advance
self done one another.
Nowadays, in our more objective life, this accent of the ego is
pronounced irritating. But god's sequence is apt to be irritating.
The New England woman's subjectivity is a result of what has
been--the enslaving by environment, the control by circumstance, of
a thing flexible, pliant, ductile in this case a hypersensitive
soul--and its endeavor to shape itself to lines and forms men in
authority dictated.
Cut off from the larger world, this woman was forced into the
smaller. Her mind must have field and exercise for its natural
activity and constructiveness. Its native expression was in the
great objective world of action and thought about action, the
macrocosm; stunted and deprived of its birthright, it turned about
and fed upon its subjective self, the microcosm.
Scattered far and wide over the granitic soil of New England there
have been the women unmarried. Through the seafaring life of the
men, through the adventures of the pioneer enchanting the hot-blooded
and daring; through the coaxing away of sturdy youthful muscle by
the call of the limitless fat lands to the west; through the siren
voice of the cities; and also through the loss of men in war--that
untellable misery--these less fortunate women--the unmarried--have
in all New England life been many. All the rounding and relaxing
grace and charm which lie between maid and man they knew only in
brooding fancy. Love might spring, but its growth was rudimentary.
Their life was not fulfilled. There were many such spinners.
These women, pertinacious at their tasks, dreamed dreams of what
could never come to be. Lacking real things, they talked much of
moods and sensations. Naturally they would have moods. Human nature
will have its confidant, and naturally they talked to one another
more freely than to their married sisters. Introspection plus
introspection again. A life vacuous in external events and
interrupted by no masculine practicality--where fluttering nerves
were never counterpoised by steady muscle afforded every
development to subjective morbidity.
And expression of their religious life granted no outlet to these
natures--no goodly work direct upon humankind. The Reformation,
whatever magnificence it accomplished for the freedom of the
intellect, denied liberty and individual choice to women.
Puritanism was the child of the Reformation. Like all religions
reacting from the degradations and abuses of the Middle Ages, for
women it discountenanced community life. Not for active ends, nor
of a certainty for contemplative, were women to hive together and
live independent lives.
In her simple home, and by making the best of spare moments, the
undirected impulse of the spinster produced penwipers for the
heathen and slippers for the dominie. But there was, through all
the long years of her life, no dignified, constructive, human
expression for the childless and husbandless woman. Because of this
lack a dynamo force for good was wasted for centuries, and tens of
thousands of lives were blighted.
In New England her theology ruled, as we have said, with an iron
and tyrannous hand. It published the axiom, and soon put it in
men's mouths, that the only outlet for women's activities was
marriage. No matter if truth to the loftiest ideals kept her
single, a woman unmarried, from a garden of Eden point of view and
the pronunciamento of the average citizen, was not fulfilling the
sole and only end for which he dogmatized women were made she was
not child-bearing.
In this great spinster class, dominated by such a voice, we may
physiologically expect to find an excess of the neurotic altruistic
type, women sickened and extremists, because their nature was
unexpressed, unbalanced, and astray. They found a positive joy in
self-negation and self-sacrifice, and evidenced in the
perturbations and struggles of family life a patience, a dumb
endurance, which the humanity about them, and even that of our
later day, could not comprehend, and commonly translated into
apathy or unsensitiveness. The legendary fervor and devotion of the
saints of other days pale before their self-denying discipline.
But instead of gaining, as in the mediaeval faith, the applause of
contemporaries, and, as in those earlier days, inciting veneration
and enthusiasm as a "holy person," the modern sister lived in her
small world very generally an upper servant in a married brother's
or sister's family. Ibsen's Pillar of Society, Karsten Bernick, in
speaking of the self-effacing Martha, voices in our time the then
prevailing sentiment, "You don't suppose I let her want for
anything. Oh, no; I think I may say I am a good brother. Of course,
she lives with us and eats at our table; her salary is quite enough
for her dress, and--what can a single woman want more?. . . You know,
in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some steady-
going person like her whom one can put to anything that may turn up."
Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself
in many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification
in the current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And
at last she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the
essence of vulgarity and the consummation of insolence "superfluous
women;" that is, "unnecessary from being in excess of what is
needed," women who had not taken husbands, or had lived apart from
men. The phrase recalls the use of the word "female"--meaning,
"for thy more sweet understanding," a woman--which grew in use with
the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth century, and persisted even
in decent mouths until Charles Lamb wrapped it in the cloth of gold of
his essay on Modern Gallantry, and buried it forever from polite usage.
In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a
being such as the world had not seen. It is difficult of
explanation. Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any
motion or phrase suggested to a man her variation from him. All
over the world women do this; unconsciously nearly always; in New
England never. The expression of the woman has there been condemned
as immodest, unwomanly, and with fierce invective; the expression
of the man been lauded. Das Ewig-Weibliche must persist without
confession of its existence. In the common conception, when among
masculine comrades she should bear herself as a sexless sort of
half-being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a weaker, unsexed creature,
not markedly masculine, like her brother or the present golfing
woman, and far from positively feminine.
All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human
expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine. Her
religion was wholly masculine, and God was always "He." Her art
in its later phases was at its height in the "Spectator" and
"Tatler," where the smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux
of Anne's London are jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman
reader that all her sex expressions are if not foul, fool, and
sometimes both fool and foul.
In this non-recognition of a woman's sex, its needs and expression
in home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals,
has been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity,
legerete; in short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine
strength. To put the woman's sex aside and suppress it was to
emphasize spinster life--and increase it. It is this nullification
of her sex traits that has led the world to say the New England
woman is masculine, when the truth is she is most femininely
feminine in everything but sex--where she is most femininely and
self-effacingly _it_.
It is in this narrowness, this purity, simplicity, and sanctity, in
this circumspection and misdirection, that we have the origin of
the New England woman's subjectivity, her unconscious
self-consciousness, and that seeming hermaphroditic attitude that
has attracted the attention of the world, caused its wonder, and
led to its false judgment of her merit.
Social changes--a result of the Zeitgeist--within the last two
generations have brought a broadening of the conception of the
"sphere" of women. Puritan instincts have been dying. Rationalism
has to a degree been taking their place. While, on the other
hand,--one may say this quite apart from construing the galvanic
twitchings of a revived medievalism in ecclesiastic and other
social affairs as real life--there have also come conceptions of
the liberty and dignity of womanhood, independent or
self-dependent, beyond those which prevailed in the nunnery world.
A popular feeling has been growing that a woman's sphere is
whatever she can do excellently. What effect this will have on
social relations at large we cannot foresee. From such conditions
another chivalry may spring! What irony of history if on New
England soil!! Possibly, the custom that now pertains of paying
women less than men for the same work, the habit in all businesses
of giving women the drudging details,--necessary work, indeed, but
that to which no reputation is affixed,--and giving to men the
broader tasks in which there is contact with the world and the
result of contact, growth, may ultimately react, just as out of
injustice and brutalities centuries ago arose a chivalrous ideal
and a knightly redresser.
The sparseness of wealth, the meagreness of material ideals, and
the frugality, simplicity, and rusticity of New England life have
never allowed a development of popular manners. Grace among the
people has been interpreted theologically; never socially. Their
geniality, like their sunshine, has always had a trace of the
northeast wind--chilled by the Labrador current of their theology.
Native wit has been put out by narrow duties. The conscience of
their theology has been instinctively for segregation, never for
social amalgamation. They are more solitary than gregarious.
We should expect, then, an abruptness of manner among those left to
develop social genius--the women even among those travelled and
most generously educated. We should expect a degree of baldness and
uncoveredness in their social processes, which possibly might be
expressed by the polysyllable which her instructor wrote at the end
of a Harvard Annex girl's theme to express its literary quality,
"unbuttoned"--unconsciously.
When you meet the New England woman, you see her placing you in her
social scale. That in tailor-making you God may have used a
yardstick different from the New England measure has not yet
reached her consciousness; nor that the system of weights and
measures of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls "the half-baked
civilization of New England" may not prevail in all towns and
countries. Should you chance not to fit any notch she has cut in
her scale, she is apt to tell you this in a raucous, strident
voice, with a schoolma'am air in delivery of her opinion. If she
is untravelled and purely of New England surroundings, these
qualities may be accented. She is undeniably frank and
unquestionably truthful. At all times, in centuries past and
to-day, she would scorn such lies as many women amazingly tell for
amusement or petty self-defence.
It is evident that she is a good deal of a fatalist. This
digression will illustrate: If you protest your belief that so far
as this world's estimate goes some great abilities have no fair
expression, that in our streets we jostle mute inglorious Miltons;
if you say you have known most profound and learned natures housed
on a Kansas farm or in a New Mexico canon; nay, if you aver your
faith that here in New England men and women of genius are
unnoticed because Messrs. Hue and Cry, voicing the windier, have
not appreciated larger capacities, she will pityingly tell you that
this larger talent is supposititious. If it were real, she
continues, it must have risen to sight and attracted the eye of
men. Her human knowledge is not usually deep nor her insight
subtle, and she does not know that in saying this she is
contradicting the law of literary history, that the producers of
permanent intellectual wares are often not recognized by their
contemporaries, nor run after by mammonish publishers. And at last,
when you answer that the commonest question with our humankind is
nourishment for the body, that ease and freedom from exhausting
labor must forerun education, literature, art, she retorts that
here is proof she is right: if these unrecognized worthies you
instance had the gifts you name, they would be superior to mere
physical wants.
If you have longanimity, you do not drive the generality closer;
you drown your reflections in Sir Thomas Browne: "The iniquity of
oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of
men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. . . . Who knows
whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more
remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the
known account of time?"
Her narrow fatalism, united with the conservatism and aristocratic
instincts common to all women from their retired life and ignorance
of their kind, gives the New England woman a hedged sympathy with
the proletarian struggle for freer existence. It may be lack of
comprehension rather than lack of sympathy. She would cure by
palliations, a leprosy by healing divers sores. At times you find
her extolling the changes wrought in the condition of women during
the last seventy years. She argues for the extension of education;
her conservatism admits that. She may not draw the line of her
radicalism even before enfranchisement. But the vaster field of the
education of the human race by easier social conditions, by lifting
out of money worship and egoism,--this has never been, she argues,
and therefore strenuously insists it never will be.
Her civic spirit is Bostonesque. A town's spirit is a moral and
spiritual attitude impressed upon members of a community where
events have engendered unity of sentiment, and it commonly
subordinates individual idiosyncrasies.
The spirit Boston presents includes a habit of mind apparently
ratiocinative, but once safely housed in its ism incredulously
conservative and persistently self-righteous--lacking flexibility.
Within its limits it is as fixed as the outline of the Common. It
has externally a concession and docility. It is polite and
kind--but when its selfishness is pressing its greediness is of the
usurious lender. In our generation it is marked by lack of
imagination, originality, initiative. Having had its origin in
Non-conformity, it has the habit of seeing what it is right for
others to do to keep their house clean--pulling down its mouth when
the rest of the world laughs, square-toeing when the rest trip
lightly, straight-lacing when the other human is erring, but all
the time carrying a heart under its east-wind stays, and eyes which
have had a phenomenal vision for right and wrong doing--for others'
wrongdoing especially; yet withal holding under its sour gravity
moral impulses of such import that they have leavened the life of
our country to-day and rebuked and held in check easier, lighter,
less profound, less illuminated, less star-striking ideals.
It is a spirit featured not unsimilarly to the Lenox
landscape--safe, serene, inviting, unable in our day to produce
great crop without the introduction of fresh material--and from
like cause. A great glacier has pressed on both human spirit and
patch of earth. But the sturdy, English bedrock of the immaterial
foundation was not by the glacier of Puritanism so smoothed,
triturated, and fertilized as was Berkshire soil by the pulverizing
weight of its titanic ice flow.
This spirit is also idealistic outside its civic
impulses,--referring constantly to the remote past or future,--and
in its eyes the abstract is apt to be as real as the concrete. To
this characteristic is due not only Emersonism and
Alcottism--really old Platonism interpreted for the transcendental
Yankee but also that faith lately revivified, infinitely
vulgarized, as logically distorted as the pneuma doctrine of the
first century, and called "Christian Science." The idealism of
Emerson foreran the dollar-gathering idealism of Mrs. Mary Baker
Eddy as the lark of spring foreruns the maple worm.
This idealism oftenest takes religious phases--as in its Puritan
origin--and in many instances in our day is content with crude
expression. Of foregone days evidence is in an incomplete list--only
twenty-five of Brigham Young's wives, some of whom bore such old
New England patronymics as Angell, Adams, Ross, Lawrence, Bigelow,
Snow, Folsom. May a fleeing of these women to Mormonism be
explained by their impatience and heart-sickness at their unsexing
social condition and religious spirit?--with the admitting to the
great scheme of life and action but one sex and that the one to
which their theocratic theologians belonged?
Speculations of pure philosophy this New England woman is inclined
to fear as vicious. In dialectics she rests upon the glories of the
innocuous transcendentalism of the nineteenth century forties.
Exceptions to this rule are perhaps those veraciously called
"occult;" for she will run to listen to the juggling logic and
boasting rhetoric of Swamis Alphadananda and Betadananda and
Gammadananda, and cluster about the audience-room of those dusky fakirs
much as a swarm of bees flits in May. And like the bees, she deserts
cells filled with honey for combs machine-made and wholly empty.
Illuminated by some factitious light, she will again go to
unheard-of lengths in extenuating Shelley's relations to his wives,
and in explaining George Eliot's marriage to her first husband.
Here, and for at least once in her life, she combats convention and
reasons upon natural grounds. "I don't see the wickedness of
Rudolph," said one spinster, referring to the tragedy connecting a
prince of Austria and a lady of the Vetchera family. "I don't see
why he shouldn't have followed his heart. But I shouldn't dare say
that to any one else in Boston. Most of them think as I do, but
they would all be shocked to have it said."
"Consider the broad meaning of what you say. Let this instance
become a universal law."
"Still I believe every sensible man and woman applauds Rudolph's
independence."
With whatsoever or whomsoever she is in sympathy this woman is apt
to be a partisan. To husband, parents, and children there could be
no more devoted adherent. Her conscience, developed by
introspective and subjective pondering, has for her own actions
abnormal size and activity. It is always alert, always busy, always
prodding, and not infrequently sickened by its congested activity.
Duty to those about her, and industry for the same beneficiaries,
are watchwords of its strength; and to fail in a mote's weight is
to gain condemnation of two severest sorts--her own and the
community's. The opinion of the community in which she lives is her
second almighty power.
In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which
Stobeus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his
Florilegium--"A sympathetic wife is a man's best possession."
She has mental sympathy--a result of her tense nervous
organization, her altruism in domestic life, her strong love,
and her sense of duty, justice, and right.
In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force
and depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose
tissue, reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to
be weak, waist normal, and hips undersized.
She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her
relaxation, and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating
air imparts. This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her
elbows set in an angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of
the Cantabrigian man. In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation,
a sympathetic copying, of an admirable norm; but it is graceless in
petticoats. As she steps she knocks her skirt with her knees, and
gives you the impression that her leg is crooked, that she does not
lock her kneejoint. More often she toes in than out.
She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It
is innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past
generations has entered its making, and no port; also, little
flesh. In New England it could not be said, as a London writer has
coarsely put it, that a woman may be looked upon as an aggregate of
so many beefsteaks.
Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is
the child of GREEK Athena, rather than of GREEK Hera, Pronuba, and
ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair
inclines to the ash shades. Her features would in passport wording
be called "regular." The expression of her face when she lives in
more prosperous communities, where salaries are and an assured
future, is a stereotyped smile. In more uncertain life and less
fortunate surroundings, her countenance shows a weariness of spirit
and a homesickness for heaven that make your soul ache.
Her mind is too self-conscious on the one hand, and too set on
lofty duties on the other, to allow much of coquetterie, or
flirting, or a femininely accented camaraderie with men--such as
the more elemental women of Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and
New York enjoy. She is farthest possible from the luxuriant beauty
of St. Louis who declared, "You bet! black-jack-diamond kind of a
time!" when asked if she had enjoyed her social dash in Newport.
This New England woman would, forsooth, take no dash in Aurovulgus.
But falling by chance among vulgarities and iniquities, she guards
against the defilement of her lips, for she loves a pure and clean
usage of our facile English speech.
The old phase of the New England woman is passing. It is the hour
for some poet to voice her threnody. Social conditions under which
she developed are almost obliterated. She is already outnumbered in
her own home by women of foreign blood, an ampler physique, a
totally different religious conception, a far different conduct,
and a less exalted ideal of life. Intermixtures will follow and
racial lines gradually fade. In the end she will not be. Her
passing is due to the unnumbered husbandless and the physical
attenuation of the married--attenuation resulting from their spare
and meagre diet, and, it is also claimed, from the excessive
household labor of their mothers. More profoundly causative--in
fact, inciting the above conditions--was the distorted morality and
debilitating religion impressed upon her sensitive spirit. Mayhap
in this present decay some Moera is punishing that awful crime of
self-sufficing ecclesiasticsm. Her unproductivity--no matter from
what reason, whether from physical necessity or a spirit-searching
flight from the wrath of God--has been her death.
A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED
. . .GREEK(52)
HESIOD
Under Bloudie Diocletian . . . a great number
of christians which were assembled togither to
heare the word of life . . . were slaine by
the wicked pagans at Litchfield, whereof . . .
as you would say, The field of dead corpses.
HOLINSHED
UPON the broad level of one of our Litchfield hills is--if we
accept ancient legend--a veritable Island of the Blessed. There
heroes fallen after strong fight enjoy rest forever.
The domination of unyielding law in the puny affairs of men--the
unfathomableness of Moera, the lot no man can escape comes upon one
afresh upon this hill-top. What clay we are in the hands of fate!
"GREEK(6)," cried Euripides--"all things the earth puts forth and
takes again."
But why should the efforts of men to build a human hive have here
been wiped away--here where all nature is wholesome and in seeming
unison with regulated human life? The air sparkles buoyantly up to
your very eyes--and almost intoxicates you with its life and joy.
Through its day-translucence crows cut their measured flight and
brisker birds flitter, and when the young moon shines out of a warm
west elegiac whippoorwills cry to the patient night.
