BY
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
THIRD SERIES
NEW YORK
HARPER AND BROTHERS
MDCCCXCIV
Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
———
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
| PAGE |
| HAWTHORNE AND BROOK FARM | 1 |
| BEECHER IN HIS PULPIT AFTER THE DEATH OF LINCOLN | 20 |
| KILLING DEER | 28 |
| AUTUMN DAYS | 37 |
| FROM COMO TO MILAN DURING THE WAR OF 1848 | 43 |
| HERBERT SPENCER ON THE YANKEE | 56 |
| HONOR | 65 |
| JOSEPH WESLEY HARPER | 72 |
| REVIEW OF UNION TROOPS, 1865 | 78 |
| APRIL, 1865 | 88 |
| WASHINGTON IN 1867 | 94 |
| RECEPTION TO THE JAPANESE AMBASSADORS AT THE WHITE HOUSE | 102 |
| THE MAID AND THE WIT | 112 |
| THE DEPARTURE OF THE GREAT EASTERN | 120 |
| CHURCH STREET | 127 |
| HISTORIC BUILDINGS | 140 |
| THE BOSTON MUSIC HALL | 151 |
| PUBLIC BENEFACTORS | 162 |
| MR. TIBBINS'S NEW-YEAR'S CALL | 169 |
| THE NEW ENGLAND SABBATH | 178 |
| THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS, 1884 | 185 |
| REFORM CHARITY | 193 |
| BICYCLE RIDING FOR CHILDREN | 204 |
| THE DEAD BIRD UPON CYRILLA'S HAT AN ENCOURAGEMENT OF "SLARTER" | 210 |
| CHEAPENING HIS NAME | 214 |
| CLERGYMEN'S SALARIES | 221 |
HAWTHORNE AND BROOK FARM
IN his preface to the Marble Faun, as before in that to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne complained that there was no romantic element in American life; or, as he expressed it, "There is as yet no such Faery-land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own." This he says in The Blithedale preface, and then adds that, to obviate this difficulty and supply a proper scene for his figures, "the author has ventured to make free with his old and affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm as being certainly the most romantic episode of his own life, essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact, and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality." Probably a genuine Brook-Farmer doubts whether Hawthorne remembered the place and his life there very affectionately, in the usual sense of that word, and although in sending the book to one of them, at least, he said that it was not to be considered a picture of actual life or character. "Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm [which essentially it has not], but merely for its own story and characters," yet it is plain that it is a very faithful picture of the kind of impression that the enterprise made upon him.
Strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority upon "the romantic episode" of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart more than he whose faith and hope and energy were all devoted to its development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent record, have never done so, and it is already so much of a thing of the past that it will probably never be done. But the memory of the place and of the time has been recently pleasantly refreshed by the lecture of Mr. Emerson and the Note-Book of Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson, whose mind and heart are ever hospitable, was one of the chief, indeed the chiefest, figure in this country of the famous intellectual "Renaissance" of twenty-five years ago, which, as is generally the case, is historically known by its nickname of "Transcendentalism," a spiritual fermentation from which some of the best modern influences of this country have proceeded.
In his late lecture upon the general subject, Mr. Emerson says that the mental excitement began to take practical form nearly thirty years ago, when Dr. Channing counselled with George Ripley upon the practicability of bringing thoughtful and cultivated people together and forming a society that should be satisfactory. "That good attempt," says Emerson, with a sly smile, "ended in an oyster supper with excellent wines." But a little later it was revived under better auspices, and as Brook Farm made a name which will not be forgotten. Mr. Emerson was never a resident, but he was sometimes a visitor and guest, and the more ardent minds of the romantic colony were always much under his influence. With his sensitively humorous eye he seizes upon some of the ludicrous aspects of the scene and reports them with arch gravity. "The ladies again," he says, "took cold on washing-days, and it was ordained that the gentlemen shepherds should hang out the clothes, which they punctually did; but a great anachronism followed in the evening, for when they began to dance the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their pockets." And again: "One hears the frequent statement of the country members that one man was ploughing all day and another was looking out of the window all day—perhaps drawing his picture, and they both received the same wages."
In Hawthorne's just published Note-Book he records a great deal of his daily experience at Brook Farm. But he was never truly at home there. Hawthorne lived in the very centre of the Transcendental revival, and he was the friend of many of its leaders, but he was never touched by its spirit. He seems to have been as little affected by the great intellectual influences of his time as Charles Lamb in England. The Custom-house had become intolerable to him. He was obliged to do something. The enterprise at Brook Farm seemed to him to promise Arcadia. But he forgot that the kingdom of heaven is within you, and when he went to the tranquil banks of the Charles he found himself in a barn-yard shovelling manure, and not at all in Arcadia. "Before breakfast I went out to the barn and began to chop hay for the cattle, and with such 'righteous vehemence,' as Mr. Ripley says, did I labor, that in the space of ten minutes I broke the machine. Then I brought wood and replenished the fires, and finally went down to breakfast and ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitchfork, and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure."
Hawthorne was a sturdy and resolute man, and any heap of manure that he attacked must yield; but he had not come to Arcadia to sweat and blister his hands, and his blank and amused disappointment is evident. He had a subtle and pervasive humor, but no spirits. He sees the pleasantness of the place and the beauty of the crops, having knowledge of them and a new interest in them; and he has a quiet conscience because he feels that he is really doing some of the manual work of the world; but he is always a spectator, a critic. He went to Brook Farm as he might have gone to an anchorite's cell; but the fervor that warms and adorns the cold bare rock he does not have, and the mere consciousness of well-doing is a chilly abstraction. "I do not believe that I should be patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. I fear it is time for me, sod-compelling as I am, to take the field again. Even my Custom-house experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally brutified!" Very soon, of course, the pilgrim to Arcadia escapes from the manure-yard, and declares as he runs that it was not he, it was a spectre of him, who milked and hoed and toiled in the sun. Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm but a few months, and after he left he never returned thither, even for a visit.
The Blithedale Romance shows that he was not unmindful of its poetic aspect; but his genius was stirring in him, and he felt that he could not work hard with his hands and write also. So he went off, and never came back; and although he may have remembered certain persons kindly, his memory of the place and of his life there could not have been very affectionate. Probably there were other diaries kept at Brook Farm; certainly there were many and many letters written thence, in which still lie, and will forever lie, buried the material for its history. But it is likely to become a tradition only, and upon its finer side more and more unreal, because of such sketches as those of Hawthorne. The most comical part of the whole was its impression—that is, such impression as it made, and without exaggerating its extent or importance upon the steady old conservatism of Boston, which was of the most inflexible and antediluvian type. The enterprise was the more appalling because it seemed somehow to be a natural product of the spirit of society there. The hen of the tri-mountain had herself hatched this inexpressible duckling. Dr. Channing, indeed, was the honored intellectual chief; the culture of Boston had owed much to the liberal theology; old Dr. Beecher had battered that theology in vain; but the liberality of Boston was like the British Whiggery of the last century: it was more intelligent and more patrician than Toryism itself.
