American Thumb-prints, by Kate Stephens.--a Project Gutenberg eBook

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 3

Copyright, 1905
By J. B. Lippincott Company

Published April, 1905

Electrotyped and Printed by
J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U. S. A.
5

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
6

PURITANS OF THE WEST

If it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? Robert Louis Stevenson
11

PURITANS OF THE WEST

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 12 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 13 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 women1 14 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 15 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:

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 17 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 18 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 mediæval and Spanish trapping of his prototype. His Dulcinea—an unexampled combination of idealism and practicality—his much-enduring 19 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 20 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 21 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 22 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 Cæsar, 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 23 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 24 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 ἐνθουσιαμóς. 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 25 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—

A sky whose mystery and melancholy, whose solitary calm and elemental rage 26 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 Bœotian, in fact, but it is long before his fat bottom lands will make a Bœotian 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 27 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 28 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, 29 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 30 Prohibitionism, the husband-man-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 31 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 32 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. 33

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

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.

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

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 hill-top 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 36 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 37 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. 38

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 39 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.

But the immediate thought or impulse to make our Western State institutions 40 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 41 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 42 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 43 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 44 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 æstivation 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 45 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-phis-pered 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 46 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 Fé railway, then it was over the hard-packed soil in most picturesque of pioneer fashions—a huge canvas-covered wagon carrying the family cook-stove, 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 47 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 48 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 49 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 cob-webbed 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 50 himself”—to use Anthony à Wood’s phrase—when Dekker sang—

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 × 50 × $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 51 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 wheat-furrow. 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 Sévigné reports herself to have done—and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sévigné relates. Now and then a young woman did say that she was living during her 52 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? 53 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 54 courtesies from one Greek letter society to another, then and there kindly wives of the professors matronizing.2 55

An early introduction into the battle of life breeds in us humans practicality and utilitarianism. Most unfortunately it disillusions. It takes from the imaginativeness 56 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 57 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, 58 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—

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 59 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 60 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 61 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 naïveté. One poor fellow had that defect of will which is mated at times with the humorous warmth which the Germans call gemüth, 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 62 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 Crœsus 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 63 on the heart-finger—these one might see hanging over and fingering—

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 64 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. 65 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 66 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 67 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 68 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 69 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 70 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 71 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. 72

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 73 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 74 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

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 76 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.

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! 77

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 infrequently asked in Hesperus University 78 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—τὰ Βέλτιστα—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, 79 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 80 glory, but each comes trailing clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stout-heartedness and courage for taking life in hand too many pæans cannot be chanted, or too many triumphant ἰώ 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, 81 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. 82

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 83 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 84 of life in some institutions in Chicago be at one with those of a thriving school where conditions are markedly kleinstädtisch.

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. 85

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

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

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 88 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 hearthstones for their family, and barns for herds and flocks. They marked off fields 89 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 90 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 91 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, 92 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 Church-Yard” 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 93 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 94 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 95 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— 96

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.”

97 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 98 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.

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 100 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 101 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 102 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 103 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.

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 105 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. 106

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 107 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——” 108

“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 109 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 110 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 Phædrus—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 111 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 réclame, 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 112 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.” 113

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!”

“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 114 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.” 115

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. 116

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 117 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.

Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain naïveté, 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 118 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.

“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.”

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 120 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 121 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. 122

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!”—’Αργὸος πολίτης χεῖνος ὡς χαχός γ’ ἀνήρ, 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,” “Ἔργον δ ουδὲν ὄνειδος, αεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος. And Hesiod’s words hold to the present day among genuine Americans. 123

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. 124 125

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 Schönberg
127

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

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 128 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. 129

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 130 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, τὰ ἔνδον. 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, 131 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 132 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 sæcula sæculorum. 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 133 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 134 have shaken with laughter ἄσβεστος. 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. 135 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 136 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 137 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 138 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 139 days pale before their self-denying discipline.