Neither volcanic ashes nor flood, whirlwind nor earthquake mere
decay has here nullified men's efforts for congregated life and
work. The soil of the hill, porous and sandy, is of moderate
fertility. Native oaks and chestnuts, slender birches and fragrant
hemlocks, with undergrowths of coral-flowering laurel, clothe its
slopes. Over its sandstone ledges brooks of soft water treble minor
airs--before they go loitering among succulent grasses and
spearmint and other thirsty brothers of the distant meadows.
Nearly two hundred years ago pioneers of a Roundhead, independent
type--the type which led William of Orange across the Channel for
preservation of that liberty which Englishmen for hundreds of years
had spoken of as "antient"--such men broke this sod, till then
untouched by axe or plough. They made clearings, and grouped their
hand-hewn houses just where in cool mornings of summer they could
see the mists roll up from their hill-locked pond to meet the rosy
day; just where, when the sun sank behind the distant New York
mountains, they could catch within their windows his last shaft of gold.
Here they laid their hearths and dwelt in primitive comfort. Their
summers were unspeakably beautiful--and hard-working. Their autumns
indescribably brilliant, hill-side and valley uniting to form a
radiance God's hand alone could hold. Their winters were of deep
snows and cold winds and much cutting and burning of wood. The
first voice of their virid spring came in the bird-calls of early
March, when snow melted and sap mounted, and sugar maples ran
syrup; when ploughs were sharpened, and steaming and patient oxen
rested their sinews through the long, pious Sabbath.
Wandering over this village site, now of fenced-in fields, you find
here and there a hearth and a few cobbles piled above it. The
chimney-shaft has long since disappeared. You happen upon stone
curbs, and look down to the dark waters of wells. You come upon
bushes of old-fashioned, curled-petal, pink-sweet roses and snowy
phlox, and upon tiger lilies flaunting odalisque faces before
simple sweetbrier, and upon many another garden plant which "a
hand-some woman that had a fine hand"--as Izaak Walton said of her
who made the trout fly--once set as border to her path. Possibly
the very hand that planted these pinks held a bunch of their
sweetness after it had grown waxen and cold. The pinks themselves
are now choked by the pushing grass.
And along this line of gooseberry-bushes we trace a path from house
to barn. Here was the fireplace. The square of small boulders
yonder marks the barn foundation. Along this path the house-father
bore at sunrise and sunset his pails of foaming milk. Under that
elm spreading between living-room and barn little children of the
family built pebble huts, in these rude confines cradling dolls
which the mother had made from linen of her own weave, or the
father whittled when snow had crusted the earth and made vain all
his hauling and digging.
Those winters held genial hours. Nuts from the woods and cider from
the orchard stood on the board near by. Home-grown wood blazed in
the chimney; home-grown chestnuts, hidden in the ashes by busy
children, popped to expectant hands; house-mothers sat with
knitting and spinning, and the father and farm-men mended fittings
and burnished tools for the spring work. Outside the stars
glittered through a clear sky and the soundless earth below lay
muffled in sleep.
Over yonder across the road was the village post-office, and not
far away were stores of merchant supplies. But of these houses no
vestige now remains. Where the post-house stood the earth is matted
with ground-pine and gleaming with scarlet berries of the
wintergreen. The wiping-out is as complete as that of the thousand
trading-booths, long since turned to clay, of old greek Mycenae, or
of the stalls of the ancient trading-folk dwelling between Jaffa
and Jerusalem where Tell-ej-Jezari now lies.
The church of white clap-boards which these villagers used for
praise and prayer not a small temple still abides. Many of the
snowy houses of old New England worship pierce their luminous ether
with graceful spires. But this meeting-house lifts a square,
central bell-tower which now leans on one side as if weary with
long standing. The old bell which summoned its people to their pews
still hangs behind green blinds--a not unmusical town-crier. But
use, life, good works have departed with those whom it exhorted to
church duty, and in sympathy with all the human endeavor it once
knew, but now fordone, in these days it never rings blithely, it
can only be made to toll. Possibly it can only be made to toll
because of the settling of its supporting tower. But the fact
remains; and who knows if some wounded spirit may not be dwelling
within its brazen curves, sick at heart with its passing and
ineffective years?
Not far from the church, up a swell of the land, lies the
burying-ground--a sunny spot. Pines here and there, also hemlocks
and trees which stand bare after the fall of leaves. But all is
bright and open, not a hideous stone-quarry such as in our day
vanity or untaught taste makes of resting-places of our dead.
Gay-colored mushrooms waste their luxurious gaudiness between the
trees, and steadfast myrtle, with an added depth to its green from
the air's clarity, binds the narrow mounds with ever-lengthening cords.
But whether they are purple with the violets of May or with
Michaelmas daisies, there is rest over all these mounds--"uber
allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'." Daily gossip and sympathy these neighbors
had. The man of this grave was he who passed many times a day up
and down the path by the gooseberry-bushes and bore the foaming
milk. He is as voiceless now as the flies that buzzed about his
shining pail. And the widow who dwelt across the road--she of the
sad eyes who sat always at her loom, for her youthful husband was
of those who never came back from the massacre of Fort William
Henry--she to whom this man hauled a sled of wood for every two he
brought to his own door, to whom his family carried elderberry
wine, cider, and home mince-meat on Thanksgiving--she, too, is
voiceless even of thanks, her body lying over yonder, now in
complete rest--no loom, no treadle, no thumping, no whirring of
spinning-wheel, no narrow pinching and poverty, her soul of heroic
endurance joined with her long separate soldier soul of action.
The pathos of their lives and the warmth of their
humanity!--however coated with New England austerity. Many touching
stories these little headstones tell--as this:
"To the memory of Mrs. Abigail, Consort of Mr. Joseph Merrill, who
died May 3rd, 1767, in the 52 year of her age."
A consort in royal dignity and poetry is a sharer of one's lot. Mr.
Joseph Merrill had no acquaintance with the swagger and pretension
of courts, and he knew no poetry save his hill-side, his villagers,
and the mighty songs of the Bible. He was a plain, simple, Yankee
husbandman, round-shouldered from carrying heavy burdens,
coarse-handed from much tilling of the earth and use of horse and
cattle. While he listened to sermons in the white church down the
slope, his eyes were often heavy for need of morning sleep; and
many a Sunday his back and knees ached from lack of rest as he
stood beside the sharer of his fortunes in prayer. Yet his simple
memorial warms the human heart one hundred and thirty-eight years
after his "consort" had for the last time folded her housewifely hands.
"Of sa great faith and charitie,
With mutuall love and amitie:
That I wat an mair heavenly life,
Was never betweene man and wfe."
It was doubtless with Master Merrill as with the subject of an
encomium of Charles Lamb's. "Though bred a Presbyterian," says
Lamb of Joseph Paice, "and brought up a merchant, he was the finest
gentleman of his time."
In May, 1767, when this sharer of humble fortune lay down to rest,
the Stamp Act had been repealed but fourteen months. The eyes of
the world were upon Pitt and Burke and Townshend--and Franklin
whose memorable examination before the House of Commons was then
circulating as a news pamphlet. The social gossip of the day--as
Lady Sarah Lennox's wit recounts--had no more recognition of the
villagers than George the Fourth.
But American sinews and muscles such as these hidden on the
Litchfield Hills were growing in daily strength by helpful, human
exercise, and their "well-lined braine" was reasoning upon the
Declaratory Act that "Parliament had power to bind the colonies in
all cases whatsoever."
Another stone a few paces away has quite another story:
"Here lies the body of Mr. Stephen Kelsey, who died April 2, 1745,
in ye 71 year of his age
as you are so was we
as we are you must be"
The peculiarities of this inscription were doubtless the
stone-cutter's; and peradventure it was in the following way that
the rhymes--already centuries old in 1745 when Stephen Kelsey
died--came to be upon his headstone.
The carver of the memorial was undeniably a neighbor and
fellow-husbandman to the children of Mr. Stephen Kelsey.
Money-earning opportunities were narrow and silver hard to come by
in the pioneering of the Litchfield Hills, and only after
scrupulous saving had the Kelsey family the cost of the headstone
at last in hand. It was then that they met to consider an epitaph.
Their neighbor bespoken to work the stone was at the meeting, and
to open the way and clear his memory he scratched the date of death
upon a tablet or shingle his own hand had riven.
"Friend Stephen's death," he began, "calleth to mind a verse often
sculptured in the old church-yard in Leicestershire, a verse
satisfying the soul with the vanity of this life, and turning our
eyes to the call from God which is to come. It toucheth not the
vexations of the world which it were vain to deny are ever present.
You carry it in your memory mayhap, Mistress Remembrance?" the
stone-master interrupting himself asked, suddenly appealing to a
sister of Master Kelsey.
Mistress Remembrance, an elderly spinster whose lover having in
their youth taken the great journey to New York, and crossed the
Devil's Stepping-Stones--which before the memory of man some
netherworld force laid an entry of Manhattan Island--had never
again returned to the Litchfield Hills--Mistress Remembrance
recalled the verses, and also her brother, Master Stephen's,
sonorous repetition of them.
In this way it came about that the mourning family determined they
should be engraven. And there the lines stand to-day in the hills,
beautiful air--far more than a century since the hour when Mistress
Remembrance and the stone-cutter joined the celestial choir in
which Master Stephen was that very evening singing.
But another headstone--
"With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked"--
quite outdoes Master Kelsey's in strange English phrase. It reads:
"Michel son of John Spencer
died Jan ye 24th 1756 in ye 10th year of his age.
Death Conquers All
Both young and Old
Tho' ne'er so wise
Discreet and Bold
In helth and Strength
this youth did Die
in a moment without one Cry."
And still another perpetuates the record of the same family:
In Memory of
Mr John Spencer Who
Died June ye 24th
1780 in the 70th
Year of his Age
In Memory of Submit
Spencer Daughter of Mr
John and Mrs Mary
Spencer Who Died
Novbr ye 21th 1755 in ye
1st Year of her Age
Oh Cruel Death to fill this
Narrow space In yonder
House Made a vast emty place
Was the child called "Submit" because born a woman? Or did the
parents embody in the name their own spiritual history of
resignation to the eternal powers?--"to fill this narrow space, in
yonder house made a vast empty place."
Farther up the slope of this God's Acre a shaft standing high in
the soft light mourns the hazards of our passage through the world.
In Memory of Mr.
Jeduthun Goodwin who
Died Feb 13th 1809 Aged
40 Years
Also Mrs. Eunice his
Wife who died August 6th
1802 Aged 33 Years
Dangers stand thick
through all the Ground
To Push us to the Tomb
And fierce diseases
Wait around To hurry Mortals home
Every village has its tragedy, alas! and that recounted in this
following inscription is at least one faithful record of terrifying
disaster. Again it seems at variance with the moral order of the
world that these quiet fields should witness the terror this tiny
memorial hints at. The stone is quite out of plumb and
moss-covered, but underneath the lichen it reads:
"Phebe, wife of Ezekiel Markham Died July 14, 1806 Ae 49
Also their 3 Sons Bela, Ciba, and Brainad was
burnt to Death in Oct 1793"
"In the midst of life we are dead"
The mother lived nearly thirteen years after. There is no
neighboring record of the father. Perhaps the two migrated after
the fearful holocaust, and he only returned to place his wife's
body beside the disfigured remains of her little ungrown men. Bela,
Ciba, and Brainard rested lonesomely doubtless those thirteen
waiting years, and many a night must their little ghosts have sat
among the wind-flowers and hepaticas of spring, or wandered midst
the drifted needles of the pines in the clear moon-light of summer,
athirst for the mother's soul of comfort and courage.
Again in this intaglio "spelt by th' unlettered Muse" rises the
question of the stone-cutter's knowledge of his mother tongue. The
church of the dead villagers still abides. But nowhere are seen the
remains of a school-house. Descendants of the cutter of Master
Kelsey's headstone haply had many orders.
The sun of Indian summer upon the fallen leaves brings out their
pungent sweetness. Except the blossoms of the subtle witch-hazel
all the flowers are gone. The last fringed gentian fed by the
oozing spring down the hill-side closed its blue cup a score of
days ago. Every living thing rests. The scene is filled with a
strange sense of waiting. And above is the silence of the sky.
With such influences supervening upon their lives, these people of
the early village--undisturbed as they were by any world call, and
gifted with a fervid and patient faith--must daily have grown in
consciousness of a homely Presence ever reaching under their
mortality the Everlasting Arm.
This potency abides, its very feeling is in the air above these
graves--that some good, some divine is impendent--that the soul of
the world is outstretching a kindred hand.
In the calm and other-worldliness of their hill-top the eternal
moralities of the Deuteronomy and of Sophocles stand clearer to
human vision--the good that is mighty and never grows,
gray,--GREEK(6)
The comings and goings, the daily labors, the hopes and interests
of these early dwellers make an unspeakable appeal--their graves in
the church-yard, the ruined foundations of their domestic life
beyond--that their output of lives and years of struggle bore no
more lasting local fruit, however their seed may now be scattered
to the upbuilding of our South and West, the conversion of China,
and our ordering of the Philippines.
And yet, although their habitations are fallen, they--such men and
women as they--still live. Their hearts, hands, and heads are in
all institutions of ours that are free. A great immortality,
surely! If such men and women had been less severe, less honest,
less gifted for conditions barren of luxuries, less elevated with
an enthusiasm for justice, less clear in their vision of the
eternal moralities, less simple and direct, less worthy inheritors
of the great idea of liberty which inflamed generations of their
ancestors, it is not possible that we should be here to-day doing
our work to keep what they won and carry their winnings further.
Their unswerving independence in thought and action and their
conviction that the finger of God pointed their way--their
theocratic faith, their lifted sense of God-leading--made possible
the abiding of their spirit long after their material body lay spent.
So it is that upon the level top of the Litchfield Hills--what with
the decay of the material things of life and the divine permanence
of the spiritual--there is a resting-place of the Blessed--an
Island of the Blessed as the old Greeks used to say--an abode of
heroes fallen after strong fighting and enjoying rest forever.
UP TO DATE MISOGYNY
He is the half part of a blessed man
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
SHAKESPEARE
If a man recognise in woman any
quality which transends the
qualities demanded in a plaything or
handmaid--if he recognise in her
the existance of an intellectual not
essentially dissimilar to his own,
he must, by plainest logic, admit
that life to express itself in all
its spontaneous forms of activity.
GEORGE ELIOT
Hard the task: your prison-chamber
Widens not for lifted latch
till the giant thews and sinews
Meet their Godlike overmatch.
GEORGE MEREDITH
"I HATE every woman!" cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a
citation of the Florilegium of Stobeus. The sentiment was not new
with Euripides--unfortunately. Before him there was bucolic Hesiod
with his precepts on wife-choosing. There was Simonides of Amorgos,
who in outcrying the degradation of the Ionian women told the
degradation of the Ionian men. There was Hipponax, who fiercely
sang "two days on which a woman gives a man most pleasure--the day
he marries her and the day he buries her."
And along with Euripides was Aristophanes, the radiant
laughter-lover, the titanic juggler with the heavens above and
earth and men below--Aristophanes who flouted the women of Athens
in his "Ecclesiazuse," and in the "Clouds" and his "Thesmophoriazuse."
Thucydides before them had named but one woman in his whole
great narrative, and had avoided the mention of women
and their part in the history he relates.
"Woman is a curse!" cried Susarion. The Jews had said it before,
when they told the story of Eve--
"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe."
Down through many centuries our forebears cast to and fro the same
sentiment--in spite of the introduction into life and literature of
the love of men for women and women for men; in spite of the growth
of romantic love. You find misogynous expression among the Latins.
In early "Church Fathers," such as St. John Chrysostom, you come
upon it in grossest form. Woman is "a necessary ill," cried the
Golden Mouthed, "a natural temptation, a wished-for calamity, a
household danger, a deadly fascination, a bepainted evil."
You see the sentiment in the laws of church and of kingdom. You
sight its miasm in the gloaming and murk of the Middle Ages, amid
the excesses which in shame for it chivalry affected and exalted.
You read it by the light of the awful fires that burnt women
accessory to the husband's crime for which their husbands were
merely hanged. You see it in Martin Luther's injunction to
Catherine von Bora that it ill bccame his wife to fasten her waist
in front--because independence in women is unseemly, their dress
should need an assistant for its donning. You chance upon it in old
prayers written by men, and once publicly said by men for English
queens to a God "which for the offence of the first woman hast
threatened unto all women a common, sharp, and inevitable malediction."
You find the sentiment in Boileau's satire and in Pope's
"Characters." You open the pages of the Wizard of the North, who
did for his own generations what Heliodorus and his chaste
Chariclea accomplished for the fourth century, and you come upon
Walter Scott singing in one of his exquisite songs--
"Woman's faith, and woman's trust,
Write the characters in dust."
All such sad evidences, it should be borne in mind, are but the
reverse of the fair picture with which men have regarded women. But
because there is a reverse side, and its view has entered and still
enters largely into human life, human estimates, and human fate, it
should be spoken about openly. Women and men inexperienced in the
outer world of affairs do not realize its still potent force.
As for the subject of these gibes, for ages they were silent.
During many generations, in the privacy of their apartments, the
women must have made mute protests to one another. "These things
are false," their souls cried. But they took the readiest defence
of physical weakness, and they loved harmony. It was better to be
silent than to rise in bold proof of an untruth and meet rude force.
Iteration and dogmatic statement of women's moral inferiority,
coupled as it often was with quoted text and priestly authority,
had their inevitable effect upon more sensitive and introspective
characters; it humiliated and unquestionably deprived many a woman
of self-respect. Still, all along there must have been a less
sensitive, sturdier, womanhood possessed of the perversive faith of
Mrs. Poyser, that "heaven made 'em to match the men," that--
"Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free,"--
men and women rise or sink; that, in fact, the interests of the two
are inseparable and wholly identical. To broad vision misogynous
expression seems to set in antagonism forces united by all the
mighty powers of human evolution throughout millions of years, and
the whole plan of God back of that soul-unfolding.