Mr. Emerson, as we said, was practically the head—or, at least, the accepted representative—of the new movement. His discourses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, his address to the divinity students, and his noble Dartmouth oration, followed by his lectures in Boston and his Nature had set the barn-yard—not offensively to retain the metaphor of the hen—into the most resonant cackle, in the midst of Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon, and there was universal thunder. The pulpits which Dr. Beecher had assaulted, and which had watched him serenely, when they heard Parker thought that the very foundations of things were going. The most distinguished chanticleers went to Mr. Emerson's lectures, and when asked if they understood him, shook their stately combs and replied, with caustic superiority, "No; but our daughters do." And when the experiment began at Brook Farm there was no doubt in conservative circles that for their sins this offshoot of Bedlam was permitted in the neighborhood. What it was, what it was meant to be, was inexplicable. Are they fools, knaves, madmen, or mere sentimentalists?... Is this Coleridge and Southey again with their Pantisocracy and Susquehanna Paradise? Is it a vast nursery of infidelity; and is it true that "the abbÉ or religieux" sacrifices white oxen to Jupiter in the back parlor? What may not be true, since it is within Theodore Parker's parish, and his house, crammed with books, and modest under the pines, is only a mile away?
These extraordinary and vague and hostile impressions were not relieved by the appearance of such votaries of the new shrine as appeared in the staid streets and halls of the city. There is always a certain amount of oddity latent in society, which rushes into such an enterprise as a natural vent, and in youth itself there is a similar latent and boundless protest against the friction and apparent unreason of the existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise this was everywhere observable. The freedom of the anti-slavery reform and its discussions had developed the "come-outers," who bore testimony at all times and places against Church and State. Mr. Emerson mentions an apostle of the gospel of love and no money, who preached zealously, but never gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the protestants against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious metaphysics upon milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder was to injure the maternal instincts of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee cannibalism, and the destruction of the tender germ of life; to swallow an oyster was to mask murder. A still selecter circle denounced the chains that shackled the tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the body. Profanity, they said, is not the use of forcible and picturesque words; it is the abuse of such to express base passions and emotions. So indecency cannot be affirmed of the model of all grace, the human body. The fig-leaf is the sign of the fall. Man returning to Paradise will leave it behind. The priests of this faith, therefore, felt themselves called upon to rebuke true profanity and indecency by sitting at their front doors upon Sunday morning with no other clothes than that of the fig-leaf period, tranquilly but loudly conversing in the most stupendous oaths, by way of conversational chiaro-oscuro, while a deluded world went shuddering to church.
These were the harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time was like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were regarded as the rule, and as the logical masquerade of this foul fiend Transcendentalism, which was evidently unappeasable, and was about to devour manner, morals, religion, and common-sense. If Father Lamson or Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and the non-resistants pleaded that those protestants had as good a right to speak as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was probably inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly-minded enough to understand it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And what was to be said—for you could not call them old dotards—when the younger protestants of the time came walking through the sober streets of Boston and seated themselves in concert-halls and lecture-rooms with hair parted in the middle and falling to their shoulders, and clad in garments such as no human being ever wore before—garments which seemed to be a compromise between the blouse of the Paris workman and the peignoir of a possible sister? For tailoring underwent the sage revision to which the whole philosophy of life was subjected, and one ardent youth, asserting that the human form itself suggested the proper shape of its garments, caused trousers to be constructed that closely fitted the leg, and bore his testimony to the truth in coarse crash breeches.
These were the ludicrous aspects of the intellectual and moral fermentation or agitation that was called Transcendentalism. And these were foolishly accepted by many as its chief and only signs. It was supposed that the folly was complete at Brook Farm, and it was indescribably ludicrous to observe reverend doctors and other dons coming out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going as dainty ladies hold their skirts and daintily step from stone to stone in a muddy street, lest they be soiled. The dons seemed to doubt whether the mere contact had not smirched them. But droll in itself, it was a thousandfold droller when Theodore Parker came through the woods and described it. With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and his nasal voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was truly laughable, yet all with infinite bonhommie and a genuine superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and as excellent a mimic as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher. On Sundays a party always went from Brook Farm to Mr. Parker's little country church. He was there just exactly what he was afterwards, when he preached to thousands of eager people at the Boston Music Hall—the same plain, simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal friends. They loved him and were proud of him; and his geniality and tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books, his jovial manliness and sturdy independence, drew to him all ages and sexes and conditions.
The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most Æsthetic culture and accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers, the industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of high esprit de corps—at least in the earlier or golden age of the colony. There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the founding of an earthly paradise upon a New England farm is no pastime. But with the best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry and devotion, there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of method, and the economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But there were never such witty potato patches and such sparkling cornfields before or since. The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and bright as any brilliant midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of it all was one figure, the practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not drawn to the enterprise by any spiritual attraction, but was hired at good wages to superintend the work, and who always seemed to be regarding the whole affair with a most good-natured wonder as a prodigious masquerade. Indeed, the description which Hawthorne gives of him at a real masquerade of the farmers in the woods depicts his attitude towards Brook Farm itself: "And apart, with a shrewd Yankee observation of the scene, stands our friend Orange, a thick-set, sturdy figure, enjoying the fun well enough, yet rather laughing with a perception of its nonsensicalness than at all entering into the spirit of the thing." That, indeed, was very much the attitude of Hawthorne himself towards Brook Farm and many other aspects of human life.
But beneath all the glancing colors, the lights and shadows of its surface, it was a simple, honest, practical effort for wiser forms of life than those in which we find ourselves. The criticism of science, the sneer of literature, the complaint of experience is that man is a miserably half-developed being, the proof of which is the condition of human society, in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the enjoyment cloys and disappoints, and the very want of labor poisons the enjoyment. Man is made body and soul. The health of each requires reasonable exercise. If every man did his share of the muscular work of the world no other man would be overwhelmed with it. The man who does not work imposes the necessity of harder toil upon him who does. Thereby the first steals from the last the opportunity of mental culture, and at last we reach a world of pariahs and patricians, with all the inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround us. Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition.
