Most of all to be remembered are those friendly circles gathered so
often round the winter's fire; not the stove, but the fire, the brightly
blazing, hospitable fire. In the early dusk, the home circle is drawn
more closely and quietly round it; but a good neighbor and his wife drop
in shortly from over the way, and the circle begins to spread. Next, a
few young folk from the other end of the village, entering in brisker
mood, find as many more chairs set in as wedges into the periphery to
receive them also. And then a friendly sleighful of old and young that
have come down from the hill to spend an hour or two, spread the circle
again, moving it still farther back from the fire; and the fire blazes
just as much higher and more brightly, having a new stick added for
every guest. There is no restraint, certainly no affectation of style.
They tell stories, they laugh, they sing. They are serious and gay by
turns, or the young folks go on with some play, while the fathers and
mothers are discussing some hard point of theology in the minister's
last sermon, or perhaps the great danger coming to sound morals from the
multiplication of turnpikes and newspapers! Meantime the good housewife
brings out her choice stock of home-grown exotics, gathered from three
realms--doughnuts from the pantry, hickory-nuts from the chamber, and
the nicest, smoothest apples from the cellar; all which, including, I
suppose I must add, the rather unpoetic beverage that gave its acid
smack to the ancient hospitality, are discussed as freely, with no fear
of consequences. And then, as the tall clock in the corner of the room
ticks on majestically towards nine, the conversation takes, it may be, a
little more serious turn, and it is suggested that a very happy evening
may fitly be ended with a prayer. Whereupon the circle breaks up with a
reverent, congratulative look on every face, which is itself the truest
language of a social nature blessed in human fellowship.
Such, in general, was the society of the homespun age....
Passing to the church, or rather I should say, to the
meeting-house--good translation, whether meant or not, of what is older
and more venerable than _church_, viz., _synagogue_--here again you meet
the picture of a sturdy homespun worship. Probably it stands on some
hill, midway between three or four valleys, whither the tribes go up to
worship, and, when the snow-drifts are deepest, go literally from
strength to strength. There is no furnace or stove save the foot-stoves
that are filled from the fires of the neighboring houses, and brought in
partly as a rather formal compliment to the delicacy of the tender sex,
and sometimes because they are really wanted. The dress of the assembly
is mostly homespun, indicating only slight distinctions of quality in
the worshipers. They are seated according to age,--the old king Lemuels
and their queens in front, near the pulpit, and the younger Lemuels
farther back, inclosed in pews, sitting back to back, impounded, all,
for deep thought and spiritual digestion; only the deacons, sitting
close under the pulpit by themselves, to receive, as their distinctive
honor, the more perpendicular droppings of the Word. Clean round the
front of the gallery is drawn a single row of choir, headed by the
key-pipe in the centre. The pulpit is overhung by an august wooden
canopy called a sounding-board--study general, of course, and first
lesson of mystery to the eyes of the children, until what time their
ears are opened to understand the spoken mysteries.
There is no affectation of seriousness in the assembly, no mannerism of
worship; some would say too little of the manner of worship. They think
of nothing, in fact, save what meets their intelligence and enters into
them by that method. They appear like men who have a digestion for
strong meat, and have no conception that trifles more delicate can be of
any account to feed the system. Nothing is dull that has the matter in
it, nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister
speaks in his great-coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling
blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of
ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less
content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard
and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and
these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,
trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity--give them anything high
enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing
sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to think of, they
have had a good day. A perceptible glow will kindle in their hard faces
only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith, or a Bellamy,
has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of thought or pile upon
their sturdy minds some heavier weight of argument--fainting never under
any weight, even that which, to the foreign critics of the discourses
preached by them and others of their day, it seems impossible for any,
the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported. These
royal men of homespun--how great a thing to them was religion!
The sons and daughters grew up, all, as you will perceive, in the
closest habits of industry. The keen jocky way of whittling out a living
by small bargains sharply turned, which many suppose to be an essential
characteristic of the Yankee race, is yet no proper inbred distinction,
but only a casual result, or incident, that pertains to the transition
period between the small, stringent way of life in the previous times of
home-production and the new age of trade. In these olden times, these
genuine days of homespun, they supposed, in their simplicity, that
thrift represented work, and looked about seldom for any more delicate
and sharper way of getting on. They did not call a man's property his
_fortune_, but they spoke of one or another as being _worth_ so much;
conceiving that he had it laid up as the reward or fruit of his
deservings. The house was a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and
producer for the house. The exchanges went on briskly enough, but
required neither money nor trade. No affectation of polite living, no
languishing airs of delicacy and softness indoors, had begun to make the
fathers and sons impatient of hard work out of doors, and set them at
contriving some easier and more plausible way of living. Their very
dress represented work, and they went out as men whom the wives and
daughters had dressed for work; facing all weather, cold and hot, wet
and dry, wrestling with the plow on the stony-sided hills, digging out
the rocks by hard lifting and a good many very practical experiments in
mechanics, dressing the flax, threshing the rye, dragging home, in the
deep snows, the great woodpile of the year's consumption; and then when
the day is ended--having no loose money to spend in taverns--taking
their recreation all together in reading or singing or happy talk or
silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep--to rise again with the
sun and pray over the family Bible for just such another good day as the
last. And so they lived, working out, each year, a little advance of
thrift, just within the line of comfort.
No mode of life was ever more expensive: it was life at the expense of
labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and the most proper
enjoyment. Even the dress of it was more expensive than we shall ever
see again. Still it was a life of honesty and simple content and sturdy
victory. Immoralities that rot down the vigor and humble the
consciousness of families were as much less frequent as they had less
thought of adventure; less to do with travel and trade and money, and
were closer to nature and the simple life of home.
It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it
imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt--a closely girded
habit of economy. Harnessed all together into the producing process,
young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse to
the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of
squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread and
grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost,
even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in
the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade or
expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with
meanness--simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is
not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any
conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get
their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it
was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be
found, is really anything but meanness.