The misogynous song and story of our forebears with momentous fall
descended and became the coarse newspaper quip which a generation
ago whetted its sting upon women--"Susan B. Anthonys"--outspoken
and seeking more freedom than social prejudices of their day
allowed. An annoying gnat, it has in these days been almost
exterminated by diffusion of the oil of fairness and better knowledge.
But even yet periodicals at times give mouth to the old misogyny.
Such an expression, nay, two, are published in otherwise admirable
pages, and with these we have to do. They are from the pen of a man
of temperament, energy, vigorous learning, and an "esurient Genie"
for books--professor of Latin in one of our great universities,
where misogynous sentiment has found expression in lectures in
course and also in more public delivery.
The first reverse phrase is of "the neurotic caterwauling of an
hysterical woman." Cicero's invective and pathos are said to be
perilously near that perturbance.
Now specialists in nervous difficulties have not yet determined
there is marked variation between neurotic caterwauling of
hysterical women and neurotic caterwauling of hysterical men.
Cicero's shrieks--for Cicero was what is to-day called "virile,"
"manly," "strenuous," "vital,"--Cicero's would naturally
approximate the men's.
To normally tuned ears caterwaulings are as unagreeable as
misogynous whoops--waulings of men as cacophonous as waulings of
women. Take an instance in times foregone. In what is the
megalomaniac whine of Marie Bashkirtseff's "Journal" more
unagreeable than the egotistical vanity of Lord Byron's wails? Each
of these pen people may be viewed from another point. More
generously any record--even an academic misogyny--is of interest
and value because expressing the idiosyncratic development or human
feeling of the world.
But, exactly and scientifically speaking, neurotic and hysteric are
contradictory terms. Neurotic men and women are described by
physicians as self-forgetting sensitives--zealous, executive;
while the hysterics of both sexes are supreme egotists, selfish,
vain, and vague, uncomfortable both in personal and literary
contact--just like wit at their expense. "If we knew all," said
George Eliot, who was never hysterical, "we would not judge." And
Paul of Tarsus wrote wisely to those of Rome, "Therefore thou art
inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art, that judgest."
Science nowadays declares that the man who wears a shirt-collar
cannot be well, and equally the same analytic spirit may some day
make evident that neurosis and hysteria are legacies of a foredone
generation, who found the world out of joint and preyed upon its
strength and calmness of nerve to set things right. Humaneness and
fair estimate are remedies to-day's dwellers upon the earth can
offer, whether the neurosis and hysteria be Latin or Saxon, men's
or indeed women's.
The second of the phrases to which we adverted tells of "the
unauthoritative young women who make dictionaries at so much a
mile." It has the smack of the wit of the eighteenth century--of
Pope's studied and never-ceasing gibes at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
after she had given him the mitten; of Dr. Johnson's "female day"
and his rumbling thunder over "the freaks and humors and spleen and
vanity of women"--he of all men who indulge in freaks and humors
and spleen and vanity!--whose devotion to his bepainted and
bedizened old wife was the talk of their literary London.
We are apt to believe the slurs that Pope, Johnson, and their
self-applauding colaborers cast upon what they commonly termed
"females" as deterrent to their fairness, favor, and fame. The
high-noted laugh which sounded from Euphelia's morning toilet and
helped the self-gratulation of those old beaux not infrequently
grates upon our twentieth century altruistic, neurotic sensibilities.
But to return to our lamb. An unauthoritative young woman, we
suppose, is one who is not authoritative, who has not authority.
But what confers authority? Assumption of it? Very rarely anything
else even in the case of a college professor. We have in our
blessed democracy no Academy, no Sanhedrim, no keeper of the seal
of authority--and while we have not we keep life, strength, freedom
in our veins. The young woman "who makes dictionaries at so much
a mile" may be--sometimes is--as fitted for authority and the
exercise of it as her brother. Academic as well as popular
prejudices, both springing mainly from the masculine mind, make him
a college professor, and her a nameless drudge exercising the
qualities women have gained from centuries of women's life
sympathetic service with belittling recognition of their work,
self-sacrifice, and infinite care and patience for detail.
Too many of our day, both of men and women, still believe with old
John Knox--to glance back even beyond Johnson and Pope and his
sixteenth century "First Blast of the Trumpet against the
Monstrous Regiment of Women"--a fine example of hysterical
shrieking in men, by the way. With the loving estimate of Knox's
contemporary, Mr. John Davidson, we heartily agree when he sings--
"For weill I wait that Scotland never bure,
In Scottis leid ane man mair Eloquent,
Into perswading also I am sure,
Was nane in Europe that was mair potent.
In Greik and Hebrew he was excellent,
And als in Latine toung his propernes,
Was tryit trym quhen scollers wer present.
Bot thir wer nathing till his uprichtnes."
We admire Knox's magnificent moral courage and the fruits of that
courage which the Scots have long enjoyed, and yet anent the
"cursed Jesabel of England," the "cruell monstre Marie," Knox
cries: "To promote a Woman to beare rule, superiorite, dominion,
or empire. . . is repugnant to Nature, contumelie to God, a thing
most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance"--just
as if he, John Knox, knew all about God's will and Nature's
designs. What pretence, John! But John took it upon himself to say
he did. He _assumed_; and time and events have proved that it was
sheer assumption on John's part. I doubt, were he now here, if he
would let a modest, bread-earning woman even make dictionaries at
so much a mile--nothing beyond type-writing, surely. He would
probably assume authority and shriek hysterically that anything
beyond the finger-play of type-writing is repugnant to Nature and
contrarious to God.
There was a Mrs. John Knox; there were two in fact--ribs.
"That servent faithfull servand of the Lord" took the first slip of
a girl when near his fiftieth year, long after he had left the
celibate priesthood; and the second, a lass of sixteen, when he was
fifty-nine. They took care of John, a mother-in-law helping, and
with service and money gave him leisure to write. The opinions of
the dames do not appear in their husband's hysteria. "I use the
help of my left hand," dictated Knox when one of these girl-wives
was writing for him a letter.
With the young women we are considering there is this eternal
variation from John Knox and his hysterical kin, Celt, Saxon, or
Latin--she does not assume authority. Consequently she makes
dictionaries at so much a mile. Such word-spinning was at one time
done by drudge men--men who had failed mayhap in the church, or in
law, or had distaste for material developments or shame for manual
work. Now, with women fortified by the learning their colleges
afford, it is oftenest done by drudge women. The law of commerce
prevails--women gain the task because they will take much less a
mile than men. Men offer them less than they would dare offer a man
similarly equipped.
But why should our brothers who teach sophomores at so much a year
fleer? even if the woman has got the job! Does not this arrangement
afford opportunity for a man to affix his name to her work? In
unnumbered--and concealed--instances. We all remember how in the
making of the----dictionary the unauthoritative woman did the work,
and the unauthoritative man wrote the introduction, and the
authoritative man affixed his name to it. We all remember that,
surely. Then there is the-- -- --; and the-- --. We do not fear to
mention names, we merely pity and do not--and we nurse pity because
with Aristotle we believe that it purifies the heart. With small
knowledge of the publishing world, I can count five such make-ups
as I here indicate. In one case an authoritative woman did her part
of the work under the explicit agreement that her name should be
upon the title-page. In the end, by a trick, in order to advertise
the man's, it appeared only in the first edition. Yet this
injustice in nowise deprived her of a heart of oak.
The commercial book-building world, as it at present stands--the
place where they write dictionaries and world's literatures at so
much a mile--is apt to think a woman is out in its turmoil for her
health, or for sheer amusement; not for the practical reasons men
are. An eminent opinion declared the other day that they were there
"to get a trousseau or get somebody to get it for 'em." Another
exalted judgment asserted, "The first thing they look round the
office and see who there is to marry."
This same world exploits her labor; it pays her a small fraction of
what it pays a man engaged in the identical work; it seizes,
appropriates, and sometimes grows rich upon her ideas. It never
thinks of advancing her to large duties because of her efficiency
in small. She is "only a woman," and with Ibsen's great Pillar of
Society the business world thinks she should be "content to occupy
a modest and becoming position." The capacities of women being
varied, would not large positions rightly appear modest and
becoming to large capacities?
For so many centuries men have estimated a woman's service of no
money value that it is hard, at the opening of the twentieth, to
believe it equal to even a small part of a man's who is doing the
same work. In one late instance a woman at the identical task of
editing was paid less than one-fortieth the sum given her
colaborer, a man, whose products were at times submitted to her for
revision and correction. In such cases the men are virtually
devouring the women--not quite so openly, yet as truly, as the Tierra
del Fuegians of whom Darwin tells: when pressed in winter by hunger
they choke their women with smoke and eat them. In our instance
just cited the feeding upon was less patent, but the choking with
smoke equally unconcealed.
The very work of these so-called unauthoritative women passes in
the eyes of the world uninstructed in the present artfulness of
book-making as the work of so-called authoritative men. It is
therefore authoritative.
Not in this way did the king-critic get together his dictionary.
Johnson's work evidences his hand on every page and almost in every
paragraph. But things are changed from the good old times of
individual action. We now have literary trusts and literary
monopolies. Nowadays the duties of an editor-in-chief may be to
oversee each day's labor, to keep a sharp eye upon the
"authoritative" men and "unauthoritative" women whose work he
bargained for at so much a mile, and, when they finish the task, to
indite his name as chief worker.
Would it be reasonable to suppose that--suffering such school-child
discipline and effacement--those twentieth century writers
nourished the estimate of "booksellers" with which Michael Drayton
in the seventeenth century enlivened a letter to Drummond of
Hawthornden?--"They are a company of base knives whom I both scorn
and kick at."
It is under such conditions as that just cited that we hear a book
spoken of as if it were a piece of iron, not a product of thought
and feeling carefully proportioned and measured; as if it were the
fruit of a day and not of prolonged thought and application; as if
it could be easily reproduced by the application of a mechanical
screw; as if it were a bar of lead instead of far-reaching wings to
minister good; as if it were a thing to step upon rather than a
thing to reach to; as if it could be cut, slashed, twisted,
distorted, instead of its really forming an organic whole with the
Aristotelian breath of unity, and the cutting or hampering of it
would be performing a surgical operation which might entirely let
out its breath of life.
Until honor is stronger among human beings--that is, until the
business world is something other than a maelstrom of hell--it is
unmanly and unwomanly to gibe at the "unauthoritative" young
woman writing at so much a mile. She may be bearing heavy burdens
of debt incurred by another. She may be supporting a decrepit
father or an idle brother. She is bread-earning. Oftenest she is
gentle, and, like the strapped dog which licks the hand that lays
bare his brain, she does not strike back. But she has an inherent
sense of honesty and dishonesty, and she knows what justice is. Her
knowledge of life, the residuum of her unauthoritative literary
experience, shows her the rare insight and truth of Mr. Howells
when he wrote, "There is _no_ happy life for a woman--except as she
is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in sacrificing
herself to their pleasure, their pride, and ambition. The advantage
that the world offers her--and it does not always offer her
that--is her choice in self-sacrifice."
Ten to one--a hundred to one the young woman is "unauthoritative"
because she is not peremptory, is not dictatorial, assumes no airs
of authority such as swelling chest and overbearing manners, is
sympathetic with another's egotism, is altruistic, is not
egotistical with the egotism that is unwilling to cast forth its
work for the instructing and furthering of human kind unless it is
accompanied by the writer's name a "signed article." She is not
selfish and guarding the ego. Individual fame seems to her view an
ephemeral thing, but the aggregate good of mankind for which she
works, eternal.
The beaux of that century of Dr. Johnson's were great in spite of
their sneers and taunts at the Clarindas and Euphelias and
Fidelias, not on account of them. We have no publication which is
to our time as the "Rambler" was to London in 1753, or the
"Spectator," "Tatler," and "Englishman" to Queen Anne's earlier
day. But in what we have let us not deface any page with misogynous
phrase and sentence--jeers or expression of evil against
one-half of humanity. Unsympathetic words about women who by some
individual fortune have become literary drudges fit ill American
lips--which should sing the nobility of any work that truly helps
our kind. These women go about in wind and rain; they sit in the
foul air of offices; they overcome repugnance to coarse and
familiar address; they sometimes stint their food; they are at all
times practising a close economy; with aching flesh and nerves they
often draw their Saturday evening stipend. They are of the sanest
and most human of our kind--laborers daily for their meed of wage,
knowing the sweetness of bread well earned, of work well done, and
rest well won.
Even from the diseased view of a veritable hater of their sex they
have a vast educational influence in the world at large, whether
their work is "authoritative" or "unauthoritative," according to
pronunciamento of some one who assumes authority to call them
"unauthoritative." It must not be forgotten--to repeat for
clearness' sake--that men laboring in these very duties met and
disputed every step the women took even in "unauthoritative" work,
using ridicule, caste distinction, and all the means of
intimidation which a power long dominant naturally possesses. To
work for lower wages alone allowed the women to gain employment.
"You harshly blame my strengthlessness and the woman-delicacy of my
body," exclaims the Antigone of Euripides, according to another
citation of the "Florilegium," of Stobeus named at the beginning,
"but if I am of understanding mind--that is better than a strong arm."
Defendants whose case would otherwise go by default need this brief
plea, which their own modesty forbids their uttering, their
modesty, their busy hands and heads, and their Antigone-like love
and GREEK. They know sympathy is really as large as the world, and
that room is here for other women than those who make dictionaries
at so much a mile as well as for themselves; and for other men than
neurotic caterwaulers and hysterical shriekers like our ancient
friend Knox, assuming that the masculine is the only form of
expression, that women have no right to utter the human voice, and
that certain men have up wire connections with omniscient
knowledge and Nature's designs and God's will, and, standing on
this pretence, are the dispensers of authority.
"If the greatest poems have not been written by women," said our
Edgar Poe, with a clearer accent of the American spirit toward
women, "it is because, as yet, the greatest poems have not been
written at all." The measure is large between the purple-faced
zeal of John Knox and the vivid atavism of our brilliant professor
and that luminous vision of Poe.
"THE GULLET SCIENCE"
Cookery is become an art, a noble
science; cooks are gentlemen.
ROBERT BURTON
_Sir Anthony Absolute_.--It is not to be
wondered at, ma'am--all this is the natural
consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a
thousand daughters, by Heaven! I'd as soon
have them taught the black art as their
alphabet!
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST
THE cook-book is not a modern product. The Iliad is the hungriest
book on earth, and it is the first of our cook-books aside from
half-sacred, half-sanitary directions to the early Aryans and Jews.
It is that acme of poetry, that most picturesque of pictures, that
most historical of histories, that most musical and delicious
verse, the Iliad, which was the first popularly to teach the
cooking art--the art in its simplicity, and not a mere handmaid to
sanitation, jurisprudence, or theology. Through the pages of that
great poem blow not only the salt winds of the AEgean Sea, but also
the savor of tender kid and succulent pig, not to mention whole
hectacombs, which delighted the blessed gods above and strengthened
hungry heroes below. To this very day--its realism is so
perfect--we catch the scent of the cooking and see the appetiteful
people eat. The book is half-human, half-divine; and in its human
part the pleasures and the economic values of wholesome fare are
not left out.
No, cook-books are not modern products. They were in Greece later
than Homer. When the Greek states came to the fore in their
wonderful art and literature and the distinction of a free
democracy, plain living characterized nearly all the peoples. The
Athenians were noted for their simple diet. The Spartans were
temperate to a proverb, and their GREEK (public meals), later
called GREEK (spare meals), guarded against indulgence in eating.
To be a good cook was to be banished from Sparta.
But with the Western Greeks, the Greeks of Sicily and Southern
Italy, it was different--those people who left behind them little
record of the spirit. In Sybaris the cook who distinguished himself
in preparing a public feast--such festivals being not
uncommon--received a crown of gold and the freedom of the games. It
was a citizen of that luxury-loving town who averred, when he
tasted the famous black soup, that it was no longer a wonder the
Spartans were fearless in battle, for any one would readily die
rather than live on such a diet. Among the later Greeks the best
cooks, and the best-paid cooks, came from Sicily; and that little
island grew in fame for its gluttons.
There is a Greek book--the Deipnosophistae--Supper of the Wise
Men--written by Atheneus--which holds for us much information about
the food and feasting of those old Hellenes. The wise men at their
supposed banquet quote, touching food and cooking, from countless
Greek authors whose works are now lost, but were still preserved in
the time of Athenaeus. This, for instance, is from a poem by
Philoxenus of Cythera, who wittily and gluttonously lived at the
court of Dionysius of Syracuse, and wished for a throat three
cubits long that the delight of tasting might be drawn out.[218-3]*
"And then two slaves brought in a well-rubb'd table.
. . . . Then came a platter
. . . . with dainty sword-fish fraught,
And then fat cuttle-fish, and the savoury tribes
Of the long hairy polypus. After this
Another orb appear'd upon the table,
Rival of that just brought from off the fire,
Fragrant with spicy odour. And on that
Again were famous cuttle-fish, and those
Fair maids the honey'd squills, and dainty cakes,
Sweet to the palate, and large buns of wheat,
Large as a partridge, sweet and round, which you
Do know the taste of well. And if you ask
What more was there, I'd speak of luscious chine,
And loin of pork, and head of boar, all hot;
Cutlets of kid, and well-boil'd pettitoes,
And ribs of beef, and heads, and snouts and tails,
Then kid again, and lamb, and hares, and poultry,
Partridges and the bird from Phasis' stream.
And golden honey, and clotted cream was there,
And cheese which I did join with all in calling
Most tender fare."
The Greeks used many of the meats and vegetables we enjoy; and
others we disclaim; for instance, cranes. Even mushrooms were known
to their cooks, and Atheneus suggests how the wholesome may be
distinguished from the poisonous, and what antidotes serve best in
case the bad are eaten. But with further directions of his our
tastes would not agree. He recommends seasoning the mushrooms with
vinegar, or honey and vinegar, or honey, or salt--for by these
means their choking properties are taken away.
The writings of Atheneus have, however, a certain literary and, for
his time as well as our own, an historic and archeologic flavor.