That some such generous and noble thought inspired this effort at practical Christianity is most probable. The Brook-Farmers did not interpret the words, "The poor ye have always with ye" to mean, "We must keep always some of you poor." They found the practical Christian in him who said to his neighbor, "Friend, come up higher." But apart from any precise and defined intention, it was certainly a very alluring prospect: that of life in a pleasant country, taking exercise in useful toil, and surrounded with the most interesting and accomplished people. Compared with other efforts upon which time and money and industry are lavished, measured by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by California gold-washing, by oil-boring, and by the Stock Exchange, Brook Farm was certainly a very reasonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the hope and aid of generous men and women. The friendships that were formed there were enduring. The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy with what is most useful to men, the kind patience and constant charity that were fostered there, have been no more lost than grain dropped upon the field. It is to the Transcendentalism that seemed to so many good souls both wicked and absurd that some of the best influences of American life to-day are due. The spirit that was concentrated at Brook Farm is diffused but not lost. As an organized effort, after many downward changes, it failed; but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the Cottage, when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright humor; when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the circle for a night or day; when those who may not be named publicly brought beauty and wit and social sympathy to the feast; when the practical possibilities of life seemed fairer, and life and character were touched ineffaceably with good influence, cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm, and remember with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days at Brook Farm.
BEECHER IN HIS PULPIT AFTER
THE DEATH OF LINCOLN
CROSS the Fulton Ferry and follow the crowd" was the direction which was said to have been given humorously by Mr. Beecher himself to a pilgrim who asked how to find his church in Brooklyn. The Easy Chair remembered it on the Sunday morning after the return of the Fort Sumter party; and crossing at an early hour in the beautiful spring day, he stepped ashore and followed the crowd up the street. That at so early an hour the current would set strongly towards the church he did not believe. But he was mistaken. At the corner of Hicks Street the throng turned and pushed along with hurrying eagerness as if they were already too late, although it was but a little past nine o'clock. The street was disagreeable like a street upon the outskirts of a city, but the current turned from it again in two streams, one flowing to the rear and the other to the front of Plymouth Church. The Easy Chair drifted along with the first, and as he went around the corner observed just before him a low brick tower, below which was an iron gate.
The gate was open, and we all passed rapidly in, going through a low passage smoothly paved and echoing, with a fountain of water midway and a chained mug—a kind thought for the wayfarer—and that little cheap charity seemed already an indication of the humane spirit which irradiates the image of Plymouth Church. The low passage brought us all to the narrow walk by the side of the church, and to the back door of the building. The crowd was already tossing about all the doors. The street in front of the building was full, and occasionally squads of enterprising devotees darted out and hurried up to the back door to compare the chances of getting in.
The Easy Chair pushed forward, and was shown by a courteous usher to a convenient seat. The church is a large white building, with a gallery on both sides, two galleries in front, and an organ-loft and choir just behind the pulpit. It is spacious and very light, with four long windows on each side. The seats upon the floor converge towards the pulpit, which is a platform with a mahogany desk, and there are no columns. The view of the speaker is unobstructed from every part. The plain white walls and entire absence of architectural ornamentation inevitably suggest the bare cold barns of meeting-houses in early New England. But this house is of a very cheerful, comfortable, and substantial aspect.
There were already dense crowds wedged about all the doors upon the inside. The seats of the pew-holders were protected by the ushers, the habit being, as the Easy Chair understood, for the holders who do not mean to attend any service to notify the ushers that they may fill the seats. Upon the outside of the pews along the aisles there are chairs which can be turned down, enabling two persons to be seated side by side, yet with a space for passage between, so that the aisle is not wholly choked. On this Sunday the duties of the ushers were very difficult and delicate, for the pressure was extraordinary. There was still more than an hour before the beginning of the service, but the building was rapidly filling; and everybody who sank into a seat from which he was sure that he could not be removed wore an edifying expression of beaming contentment which must have been rather exasperating to those who were standing and struggling and dreadfully squeezed around the doors.
Presently the seats were all full. The multitude seemed to be solid above and below, but still the new-comers tried to press in. The platform was fringed by the legs of those who had been so lucky as to find seats there. There was loud talking and scuffling, and even occasionally a little cry at the doors. One boy struggled desperately in the crowd for his life, or breath. The ushers, courteous to the last, smiled pitifully upon their own efforts to put ten gallons into a pint pot. As the hour of service approached a small door under the choir and immediately behind the mahogany desk upon the platform opened quietly, and Mr. Beecher entered. He stood looking at the crowd for a little time, without taking off his outer coat, then advanced to the edge of the platform and gave some directions about seats. He indicated with his hands that the people should pack more closely. The ushers evidently pleaded for the pew-holders who had not arrived; but the preacher replied that they could not get in, and the seats should be filled that the service might proceed in silence. Then he removed his coat, sat down, and opened the Hymn-Book, while the organ played. The impatient people meantime had climbed up to the window-sills from the outside, and the great white church was like a hive, with the swarming bees hanging in clusters upon the outside.
The service began with an invocation. It was followed by a hymn, by the reading of a chapter in the Bible, and a prayer. The congregation joined in singing; and the organ, skilfully and firmly played, prevented the lagging which usually spoils congregational singing. The effect was imposing. The vast volume filled the building with solid sound. It poured out at the open windows and filled the still morning air of the city with solemn melody. Far upon every side those who sat at home in solitary chambers heard the great voice of praise. Then amid the hush of the vast multitude the preacher, overpowered by emotion, prayed fervently for the stricken family and the bereaved nation. There was more singing, before which Mr. Beecher appealed to those who were sitting to sit closer, and for once to be incommoded that some more of the crowd might get in; and as the wind blew freshly from the open windows, he reminded the audience that a handkerchief laid upon the head would prevent the sensitive from taking cold. Then opening the Bible he read the story of Moses going up to Pisgah, and took the verses for his text.
The sermon was written, and he read calmly from the manuscript. Yet at times, rising upon the flood of feeling, he shot out a solemn adjuration or asserted an opinion with a fiery emphasis that electrified the audience into applause. His action was intense but not dramatic; and the demeanor of the preacher was subdued and sorrowful. He did not attempt to speak in detail of the President's character or career. He drew the bold outline in a few words, and leaving that task to a calmer and fitter moment, spoke of the lessons of the hour. The way of his death was not to be deplored; the crime itself revealed to the dullest the ghastly nature of slavery; it was a blow not at a man, but at the people and their government; it had utterly failed; and, finally, though dead the good man yet speaketh. The discourse was brief, fitting, forcible, and tender with emotion. It was a manly sorrow and sympathy that cast its spell upon the great audience, and it was good to be there. When words have a man behind them, says a wise man, they are eloquent. There was another hymn before the benediction, a peal of pious triumph, which poured out of the heart of the congregation, and seemed to lift us all up, up into the sparkling, serene, inscrutable heaven.