But instead of gaining, as in the mediæval 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.” 140

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 141 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. 142 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, légèreté; 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 143 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 mediævalism in ecclesiastic and other social affairs as real life—there have also come conceptions of the liberty 144 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 145 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 146 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 147 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 cañon; 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 148 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 149 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. 150

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 151 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 152 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 153 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. 154 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 155 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 Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his Florilegium—“A sympathetic 156 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 157 she knocks her skirt with her knees, and gives you the impression that her leg is crooked, that she does not lock her knee-joint. 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 γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις 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 158 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. 159

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 Mœra is punishing that awful crime of self-sufficing 160 ecclesiasticism. 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. 161

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

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 Lichfield, whereof ... as you would say, The field of dead corpses. Holinshed
163

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

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 Mœra, the lot no man can escape—comes upon one afresh upon this hill-top. What clay we are in the hands of fate! “ἅπαντα τíχτει χθὼν πάλιν τε λαμβáνει,” 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 164 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 165 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 166 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 handsome 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. 167

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 168 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 Mycenæ, 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 169 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 170 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—“über 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 171 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:

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, 172 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.

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, 173 “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.”

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 175 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 176 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.

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 178 Acre a shaft standing high in the soft light mourns the hazards of our passage through the world.

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 179 moss-covered, but underneath the lichen it reads:

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 windflowers and hepaticas of spring, or wandered midst the drifted needles of the pines in the clear moonlight of summer, athirst for the mother’s soul of comfort and courage.

Again in this intaglio “spelt by th’ 180 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 181 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,—μέγας ἐν τούτοις θεὸς, οὐδὲ γηράσχει.

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. 182

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. 183

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. 184 185

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

If a man recognise in woman any quality which transcends the qualities demanded in a plaything or handmaid—if he recognise in her the existence of an intellectual life 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

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

“I hate every woman!” cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a citation of the Florilegium of Stobæus. 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 188 Athens in his “Ecclesiazusæ,” and in the “Clouds” and his “Thesmophoriazusæ.” 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—

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 189 “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 became 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 190 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—

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. 191

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,”— 192 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 193 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 194 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, 195 “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 196 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 197 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 198 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—

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 199 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.

“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 200 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 201 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 202 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 203 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 204 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” 205 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 206 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 207 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, 208 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 209 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. 210

“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 Stobæus 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 ἀσθένεια. 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 211 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. 212 213

“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST

214
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

“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
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 Ægean Sea, but also the savor of tender kid and succulent pig, not to mention whole hectacombs, 216 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 συσσίτια (public meals), later called φειδίτια (spare meals), guarded against indulgence in eating. To be a good cook was to be banished from Sparta.

But with the Western Greeks, the 217 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 Deipnosophistæ—Supper of the “Wise Men—written by Athenæus—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 218 Greek authors whose works are now lost, but were still preserved in the time of Athenæus. 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.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
219 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 Athenæus 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 220 by these means their choking properties are taken away.

The writings of Athenæus have, however, a certain literary and, for his time as well as our own, an historic and archæologic flavor. The only ancient cook-book 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—

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 221 of increasing the size of the liver of the pig—just as the liver of the Strasbourg geese is enlarged for pâté 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 222 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 223 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 Cæsar, who was censured for over-nicety by his father, the Emperor Tiberius of Capreæ 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 224 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 225 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 super-abundant 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 Cæesar 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 226 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, 227 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 228 Culinariæ”4 is evidence of this:

“Domus Eegis 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, opynly to be holden for worshuppfull and honest peopull resorting 229 to his courte; and no more melis, nor brekefast, nor chambyr, but for his children in householde; for which four melys he ordeyned 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.” 230

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 231 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 232 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 233 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 234 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.”

“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 235 [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 coquinæ or magnus coquus, 236 was not the man of least importance. Some old author whose name and book 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, 237 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 238 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.’ 239

“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: 240

“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, 241 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 242 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 243 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 244 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 245 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 246 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 247 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 248 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 after-noone. 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 249 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 come continueth in each towne and market without any just cause (except it be that landlords doo get licenses to carie come out of the land onelie to keepe up the prices for their owne private games 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 250 Booke,” Tusser’s5 “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 251 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 252 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, 253 whose labour is not lost if anything please.”

“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.... Transcribed 254 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, 255 “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 256 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.” 257

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 258 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 cook-book was never written.