The only ancient cookbook pure and simple--bent on instruction in
the excellent art--which has come down to us is that of Apicius, in
ten short books, or chapters. And which Apicius? Probably the
second of the name, the one who lectured on cooking in Rome during
the reign of Augustus. He gave some very simple directions which
hold good to the present day; for instance--
"UT CARNEM SALSAM DULCEM FACIAS
"Carnem salsam dulcem facies, si prius in lacte coquas, et postea
in aqua."
But again his compounds are nauseating even in print. He was famous
for many dishes, and Pliny, in his Natural History, says he
discovered the way of increasing the size of the liver of the
pig--just as the liver of the Strasbourg geese is enlarged for pate
de foie gras, and as our own Southern people used to induce
pathological conditions in their turkeys.
The method of Apicius was to cram the pig with dried figs, and,
when it was fat enough, drench it with wine mixed with honey.
"There is," continues Pliny, "no other animal that affords so great
a variety to the palate; all others have their taste, but the pig
fifty different flavors. From this tastiness of the meat it came
about that the censors made whole pages of regulations about
serving at banquets the belly and the jowls and other dainty parts.
But in spite of their rules the poet Publius, author of the Mimes,
when he ceased to be a slave, is said never to have given an
entertainment without a dish of pig's belly which he called `sumen.'"
"Cook Apicius showed a remarkable ingenuity in developing luxury,"
the old Roman says at another time, "and thought it a most
excellent plan to let a mullet die in the pickle known as `garum.'"
It was ingenuity of cruelty as well as of luxury. "They killed the
fish in sauces and pickled them alive at the banquet," says
Seneca, "feeding the eye before the gullet, for they took pleasure
in seeing their mullets change several colors while dying." The
unthinkable garum was made, according to Pliny, from the intestines
of fish macerated with salt, and other ingredients were added
before the mixture was set in the sun to putrefy and came to the
right point for serving. It also had popularity as a household
remedy for dog-bites, etc.; and in burns, when care was necessary
in its application not to mention it by name--so delicately timid
was its healing spirit. Its use as a dish was widespread, and
perhaps we see in the well-known hankerings of the royal George of
England a reversion to the palate of Italian ancestors.
But garum was only one of strange dishes. The Romans seasoned much
with rue and asafetida!--a taste kept to this day in India, where
"Kim" eats "good curry cakes all warm and well-scented with hing
(asafetida)." Cabbages they highly estimated; "of all garden
vegetables they thought them best," says Pliny. The same author
notes that Apicius rejected Brussels sprouts, and in this was
followed by Drusus Cesar, who was censured for over-nicety by his
father, the Emperor Tiberius of Capree villas fame.
Upon cooks and the Roman estimate of their value in his day Pliny
also casts light. "Asinius Celer, a man of consular rank and noted
for his expenditure on mullet, bought one at Rome during the reign
of gaius Caligula for eight thousand sesterces. Reflection on this
fact," continues Pliny, "will recall the complaints uttered against
luxury and the lament that a single cook costs more than a horse.
At the present day a cook is only to be had for the price of a
triumph, and a mullet only to be had for what was once the price of
a cook! Of a fact there is now hardly any living being held in
higher esteem than the man who knows how to get rid of his master's
belongings in the most scientific fashion!"
Much has been written of the luxury and enervation of Romans after
the republic, how they feasted scented with perfumes, reclining and
listening to music, "nudis puellis ministrantibus." The story is
old of how Vedius Pollio "hung with ecstasy over lampreys fattened
on human flesh; "how Tiberius spent two days and two nights in one
bout; how Claudius dissolved pearls for his food; how Vitellius
delighted in the brains of pheasants and tongues of nightingales
and the roe of fish difficult to take; how the favorite supper of
Heliogabalus was the brains of six hundred thrushes. At the time
these gluttonies went on in the houses of government officials, the
mass of the people, the great workers who supported the great
idlers, fed healthfully on a mess of pottage. The many to support
the superabundant luxury of a few is still one of the mysteries of
the people.
But in the old Rome the law of right and honest strength at last
prevailed, and monsters gave way to the cleaner and hardier chiefs
of the north. The mastery of the world necessarily passed to
others;--it has never lain with slaves of the stomach.
The early folk of Britain--those Cesar found in the land from which
we sprang--ate the milk and flesh of their flocks. They made bread
by picking the grains from the ear and pounding them to paste in a
mortar. Their Roman conquerors doubtless brought to their midst a
more elaborated table order. Barbarous Saxons, fighters and
freebooters, next settling on the rich island and restraining
themselves little for sowing and reaping, must in their incursions
have been flesh-eaters, expeditiously roasting and broiling
directly over coals like our early pioneers.
This mode of living also would seem true of the later-coming Danes,
who after their settlement introduced, says Holinshed, another
habit. "The Danes," says that delightful chronicler, "had their
dwelling. . . among the Englishmen, whereby came great harme; for
whereas the Danes by nature were great drinkers, the Englishmen by
continuall conversation with them learned the same vice. King
Edgar, to reforme in part such excessive quaffing as then began to
grow in use, caused by the procurement of Dunstane [the then
Archbishop of Canterbury] nailes to be set in cups of a certeine
measure, marked for the purpose, that none should drinke more than
was assigned by such measured cups. Englishmen also learned of the
Saxons, Flemings, and other strangers, their peculiar kinds of
vices, as of the Saxons a disordered fierceness of mind, of the
Flemings a feeble tendernesse of bodie; where before they rejoiced
in their owne simplicitie and esteemed not the lewd and
unprofitable manners of strangers."
But refinement was growing in the mixture of races which was to
make modern Englishmen, and in the time of Hardicanute, much given
to the pleasures of the table and at last dying from too copious a
draught of wine,--"he fell downe suddenlie," says Holinshed, "with
the pot in his hand"--there was aim at niceness and variety and
hospitable cheer.
The Black Book of a royal household which Warner quotes in his
"Antiquitates Culinarie"[228-4]* is evidence of this:
"Domus Regis Hardeknoute may be called a fader noreshoure of
familiaritie, which used for his own table, never to be served with
ony like metes of one meale in another, and that chaunge and
diversitie was dayly in greate habundance, and that same after to
be ministred to his alms-dishe, he caused cunyng cooks in
curiositie; also, he was the furst that began four meales
stablyshed in oon day, oprly to be holden for worshuppfull and
honest peopull resorting to his courte; and no more melis, nor
brekefast, nor chambyr, but for his children in householde; for
which four melys he ordered four marshalls, to kepe the honor of
his halle in recevyng and dyrecting strangers, as well as of his
householdemen in theyre fitting, and for services and ther precepts
to be obeyd in. And for the halle, with all diligence of officers
thereto assigned from his furst inception, tyll the day of his
dethe, his house stode after one unyformitie."
Of Hardicanute, "it hath," says Holinshed, "beene commonlie told,
that Englishmen learned of him their excessive gourmandizing and
unmeasurable filling of their panches with meates and drinkes,
whereby they forgat the vertuous use of sobrietie, so much
necessarie to all estates and degrees, so profitable for all
commonwealthes, and so commendable both in the sight of God, and
all good men."
Not only to the Danes, but also to the later conquerors, the
Normans, the old chronicler attributes corruption of early English
frugality and simplicity. "The Normans, misliking the gormandise
of Canutus, ordeined after their arrivall that no table should be
covered above once in the day. . . . But in the end, either waxing
wearie of their owne frugalitie or suffering the cockle of old
custome to overgrow the good corne of their new constitution, they
fell to such libertie that in often feeding they surmounted Canutus
surnamed the hardie. . . . They brought in also the custome of long
and statelie sitting at meat."
A fellow-Londoner with Holinshed, John Stow, says of the reign of
William Rufus, the second Norman king of England, "The courtiers
devoured the substance of the husbandmen, their tenants."
And Stow's "Annales" still further tell of a banquet served in
far-off Italy to the duke of Clarence, son of Edward III., when,
some three hundred years after the Norman settlement, the lad
Leonell went to marry Violentis, daughter of the duke of Milan. It
should not be forgotten that in the reign of Edward II. of England,
grandfather of the duke, proclamation had been issued against the
"outrageous and excessive multitude of meats and dishes" served
by the nobles in their castles, as well by "persons of inferior
rank imitating their example, beyond what their station required
and their circumstances could afford."
"At the comming of Leonell," says Stow, "such aboundance of
treasure was in most bounteous maner spent, in making most
sumptuous feasts, setting forth stately fightes, and honouring with
rare gifts above two hundred Englishmen, which accompanied his [the
duke of Milan's] son-in-law, as it seemed to surpasse the
greatnesse of most wealthy Princes; for in the banquet whereat
Francis Petrarch was present, amongst the chiefest guestes, there
were above thirtie courses of service at the table, and betwixt
every course, as many presents of wonderous price intermixed, all
which John Galeasius, chiefe of the choice youth, bringing to the
table, did offer to Leonell. . . And such was the sumptuousnesse of
that banquet, that the meats which were brought from the table,
would sufficiently have served ten thousand men."
The first cook-book we have in our ample English tongue is of date
about 1390. Its forme, says the preface to the table of contents,
this "forme of cury [cookery] was compiled of the chef maistes
cokes of kyng Richard the Secunde kyng of nglond aftir the
conquest; the which was accounted the best and ryallest vyand [nice
eater] of alle csten ynges [Christian kings]; and it was compiled
by assent and avysement of maisters and [of] phisik and of
philosophie that dwellid in his court. First it techith a man for
to make commune pottages and commune meetis for howshold, as they
shold be made, craftly and holsomly. Aftirward it techith for to
make curious potages, and meetes, and sotiltees, for alle maner of
states, bothe hye and lowe. And the techyng of the forme of making
of potages, and of meetes, bothe of flesh, and of fissh, buth [are]
y sette here by noumbre and by ordre. Sso this little table here
fewyng [following] wole teche a man with oute taryyng, to fynde
what meete that hym lust for to have."
The "potages" and "meetis" and "sotiltees" it techith a man for to
make would be hardly more endurable to the modern stomach than some
old Greek and Roman seasonings we have referred to. There is no
essential difference between these and the directions of a rival
cook-book written some forty or fifty years later and divided into
three parts--Kalendare de Potages dyvers, Kalendare de Leche Metys,
Dyverse bake metis. Or of another compiled about 1450. Let us see
how they would make a meat.
"Stwed Beeff. Take faire Ribbes of ffresh beef, And (if thou wilt)
roste hit til hit be nygh ynowe; then put hit in a faire possenet;
caste therto parcely and oynons mynced, reysons of corauns, powder
peper, canel, clowes, saundres, safferon, and salt; then caste
thereto wyn and a litull vynegre; sette a lyd on the potte, and
lete hit boile sokingly on a faire charcole til hit be ynogh; then
lay the fflessh, in disshes, and the sirippe thereuppon, And serve
it forth."
And for sweet apple fritters:
"Freetours. Take yolkes of egges, drawe hem thorgh a streynour,
caste thereto faire floure, berme and ale; stere it togidre till
hit be thik. Take pared appelles, cut hem thyn like obleies [wafers
of the eucharist], ley hem in the batur; then put hem into a
ffrying pan" and fry hem in faire grece or buttur til thei ben
browne yelowe; then put hem in disshes; and strawe Sugur on hem
ynogh, And serve hem forthe."
Still other cook-books followed--the men of that day served hem
forthe among which we notice "A noble Boke off Cookry ffor a prynce
houssolde or eny other estately houssolde," ascribed to about the
year 1465.
To the monasteries the art of cooking is doubtless much indebted,
just as even at the present day is the art of making liqueurs.
Their vast wealth, the leisure of the in-dwellers, and the gross
sensualism and materialism of the time they were at their height
would naturally lead to care for the table and its viands. Within
their thick stone walls, which the religious devotion of the
populace had reared, the master of the kitchen, magister coquine or
magnus coquus, was not the man of least importance. Some old author
whose name andbook do not come promptly to memory refers to the
disinclination of plump capons, or round-breasted duck, to meet
ecclesiastical eyes--a facetiousness repeated in our day when the
Uncle Remuses of Dixie say they see yellow-legged chickens run and
hide if a preacher drives up to supper.
Moreover, the monasteries were the inns of that day where
travellers put up, and in many instances were served free no price,
that is, was put upon their entertainment, the abbot, or the
establishment, receiving whatever gift the one sheltered and fed
felt able or moved to pay.
Contemporary accounts of, or references to, the cooking and
feasting in religious houses are many--those of the Vision of Long
Will concerning Piers the Plowman, those of "Dan Chaucer, the first
warbler," of Alexander Barclay, and Skelton, great satirist of
times of Henry VIII., and of other authors not so well remembered.
Now and then a racy anecdote has come down like that which Thomas
Fuller saves from lip tradition in his "History of Abbeys in
England." It happened, says Worthy Fuller, that Harry VIII.,
"hunting in Windsor Forest, either casually lost, or (more probable)
wilfully losing himself, struck down about dinner-time to the abbey
of Reading; where, disguising himself (much for delight, more for
discovery, to see unseen), he was invited to the abbot's table, and
passed for one of the king's guard, a place to which the proportion
of his person might properly entitle him. A sirloin of beef was set
before him (so knighted saith tradition, by this King Henry), on
which the king laid on lustily, not disgracing one of that place
for whom he was mistaken.
"`Well fare thy heart!' quoth the abbot; `and here in a cup of sack
I remember the health of his grace your master. I would give an
hundred pounds on the condition I could feed so heartily on beef as
you do. Alas! my weak and squeazy stomach will badly digest the
wing of a small rabbit or chicken.'
"The king pleasantly pledged him, and, heartily thanking him for his
good cheer, after dinner departed as undiscovered as he came thither.
"Some weeks after, the abbot was sent for by a pursuivant, brought
up to London, clapped in the Tower, kept close prisoner, fed for a
short time with bread and water; yet not so empty his body of food,
as his mind was filled with fears, creating many suspicions to
himself when and how he had incurred the king's displeasure. At
last a sirloin of beef was set before him, on which the abbot fed
as the farmer of his grange, and verified the proverb, that `Two
hungry meals make the third a glutton.'
"In springs King Henry out of a private lobby, where he had placed
himself, the invisible spectator of the abbot's behavior. `My lord,'
quoth the king, `presently deposit your hundred pounds in gold, or
else no going hence all the days of your life. I have been your
physician to cure you of your squeazy stomach; and here, as I
deserve, I demand my fee for the same!'
"The abbot down with his dust; and, glad he had escaped so,
returned to Reading, as somewhat lighter in purse, so much more
merrier in heart than when he came thence."
The "squeazy" abbot stood alone in proclamation of his disorder.
Archbishop Cranmer, according to John Leland, king's antiquary to
Henry VIII., found it necessary in 1541 to regulate the expenses of
the tables of bishops and clergy by a constitution--an instrument
which throws much light on the then conditions, and which ran as follows:
"In the yeare of our Lord MDXLI it was agreed and condescended
upon, as wel by the common consent of both tharchbishops and most
part of the bishops within this realme of Englande, as also of
divers grave men at that tyme, both deanes and archdeacons, the
fare at their tables to be thus moderated.
"First, that tharchbishop should never exceede six divers kindes of
fleshe, or six of fishe, on the fishe days; the bishop not to
exceede five, the deane and archdeacon not above four, and al other
under that degree not above three; provided also that tharchbishop
myght have of second dishes four, the bishop three; and al others
under the degree of a bishop but two. As custard, tart, fritter,
cheese or apples, peares, or two of other kindes of fruites.
Provided also, that if any of the inferior degree dyd receave at
their table, any archbishop, bishop, deane, or archdeacon, or any
of the laitie of lyke degree, viz. duke, marques, earle, viscount,
baron, lorde, knyght, they myght have such provision as were mete
and requisite for their degrees. Provided alway that no rate was
limited in the receavying of any ambassadour. It was also provided
that of the greater fyshes or fowles, there should be but one in a
dishe, as crane, swan, turkey cocke, hadocke, pyke, tench; and of
lesse sortes but two, viz. capons two, pheasantes two, conies two,
and woodcockes two. Of lesse sortes, as of patriches, the
archbishop three, the bishop and other degrees under hym two. Of
blackburdes, the archbishop six, the bishop four, the other degrees
three. Of larkes and snytes (snipes) and of that sort but twelve.
It was also provided, that whatsoever is spared by the cutting of,
of the olde superfluitie, shoulde yet be provided and spent in
playne meates for the relievyng of the poore. _Memorandum_, that
this order was kept for two or three monethes, tyll by the disusyng
of certaine wylful persons it came to the olde excesse."
Still one more tale bearing upon a member of the clergy who would
set out more "blackburdes" than "tharchbishop" is told by
Holinshed. It has within it somewhat of the flavor of the odium
theologicum, but an added interest also, since it turns upon a dish
esteemed in Italy since the time of the imperial Romans--peacock,
often served even nowadays encased in its most wonderful plumage.
The Pope Julius III., whose luxurious entertainment and comport
shocked the proprieties even of that day, and who died in Rome
while the chronicler was busy in London, is the chief actor.
"At an other time," writes Holinshed, "he sitting at dinner,
pointing to a peacocke upon his table, which he had not touched;
Keepe (said he) this cold peacocke for me against supper, and let
me sup in the garden, for I shall have ghests. So when supper came,
and amongst other hot peacockes, he saw not his cold peacocke
brought to his table; the pope after his wonted manner, most
horriblie blaspheming God, fell into an extreame rage, &c.
Whereupon one of his cardinals sitting by, desired him saieng: Let
not your holinesse, I praie you, be so mooved with a matter of so
small weight. Then this Julius the pope answeringe againe: What
(saith he) if God was so angrie for one apple, that he cast our
first parents out of paradise for the same, whie maie not I being
his vicar, be angrie then for a peacocke, sithens a peacocke is a
greater matter than an apple."
In England at this time controlling the laity were sumptuary laws,
habits of living resulting from those laws, and great inequalities
in the distribution of wealth. On these points Holinshed again
brings us light:
"In number of dishes and change of meat," he writes, "the nobilitie
of England (whose cookes are for the most part musicall-headed
Frenchmen and strangers) do most exceed, sith there is no daie in
maner that passeth over their heads, wherein they have not onelie
beefe, mutton, veale, lambe, kid, porke, conie, capon, pig, or so
manie of these as the season yeeldeth; but also some portion of the
red or fallow deere, beside great varietie of fish and wild foule,
and thereto sundrie other delicates wherein the sweet hand of the
seasoning Portingale is not wanting. so that for a man to dine with
one of them, and to taste of everie dish that standeth before him.
. . is rather to yeeld unto a conspiracie with a great deale of
meat for the speedie suppression of naturall health, then the use
of a necessarie meane to satisfie himselfe with a competent repast,
to susteine his bodie withall. But as this large feeding is not
seene in their gests, no more is it in their owne persons, for sith
they have dailie much resort unto their tables. . . and thereto
reteine great numbers of servants, it is verie requisit and
expedient for them to be somewhat plentifull in this behalfe.
"The chiefe part likewise of their dailie provision is brought
before them. . . and placed on their tables, whereof when they have
taken what it pleaseth them, the rest is reserved and afterwards
sent downe to their serving men and waiters, who feed thereon in
like sort with convenient moderation, their reversion also being
bestowed upon the poore, which lie readie at their gates in great
numbers to receive the same.
"The gentlemen and merchants keepe much about one rate, and each of
them contenteth himselfe with foure, five or six dishes, when they
have but small resort, or peradventure with one, or two, or three
at the most, when they have no strangers to accompanie them at
their tables. And yet their servants have their ordinarie diet
assigned, beside such as is left at their masters, boordes, and not
appointed to be brought thither the second time, which
neverthelesse is often seene generallie in venison, lambe, or some
especiall dish, whereon the merchant man himselfe liketh to feed
when it is cold."
"At such times as the merchants doo make their ordinarie or
voluntarie feasts, it is a world to see what great provision is
made of all maner of delicat meats, from everie quarter of the
countrie. . . . They will seldome regard anie thing that the
butcher usuallie killeth, but reject the same as not worthie to
come in place. In such cases all gelisses of all coleurs mixed with
a varitie in the representation of sundrie floures, herbs, trees,
formes of beasts, fish, foules and fruits, and there unto
marchpaine wrought with no small curiositie, tarts of diverse hewes
and sundrie denominations, conserves of old fruits foren and
homebred, suckets, codinacs, marmilats, marchpaine, sugerbread,
gingerbread, florentines, wild foule, venison of all sorts, and
sundrie outlandish confections altogither seasoned with sugar. . .
doo generalie beare the swaie, beside infinit devises of our owne
not possible for me to remember. Of the potato and such venerous
roots as are brought out of Spaine, Portingale, and the Indies to
furnish our bankets, I speake not. "
"The artificer and husbandman make greatest accompt of such meat as
they may soonest come by, and have it quickliest readie. . . .
Their food also consisteth principallie in beefe and such meat as
the butcher selleth, that is to saie, mutton, veale, lambe, porke,
etc.,. . . beside souse, brawne, bacon, fruit, pies of fruit,
foules of sundrie sorts, cheese, butter, eggs, etc. . . . To
conclude, both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficientlie
liberall and verie friendlie at their tables, and when they meet
they are so merie without malice and plaine, without inward Italian
or French craft and subtiltie, that it would doo a man good to be
in companie among them.
"With us the nobilitie, gentrie and students doo ordinarilie go to
dinner at eleven before noone, and to supper at five, or betweene
five and six at afternoone. The merchants dine and sup seldome
before twelve at noone, and six at night, especiallie in London.
The husbandmen dine also at high noone as they call it, and sup at
seven or eight. . . . As for the poorest sort they generallie dine
and sup when they may, so that to talke of their order of repast it
were but a needlesse matter."
"The bread through out the land," continues Holinshed, "is made of
such graine as the soil yeeldeth, neverthelesse the gentilitie
commonlie provide themselves sufficientlie of wheat for their owne
tables, whilst their houshold and poore neighbours in some shires
are inforced to content themselves with rie, or baricie, yea and in
time of dearth manie with bread made either of beans, or peason, or
otes, or of altogether and some acornes among. . . . There be much
more ground eared now almost in everie place than hath beene of
late yeares, yet such a price of corne continueth in each towne and
market without any just cause (except it be that landlords doo get
licenses to carie corne out of the land onelie to keepe up the
prices for their owne private gaines and ruine of the
commonwealth), that the artificer and poore laboring man is not
able to reach unto it, but is driven to content himselfe with
horsse corne I mean beanes, peason, otes, tarres, and lintels. "
Books had been written for women and their tasks within--the
"Babees Booke," Tusser's [250-5]* "Hundrethe Good Pointes of
Huswifry," "The Good Husive's Handmaid"--the last two in the
sixteenth century; these and others of their kidney. A woman who
thought, spoke, and wrote in several tongues was greatly filling
the throne of England in those later times.
Cook-and receipt-books in the following century, that is in the
seventeenth, continued to discover women, and to realize moreover
that to them division of labor had delegated the household and its
businesses. There were "Jewels" and "Closets of Delights"
before we find an odd little volume putting out in 1655 a second
edition. It shows upon its title-page the survival from earlier
conditions of the confusion of duties of physician and cook--a fact
made apparent in the preface copied in the foregoing "forme of
cury" of King Richard--and perhaps intimates the housewife should
perform the services of both. It makes, as well, a distinct appeal
to women as readers and users of books. Again it evidences the
growth of the Commons. In full it introduces itself in this wise:
"The Ladies Cabinet enlarged and opened: containing Many Rare
Secrets and Rich Ornaments, of several kindes, and different uses.
Comprized under three general Heads, viz. of 1 Preserving,
Conserving, Candying, etc. 2 Physick and Chirurgery. 3 Cooking and
Housewifery. Whereunto is added Sundry Experiments and choice
Extractions of Waters, Oyls, etc. Collected and practised by the
late Right Honorable and Learned Chymist, the Lord Ruthuen."
The preface, after an inscription "To the Industrious improvers of
Nature by Art; especially the vertuous Ladies and gentlewomen of
the Land," begins:
"Courteous Ladies, etc. The first Edition of this--(cal it what you
please) having received a kind entertainment from your Ladiships
hands, for reasons best known to yourselves, notwithstanding the
disorderly and confused jumbling together of things of different
kinds, hath made me (who am not a little concerned therein) to
bethink myself of some way, how to encourage and requite your
Ladiships Pains and Patience (vertues, indeed, of absolute
necessity in such brave employments; there being nothing excellent
that is not withal difficult) in the profitable spending of your
vacant minutes." This labored and high-flying mode of address
continues to the preface's end. . . ."I shall thus leave you at
liberty as Lovers in Gardens, to follow your own fancies. Take what
you like, and delight in your choice, and leave what you list to
him, whose labour is not lost if anything please."
In turning the leaves of the book one comes upon such naive
discourse as this:
"To make the face white and fair.
"Wash thy face with Rosemary boiled in white wine, and thou shalt
be fair; then take Erigan and stamp it, and take the juyce thereof,
and put it all together and wash thy face therewith. Proved."
It was undoubtedly the success of "The Ladies Cabinet" and its
cousins german that led to the publication of a fourth edition in
1658 of another compilation, which, according to the preface, was
to go "like the good Samaritane giving comfort to all it met." The
title was "The Queens Closet opened: Incomparable Secrets in
Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery, As they
were presented unto the Queen By the most Experienced Persons of
our times. . . . Transscribed from the true Copies of her Majesties
own Receipt Books, by W. M. one of her late Servants." It is
curious to recall that this book was published during the Cromwell
Protectorate--1658 is the year of the death of Oliver--and that the
queen alluded to in the title--whose portrait, engraved by the elder
William Faithorne, forms the frontispiece--was Henrietta Maria,
widow of Charles I., and at that time an exile in France.
During this century, which saw such publications as Rose's "School
for the Officers of the Mouth," and "Nature Unembowelled," a
woman, Hannah Wolley, appears as author of "The Cook's Guide."
All such compilations have enduring human value, but we actually
gain quite as much of this oldest of arts from such records as
those the indefatigable Pepys left in his Diary. At that time men
of our race did not disdain a knowledge of cookery. Izaak Walton,
"an excellent angler, and now with God," dresses chub and trout in
his meadow-sweet pages. Even Thomas Fuller, amid his solacing and
delightful "Worthies," thinks of the housewife, and gives a
receipt for metheglin.
And a hundred years later Dr. Johnson's friend, the Rev. Richard
Warner, in his "Personal Recollections," did not hesitate to
expand upon what he thought the origin of mince pies. Warner's
Johnsonian weight in telling his fantasy recalls Goldsmith's quip
about the Doctor's little fish talking like whales, and also Johnson's
criticism upon his own "too big words and too many of them."
Warner wrote, "In the early ages of our country, when its present
widely spread internal trade and retail business were yet in their
infancy, and none of the modern facilities were afforded to the
cook to supply herself, on the spur of the moment". . . it was the
practice of all prudent housewives, to lay in, at the conclusion of
every year (from some contiguous periodical fair), a stock
sufficient for the ensuing annual consumption, of. . . every sweet
composition for the table such as raisins, currants, citrons, and
`spices of the best.'
"The ample cupboard. . . within the wainscot of the dining parlour
itself . . . formed the safe depository of these precious stores.
"`When merry Christmas-tide came round'. . . the goodly litter of
the cupboard, thus various in kind and aspect, was carefully swept
into one common receptacle; the mingled mass enveloped in pastry
and enclosed within the duly heated oven, from whence. . . perfect
in form, colour, odour, flavour and temperament, it smoked, the
glory of the hospitable Christmas board, hailed from every quarter
by the honourable and imperishable denomination of the Mince-Pye."
In the eighteenth century women themselves, following Hannah
Wolley, began cook-book compiling. So great was their success that
we find Mrs. Elizabeth Moxon's "English Housewifry" going into
its ninth edition in the London market of 1764. All through history
there have been surprises coming to prejudiced minds out of the
despised and Nazarene. It was so about this matter of
cook-books--small in itself, great in its far-reaching results to
the health and development of the human race.
Women had been taught the alphabet. But the dogmatism of Dr.
Johnson voiced the judgment of many of our forebears: a dominant
power is always hard in its estimate of the capacities it controls.
"Women can spin very well," said the great Cham, "but they can not
make a good book of cookery." He was talking to "the swan of
Lichfield," little Anna Seward, when he said this, and also to a
London publisher. The book they were speaking of had been put forth
by the now famous Mrs. Hannah Glasse, said to be the wife of a
London attorney.
The doctor--possibly with an eye to business, a publisher being
present--was describing a volume he had in mind to make, "a book
upon philosophical principles," "a better book of cookery than has
ever yet been written." "Then," wisely said the dogmatic doctor,
"as you can not make bad meat good, I would tell what is the best
butcher's meat, the best beef, the best pieces; how to choose young
fowls; the proper seasons of different vegetables; and then how to
roast and boil and compound." This was the plan of a poet,
essayist, lexicographer, and the leading man of letters of his day.
His cookbook was never written.
But good Mrs. Glasse had also with large spirit aimed at teaching
the ignorant, possibly those of a kind least often thought of by
instructors in her art. She had, forsooth, caught her hare outside
her book, even if she never found him in its page. "If I have not
wrote in the high polite style," she says, with a heart helpful
toward the misunderstood and oppressed, and possibly with the pages
of some pretentious chef in mind, "I hope I shall be forgiven; for
my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must
treat them in their own way. For example, when I bid them lard a
fowl, if I should bid them lard with large lardoons, they would not
know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces
of bacon, they know what I mean. So in many other things in Cookery
the great cooks have such a high way of expressing themselves, that
the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean."
Mrs. Glasse's book was published in 1747--while Dr. Johnson had
still thirty-seven years in which to "boast of the niceness of his
palate," and spill his food upon his waistcoat. "Whenever," says
Macaulay, "he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had
been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he
gorged himelf with such violence that his veins swelled and the
moisture broke out on his forehead. "But within forty-eight years
of the December his poor body was borne from the house behind Fleet
Street to its resting-place in Westminster Abbey, a thin volume,
"The Frugal Housewife," written by our American Lydia Maria Child,
had passed to its ninth London edition, in that day sales being
more often than in our own a testimony of merit. This prevailing of
justice over prejudice is "too good for any but very honest
people," as Izaak Walton said of roast pike. Dogmatism is always
eating its own words.
Since the master in literature, Dr. Johnson, planned his cook-book
many cooking men have dipped ink in behalf of instruction in their
art. Such names as Farley, Careme, and Soyer have been written, if
not in marble or bronze, at least in sugar of the last caramel
degree--unappreciated excellencies mainly because of the
inattention of the pubic to what nourishes it, and lack of the
knowledge that the one who introduces an inexpensive, palatable,
and digestible dish benefits his fellow-men.
The names of these club cooks and royal cooks are not so often
referred to as that of the large and human-hearted Mrs. glasse. A
key to their impulse toward book-making must, however, have been
that offered by Master Farley, chief cook at the London Tavern, who
wrote in 1791, a hundred and fourteen years ago: "Cookery, like
every other Art, has been moving forward to perfection by slow
Degrees. . . . And although there are so many Books of this Kind
already published, that one would hardly think there could be
Occasion for another, yet we flatter ourselves, that the Readers of
this Work will find, from a candid Perusal, and an impartial
Comparison, that our Pretensions to the Favour of the Public are
not ill-founded."
Such considerations as those of Master Farley seem to lead to the
present great output. But nowadays our social conditions and our
intricate and involved household arrangements demand a
specialization of duties. The average old cook-book has become
insufficient. It has evolved into household-directing as well as
cook-directing books, comprehending the whole subject of esoteric
economies. This is a curious enlargement; and one cause, and
result, of it is that the men and women of our domestic corps are
better trained, better equipped with a logical, systematized,
scientific knowledge, that they are in a degree specialists--in a
measure as the engineer of an ocean greyhound is a specialist, or
the professor of mathematics, or the writer of novels is a
specialist. And specialists should have the dignity of special
treatment. In this movement, it is to be hoped, is the wiping out
of the social stigma under which domestic service has so long lain
in our country, and a beginning of the independence of the domestic
laborer--that he or she shall possess himself or herself equally
with others--as other free-born people possess themselves, that is.
And closely allied with this specialization another notable thing
has come about. Science with its microscope has finally taught what
religion with its manifold precepts of humility and humanity has
failed for centuries to accomplish, thus evidencing that true
science and true religion reach one and the same end. There are no
menial duties, science clearly enunciates: the so-called drudgery
is often the most important of work, especially when the worker
brings to his task a large knowledge of its worth in preserving and
sweetening human life, and perfectness as the sole and satisfactory
aim. Only the careless, thriftless workers, the inefficient and
possessed with no zeal for perfection of execution, only these are
the menials according to the genuine teachings of our day--and the
ignorant, unlifted worker's work is menial (using the word again in
its modern English and not its old Norman-French usage) whatever
his employment.
In verse this was said long ago, as the imagination is always
forestalling practical knowledge, and George Herbert, of the
seventeenth century, foreran our science in his "Elixir:"
"All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with this tincture _for thy sake_
Will not grow bright and clean.
"A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine.
"This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told."
Present-day, up-to-date books on housekeeping stand for the fact
that in our households, whatever the estimates of the past and of
other social conditions, all work is dignified--none is menial. For
besides intelligent knowledge and execution, what in reality, they
ask, gives dignity to labor? Weight and importance of that
particular task to our fellow-beings? What then shall we say of the
duties of cook? of housemaid? of chambermaid? of the handy man, or
of the modest maid of all work? For upon the efficient performance
of the supposedly humblest domestic servitor depends each life of
the family. Such interdependence brings the employed very close to
the employer, and no bond could knit the varied elements of a
household more closely, none should knit it more humanly.
The human, then, are the first of the relations that exist between
employer and employee, that "God hath made of one blood all
nations of the earth." It is a truth not often enough in the minds
of the parties to a domestic-service compact. And besides this
gospel of Paul are two catch-phrases, not so illuminated but
equally humane, which sprang from the ameliorating spirit of the
last century--"Put yourself in his place," and "Everybody is as
good as I." These form the best bed-rock for all relations between
master and servant. There is need of emphasizing this point in our
books on affairs of the house, for a majority of our notably rich
are new to riches and new to knowledge, and as employers have not
learned the limitation of every child of indulgence and also polite
manners in early life.
It is after all a difference of environment that makes the
difference between mistress and maid, between master and man. The
human being is as plastic as clay--_is_ clay in the hands of
circumstance. If his support of wife and children depended upon
obsequiousness of bearing, the master might, like the butler,
approximate Uriah Heep. If the mistress's love of delicacy and
color had not been cultivated by association with taste from
childhood, her finery might be as vulgar as the maid's which
provokes her satire. It is after all a question of surroundings and
education. And in this country, where Aladdin-fortunes spring into
being by the rubbing of a lamp--where families of, for example,
many centuries of the downtrodden life of European peasant jump
from direst poverty to untold wealth--environment has often no
opportunity to form the folk of gentle breeding. Many instances are
not lacking where those who wait are more gently bred than those
who are waited upon.
In their larger discourse, then, up-to-date household books stand
for the very essence of democracy and human-heartedness--which is
also the very essence of aristocracy. After the old manner which
Master Farley described, our women seem to have given their books
to the public with the faith that they contain much other books
have not touched--to stand for an absolutely equable humanity, for
kindness and enduring courtesy between those who employ and those
who are employed, the poor rich and the rich poor, the householders
and the houseworkers--to state the relations between master and
man and mistress and maid more explicitly than they have before
been stated, and thus to help toward a more perfect organization of
the forces that carry on our households--to direct with scientific
and economic prevision the food of the house members; to emphasize
in all departments of the house thorough-going sanitation and
scientific cleanliness.
Of questions of the household--of housekeeping and home-making--our
American women have been supposed somewhat careless. Possibly this
judgment over the sea has been builded upon our women's vivacity,
and a subtle intellectual force they possess, and also from their
interest in affairs at large, and again from their careful and
cleanly attention to their person--"they keep their teeth too
clean," says a much-read French author. Noting such
characteristics, foreigners have jumped to the conclusion that
American women are not skilled in works within doors. In almost
every European country this is common report. "We german women are
such devoted housekeepers," said the wife of an eminent Deutscher,
"and you American women know so little about such things!" "Bless
your heart!" I exclaimed--or if not just that then its German
equivalent--thinking of the perfectly kept homes from the rocks and
pines of Maine to the California surf; "you German women with your
little haushaltungen, heating your rooms with porcelain stoves, and
your frequent reversion in meals to the simplicity of wurst and
beer, have no conception of the size and complexity of American
households and the executive capabilities necessary to keep them in
orderly work. Yours is mere doll's housekeeping--no furnaces, no
hot water, no electricity, no elevators, no telephone, and no
elaborate menus."
Our American women are model housekeepers and home-makers, as
thousands of homes testify, but the interests of the mistresses of
these houses are broader, their lives are commonly more projected
into the outer world of organized philanthropy and art than women's
lives abroad, and the apparent nonintrusion of domestic affairs
leads foreigners to misinterpret their interest and their zeal. It
is the consummate executive who can set aside most personal cares
and take on others efficiently. Moreover, it is not here as where
a learned professor declared: "Die erste Tugend eines Weibes ist
die Sparsamkeit."
To have a home in which daily duties move without noise and as like
a clock as its human machinery will permit, and to have a table of
simplicity and excellence, is worth a pleasure-giving ambition and
a womanly ambition. It is to bring, in current critical phrase,
three-fourths of the comfort of life to those whose lives are joined
to the mistress of such a household--the loaf-giver who spends her
brains for each ordered day and meal. Moreover, and greatest of
all, to plan and carry on so excellent an establishment is
far-reaching upon all men. It is the very essence of morality--is
duty--_i. e._, service--and law.
The French aver that men of the larger capacity have for food a
particularly keen enjoyment. Possibly this holds good for
Frenchmen--for the author of Monte Cristo, or for a
Brillat-Savarin, of whose taste the following story is told:
"Halting one day at Sens, when on his way to Lyons, Savarin sent,
according to his invariable custom, for the cook, and asked what he
could have for dinner. `Little enough,' was the reply. `But let us
see,' retorted Savarin; `let us go into the kitchen and talk the
matter over.' There he found four turkeys roasting. `Why!'
exclaimed he, `you told me you had nothing in the house! let me
have one of those turkeys.' `Impossible!' said the cook; they are
all bespoken by a gentleman up-stairs.' `He must have a large party
to dine with him, then?' `No; he dines by himself.' `Indeed!' said
the gastronome; `I should like much to be acquainted with the man
who orders four turkeys for his own eating.' The cook was sure the
gentleman would be glad of his acquaintance, and Savarin, on going
to pay his respects to the stranger, found him to be no other than
his own son. `What! you rascal! four turkeys all to yourself!'
`Yes, sir,' said Savarin, junior; `you know that when we have a
turkey at home you always reserve for yourself the pope's nose; I was
resolved to regale myself for once in my life; and here I am, ready
to begin, although I did not expect the honour of your company.'"
The French may say truly of the famous "high-priest of gastronomy."
And a story which has lately appeared in Germany tells of a
sensitive palate in Goethe: "At a small party at the court of
Weimar, the Marshal asked permission to submit a nameless sample of
wine. Accordingly, a red wine was circulated, tasted, and much
commended. Several of the company pronounced it Burgundy, but could
not agree as to the special vintage or the year. Goethe alone
tasted and tasted again, shook his head, and, with a meditative
air, set his glass on the table. `Your Excellency appears to be of
a different opinion,' said the court marshal. `May I ask what name
you give to the wine?' `The wine,' said the poet, `is quite unknown
to me; but I do not think it is a Burgundy. I should rather
consider it a good Jena wine that has been kept for some while in
a Madeira cask.' `And so, in fact, it is,' said the court marshal.
For a more discriminating palate, one must go to the story of the
rival wine-tasters in `Don Quixote,' who from a single glass
detected the key and leather thong in a cask of wine."
But that great capacity means also discriminating palate could
hardly be true for Americans of the old stock and simple life.
Judge Usher, Secretary of Interior in Lincoln's Cabinet at the time
of the President's death, said that he had never heard Abraham
Lincoln refer to his food in any way whatever.
From a consideration of women's cook-books springs another
suggestion. Heaped upon one's table, the open pages and appetiteful
illustrations put one to thinking that if women of intelligence,
and of leisure except for burdens they assume under so-called
charity or a faddish impulse, were to take each some department of
the household, and give time and effort to gaining a complete
knowledge of that department--a knowledge of its evolution and
history, of its scientific and hygienic bearings, of its
gastronomic values if it touched upon the table--there would be
great gain to the world at large and to their friends. For
instance, if a woman skilled in domestic science and the domestic
arts were to take some fruit, or some vegetable, or cereal, or
meat, and develop to the utmost what an old author-cook calls,
after those cook-oracles of ancient Rome, the "Apician mysteries"
of the dish, her name would deserve to go down to posterity with
something of the odor--or flavor--of sanctity. Hundreds of saints
in the calendar never did anything half so meritorious and worthy
of felicitous recognition from their fellowmen.
Take, for example, the democratic cabbage and its cousins german,
and their treatment in the average cuisine. What might not such an
investigation show this Monsieur Chou or Herr Kohl and his
relations capable of?--the cabbage itself, the Scotch kale, the
Jersey cabbage, and Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, and
broccoli, and kohl-rabi, and cabbage palms, and still other
species! Looked at in their evolution, and the part they have
played in human history as far back as in old Persia and the
Anabasis of the Greeks, and so late as the famine times of Ireland,
these succulent and nutritious vegetables would be most
interesting. And, even if chemically their elements vary, the fact
that all the family are blessed with a large percentage of nitrogen
might be shown to have increased their usefulness long before
chemists analyzed their tissues and told us why men who could not
buy meat so carefully cultivated the foody leaves. Under such sane
and beneficent impulses every well-directed household would become
an experiment station for the study of human food--not the
extravagant and rare after the test and search of imperial
Heliogabalus, but in the best modern, scientific, economic,
gastronomic, and democratic manner.
Since making this foregoing suggestion I find this point similarly
touched by the man who dissertated on roast pig. "It is a
desideratum," says Lamb, "in works that treat de re culinaria,
that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours:
as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable
with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant
jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a
pretty problem), being itself unctious, seeketh the adventitious
lubricitv of melted butter--and why the same part in pork, not more
oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with
the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnips. . . . We are
as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly,
and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us."
In speaking of modern household books one cannot have done without
adding still one word more about the use of the word "servant" as
these books seem to speak of it. Owing to an attempted
Europeanizing of our ideas, and also to the fact that many of our
domestics are of foreign birth and habits of thought--or of the
lowly, velvet-voiced, unassertive suavity of the most loyal
negro--the term has gradually crept to a quasi acceptance in this
country. It is a word not infrequently obnoxious to
Americans--employers--of the old stock, and trained in the spirit
which wrote the Declaration of Independence and fought its sequent
War. "From the time of the Revolution," says Miss Salmon in her
"Domestic Service," "until about 1850 the word, servant, does not
seem to have been generally applied in either section [north or
south] to white persons of American birth."
The term indicates social conditions which no longer exist and
represents ideas which no longer have real life--we have but to
consider how the radical Defoe published, in 1724, "The great Law
of Subordination consider'd; or, the Insolence and Unsufferable
Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir'd into," to be
convinced of our vast advance in human sympathy--and a revival of
our American spirit toward the word would be a wholesome course. In
the mouths of many who use it to excess--those mainly at fault are
innocently imitative, unthinking, or pretentious women--it sounds
ungracious, if not vulgar, and distinctly untrue to those who made
the country for us and desirable for us to live in; and untrue also
to the best social feeling of to-day. It is still for a genuine
American rather hard to imagine a person such as the word "servant"
connotes--a lackey, a receiver of tips of any sort--with an
election ballot in hand and voting thinkingly, knowingly,
intelligently for the guidance of our great government. It would
not have been so difficult for the old GREEK of Athens to vote upon
the Pnyx as for such a man to vote aright for us. And not
infrequently, in the ups and downs of speculation and the mushroom
growth and life of fortunes among us, the "servant," to use the
old biblical phrase, is sometimes greater in moral, intellectual,
and social graces than his "lord." The term belongs to times, and
the temperamental condition of times when traces of slavery were
common, and when employers believed, and acted upon the faith, that
they hired not a person's labor but the person himself--or
herself--who was subject to a sort of ownership and control.
Let us remand the word to the days of Dean Swift and such
conditions as the tremendous satire of his "Directions to Servants"
exhibited, in which except perhaps in Swift's great heart--there
was neither the humanity of our times, nor the courtesy of our
times, nor the sure knowledge of our times--which endeavor to
create, and, in truth, are gradually making trained and skilful
workers in every department, and demand in return for service with
perfectness as its aim, independence of the person, dignified
treatment and genuine respect from the employer.
All these things the women's household and cook-books will be, nay,
are, gradually teaching, and that which Charles Carter, "lately
cook to his Grace the Duke of Argyle," wrote in 1730 may still hold
good: "'Twill be very easy," said Master Carter, "for an ordinary
Cook when he is well-instructed in the most Elegant Parts of his
Profession to lower his Hand at any time; and he that can
excellently perform in a Courtly and Grand Manner, will never be at
a Loss in any other." When this future knowledge and adjustment
come we shall be free from the tendencies which Mistress Glasse,
after her outspoken manner, describes of her own generation: "So
much is the blind folly of this age," cries the good woman, "that
they would rather be imposed upon by a French booby than give
encouragement to a good English cook."
Economic changes such as we have indicated must in measurable time
ensue. The science and the art of conducting a house are now
obtaining recognition in our schools. Not long, and the knowledge
will be widespread. Its very existence, and the possibility of its
diffusion, is a result of the nineteenth century movement for the
broadening of women's knowledge and the expansion of their
interests and independence--this wedded with the humane conviction
that the wisest and fruitfullest use of scientific deduction and
skill is in the bettering of human life. Behind and giving potence
to these impulses is the fellowship, liberty, and equality of human
kind--the great idea of democracy.
Already we have gone back to the wholesomeness of our English
forebears' estimate that the physician and cook are inseparable.
Further still, we may ultimately retrace our ideas, and from the
point of view of economics and sociology declare that with us, as
with the old Jews and Greeks, the priest and the cook are one.
PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
And this I sweare by blackest brooke of hell,
I am no pick-purse of another's wit.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Yet these mine owne, I wrong not other men,
Nor traffique farther then this happy clime,
Nor filch from Portes, nor from Petrarchs pen,
A fault too common in this latter time.
Divine Sir Philip, I avouch thy writ,
I am no pick-purse of another's wit.
MICHAEL DRAYTON
A thing always becomes his at last who says
it best, and thus makes it his own.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
AMONG the jocularities of literature none is greater than Squire
Bickerstaff's; and none has had greater results--with perhaps one
exception. The practicality of the Squire's jest and the flavor of
it suited the century of Squire Western rather than our own. But
its excuse was in the end it served of breaking the old
astrologer's hold upon the people.
Jonathan Swift is the writer to whom the original Bickerstaff
squibs are in the main to be ascribed. It is due to Swift's clarity
and strength that they are among the best of literary fooling.
But Swift was not alone. He had the help of Addison, Steele, Prior,
Congreve, and other wits of Will's Coffee-House and St. James's.
Together they set all London laughing. Upon Swift's shoulders,
however, falls the onus of the joke which must have been his
recreation amid pamphleteering and the smudging of his
ecclesiastical hand with political ink. It happened in 1708.
The English almanac was not in Swift's day as in later times a
simple calendar of guesses about the weather. It was rather a
"prognosticator" in ambiguous phrase of war, pestilence, murder,
and such horrors as our yellow press nowadays serves up to readers,
like in development to the conning public of the old almanacs. It
was at all times solemn and dogmatic. What the almanac
prognosticated was its philomath's duty to furnish. His science and
prescience builded a supposed influence of the stars and their
movements upon the moral life of man.
Squire Bickerstaff's jest had to do with almanac-makers, and was
directed against a chief pretender, Dr. Partridge, the astrologer
and philomath Pope refers to when he speaks of the translation of
the raped "Lock" to the skies:
"This Partridge soon shall view in cloudless skies,
When next he looks through Galileo's eyes;
And hence th' egregious wizard shall foredoom
The fate of Louis and the fall of Rome."
In the seventeenth century the ascendency of these charlatans had.
become alarming. One of the most adroit and unscrupulous of their
number--William Lilly--had large following. They not only had the
popular ear, but now and then a man like Dryden inclined to them.
Nor did Sir Thomas Browne "reject a sober and regulated astrology."
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the scandal of their
excesses was growing, and it was then that Swift came forward--just
as Swift was constantly coming forward with his great humanity, in
one instance to save Ireland the infliction of Wood's halfpence,
and again in protest against English restriction of Irish trade;
poor Swift's heart was always with the poor, the duped and
undefended--it was then that Swift came forward with "Predictions
for the year 1708. Wherein the Month, and the Day of the Month, are
set down, the Person named, and the great Actions and Events of
next Year particularly related, as They will come to Pass. Written
to Prevent the People of England from being farther imposed on by
the vulgar Almanack-Makers."
The surname of the signature, "Isaac Bickerstaff," Swift took from
a locksmith's sign. The Isaac he added as not commonly in use.
"I have considered," he begins, "the gross abuse of astrology in
this kingdom, and upon debating the matter with myself, I could not
possibly lay the fault upon the art, but upon those gross
impostors, who set up to be the artists. I know several learned men
have contended that the whole is a cheat; that it is absurd and
ridiculous to imagine the stars can have any influence at all upon
human actions, thoughts, or inclinations; and whoever has not bent
his studies that way may be excused for thinking so, when he sees
in how wretched a manner that noble art is treated by a few mean,
illiterate traders between us and the stars; who import a yearly
stock of nonsense, lies, folly, and impertinence, which they offer
to the world as genuine from the planets, though they descend from
no greater a height than their own brains. . . .
"As for the few following predictions, I now offer the world, I
forebore to publish them till I had perused the several Almanacks
for the year we are now entered upon. I found them all in the usual
strain, and I beg the reader will compare their manner with mine:
and here I make bold to tell the world that I lay the whole credit
of my art upon the truth of these predictions; and I will be
content that Partridge and the rest of his clan may hoot me for a
cheat and impostor, if I fail in any single particular of moment. . . .
"My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it to show
how ignorant these sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own
concerns: it relates to Partridge, the Almanack-maker. I have
consulted the star of his nativity by my own rules, and find he
will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at
night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it,
and settle his affairs in time. . . ."
An "Answer to Bickerstaff by a Person of Quality," evidently from
the hand of Swift and his friends, followed these "Predictions."
"I have not observed for some years past," it begins, "any
insignificant paper to have made more noise, or be more greedily
bought, than that of these Predictions. . . . I shall not enter
upon the examination of them; but think it very incumbent upon the
learned Mr. Partridge to take them into his consideration, and lay
as many errors in astrology as possible to Mr. Bickerstaff's
account. He may justly, I think, challenge the 'squire to publish
the calculation he has made of Partridge's nativity, by the credit
of which he so determinately pronounces the time and manner of his
death; and Mr. Bickerstaff can do no less in honour, than give Mr.
Partridge the same advantage of calculating his, by sending him an
account of the time and place of his birth, with other particulars
necessary for such a work. By which, no doubt, the learned world
will be engaged in the dispute, and take part on each side
according as they are inclined. . . ."
"The Accomplishment of the first of Mr. Bickerstaff's Predictions,
being an Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge, the Almanack-Maker,
upon the 29th instant in a Letter to a Person of Honour, written in
the year 1708," continues the jocularity.
"My Lord: In obedience to your Lordship's commands, as well as to
satisfy my own curiosity, I have some days past inquired constantly
after Partridge the Almanack-maker, of whom it was foretold in Mr.
Bickerstaff's Predictions, published about a month ago, that he
should die the 29th instant, about eleven at night, of a raging
fever. . . . I saw him accidentally once or twice, about ten days
before he died, and observed he began very much to droop and
languish, though I hear his friends did not seem to apprehend him
in any danger. About two or three days ago he grew ill,. . . but
when I saw him he had his understanding as well as ever I knew, and
spoke strong and hearty, without any seeming uneasiness or
constraint [saying]. . . . `I am a poor ignorant fellow, bred to a
mean trade, yet I have sense enough to know that all pretences of
foretelling by astrology are deceits for this manifest reason:
because the wise and the learned, who can only judge whether there
be any truth in this science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at
and despise it; and none but the poor, ignorant vulgar give it any
credit, and that only upon the word of such silly wretches as I and
my fellows, who can hardly write or read.'. . .
"After half an hour's conversation I took my leave, being almost
stifled with the closeness of the room. I imagined he could not
hold out long, and therefore withdrew to a little coffee-house hard
by, leaving a servant at the house with orders to come immediately
and tell me, as near as he could, the minute when Partridge should
expire, which was not above two hours after."
The burlesque next before the public, "Squire Bickerstaff detected;
or, the Astrological Impostor convicted, by John Partridge, student
of physic and astrology, a True and Impartial account of the
Proceedings of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., against me," was doubtless
drawn up by Addison's friend Yalden, whom Scott speaks of as
"Partridge's near neighbor."
"The 28th of March, Anno Dom. 1708," it begins, "being the night
this sham prophet had so impudently fixed for my last, which made
little impression on myself: but I cannot answer for my whole
family. for my wife, with concern more than usual, prevailed on me
to take somewhat to sweat for a cold; and between the hours of
eight and nine to go to bed; the maid, as she was warming my bed,
with a curiosity natural to young wenches, runs to the window, and
asks of one passing the street who the bell tolled for? Dr.
Partridge, says he, the famous almanack-maker, who died suddenly
this evening: the poor girl, provoked, told him he lied like a
rascal; the other very sedately replied, the sexton had so informed
him, and if false, he was to blame for imposing upon a stranger.