KILLING DEER
WHAT shall he have that kill'd the deer?" sang the foresters in Arden. If you are in the wild woods of the Adirondacks you lie behind a log or rock by which the animal is likely to pass; you scarcely breathe as you wait with your hand grasping your rifle. The slow hours drag by, and you are very wet, or the gnats and mosquitoes sting, or you are hungry, cramped, or generally uncomfortable—but hark! What's that? A slight rustle! You are all alert. Your heart beats. Your hands tingle. Breathlessly you stare towards the sound. And then—nothing. A twig dropped.
Ah well! that's nothing. Very cautiously you stretch the leg which has the most stitch in it lest you should alarm the deer. The position and the progress of affairs are a little monotonous; but if the day that counts one glorious nibble is a day well spent, how much more so that which gives you the chance of a deer! 'St! A slight but decided crashing beyond the wood. A faint, startled, hurrying sound; and the next moment, erect, alive in every hair, the proud antlers quivering, the eye wild but soft, the form firm and exquisitely agile, the buck bounds into view. Crack you go, you poor miserable skulker behind a rotten log, and off he goes, the dappled noble of the forest!
Perhaps you hit him and kill him. You outwit him and murder him. Well, in Venice the bravos hid in dark doorways and stabbed the gallants hieing home from love and lady. Anybody can stab in the dark, or shoot from an ambush. To kill an animal for sport is wretched enough; but if you talk of manliness and use other fine words, be at least fair. Give him a chance. Put your two legs, your two arms, a knife, and your human wit against his four legs, greater strength, antlers, and want of brain. Then is the contest fair. You who seek his life for fun give him a chance at yours for self-defence. The sylvan shades approve the equal strife; and if you fall you are at least not disgraced.
If you are a deer-stalker you creep up stealthily to find them feeding, and if you can creep near enough, you blaze away. I hope that you have seen Doyle's picture of you, a company of you, scrambling up the side of a hill hoping to catch the prey over the brow. But you will not do it. They are off, the blithe beauties, and you may get up from your stomachs as soon as you choose.
Or you may hunt in a deer preserve with drivers and hounds. You pass beyond the thicket in which they lurk, leaving the drivers to urge them forth. You emerge upon sunny open spaces waving with thin, long, dry grass, tufted with thick shrubs, and dotted with convenient mossy rocks. Here is a favorite path of the flying deer, and you post yourself expectant behind a rock. How calm and lovely the brilliant October day! How the mass of the foliage shines in the clear sunlight! How every prospect pleases, and only man is—hark, again! They are coming. Lie low. Still as death. Oh! the beauties! There they are! And one glorious chief of chiefs darts straight and swift towards your ambush. Just beyond is the covert. He believes that safety is there. The quiet sunny nooks in which he shall lie and feed, the pleasant shades at noon, the leafy lair—they are all there a hundred rods before. Press on! press on! oh delicate, swift feet! He is not man who does not follow you with human sympathy. Innocence, purity, helplessness, they skim the sunny space with you. Too late! A sharp, mean sound, the bounding falters, the panting racer falls. The dogs and men rush on. They slay the hapless victim. 'Tis a noble sport! 'Tis a manly business!
Lately I saw two deer, two stately bucks. It was a solitary, sunny opening upon which I suddenly came. They were lying at the edge of the wood, and rose with a startled spring, for an instant looked, and with one bound, as if they would leap over the tree tops, were lost in the thicket. The grace and charm they gave to the wood were indescribable. Into the remotest gloom they sent a flash of sunlight. Nothing fierce, or treacherous, or repulsive, consorts with the image of a deer, and when they vanished the whole wood was peopled with their lovely forms. If I had gone back to dinner dragging a mangled body along the wood road, or carrying the piteous burden in a wagon, how could that sunlit beech wood ever again be so sylvan sweet and Arcadian? The tranquil, secluded, happy scene would have been blood-stained. It would have been a fantastic remorse, but how could I have justified the killing of the deer?
No. I have not killed deer in the Adirondacks, nor moose at Moosehead. I do not quarrel with those who have; and I hope they are as satisfied as I am. One day I hope to reach those pleasant places, but I hope to see deer, not to kill them. I am content that other people should slay my venison as well as my beef; and I shall not pretend to find any sport in the shambles, whether in the outskirts of the city or in the mountain valleys. I do not insist upon killing the chickens that I eat, nor the partridges, nor the quail. The noble art of Venery is a fine term to describe the butcher's business. A man who sees a heron streaming through the tranquil summer sky and only wishes for his gun, or who sees the beautiful bound of a deer in the woods with no other wish than that of killing it, I do not envy, as I do not envy the farmer slaughtering pigs. The bravest and most robust manhood is not necessarily developed nor proved either by sticking pins into grasshoppers or firing shot into deer.
"Ah yes! but you treat it too seriously," says young Nimrod. "It is not a matter of reason, but of feeling and excitement. As you lie in your ambush and hear suddenly the shouting of the drivers, the barking of the dogs, the crackling and rustling of boughs and leaves, you cannot help the intense excitement. Your blood burns, your nerves tingle, your ears quiver, your eyes leap from your head, and, upon my honor, sir, when our best sportsman saw the deer near him last year in Maine, he fixed his eyes steadily upon him, but such was his nervous twitter that he pointed his rifle straight into the ground and fired. He wounded the ground severely, but the deer escaped. What is the use of talking to him about butchery? Nothing in the world interests or charms him so much as hunting. Besides, you get used to it. It is not pleasant, probably, for the tyro, who is a surgical student, to see men's legs and arms cut off. You could not see it without shuddering, perhaps not without sickening and fainting. But there must be surgeons, and how long would it be before you would actually enjoy it?
"There. Hark! tally ho, tantivity! Is not the language rich with metaphors derived from the hunt? Does not literature ring with hunting songs and choruses and glees? Is it not all inwrought with romance and poetry? Waken, lords and ladies gay! The baying hound, the winding horn, the scarlet huntsman, the flying fox, the streaming, flashing dash across the country—they are of the very essence of the life and civilization from which we spring. They are the soul of the 'Merrie England' which is our chief tradition. Come, come! to the Adirondacks! to Moosehead!
"'All nature smiles to usher in
The jocund Queen of morn,
And huntsmen with the day begin
To wind the mellow horn!'"
Yes, the horn winds far and sweet in story and song, until it becomes the horn of elf-land faintly blowing, and man is a carnivorous animal who feeds on flesh. But butchers and fishermen are provided to supply the market. Is the carnivorous formation of man a reason that boys should stone birds or men shoot deer, that we should bait dogs and fight cocks and kill scared pigeons, not for food, but for fun? Foxes may be a pest that should be exterminated, like bears in a frontier country. But when a country is so advanced in settlement and civilization that prosperous gentlemen dress themselves gayly in scarlet coats and buckskin breeches, and ride blooded horses, and follow costly packs of hounds across country hunting a frightened fox, the fox is no longer a pest, and the riders are not frontiersmen and honest settlers; they are butchers, not for a lawful purpose, but for pleasure. Yes; the law solemnly takes life, but the judge who should take life for sport—!