But good Mrs. Glasse had also with large spirit aimed at teaching the ignorant, possibly those of a kind least often 259 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 260 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 himself 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 261 cooking men have dipped ink in behalf of instruction in their art. Such names as Farley, Carême, 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 public 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 262 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 263 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 264 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:”

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 266 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 267 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 268 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 269 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 thoroughgoing 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 270 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 271 projected into the outer world of organized philanthropy and art than women’s lives abroad, and the apparent non-intrusion 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 272 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 273 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 274 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 275 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. 276 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 fellow-men.

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! 277 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 278 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 lubricity 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 279 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 280 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 δοῦλοι of Athens to vote upon the 281 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 282 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 283 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. 284

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. 285

PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

A thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.
James Russell Lowell
287

PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

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 288 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 pre-science builded a supposed influence of the stars and their movements upon the moral life of man.

Squire Bicker staff’s jest had to do with almanac-makers, and was directed against a chief pretender, Dr. Partridge, 289 the astrologer and philomath Pope refers to when he speaks of the translation of the raped “Lock” to the skies:

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, 290 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 291 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 292 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 293 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, 294 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 295 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 296 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, 297 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 298 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 299 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.... 300

“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 301 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, 302 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, 303 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 304 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 305 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 306 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. 307

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 308 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 309 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 ☌ of ☉ and ☿. 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. 310 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

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 311 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 312 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 ☌ of ☉ and ☿. 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; 313 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 314 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, 315 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 prognosticate, cannot afford me so much mortification as his life, health, and safety would give me joy and satisfaction....”

“Courteous 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 316 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 Prædicting 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 prædict 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 317 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 318 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 319 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.”
320

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 ὕβρις 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.

“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.6 have continued to publish Almanacks in his name ever since; asserting for some years that he 321 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 322 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 323 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 324 next, J. J——n,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.’
325

“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 326 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 327 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 ἄσβεστος γέλως—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 328 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.

“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,’

“And Abraham pressed him greatly: 329 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; 330 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 331 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.8

“When Abraham sat at his tent-door, according to his custom, waiting to 332 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, 333 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 334 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 colloquy9 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 335 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.

“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 336 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.

“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 337 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.’
338

“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.

“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 air-bath 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, 340 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 341 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 342 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 343 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:

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.

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 cœlo nubila spissa
Stellas abstulerant. Umbrarum tempus erat quo
Horrenda ignavis monstra apparent. Pueri tum
Parvi matribus intus adhærent. Non gratiorem
Noctem fur unquam invenit. Sed qui veniunt post
Hanc ædem veterem? Celebrantne aliqua horrida sacra
Mercurio furum 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 tegumentis?
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 æternum! 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 laeti
Judex accipiunt et filia pulchra sodales
Hos furtivos. Ad mensam veniunt. Juvenes cur
Tam agitantur? Quid portentum conspiciunt nunc?
Protrudunt oculi quasi ranarum! Nihil est in
Mensa præter turkeys! Unus quoque catino!
Solum hoc, præterea nil!

3 The translation is that of C. D. Yonge.

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.

“Tusser, they tell me, when thou wert alive,
Thou, teaching thrift, thyselfe could’st never thrive.”

6 The printers, William and Andrew Bradford.

7 John Jerman.

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.

9 Used through the courtesy of the editor of “The William and Mary College Quarterly.”

10 This Jacob Tonson will be recalled as the chief bookseller (publisher) in London for some years prior to his death, 2 April, 1736.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women

AMERICAN THUMB-PRINTS

CONTENTS

PURITANS OF THE WEST

PURITANS OF THE WEST

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST

“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST

PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

FOOTNOTES:

Transcriber’s Note:

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

	Page
Puritans of the West	11
The University of Hesperus	35
Two Neighbors of St. Louis	87
The New England Woman	127
A New England Abode of the Blessed	163
Up-to-date Misogyny	187
“The Gullet Science”	215
Plagiarizing Humors of Benjamin Franklin	287

The Project Gutenberg eBook of American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women

AMERICAN THUMB-PRINTS

CONTENTS

PURITANS OF THE WEST

PURITANS OF THE WEST

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

“THE GULLET SCIENCE” A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST

“THE GULLET SCIENCE” A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST

PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

FOOTNOTES:

Transcriber’s Note:

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST

“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST