TOUCHING A LONG SLUMBERING CHORD
If houses have souls, as Hawthorne believed and taught, and can admire
and remember, there is one residence, toward which I turn my willing
pilgrim feet, on revisiting the earth, which supports his way of
thinking. I was hardly within the door of this dwelling, once occupied
by my father, himself a clergyman, when it began to reel off to me, the
impressions it had received and retained, for a generation. First, came
in minute detail, with all the vividness of moving pictures, a recital
touching the old-fashioned donation party which, like the husking-bee
and the quilting-bee or house-raising, requires a good deal of
interpretation to those, living in days, when money flows like water.
The mingling of work and pleasure, combining philanthropy and social
enjoyment was the custom of the time. All came together in a fine spirit
of neighborliness and all the labor and all the supplies for the feast
were gratuitously furnished. A Donation Party was featured particularly
by spare-ribs, also by cake, bags of flour, and pies, also by all kinds
of things both from the cellar and larder of the members of the parish.
The soiree with refreshments, was always a surprise, with this exception
that the minister's wife was asked, with a knowing look, if the dominie
was to be at home. The outstanding fact was the overwhelming abundance
of everything. The party over, when we sat down to a meal, we began just
where we left off at the last repast.
_The Past at Least is Secure_
Wood, in sled lengths, used to be dragged to our door. Coal was unknown
to our experience. When a man had a pig-sticking, in anticipation of the
school-teacher's coming to his house to board, he brought a portion of
the result to the manse, as if to obtain and enjoy a blessing on the
rest. A minister's salary was by necessity used for pocket money. The
occasions were joyous, social, extremely helpful, and welcome. The cake
left a precious memory behind. Sometimes the lambs of the flock combined
to procure something that the shepherd was known to need. What killed
the Donation Party and buried it, beyond the hope of resurrection, was
the fun and ridicule and wit that came to be aimed at its ludicrous
features. A colored porter, on a Pullman car, said he had a good
position until the comic papers took up the prevalent method of
collecting tips and made it ridiculous. One must orient himself to
place the right estimate upon this party at the minister's house. He was
not in those days independent to the point of being defiant. There was
no beggary, no humiliation, and the people were generous, considering
that they had, in many cases, difficult problems of their own. If a
minister went into a community to live, as they did, there was a fine
feeling all around.
_Where a Critical Struggle was Beginning_
As I stood in the floor of my early home all the situations were plainly
outlined for me. In the front corner of one of the best rooms, stood the
study table of the dominie, on which he wrote the ministerial
recommendations. Ministers used to be mediators: that was their office.
This kindly disposition, to put the influence of one's name, and the
weight of his ministerial character, behind any good thing, that seemed
to need promoting, could be developed into a form of second nature. The
new form of charity, "Not alms, but a friend," did not reduce the number
of letters of recommendation. We were taught that a little kindness is
often worth more than a great deal of money. The poor, unemployed man
lacked opportunity, acquaintance, and recognition. The minister, in pure
disinterestedness, brothers him. The usual form of helpfulness is a
letter. The misfortune is that everybody can recommend anybody.
Exaggerations can be given to certain qualities and a discreet silence
observed with regard to others. Thus Mrs. Stowe accentuates the negro's
peculiarly religious character and disposition. Thus Wendell Phillips
never tells the truth, and yet he always tells truth.
_Rising Young Men_
The relation of this subject to the book canvasser is extremely
suggestive. Some of those who have written their names highest on the
rolls of deserved honor have followed this laudable calling. The
foremost American, George Washington, sold two hundred copies of
Bydell's "American Savage." Our most melodious poet, Longfellow, sold
books by subscription. Our pre-eminent orator, Daniel Webster, handled
de Tocqueville's "America." Our greatest general, the hero of
Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant, canvassed for Irving's "Columbus." And our
magnetic statesman, James G. Blaine, began his career as a canvasser for
a life of Henry Clay. In the small, dark, dingy parlors of country
hotels, travelers on rainy days often now find copies of books that were
sold, or rather traded, to the well-fed, good natured, boniface in
exchange for entertainment. I can remember items that I have read in
these books. I can now go to the tavern and the table where I read after
dinner from Butler's book his explanation of the reason that he lost
more cases after he became celebrated as a lawyer than he did before.
After his fame was established clients flocked to him, with desperate
cases. They did not balk at the amount of his retaining fee. As these
hotly contested cases had been put through all of their preliminary
stages, in all the lower courts, Benjamin F. Butler has lost each one of
these chances to get his client by. The case was substantially decided
adversely before the great lawyer appeared in it at all.