Nimrod, despite the winding horn, the human relation to domestic animals that serve us is still barbarous. No man can see what treatment a noble horse, straining and struggling to do his best, often receives from his owner, without wincing at the fate that abandons so fine a creature to so ignoble and cruel a tormentor. But the kindly hand of civilization has at last reached the animals. In Cincinnati there is a statue newly raised to their protector. They will never know him, but the American list of worthies is incomplete in which the name of Henry Bergh is not "writ large."
AUTUMN DAYS
THE "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" comes long before the maples are crimson and the birches yellow. The splendor of the summer is very brief. If it be really hot, July is not over before you may see the leaves slightly shrivelling, and the woods have a half-crisp, curdled aspect. The intense heat of the year gives a sense of violent and rapid struggle, as if all the natural processes were wonderfully accelerated by an access of fever, and the long cool repose of convalescence follows in the clear, bright autumn days.
The enjoyment of these things is a kind of test of character. If a man found himself ceasing to take pleasure in the moon and flowers and children—if the red leaf of the fall gave him the same emotion as the green leaf of the spring—he might well feel that he was old and his heart worn out.
The finest sight is the autumn of age, like that of the year. Some men shrivel and dry up as they grow old. Some become coarse, or cynical, or sad. Some, after a noble promise and even a full flowering, ripen no fruit at all, and leave only a few reluctant and blighted results. Some stand covered with "nurly" balls, hard, dry, and useless. Others are stripped and bare. But a genial, golden age has all the qualities of a warm October day. There is soft repose upon the landscape. No harsh winds blow, no sharp chills freeze. The distance on all sides is delicate and lost in luminous haze. Behind, it is romantic and fair; before, it is beautiful and alluring. On all the misty hill-tops visible summer seems to linger. The fields are crimson and yellow with the riches of the orchard; the purple grape glistens kindly, and the golden pumpkin lies comfortably under the stooks of dry corn. In the woods the light winds shake the trees and the dropping nuts patter upon the fallen leaves. Along the road the profuse golden-rod waves its bright spray, and the cool, scentless asters gleam like pallid stars. The heat is so honest that the round earth seems to bask in it with conscious joy. That shining sky hides no lightning. It hangs serenely over—a visible benediction. Night and day the barn doors stand wide open, and the great barn is bursting with its heaped treasures. The wagons come and go, and the beat of the flail begins. Bright and beautiful and abundant is the cheery scene, but there is a pervading sense of accomplishment. The cattle graze in the pastures, and in the meadows where the growth is over. The harvest fields will clearly do no more. The green of June has faded into the russet of October, and even the gorgeous leaves burn, a hectic hue, upon the landscape. The earth has done its work for the year, and there is a feeling of gathering in, of closing the doors, and of going to rest.
When the autumn of a man's life is thus sweet and fruitful and serene, we see how outward nature merely hints and foreshows its master. In great, visible, palpable operations and results it images the fine and unmarked processes that go on in man. And yet, by its unfailing method, its annual return, the regular spring and bud and flower and fruit, it is a ceaseless, silent monitor. Measured by our own lives, how touching the fidelity of the year! Who is not rebuked by the honest apple-tree in his own garden? The plums are more like us. They are almost infallibly stung by the curculio. But how many a man who fights the curculio with all his fortune is himself stung all over by selfishness and pride! We might well be ashamed to walk in the woods. The mute obedience of the trees ought to be too impressive for us. Yes, in the long autumn nights they wrestle and roar. Their mighty voice thunders out and smites the heart of the awakening sleeper. But will you claim that it is their protest against the inevitable law, that they too are rebellious and forgetful and disdainful as we are? It seems to me only piercingly sad in its wildest tumult. It is the blind king feeling for his peers and crying out when he does not find them. "Lords of the world" shout the autumn woods, tossing their branches and groping blindly in the air—"men and women who are the latest born, the Benjamins of heaven, who are set over us to subdue and govern, ye alone, in all the wide creation, are false and heedless! What man of you all is as true and noble for a man as the oak upon your hill-top for an oak? The oak obeys every law, regularly increases and develops, stretches its shady arms of blessing, proudly wears its leafy coronal, and drops abundant acorns for future oaks as faithful; but who of ye all does not violate the law of your life—so that we, if we follow you, would be so death-struck with dry-rot that the trees would fail upon every hand and the earth become a desert!"
So wail and roar the storm-swept autumn woods. In the late October nights you may awaken, when the world is lost in the mystery of darkness, and hear that appealing cry. Time and civilization have slain the dryads and sweet sylvan populace, as Herod slew the innocents. But although common-sense has buried them, the imagination will not let them die. They survive in other forms, and with other voices they speak to us—not as the spirits of the trees, but as their conscious life, they yet whisper, and our hearts listen. Let the hickories and pine-trees preach to us a little in these warm October afternoons. A stately elm is the archbishop of my green diocese. In full canonicals he stands sublime. His flowing robes fill the blithe air with sacred grace. The light west winds and watery south are his fresh young deacons, his ecclesiastical aides-de-camp. He rules the landscape round. And I—this penitent old Easy Chair—attend devoutly when I hear the eloquent rustling of his voice—as the neighbors of Saint George Herbert, of Bemerton, used to stop their ploughs in the furrow and bow, with uncovered head, while the sound of his chapel-bell tinkled in the air.
FROM COMO TO MILAN DURING THE WAR OF 1848.
AS the afternoon was ending—walking from Lago Maggiore and the Lake of Lugano to the Lake of Como—we passed a shrine at which a mother and children were kneeling and chanting the Ave Maria, and an ass with loaded panniers jogged slowly by. The vesper bells began to ring from an old church-tower upon a mountain-side, while far over the rounding tops of orange and fig trees in the warm-descending vale a triangle of dark-blue water was the first glimpse of Como. My knees bent a little, not with fatigue, but with reverence, as if I were again entering the very court and heart of Italy. A group of girls, less timorous or more interested than the crowd upon the Lugano Lake shore, asked us if there were any news—if France were coming to help Italy. But ours, alas! were not the beautiful feet upon the mountains. We could only say "nothing" and "good-bye."
At Santa Croce we came out in full view of the lake, upon which lay the splendor of sunset, and, taking a path which we were told would shorten the journey, we lost our way upon a huge hill-side. But as we reached the summit the full moon rose from behind the heights upon the opposite shores of Como, and a handsome Italian boy showed us a straight path to Cadenabia upon the margin of the lake. I gave him a silver trifle, and he wished us "felice viaggio" with his black eyes and his musical lips; and leaving him like a shepherd boy of the purer Arcadia of the hills, we descended rapidly into a vineyard, and so came to the shore.