She asked a second, and a third, as they passed, and every one was
in the same tone. Now, I do not say these are accomplices to a
certain astrological 'squire, and that one Bickerstaff might be
sauntering thereabout, because I will assert nothing here, but what
I dare attest for plain matter of fact. My wife at this fell into
a violent disorder, and I must own I was a little discomposed at
the oddness of the accident. In the mean time one knocks at my
door; Betty runs down, and opening, finds a sober grave person,
who modestly inquires if this was Dr. Partridge's? She, taking him
for some cautious city patient, that came at that time for privacy,
shews him into the dining-room. As soon as I could compose myself,
I went to him, and was surprised to find my gentleman mounted on a
table with a two-foot rule in his hand, measuring my walls, and
taking the dimensions of the room. Pray, sir, says I, not to
interrupt you, have you any business with me?--Only, sir, replies
he, order the girl to bring me a better light, for this is a very
dim one.--Sir, says I, my name is Partridge.--O! the doctor's
brother, belike, cries he; the staircase, I believe, and these two
apartments hung in close mourning will be sufficient, and only a
strip of bays round the other rooms. The doctor must needs die
rich, he had great dealings in his way for many years; if he had no
family coat, you had as good use the escutcheons of the company,
they are as showish, and will look as magnificent, as if he was
descended from the blood royal.--With that I assumed a greater air
of authority, and demanded who employed him, or how he came
there?--Why, I was sent, sir, by the company of undertakers, says
he, and they were employed by the honest gentleman, who is executor
to the good doctor departed; and our rascally porter, I believe, is
fallen fast asleep with the black cloth and sconces, or he had been
here, and we might have been tacking up by this time.--Sir, says I,
pray be advised by a friend, and make the best of your speed out of
my doors, for I hear my wife's voice (which, by the by, is pretty
distinguishable), and in that corner of the room stands a good
cudgel, which somebody has felt before now; if that light in her
hands, and she know the business you come about, without consulting
the stars, I can assure you it will be employed very much to the
detriment of your person.--Sir, cries he, bowing with great
civility, I perceive extreme grief for the loss of the doctor
disorders you a little at present, but early in the morning I will
wait on you with all the necessary materials. . . .
"Well, once more I got my door closed, and prepared for bed, in
hopes of a little repose after so many ruffling adventures; just as
I was putting out my light in order to it, another bounces as hard
as he can knock; I open the window and ask who is there and what he
wants? I am Ned, the sexton, replies he, and come to know whether
the doctor left any orders for a funeral sermon, and where he is to
be laid, and whether his grave is to be plain or bricked?--Why,
sirrah, say I, you know me well enough; you know I am not dead, and
how dare you affront me after this manner?--Alackaday, sir, replies
the fellow, why it is in print, and the whole town knows you are
dead; why, there is Mr. White, the joiner, is fitting screws to
your coffin; he will be here with it in an instant: he was afraid
you would have wanted it before this time. . . . In short, what
with undertakers, embalmers, joiners, sextons, and your damned
elegy hawkers upon a late practitioner in physic and astrology, I
got not one wink of sleep the whole night, nor scarce a moment's
rest ever since. . . .
"I could not stir out of doors for the space of three months after
this, but presently one comes up to me in the street, Mr.
Partridge, that coffin you was last buried in, I have not yet been
paid for: Doctor, cries another dog, how do you think people can
live by making of graves for nothing? next time you die, you may
even toll out the bell yourself for Ned. A third rogue tips me by
the elbow, and wonders how I have the conscience to sneak abroad
without paying my funeral expenses.--Lord, says one, I durst have
swore that was honest Dr. Partridge, my old friend, but, poor man,
he is gone.--I beg your pardon, says another, you look so like my
old acquaintance that I used to consult on some private occasions;
but, alack, he is gone the way of all flesh.--Look, look, look, cries
a third, after a competent space of staring at me, would not one think
our neighbour, the almanack-maker, was crept out of his grave, to take
the other peep at the stars in this world, and shew how much he is
improved in fortune-telling by having taken a journey to the other?...
"My poor wife is run almost distracted with being called widow Partridge,
when she knows it is false; and once a term she is cited into the court
to take out letters of administration. But the greatest grievance is a
paltry quack that takes up my calling just under my nose, and in his
printed directions, with N. B.--says he lives in the house of the late
ingenious Mr. John Partridge, an eminent practitioner in leather,
physic, and astrology...." The astrologer, forgetting to refer to the
stars for evidence, indignantly declared himself to be alive, and
Swift's returning "Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., against what
is objected to by Mr. Partridge in his Almanack for the present year,
1709, by the said Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.," complains:
"Mr. Partridge has been lately pleased to treat me after a very rough
manner in that which is called his almanack for the present year...
[regarding] my predictions, which foretold the death of Mr. Partridge
to happen on March 29, 1708. This he is pleased to contradict absolutely
in the almanack he has published for the present year....
"Without entering into criticisms of chronology about the hour of his
death, I shall only prove that Mr. Partridge is not alive. And my first
argument is this: about a thousand gentlemen having bought his almanacks
for this year, merely to find what he said against me, at every line they
read, they would lift up their eyes, and cry out betwixt rage and
laughter, `they were sure no man alive ever writ such damned stuff as
this.' Neither did I ever hear that opinion disputed:. . .
Therefore, if an uninformed carcase walks still about and is
pleased to call himself Partridge, Mr. Bickerstaff does not think
himself any way answerable for that. Neither had the said carcase
any right to beat the poor boy who happened to pass by it in the
street, crying, `A full and true account of Dr. Partridge's death,'
etc.
". . . I will plainly prove him to be dead, out of his own almanack
for this year, and from the very passage which he produces to make
us think him alive. He there says `he is not only now alive, but
was also alive upon that very 29th of March which I foretold he
should die on': by this he declares his opinion that a man may be
alive now who was not alive a twelvemonth ago. And indeed there
lies the sophistry of his argument. He dares not assert he was
alive ever since that 29th of March, but that he `is now alive and
was so on that day': I grant the latter; for he did not die till,
night, as appears by the printed account of his death, in a letter
to a lord; and whether he be since revived, I leave the world to
judge. . . ."
The joke had gained its end; the astrologer and philomath had been
ridiculed out of existence. But the name of the "astrological
'squire" was in everybody's mouth; and when in April, 1709, Steele
began "The Tatler," Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, spoke in the
dedication of a gentleman who "had written Predictions, and Two or
Three other Pieces in my Name, which had render'd it famous through
all Parts of Europe; and by an inimitable Spirit and Humour, raised
it to as high a Pitch of Reputation as it could possibly arrive at."
The Inquisition in Portugal had, with utmost gravity, condemned
Bickerstaff's predictions and the readers of them, and had burnt
his predictions. The Company of Stationers in London obtained in
1709 an injunction against the issuing of any almanac by John
Partridge, as if in fact he were dead.
If the fame of this foolery was through all parts of Europe, it
must also have crossed to the English colonies of America, and by
reference to this fact we may explain the curious literary parallel
Poor Richard's Almanac affords. Twenty-five years later Benjamin
Franklin played the selfsame joke in Philadelphia.
Franklin was but two years old when Swift and his Bickerstaff
coadjutors were jesting. But by the time he had grown and wandered
to Philadelphia and become a journeyman printer--by 1733--Addison,
Steele, Prior, and Congreve had died, and Swift's wonderful mind was
turned upon and eating itself in the silent deanery of St. Patrick's.
Conditions about him gave Franklin every opportunity for the jest.
The almanac in the America of 1733 had even greater acceptance than
the like publication of England in Isaac Bickerstaff's day. No
output of the colonial press, not even the publication of
theological tracts, was so frequent or so remunerative. It was the
sole annual which commonly penetrated the farmhouse of the
colonists, where it hung in neighborly importance near the Bible,
Fox's "Book of Martyrs," and Jonathan Edwards's tractate on "The
Freedom of the Human Will." And it had uses. Besides furnishing a
calendar, weather prophecies, and jokes, it added receipts for
cooking, pickling, dyeing, and in many ways was the "Useful
Companion" its title-page proclaimed.
So keen, practical, and energetic a nature as Franklin's could not
let the opportunity pass for turning a penny, and with the
inimitable adaptability that marked him all his life he begins his
Poor Richard of 1733:
"Courteous Reader, I might in this place attempt to gain thy favour
by declaring that I write Almanacks with no other view than that of
the publick good, but in this I should not be sincere; and men are
now-a-days too wise to be deceiv'd by pretences, how specious
soever. The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and
my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud; she can not
bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow, while I do
nothing but gaze at the stars; and has threatened more than once to
burn all my books and rattling-traps (as she calls my instruments),
if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my
family. The printer has offer'd me some considerable share of the
profits, and I have thus began to comply with my dame's desire.
"Indeed, this motive would have had force enough to have made me
publish an Almanack many years since, had it not been overpowered
by my regard for my good friend and fellow-student, Mr. Titan
Leeds, whose interest I was extreamly unwilling to hurt. But this
obstacle (I am far from speaking it with pleasure) is soon to be
removed, since inexorable death, who was never known to respect
merit, has already prepared the mortal dart, the fatal sister has
already extended her destroying shears, and that ingenious man must
soon be taken from us. He dies, by my calculation, made at his
request, on Oct. 17, 1733, 3 ho. 29 m., P.M., at the very instant
of the o' of ***CIRCLE-DOT and FEMALE***. By his own calculation he will
survive till the 26th of the same month. This small difference
between us we have disputed whenever we have met these nine years
past; but at length he is inclinable to agree with my judgment.
Which of us is most exact, a little time will now determine. As,
therefore, these Provinces may not longer expect to see any of his
performances after this year, I think myself free to take up my
task, and request a share of publick encouragement, which I am the
more apt to hope for on this account, that the buyer of my Almanack
may consider himself not only as purchasing an useful utensil, but
as performing an act of charity to his poor
"Friend and servant,
"R. SAUNDERS."
Franklin had a more eager biter than Partridge proved to
Bickerstaff's bait, and Titan Leeds, in his American Almanack for
1734, showed how uneasy was the hook:
"Kind Reader, Perhaps it may be expected that I should say
something concerning an Almanack printed for the Year 1733, said to
be writ by Poor Richard or Richard Saunders, who for want of other
matter was pleased to tell his Readers, that he had calculated my
Nativity, and from thence predicts my Death to be the 17th of
October, 1733. At 29 min. past 3 a-clock in the Afternoon, and that
these Provinces may not expect to see any more of his (Titan Leeds)
Performances, and this precise Predicter, who predicts to a Minute,
proposes to succeed me in Writing of Almanacks; but
notwithstanding his false Prediction, I have by the Mercy of God
lived to write a diary for the Year 1734, and to publish the Folly
and Ignorance of this presumptuous Author. Nay, he adds another
gross Falsehood in his Almanack, viz.--That by my own Calculation,
I shall survive until the 26th of the said Month (October), which
is as untrue as the former, for I do not pretend to that Knowledge,
altho, he has usurpt the Knowledge of the Almighty herein, and
manifested himself a Fool and a Lyar. And by the mercy of God I
have lived to survive this conceited Scriblers Day and Minute
whereon he has predicted my Death; and as I have supplyed my
Country with Almanacks for three seven Years by past, to general
Satisfaction, so perhaps I may live to write when his Performances
are Dead. Thus much from your annual Friend, Titan Leeds, October
18, 1733, 3 ho. 33 min. P.M."
". . . In the preface to my last Almanack," wrote Franklin, in
genuine humor, in Poor Richard for 1734, "I foretold the death of
my dear old friend and fellow-student, the learned and ingenious
Mr. Titan Leeds, which was to be the 17th of October, 1733, 3 h.,
29 m., P.M., at the very instant of the o' of ***CIRCLE-DOT and
FEMALE.*** By his own calculation, he was to survive till the 26th of
the same month, and expire in the time of the eclipse, near 11
o'clock A.M. At which of these times he died, or whether he be
really yet dead, I cannot at this present writing positively assure
my readers; forasmuch as a disorder in my own family demanded my
presence, and would not permit me, as I had intended, to be with
him in his last moments, to receive his last embrace, to close his
eyes, and do the duty of a friend in performing the last offices to
the departed. Therefore it is that I cannot positively affirm
whether he be dead or not; for the stars only show to the skilful
what will happen in the natural and universal chain of causes and
effects; but 'tis well known, that the events which would otherwise
certainly happen, at certain times, in the course of nature, are
sometimes set aside or postpon'd, for wise and good reasons, by
the immediate particular disposition of Providence; which
particular disposition the stars can by no means discover or
foreshow. There is, however (and I can not speak it without
sorrow), there is the strongest probability that my dear friend is
no more; for there appears in his name, as I am assured, an
Almanack for the year 1734, in which I am treated in a very gross
and unhandsome manner, in which I am called a false predicter, an
ignorant, a conceited scribbler, a fool and a lyar. Mr. Leeds was
too well bred to use any man so indecently and so scurrilously, and
moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary; so
that it is to be feared that pamphlet may be only a contrivance of
somebody or other, who hopes, perhaps, to sell two or three years'
Almanacks still, by the sole force and virtue of Mr. Leeds' name.
But, certainly, to put words into the mouth of a gentleman and a
man of letters against his friend, which the meanest and most
scandalous of the people might be ashamed to utter even in a
drunken quarrel, is an unpardonable injury to his memory, and an
imposition upon the publick.
"Mr. Leeds was not only profoundly skilful in the useful science he
profess'd, but he was a man of exemplary sobriety, a most sincere
friend, and an exact performer of his word. These valuable
qualifications, with many others, so much endeared him to me, that
although it should be so, that, contrary to all probability,
contrary to my prediction and his own, he might possibly be yet
alive, yet my loss of honour, as a prognosticator, cannot afford me
so much mortification as his life, health, and safety would give me
joy and satisfaction. . . ."
Again, Leeds, in The American Almanack for 1735, returns Franklin's jest:
"Corteous and Kind Reader: My Almanack being in its usual Method,
needs no Explanation; but perhaps it may be expected by some that
I shall say something concerning Poor Richard, or otherwise Richard
Saunders's Almanack, which I suppose was printed in the Year 1733
for the ensuing Year 1734, wherein he useth me with such Good
Manners, I can hardly find what to say to him, without it is to
advise him not to be too proud because by his Predicting my Death,
and his writing an Almanack. . . .
"But if Falsehood and Inginuity be so rewarded, What may he expect
if ever he be in a capacity to publish that that is either Just or
according to Art? Therefore I shall say little more about it than,
as a Friend, to advise he will never take upon him to predict or
ascribe any Person's Death, till he has learned to do it better
than he did before. . . ."
To this exhortation Franklin makes the following gay sally in Poor
Richard for 1735.
". . . Whatever may be the musick of the spheres, how great soever
the harmony of the stars, 'tis certain there is no harmony among
the star-gazers: but they are perpetually growling and snarling at
one another like strange curs, or like some men at their wives. I
had resolved to keep the peace on my own part, and offend none of
them; and I shall persist in that resolution. But having receiv'd
much abuse from Titan Leeds deceas'd (Titan Leeds when living
would not have used me so): I say, having receiv'd much abuse from
the ghost of Titan Leeds, who pretends to be still living, and to
write Almanacks in spight of me and my predictions, I can not help
saying, that tho' I take it patiently, I take it very unkindly. And
whatever he may pretend, 'tis undoubtedly true that he is really
defunct and dead. First, because the stars are seldom disappointed,
never but in the case of wise men, sapiens dominabitur asties, and
they foreshadowed his death at the time I predicted it. Secondly,
'twas requisite and necessary he should die punctually at that time
for the honor of astrology, the art professed both by him and his
father before him. Thirdly, 'tis plain to every one that reads his
two last Almanacks (for 1734 and '35), that they are not written
with that life his performances used to be written with; the wit is
low and flat; the little hints dull and spiritless; nothing smart
in them but Hudibras's verses against astrology at the heads of the
months in the last, which no astrologer but a dead one would have
inserted, and no man living would or could write such stuff as the
rest. But lastly, I shall convince him from his own words that he
is dead (ex ore suo condemnatus est); for in his preface to his
Almanack for 1734, he says: `Saunders adds another gross falsehood
in his Almanack, viz., that by my own calculation, I shall survive
until the 26th of the said month, October, 1733, which is as
untrue as the former.' Now if it be as Leeds says, untrue and a
gross falsehood, that he survived till the 26th of October, 1733,
then it is certainly true that he died before that time; and if he
died before that time he is dead now to all intents and purposes,
anything he may say to the contrary notwithstanding. And at what
time before the 26th is it so likely he should die, as at the time
by me predicted, viz., the 17th of October aforesaid? But if some
people will walk and be troublesome after death, it may perhaps be
borne with a little, because it cannot well be avoided, unless one
would be at the pains and expense of laying them in the Red Sea;
however, they should not presume too much upon the liberty allowed
them. I know confinement must needs be mighty irksome to the free
spirit of an astronomer, and I am too compassionate to proceed
suddenly to extremities with it; nevertheless, tho, I resolve with
reluctance, I shall not long defer, if it does not speedily learn
to treat its living friends with better manners.
"I am,
"Courteous reader,
"Your obliged friend and servant,
"R. SAUNDERS."
Here for the nonce the jeu d'esprit ended. In carrying the matter
further Franklin hardly showed the taste of Bickerstaff. The
active, bristling, self-assertive GREEK which characterized his
early manhood led him further on to stand over the very grave of
Leeds. Before he made his Almanac for 1740 his competitor had died.
But even Leeds dead he seemed to deem fair play.
"October 7, 1739.
"COURTEOUS READER: You may remember that in my first Almanack,
published for the year 1733, I predicted the death of my dear
friend, Titan Leeds, Philomat, to happen that year on the 17th day
of October, 3 h. 29 m. P.M. The good man, it seems, died
accordingly. But W. B. and A. B. [320-6]* have continued to publish
Almanacks in his name ever since; asserting for some years that he
was still living. At length when the truth could no longer be
concealed from the world, they confessed his death in their
Almanack for 1739, but pretended that he died not till last year,
and that before his departure he had furnished them with
calculations for 7 years to come.--Ah, my friends, these are poor
shifts and thin disguises; of which indeed I should have taken
little or no notice, if you had not at the same time accused me as
a false predictor; an aspersion that the more affects me as my
whole livelyhood depends on a contrary character.