_Tendency to Exaggerate Rather than to Daguerreotype_
The dependence of the agent upon ministers is a testimonial to their
sympathy. It stamps them as leaders and establishes the fact that their
influence in the community is effective. Great evils are wrought in
churches and communities by the fact that indorsements are so easily
obtained. A man who wants testimonials can get them. Some of our little
home missionary churches in the West, that deserve better things, are
grievously tormented. This department of religious helpfulness has been
so sadly overworked that it is suggestive to find one Christian
association of young men that now omits to give letters of
recommendation, feeling that discrimination is always difficult and
certainly invidious.
_The Practice Has Boomerang Implications_
When one is in doubt about recommending a person or thing he ought to
take the elder Weller's advice with regard to widows, "Don't." A letter
of recommendation ought not to express the judgment of him who seeks it,
but of him who gives it. Recommendations too often embody the opinion of
the applicant only voiced in the words of a man of influence and
position. The pen had over-employment as compared with the feet. We
ought to help convicts, released from prison, at the expiration of their
sentence, to get employment; but the employer ought to be put in
possession of the facts. There is probably no one of us but can say that
his letters of recommendation have surpassed in fruitfulness every other
form of helpful service. By them currents have been set in motion that
have changed the course of many a life. Among those eminent deeds that
have caused most of happiness to others, that the angels unmistakably
approved, stand out foremost in all one's past those instances in which
a letter of introduction and of unhesitating recommendation has brought
certain rare spirits into appropriate positions of usefulness and honor.
An aged clergyman, loving and beloved, tells a wondering company, how
one of Boston's merchant-princes went up to the metropolis of New
England, cherishing in his pocket as his chief possession, a letter that
meant every word it said and into which a whole country church, through
its minister, had put its true estimate of a young, manly, Christian
character, also its well wishes and its hopes.
_Things with a Difference_
There is a saying that Adam once returned to the earth where he
recognized no country but Spain. "Ah," said he, "this is exactly as I
left it." Since 1880 we have built more than five hundred cities in
America, among them some of the smartest in the world. We once lived
here, in a plain country town, and now forsooth they have a little doll
of a city. In a Boston burial ground there is an enclosed grave-lot. The
iron fence is warping and rusting and crumbling. On the iron gate-way to
the lot is moulded the caption, "Never to be disturbed." Nature the
same, everything else changes is the rule. Even in hoarse, brutal,
unprogressive Russia everything is becoming new fangled, dress,
features, manners, pursuits, all are becoming new. The alterations, in
our former place of abode, have been so unconsciously and so gradually
made, as to escape the attention of the resident. The secrecy with which
all forms of business was conducted is an example. "No admittance"
signs were once so much used that the form could have been manufactured
in lots and kept in stock to supply the constant demand. It used to be
the custom, in paying a bill, for a man as he drew out his pocket-book,
to turn half way around, and with his back to the gentleman he was
dealing with, open the wallet and examine his money.
There has been an astonishing increase in the number of employments, as
compared with the few different vocations of earlier days. Medical men
and lawyers had no specialties as they do now. Many doctors today, who
would like an all-round development, would better enjoy a country
practice. The sons of the physicians have gone into vocations that were
hardly recognized when their fathers began practice. One of the
electrical firms asked to be given, for their work alone, the entire
graduating class of 1900 from Cornell University.
_The Changing World_
The slang of a generation ago, some of it is given a permanent place in
our language, and while in the dictionaries it is rated as a
colloquialism, it is thus recognized. It has increased so greatly in the
speech of the people, it comes freely also from student bodies, from the
trades and sports and from the war camps, that it will now keep the
lexicon makers busy.
[Illustration: PARADISE LOST--BEFORE THE SALEM FIRE]
[Illustration: PARADISE REGAINED--AFTER THE CONFLAGRATION]
Swearing has grown milder. The grossness and blasphemy are largely
barred, while the expletives that technically may not be swearing at
all, being used for raciness, vigor and emphasis, have increased one
hundred fold.
A symptom of decadence is the elimination of book-stores. Speaking
broadly it is impossible to find a stall with a stock of books except in
the larger cities. When desirous of substantial reading matter I am
sometimes able to buy biographies and other books, worth while, at the
drug store in a country town. On moving into flats, families commit an
unpardonable sin in disposing of their books. The most sickening sight
in New York, Chicago, or Boston is to see second-hand books faded and
weather-beaten exposed on the street for sale at a seedy, feeble price.
In spite of the strong drift of governments toward democracy, in
revisiting the earth, I detected an exaggeration of class feeling as
compared with the early days when there were no poor in the whole town
and hardly any very rich. Our pleasures were then more simple and our
life, on the whole, more serious.