It was a moment of mingled twilight and moonlight. A glittering path lay from the Cadenabia shore to the Villa Melzi opposite; and, hailing an old boatman, we glided up that golden way to the vine-clustered balcony which I knew at Bellagio under the moon. The air was calm and bland. The water was oily and gleaming. The mountains stood around us dusky and vast in the ghostly light as we went silently over the lake.
We landed, and took tea upon the balcony at the hotel whose only rival in Europe for romantic picturesqueness is the Trois Couronnes at Vevey upon the Lake of Geneva. The "magic casement" of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" was ours at Bellagio. The lake murmured with music everywhere. We saw the boats full of people singing choruses, then talking and laughing as they floated away. The sound of instruments, the throb of strings, the sad, mellow peal of horns, filled the air; and long after midnight a band was still playing in the village. About midnight Edmund and Frank bathed in the lake. Their figures were white as marble in the black water, and they struck the calm into sparkles of splendor as they swam out....
The boat which we took to descend the lake to the town of Como had three rowers. The chief, whom I remembered from last year, groaned bitterly over the war, because there were so few strangers.
"Trade, you see, is conservative," said I to Edmund.
"Como is conservatism itself," he tranquilly replied.
"We live upon the strangers," continued Giovanni Battista, the boatman, with a simplicity and truthfulness that made us laugh; "and this year nobody comes. The Italians are driven away, and the foreigners are frightened."
He had not been to Como for two months, although his business is plying upon the lake, and his winter depends upon his summer. "The war is bad for all of us," he said, "and after all the Germans are back again."
... Farther on, and nearer Como, the shore is covered with handsome villas, of which the most remarkable for beauty and fame are Madame Pasta's, a magnificent estate, and Taglioni's, which is not yet finished, and the stately Odescalchi. As we passed Madame Pasta's the old boatman shrugged his shoulders and trilled with his voice. "That's the way the money came there," he said, contemptuously. He was clearly of opinion that only the decaying and decayed families whose names he had heard all his life, and whose ancestors his fathers knew, were to be spoken of with praise.
"Whose villa is that?" asked I.
"Eh! che! nobody's," he replied; "if it were anybody's we should know."
At five o'clock we rounded the point over which I had stood upon the height the year before on a still September afternoon hearing the girls sing in a boat below, and so came to the shore at Como.
Everywhere there was an air of consternation. The Austrians had just re-occupied the town, and the streets were full of the "hated barbarians," rattling about with long swords and standing on guard at the doors of public buildings. The walls bristled with military notices. Among others I read one exhorting all well-disposed people to surrender arms of every kind by a certain day at a place named. The people seemed to be stupefied, and gazed in dull wonder upon the soldiers.
Out of the square, ringing with Austrian sabres, we stepped into the Duomo, dim and lofty and hushed, untouched by revolutions or triumphs. A few inodorous sinners were kneeling and praying. They were very poor and ignorant. But this was their palace, and they looked as if they knew that the great Emperor of the barbarians had not one more gorgeous or solemn.
We tried to secure seats in the post for Milan. There was no place. We applied at the offices of public and private diligences. It was still impossible. The evening was cool and clear, and we considered. The distance to Milan was but eight hours of our walking, and we were making a walking tour. And although we had scarcely bargained for a promenade over the plains of Lombardy in an August sun—yet this perfect moon? Should we turn back without seeing the Goths encamped around the most glorious of Gothic cathedrals?
It was nine o'clock when we shouldered our knapsacks and set forth. The dwellers in romantic Como, standing at their doors, looked wonderingly upon the four pedestrians marching in regular resolute tramp along the streets, evidently moving upon Milan. The small children plainly thought us a part of the imperial and royal army. "Here come the Austrians," whispered one boy to another, as he gazed at the gray wide-awakes and knapsacks.
The mild Francis looked at him with the air of an army which would respect persons and property so long as it was unmolested, and wished the boy so soft a buona notte that he smiled gently, and I am sure his dreams were not disturbed.
We passed out of the gate of Como full against the round rising moon, and took the broad hard highway for Milan. We passed a few wagons loaded with the furniture of some fugitive rolling slowly along. As we pushed on, the idea of penetrating by night and on foot into a country at war was stimulating and novel. But what consciousness of war could survive in the deep peace of that night? The fields were covered with high corn, and the hard straight road went before us in dim perspective. There were no other travellers. Two or three empty vetturas or a wine cart straggled lazily by, the little bells upon the horses tinkling, and the drivers fast asleep. Nor were the villages many. As we passed a group of half a dozen houses a fellow was sleeping soundly upon a bench at a door. When we broke in upon the silence of night by asking the name of the village, he sprang up nimbly and limped rapidly out of sight as if the question had been a pistol-shot and had wounded him. Everybody was nervous "in questo momento." Towards midnight we stopped at a house which should have been near the point at which we meant to sleep until sunrise, and roused an old lady who shrilly chirped and twittered her terror through the slide in the door. But satisfying her that we were neither Croats nor cannibals, she told us that we were yet a mile or two from Balasina.
It was now twelve o'clock, and the land seemed sunk in a sleep of death. There was no sound but our own echoes as we entered the dreary, dismal village, which, like all Italian villages, is merely a dirty street bordered with gloomy houses. They looked so hopeless with their grim stone fronts, high-barred windows out of reach, and huge gates, as if expecting nothing but hostility, that when we stopped before the inn we felt like the wretched wights who beheld the dungeons of an ogre; and when Edmund exclaimed in what seemed a terrible voice, so still was the night, "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" we started as if he had joked in church. Then the vision of a pleasant inn hung for a moment in our minds, and the sense of the preposterous contrast awakened a loud peal of laughter which died away echoing among those houses which were as hospitable as sea-crags. While we stood debating, a group of peasants, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, passed spectrally by, staring steadily at us, as if they would not be unwilling to strike a final blow for the kingdom of Italy.