"But to put this matter beyond dispute, I shall acquaint the world
with a fact, as strange and surprising as it is true; being as
follows, viz.:
"On the 4th instant, toward midnight, as I sat in my little study
writing this Preface, I fell fast asleep; and continued in that
condition for some time, without dreaming any thing, to my
knowledge. On awaking I found lying before me the following, viz.:
"`DEAR FRIEND SAUNDERS: My respect for you continues even in this
separate state; and I am griev'd to see the aspersions thrown on
you by the malevolence of avaricious publishers of Almanacks, who
envy your success. They say your prediction of my death in 1733 was
false, and they pretend that I remained alive many years after. But
I do hereby certify that I did actually die at that time, precisely
at the hour you mention'd, with a variation only of 5 min. 53 sec.,
which must be allow'd to be no great matter in such cases. And I do
further declare that I furnish'd them with no calculations of the
planets' motions, etc., seven years after my death, as they are
pleased to give out: so that the stuff they publish as an Almanack
in my name is no more mine than 'tis yours.
"`You will wonder, perhaps, how this paper comes written on your
table. You must know that no separate spirits are under any
confinement till after the final settlement of all accounts. In the
meantime we wander where we please, visit our old friends, observe
their actions, enter sometimes into their imaginations, and give
them hints waking or sleeping that may be of advantage to them.
Finding you asleep, I enter'd your left nostril, ascended into
your brain, found out where the ends of those nerves were fastened
that move your right hand and fingers, by the help of which I am
now writing unknown to you; but when you open your eyes you will
see that the hand written is mine, tho, wrote with yours.
"`The people of this infidel age, perhaps, will hardly believe this
story. But you may give them these three signs by which they shall
be convinced of the truth of it.--About the middle of June next, J.
J----n,[324-7]* Philomat, shall be openly reconciled to the Church
of Rome, and give all his goods and chattels to the chappel, being
perverted by a certain country schoolmaster. On the 7th of
September following my old Friend W. B----t shall be sober 9 hours,
to the astonishment of all his neighbours:--And about the same time
W. B. and A. B. will publish another Almanack in my name, in spight
of truth and common sense.
"`As I can see much clearer into futurity, since I got free from
the dark prison of flesh, in which I was continually molested and
almost blinded with fogs arising from tiff, and the smoke of burnt
drams; I shall in kindness to you, frequently give you information
of things to come, for the improvement of your Almanack: being,
Dear Dick, Your Affectionate Friend,
"`T. LEEDS.'
"For my own part, I am convinced that the above letter is genuine.
If the reader doubts of it, let him carefully observe the three
signs; and if they do not actually come to pass, believe as he
pleases. I am his humble Friend,
"R. SAUNDERS."
In this wise ended Poor Richard's jest. Franklin's style throughout
is so simple and direct that one is at first inclined to scout the
suggestion that the joke is not entirely original. It is
impossible, however, to suppose that Franklin, with his broad
reading, did not know Squire Bickerstaff's. The development of the
humor is wholly imitated. But Franklin made the method his own so
thoroughly that his wit has those keener, subtler, more agile
qualities which have distinguished American from the slower and
sedater humor of the English. In the Bickerstaff jocularity
evidences of the death of Partridge are enumerated in material
surroundings of a not too prosperous London quack. Franklin, on the
other hand, ironically and graphically reasons upon supposititious
traits and qualities of character and breeding.
In England, Swift's squib having given the death-blow to
astrology, "Merlinus Liberatus, by John Partridge," was published
years after, but shorn of its specious and misleading pretences.
Franklin's jesting was more self-seeking.
Not one of Franklin's biographers or editors has referred to the
Bickerstaff joke. Upon the contrary, in an "Introduction to
Fac-simile of Poor Richard's Almanack for 1733," published by The
Duodecimos in 1894, it is asserted that Franklin "in a strain of
delightful satire upon the already venerable pretensions of
almanac-makers to foretell the future,. . . disposes of this
difficulty by a method so novel, so ingenious, and withal of an
illuminating power so far-reaching as to set the whole colony
talking about it."
It need hardly be added that none of Swift's biographers--all being
English--have hinted at Franklin's pleasantry.
The inextinguishable laughter--the true Homeric GREEK(2)--which is
the atmosphere of both incidents, fits them to rank with the
imaginary durance of Sancho Panza upon his island, or with Tartarin
in Tarascon, or, to go to the first humor of literature, with the
advance and retreat of Thersites in the council of Zeus--nourished
kings. And in Britain and America all our heroes were real.
Upon other occasions than the Saunders-Leeds jesting Franklin loved
playful feint; he had "Bagatelles" for his delight. It was a
quizzical side of the character which made him the first of our
notable American humorists. To amuse himself with an oriental
apologue which he called "The Parable of Persecution," he had the
story bound with a Bible. From this book he would read the legend
aloud, amazing his auditors that so beautiful a scriptural passage
had escaped their knowledge.
The form in which Franklin cast the tale is this:
"And it came to pass after these things, that Abraham sat in the
door of his tent, about the going down of the sun.
"And behold a man, bowed with age, came from the way of the
wilderness, leaning on a staff.
"And Abraham arose and met him, and said unto him, `Turn in, I pray
thee, and wash thy feet, and tarry all night, and thou shalt arise
early on the morrow, and go thy way.'
"But the man said, `Nay, for I will abide under this tree.'
"And Abraham pressed him greatly: so he turned and they went into
the tent, and Abraham baked unleavened bread, and they did eat.
"And when Abraham saw that the man blessed not God, he said unto
him, `Wherefore dost thou not worship the most high God, Creator of
heaven and earth?'
"And the man answered and said, `I do not worship the God thou
speakest of, neither do I call upon his name; for I have made to
myself a god, which abideth alway in mine house, and provideth me
with all things.'
"And Abraham's zeal was kindled against the man, and he arose and
fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness.
"And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, `Abraham, where
is the stranger?'
"And Abraham answered and said, `Lord, he would not worship thee,
neither would he call upon thy name; therefore have I driven him
out from before my face into the wilderness.'
"And God said, `Have I borne with him these hundred and ninety and
eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding
his rebellion against me; and couldst not thou, that art thyself a
sinner, bear with him one night?'
"And Abraham said, `Let not the anger of the Lord wax hot against
his servant; lo, I have sinned; lo, I have sinned; forgive me, I
pray thee.'
"And Abraham arose, and went forth into the wilderness, and sought
diligently for the man, and found him, and returned with him to the
tent; and when he had treated him kindly, he sent him away on the
morrow with gifts.
"And God spake again unto Abraham, saying, `For this thy sin shall
thy seed be afflicted four hundred years in a strange land.
"`But for thy repentance will I deliver them; and they shall come
forth with power, and with gladness of heart, and with much substance.'"
Franklin's fine literary sense and feeling would doubtless have
told him that the tale was oriental, even if Jeremy Taylor, whose
"Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying" it brings to a finish,
had not introduced it with the words, "I end with a story which I
find in the Jews' book.[331-8]*
"When Abraham sat at his tent-door, according to his custom,
waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stooping and
leaning on his staff, weary with age and travail, coming toward
him, who was a hundred years of age; he received him kindly, washed
his feet, provided supper, caused him to sit down; but, observing
that the old man eat and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on
his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of heaven.
The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and
acknowledged no other god. At which answer Abraham grew so
zealously angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and
exposed him to all the evils of the night and an unguarded
condition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham, and
asked him where the stranger was. He replied, `I thrust him away
because he did not worship thee.' God answered him, `I have
suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonoured me; and
couldst not thou endure him one night, when he gave thee no
trouble?' Upon this saith the story, Abraham fetched him back
again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction.
Go thou and do likewise, and thy charity will be rewarded by the
God of Abraham."
Franklin's pleasantries with this parable led Lord Kames to ask it
of him. The fertile Scotchman at once incorporated it in his
"Sketches of the History of Man," and published it in 1774,
accrediting it to Franklin. "The charge of plagiarism has, on this
account," says Bishop Heber, in his life of Jeremy Taylor, "been
raised against Franklin; though he cannot be proved to have given
it to Lord Kames as his own composition. With all Franklin's
abilities and amiable qualities," continues the clear-eyed bishop,
"there was a degree of quackery in his character which. . . has made
the imputation of such a theft more readily received against him
than it would have been against most other men of equal eminence."
In more finely sensitive writers who have treated Franklin there is
a feeling that he "borrowed." The words of the missionary bishop
show the sentiment was common in England a century and a quarter
ago. In our country the conviction was expressed with more spirit
in a colloquy[334-9]* between a New England man and a Virginian,
preserved in John Davis's manuscript, "Travels in America during
1798-99, 1800, 1801, 1802."
"I obtained," wrote Davis of his visit to Washington,
"accommodations at the Washington Tavern, which stands opposite the
Treasury. At this tavern I took my meals at the public table, where
there was every day to be found a number of clerks, employed at the
different offices under government, together with about
half-a-dozen Virginians and a few New England men. There was a
perpetual conflict between these Southern and Northern men, and one
night I was present at a vehement dispute, which terminated in the
loss of a horse, a saddle, and bridle. The dispute was about Dr.
Franklin; the man from New England, enthusiastic in what related
to Franklin, asserted that the Doctor, being self-taught, was
original in everything that he had ever published.
"The Virginian maintained that he was a downright plagiarist.
"_New England Man_.--Have you a horse here, my friend?
"_Virginian_.--Sir, I hope you do not suppose that I came hither on
foot from Virginia. I have him in Mr. White's stable, the prettiest
Chickasaw that ever trod upon four pasterns.
"_New England Man_.--And I have a bay mare that I bought for ninety
dollars in hard cash. Now I, my friend, will lay my bay mare
against your Chickasaw that Dr. Franklin is not a plagiarist.
"_Virginian_.--Done! go it! Waiter! You, waiter!
"The waiter obeyed the summons, and, at the order of the Virginian,
brought down a portmanteau containing both Franklin's
`Miscellanies' and Taylor's `Discourses.'
"The New England man then read from the former the celebrated
parable against persecution. . . . And after he had finished he
exclaimed that the `writer appeared inspired.'
"But the Virginian maintained that it all came to Franklin from
Bishop Taylor's book, printed more than a century ago. And the New
England man read from Taylor. . . . When he had done reading, a
laugh ensued; and the Virginian, leaping from his seat, called to
Atticus, the waiter, to put the bay mare in the next stall to the
Chickasaw and to give her half a gallon of oats more, upon the
strength of her having a new master!
"The New England man exhibited strong symptoms of chagrin, but
wagered `a brand-new saddle' that this celebrated epitaph of
Franklin's undergoing a new edition was original. The epitaph was
then read:
`The Body
of Benjamin Franklin, Printer
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its lettering and gilding),
Lies here, food for worms.
Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will (as he believ'd) appear once more,
In a new
And more beautiful Edition,
Corrected and Amended
By
The Author.'
"The Virginian then said that Franklin robbed a little boy of it.
`The very words, sir, are taken from a Latin epitaph written on a
bookseller, by an Eton scholar.
`Vitae _volumine_ peracto
Hic FINIS JACOBI TONSON[338]*
Perpoliti Sociorum Principis:
Qui velut Obstretrix Musarum
_In Lucem Edidit_
Felices Ingenii Partus.
Lugete Scriptorum Chorus,
Et Frangite Calamos!
Ille vester _Margine Erasus deletur_,
Sed haec postrema Inscriptio
Huic _Primae_ Mortis _Paginae_
Imprimatur,
Ne _Praelo Sepulchri_ commissus
Ipse _Editor careat Titulo_:
Hic Jacet _Bibliopola_
_Folio_ vitae delapso
Expectans _novam Editionem_
Auctoriem et Emendatiorem.'
"And then, says Mr. Davis, the bet was awarded the Virginian. He
referred to the `Gentleman's Magazine' for February, 1736, where
the Latin inscription accredited to the Eton scholar, with a
translation by a Mr. P----, was to be found.
"After this second decision the Virginian declared that he would
lay his boots against the New Englander's that Franklin's pretended
discovery of calming troubled waters by pouring upon them oil might
be found in the third book of Bede's `History of the Church;' or
that his facetious essay on the airbath is produced, word for word,
from Aubrey's `Miscellanies.' But the New Englander, who had lost
horse, saddle, and bridle, declined to run the risk on Dr. Franklin
of going home without his boots."
There are other instances of the philosopher's palpable taking. To
one, Franklin's editor, Mr. Bigelow, adverts when he notes in
Franklin's letter of November 5, 1789, to Alexander Smith: "I find
by your letter that every man has patience enough to hear calmly
and coolly the injuries done to other people. "The marvellous
precision and terseness of Swift--that keen, incisive melancholy
wit of his from which great writers have taken ideas and phrases as
gold-seekers have picked nuggets from California earth--Swift had
more finely said what Franklin stumbled after when he wrote that he
"never knew a man who could not bear the misfortunes of another
like a Christian."
Franklin had originality. His many devices are evidence. But
careful study of that which brought him much public
attention--bagatelles by which he attached himself to popular
affection--show all-round appropriation. He loved to stand in
public light--to hear applause of himself. He loved to quiz his
listeners, to bamboozle his readers. If his buying and applauding
public believed Poor Richard's proverbs sprang from his active mind
instead of having been industriously gathered from old English and
other folk proverbs and dyed with his practical humor--"the wisdom
of many ages and nations," as Franklin afterwards put it--that was
their blunder by which he would gain gold as well as glory. Even
"Richard Saunders" was not original with Franklin. It was the
pen-name of a compiler of English almanacs. The young printer
busily working his press doubtless chuckled at his deceptions--in
spite of his filched maxim about honesty being the best policy.
And it went with him all through life. His love of public applause,
his desire to accumulate and his gleaming, quizzical humor led him
on. His wonderful ease at adopting others, products and making them
his own one may admire if he turn his eyes from the moral
significance, the downright turpitude of not acknowledging the
source. Franklin's practice would certainly not stand the test of
universal application which his great contemporary, Kant, demanded
of all acts.
There has been of late endeavor to rehabilitate Franklin's
industrious common sense and praise its circumstance. So late as
last year our American ambassador to St. James addressed students
of the Workingmen's College in London upon the energy, self-help,
and sense of reality of this early American, and found the leading
features of his character to be honesty(!) and respect for facts.
It is, after all, a certain grace inherent in Franklin, a human
feeling, a genial simplicity and candor, a directness of utterance
and natural unfolding of his matter which are his perennial value
in a literary way, and which warrant the estimate of an English
critic who calls him the most readable writer yet known on the
western side of the Atlantic.
FOOTNOTES
(Transferred to "end-notes")
[13-1]* I include "women" because Lucy Stone once told me she
draughted some of the Kansas laws for married women while sitting
in the nursery with her baby on her knee. Other women worked with
her, she said. Their labor was in the fifties of the nineteenth
century--at the height of the movement to ameliorate the legal
condition of married women.
[54-2]* Other societies also have vitality. The sortie of a handful
of students one November night following election, a dinner each
year celebrates. Grangers supposedly inimical to the interests of
the University had won at the polls. The moon shone through a
white, frosty air; the earth was hard and resonant. What the
skulkers accomplished and the merry and hortative sequent to their
furtive feast were told at the time by the beloved professor of
Latin, the "professoris alicujus."
"T. C.'S" HORRIBILES.
Jam noctis media hora. In coelo nubila spissa
Stellas abstulerant. Umbrarum tempus erat quo
Horrenda ignavis monstra apparent. Pueri tum
Parvi matribus intus adhaerent. Non gratiorem
Noctem fur unquam invenit. Sed qui veniunt post
Hanc aedem veterem? Celebrantne aliqua horrida sacra
Mercurio furnm patrono? Discipuline?
Non possunt! Tuti in lectis omnes requiescunt!
Estne sodalicium studiosorum relevans se
Magnis a curis? Sed cur huc conveniunt tam
Furtivi? In manibus quidnam est vel sub tegnmentis?
O pudor! Et pullos et turkey non bene raptos!
Vina etiam subrepta professoris alicujus
(Horresco referens) e cella! Dedecus! Est nil
Tutum a furibus? En pullos nunc faucibus illis
Sorbent! Nunc sunt in terra, tum in ictu oculi non
Apparebunt omne in aeternum! Miseros pullos,
Infelices O pueros! Illi male capti
A pueris, sed hi capientur mox male (O! O!!)
A Plutone atro!
Forsan lapsis quinque diebus, cum sapiens vir
Omnes hos juvenes ad cenam magnificenter
Invitavit. Tempore sane adsunt. Bene lacti
Judex accipiunt et filia pulchra sodales
Hos furtivos. Ad mensam veniunt. Juvenes cur
Tam agitantur? Quid portentum conspiciunt nunc?
Protrudunt oculi quasi ranarnm! Nihil est in
Mensa praeter turkeys! Unus quoque catino!
Solum hoc, praeterea nil!
[218-3]* The translation is that of C.D. Yonge.
[228-4]* The ancient classic and early English writers afforded
many instances of their people's culinaria, and only when their
content became familiar did I find that the Rev. Richard Warner
had, in the last part of the eighteenth century, gone over the
ground and chosen like examples--perhaps because they were the
best. This quotation, and another one or two following, are solely
found in our libraries in his admirable book here cited. Master
Warner, writing nearer the old sources, had the advantage of
original manuscripts and collections.
[250-5]* "Tusser, they tell me, when thou wert alive,
Thou, teaching thrift, thyselfe could'st never thrive."
[320-6]* The printers, William and Andrew Bradford.
[324-7]* John Jerman
[331-8]* "The Jews' book" is, according to various researches,
believed to be "The Rod of Judah," a rabbinical work presented to
the Senate of Hamburg in the seventeenth century, and carrying the
legend in its Latin dedication. But the tale really dates back to
the "Bostan," or "Tree Garden," of the Persian poet Saadi, who
says, in another work, that he was a prisoner to the Crusaders, and
labored in company with fellow-captives who were Jews in the
trenches before Tripoli.
[334-9]* Used through the courtesy of the editor of "The William
and Mary College Quarterly."
[End.]