The increased height in houses is apparent. As the family prospers, it
seeks to have the walls in the second story carried up full height,
that they may not show inside the pitch of the roof which is the
distinguishing mark of a cottage.
_The Unexpected Happens_
I suppose that the passing years make little or no impression on a
well-built stone wall, but where growth and prosperity abound they are
not likely to preserve many of the primitive buildings and land-marks,
but if any living man had predicted the entire remaking and reshaping of
this place of my early residence the reply would have been that if the
Lord would work a miracle then might this thing be. The man who
professed to know just how we are made, as an automobile maker knows a
car, tells us that in seven years we get, physically, a brand new
outfit, that old things pass away, and all things become new. As we have
not now the same bodies so we have not the same mind. Our ideals, our
manners are different. We are different. We have had many a re-birth.
Time has brought changes that could no more be withstood than you could
resist the earth in its revolution. It is the miracle of a generation,
which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would
sound to many ears like a fable. The growth in population and in wealth,
during a long constructive period, has kept up the clatter of the
hammer, the cry of "mort," and the scent of the resinous odor of the
pine. Inventions and improvements have placed man in a new relation to
the globe he inhabits. Since new ideas began to prevail former methods
have been discarded. Even a snake, with years, sheds its scales and
envelopes itself in a new skin. The sun once stood still, and the Jordan
was arrested in its banks, but life and the stream of events have flowed
on without pause or rest. People who have never made a visit, like ours,
will talk freely, far from wisely, about what they have always said, and
always thought, as if they had always looked through the same eyes, and
judged by the same standards. Not so. You looked on life as it seemed
then and are looking again with the picture shifted. Your whole point of
view is changed. When a man says, "I have always felt," he means that he
has felt thus, back part way, or to a given point, but not so certainly
much beyond it.
_The Past Looks Like a Dream_
We made from recollection and were aided by inquiry, a catalogue of the
false prophets who early moved away, to the big cities, saying that the
place where we had lived would never increase much in business or
population. There is a French proverb which warns people not to use the
words "never or always." The Wall Street Journal has just used that
unreliable forbidden word "never." It heads an article, "Cheap Food
Never Again." Any man living in our old place of residence would be wary
of the use of the term "never." He would feel that almost any good
fortune may come. With tractors and gang-plows operating in the Land of
the Dakotas, South Dakota alone being a quarter larger than all New
England, and Montana, the third largest state in the union, very much
more than equal in size to England, Scotland, Ireland combined and Texas
as big as Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland together,
these states being now chiefly unfarmed, with shoals of immigrants after
the war to work these fields, bounded only by the sky line, how can a
man use the expression, Cheap Food Never Again? The statesman Cambon
said that never would Rome cease to belong to the people and that never
would Rome be the capital of the king of Italy. A Clergyman here, of
high authority and position, showed how all the sovereigns of the chief
European nations were blood relatives and announced that there could
never be another great war. He became positive. He said such a thing was
unthinkable. Look next at the harvest of death in the German war. "He
who, outside of mathematics, pronounces the word 'impossible' lacks
prudence."
_Achilles Pondered in His Tent_
Yankee Doodle's criticism was quite just. He could not see the town
because there were so many houses. We need to get away from the crowded
streets and narrow lanes and talkative people to win a true perspective.
I wanted to sit down alone and think things over. The people, generally,
were as strange to me as I was to them, and yet there was a time, when I
was as well-known to everybody, as a child is to his own mother, and
when I knew everybody in town. All the alterations of things are
wondrously complete, but these were nothing to the change of appearance
in the faces of the people. The old familiar countenances, where were
they? I looked here and I looked there and everywhere but they had
largely vanished from above and below the earth. The character of the
dog has undergone less change, than that of the human master, to whom he
is so strangely attached. Change, that immutable law of nature, had
wrought such shifts in the faces among old acquaintances that all smiles
of recognition were wanting. But when I look in the glass I see no
change. To the people I must have appeared as the veriest Rip Van
Winkle. It was not the fault of the thrifty, prosperous place that I had
slept so long, but like Rip Van Winkle it was in me to come back, and I
am trying to learn to say with him, Everything is changed and I am
changed. He recalled the occurrences before he entered upon his extended
slumber and returned to find that the place was altered. It was enlarged
and more populous and had rows of houses which he had not seen before.
The dress of the people, too, was of a different fashion from that to
which he was accustomed but whether under the somnolent influences of
his lethargies, or free from them, he mused amid all the changes of
outward affairs upon one immutable scene, "the lordly river moving on
its silent but majestic course."