They disappeared, and we struck a resounding blow upon the door of the albergo, and another and another. After a while there was a sound of stealthily unbarring window-shutters, followed by a voice demanding the reason of the tumult. We explained that we were friends who wanted beds for the night. No, that was impossible, "the voice replied far up the height;" there were no beds, and we had better push on to the next tavern. We expostulated in many tongues with the dimly-visioned head that now appeared, pleading that we were strangers from a far country who were very tired and sleepy. The head disappeared for a few moments and we heard a low colloquy. Then the great gate of the albergo swung sullenly open, and we stepped into a dim court, and the dimly-visioned face became a face like a dull razor, it was so thin-featured and stupid. The man asked us to stop, and, stepping aside, he called a woman's name, then stood waiting, his wretched dozing face illuminated by the weak lustre of a long-wicked tallow-candle which he held. Presently he moved on along the windows of the court conversing with an invisible within the house. When those murmuring arrangements were made, he led us up a dirty stone staircase, trying to open various doors with keys that did not fit the locks; and finally, after a desperate wrestle with one, he swore fiercely in a thin, wiry voice that made the blood run cold, and then smashed the door of the chamber, carrying away wood-work and lock together. It was a vast room of immense discomfort, and after barricading the disabled door with tables and chairs, we lay down and fell asleep upon beds which could furnish no dreams.
In the morning we ate grapes and peaches, and finding a wagon which we could hire, we bribed our pedestrian consciences and bowled over the beautiful road to Milan as republicans, reluctantly confessing that the imperial and royal post-roads were the best in the world.
"Yes—but not for the public benefit," said the mild Francis; "they are for the quicker transport of troops and artillery to oppress the people."
Silent, broken-hearted Milan! No, not yet visibly broken-hearted, for the Cathedral sparkled pure and lofty in the rare, blue summer air. It was the morning of the Feast of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary, to whom the Cathedral is dedicated, and was therefore high festival. But the people had little aspect of joy. We stopped at the gate, and sat in the steady glare of the sun while our passports were closely inspected. Outside the city wall lay a wilderness of tree trunks, which had been levelled in expectation of a siege by the Austrians. They were useless now; and groups of soldiers in gray slouched hats and black plumes—a kind of Robin Hood uniform—were clustered idly and curiously about the gate. They looked worn and red and wasted, and I fancied had taken part in the fight of the burning day which had made almost as many idiots as corpses in the Austrian army.
Within the city the streets were broken up, and the paving-stones designed for barricades were merely roughly laid back again in their places. In the long vista of the streets there was no shop open. The only signs of traffic were the stands of the fruit-merchants shaded by gayly-striped awnings, and covered with piles of glowing fruit. Multitudes of brightly-dressed people strolled idly and curiously up and down, and a company of sappers and miners marched by without music, but carrying their implements and their soiled accoutrements. They were dirty and draggled, like a corps marching across a battle-field to dig a hopeless ditch. There were no carriages moving; there was no noise, no hurry, no excitement, only that scuffling murmur which makes the silence of a great city spectral. The stately Milanese women walked finely by. Their long black hair was drawn away from the forehead and folded in massive plaits; and the black veil that hung from the back of the head was partly gathered over the arm. Queen-like they walked, carrying the bright-colored fan which was raised to shield their eyes from the sun, or languidly waved against their bosoms. Forms of the Orient or of Spain, the imagination touched them with pathetic dignity—matrons of a lost country.
HERBERT SPENCER ON THE YANKEE
IT was a very distinguished and agreeable company that greeted Mr. Herbert Spencer at dinner, and the speaking was capital. His own address was an interesting paper, in which he preached "the gospel of relaxation." In an interview published some time before, he had made some incisive criticisms upon American life and character, and in his dinner address he said that he was going to find fault.
"The Redcoats all talk to us like uncles or pedagogues," exclaimed Americus, impatiently. "What business have they to lecture us in this style? We are quite old enough to take care of ourselves, and quite able to run this continent without any instruction from Englishmen. Suppose that some American guest in England should say to his hosts that he wanted to give them some good advice, and point out to them a few of their defects, and then proceed to pat them on the head with patronizing praise, don't you think there would be a storm? If strangers like us, very well; if they don't like us, very well. It is a matter of supreme indifference to us."
Why, then, Americus, do we ask them how they like us? And why should the people of one country scornfully decline to hear the comments of sensible people of other countries? Every man is, or ought to be, glad to receive intelligent counsel, and to see his life from other points of view than his own. Why should not the citizen be equally sensible? We did not ask De Tocqueville to come and see us and analyze our political institutions and their operations. We did not ask Von Holst to write our constitutional history. But De Tocqueville and Von Holst have laid us and all other lovers of popular constitutional liberty under great obligations. Both of them have written better books of their kind about us than any American has written.
It is absurd to snarl that we don't care what they say, and that they had better stay at home and not lecture us. When Dickens stung us with the satire of Martin Chuzzlewit, he was not only accused of ingratitude—as if a man were bound to find no fault with any abuse, and not to criticise any tendency, in a country where he had been kindly welcomed—but he was told to look at home, and assured that if he wanted to depict outrageous evils and ridiculous people he had only to portray his beloved England. That was said with a fine air of indignation. But what else was Dickens doing all his life? What are his books, in this point of view, but a prolonged arraignment of the abuses and of the absurd social types of his native England? But when Henry James, Jun., draws a good-natured and shrewd sketch of the American girl abroad in Daisy Miller, although it is plainly intended to show to conventional Europe that the American girl is misjudged, we petulantly wonder why he could not choose another type to illustrate.
The observations of intelligent foreign critics are no more hostile than the American criticisms which they confirm. When, for instance, after a very intelligent recognition of the material advantages of this country, Mr. Spencer says that if there had been another and higher progress commensurate with the material advance there would be nothing to wish, he says nothing which very many Americans have not felt and said, and he adds an improvement from history which had occurred to many Americans, and had been strongly stated by them, that while the republics of the Middle Ages surrounded themselves with material splendor, their liberty decayed. And what is this but a contemporary statement of the old truth which Goldsmith put into memorable verse a hundred years ago,
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
Mr. Spencer's further remarks that under the forms of freedom we may lose its substance, and that in some ways, which he points out, we are losing it, is the burden of the warning of many an intelligent American, which does not need the old illustration of CÆsar's introduction of the empire under republican forms, nor the warning of Burke, that "ambition, though it has ever the same general views, has not at all times the same means nor the same particular objects." So when Mr. Spencer says that paper constitutions will not work as they are intended to work, and that the real basis and bulwark of national greatness and of progressive liberty is character and not education, he says what every thoughtful American perceives and believes. He does not say, indeed, what many Americans know, and what explains the emphasis with which we insist upon education, that the perception of the desirability of general education is in itself an evidence of character. Education alone may not save a people from political trouble, but constitutional liberty will not be maintained by an ignorant people.
That our good-nature is a kind of moral indifference which is really a defect of character is another of Mr. Spencer's observations which is a corroboration of much American comment upon American life. It has an explanation in the conditions of that life for which Mr. Spencer does not make allowance. But his remark is only that of the railroad traveller last summer which this Easy Chair recorded. In a new country—if an American without incurring the penalty of high-treason may call this a new country—everybody must good-humoredly help everybody else, and make the best of everything.
Perhaps Mr. Spencer has not heard the story of the American gentleman travelling in a certain part of the country, who was quartered in a hotel, in a room of which the window opened upon the piazza where his fellow-citizens sat tilted back in chairs, talking, reading the newspapers, and expectorating. There was no shade or shutter to the window. The traveller, desiring to change his dress, for want of any other curtain hung a shirt over the window to secure his seclusion. But a watchful fellow-citizen chanced to see the unwonted attempt to escape the public eye, and the traveller was surprised in the most intimate stage of his change of raiment to see the improvised curtain suddenly torn away, and a face thrust inquiringly into the window with the remark, "I jess wanted to see what you're so—— private about." The case was an extreme one, and a laugh was certainly a better recourse than a revolver.
In everything that involves a principle, as Mr. Spencer truly says, there is profound wisdom in Hamlet's phrase, "Greatly to find quarrel in a straw." But this again is only a new face of the old wisdom obsta principiis. For a straw shows which way the wind blows. How can a sensible American quarrel with the shrewd and kindly insight of a quiet Englishman who, when he is asked his opinion, shows that he agrees with the asker? At the dinner Mr. Spencer did not speak as an Englishman, or a critic, or a cynic, but as a philosopher. The end of all our study and endeavor, he said, should be complete living. We do not learn for learning's sake, we are not self-denying for the sake of self-denial, but all is for fuller and richer living. Intemperate devotion to work of any kind, like all intemperance, weakens the power of right living. In America, as in England, there is this absorbing passion for work. Therefore, in the interest of a better and more truly efficient life, let us heed the gospel of relaxation and recreation.
It was, as he said, an unconventional after-dinner speech, and Carl Schurz very happily cited the speaker himself as a striking illustration—as striking as any Yankee—of the consequences of disregarding his own doctrine of the desirability of recreation for a completer life. But it was not an English uncle "tipping" his bumptious American nephew with good advice, nor a pedagogue lecturing us upon our follies and defects, nor a supercilious foreigner condescending. It was a thoughtful guest of our own kindred, of the same high and generous purpose that we attribute to the best of our countrymen, comparing notes in the most friendly way, and speaking to us not distinctively as Americans so much as men living in America. If any American of corresponding standing with Mr. Spencer should go to England and speak to Englishmen after dinner in the same simple and friendly way, they would be very foolish fellows if they listened with any less courtesy and heed than we have listened to Mr. Spencer.
HONOR
THESE are very precious words of Lovelace:
"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."
And Francis First's message to his mother after Pavia, "All is lost but honor," is in the same key. Yet honor has been as much travestied as liberty, and the crimes committed in its name are as many. Falstaff's is a sharp antistrophe: "What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air." But for that whiff of air how many noble lives have been sacrificed!
Alexander Hamilton knew his own time, and he decided that his refusal of Burr's challenge would be regarded as cowardly, and destroy his prestige and influence. We may say that a morally greater man would nevertheless have dared to refuse it, but we must also consider that Hamilton knew the popular estimate of his own standard of life, and would naturally test his conduct by that standard. He was a soldier and a man of the world of the eighteenth century. Dr. Nott, the echoes of whose famous sermon on Hamilton's death still linger in tradition, might have declined to fight and been justified. He was a clergyman, and popular feeling excused him from resorting to the field of honor. But it is very doubtful if it would have excused Hamilton.
He might have urged that Burr had no right to make his demand. But Hamilton knew that he had spoken most strongly of Burr, and he knew that Burr knew it. He thought Burr an unprincipled and dangerous fellow, and he said so plainly. But there was the familiar preface to Hamilton's explanation of the charges against him as Secretary of the Treasury. Could he take the lofty height of moral principle? Or could he stand upon the technical punctilio of the duel? His honor, by which he meant the consistency of his life and the standards that he acknowledged, seemed to him to allow him no alternative, and he was slain by the necessity of what is unquestionably a false sense of honor.
A man's honor, in the sense that we may attribute to the lines of Lovelace, is his most precious possession. But it is something which is wholly in his own keeping, and is not at the mercy or whim of another. He can soil it, but except himself the whole world cannot smirch it. If a man had told Dr. Channing that he lied, or had dashed a glass of wine in his face, the honor of Dr. Channing would still have remained unsullied, not because he was a minister, but because of a reason which is equally applicable to all other men—because of his moral rectitude and courage. That a ribald tongue railed at him for lying when he had spoken the truth could not affect him except with pity or wonder. Even if the charge were true and he had told a lie, he would, indeed, have soiled his own honor, but the railer would not have touched it.
This view assumes that honor is something else than notoriety, which in turn is something very different from fame or character. Notoriety is current familiarity with a man's name, which is given by much mention of it arising from any kind of conduct. Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds or noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind. But honor is absolutely individual and personal. It is conscious and willing loyalty to the highest inward leading. It is that quality which cannot be insulted. This is the sublime instinct of which Lovelace sings. I could not so much love thee, Lucasta, purest of the pure, if I did not love purity more. Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis amica veritas.
The ordinary talk about honor is a parody of this spiritual loyalty. A man seizes another by the nose at a public table, or he slaps his face in the street, or he tells him in the sacred precincts of the club that he lies, or he posts him as a coward, or he insults his wife or daughter—such a man invites summary retaliation, and he generally gets it. But there is no question of honor involved. "Suppose your nose pulled at the opera," said a gentleman at the club, discussing the ethics of honor—"your nose, you know," he said, with horror, and unconsciously holding his own forward—"what could be a more unspeakable insult?" "Yes," answered his protagonist; "but does a man carry his honor in his nose?" Nature has provided instincts and weapons for the defence of our noses. But she has not made the nose the citadel of honor, nor has she left honor at the mercy of a sot who may choose to drench it with wine.
There was a quarrel the other day between two men, one of whom had said that the way in which the other had done something was not the way of a gentleman; the other replied that he would not stand being called ungentlemanly. There was a closing and grappling, and then one whipped out a pistol and began firing at the other, who took to the street, and most naturally but inconsiderately dodged behind innocent citizens in the street to avoid the bullets. The pursuer fired as opportunity served, while the pursued dashed into a hotel to borrow a pistol to return the broadside. Stanley might have seen such a performance in the Mmjumbo regions on the shores of Lake Nyanza or the banks of the Zambesi, but what had it to do with honor? Is that what Lovelace loved more than Lucasta? Is that what King Francis—more's the pity if this were the thing—did not lose at Pavia!
Our honor is solely in our own keeping. To have your nose pulled is not to be dishonored, but so to behave that it deserves pulling. But, Alcibiades of the clubs, remember that it is not the pulling which makes the dishonor.
