WHAT HAD BECOME OF THE OLD ECCENTRICITIES
On revisiting the earth nothing is more remarkable than to find that
with each man goes one striking characterization. There is usually one
prevalent well-founded recollection based upon a temperamental
peculiarity, and the impression was made, that the former citizen was
fortunate to leave that one item in the memory of the people. You make
reference to him, "Oh, yes, he was our town clerk for twenty years." As
often as you mention him you are told again the fact which distinguishes
him. One beloved character was Abiel Bassett. "Oh yes, he was our good
deacon, Deacon Bassett." He was a farmer. As such, he made his living,
but that was nothing to the point. "Deacon Bassett"--that was all. Cain
stands in the catechism for one fact. There are two things beside, that
could be said of him. It is not usual to mention them. Judas must have
had excellent qualities or he would not have been made an apostle. One
thing attaches to him. If a person's picture is to be taken he might
like to designate the occasion and expression, but then he might show
self-consciousness which spoils everything. He must not appear to want
"to be seen of men." History wants to make his picture a likeness, just
as he is, and as his friends see him, every day. On revisiting the earth
I find that one act is always stated of my father. It gave him earthly
immortality. It was not his greatest act nor his best. He took no pose
for the permanent picture. Joseph Jefferson, Kate Claxton and Edwin
Booth had, each of them, one part that fitted them like a garment and
fully expressed them. It would inevitably become the favorite selected
for a "Benefit Night." Audiences in part determined their public
character. My father took his permanent position thus by a kind of
election.
He was not consulted. History does not say, "How would you like to have
your picture taken now?" He is caught like a fly in the amber and there
he remains. His repute is imperishable. Thus statuesque is history.
_Forgetting all Except One Truth_
My mother left one clear-cut impression. It remained like the imprint of
a fern leaf on a rock, a suggestive though accidental record of the
years gone by. It was a simple picture stamped with a strange
indelibility, like the patience of Job, the meekness of Moses, the
daring of Daniel, the greed of Shylock, the indecision of Hamlet, the
jealousy of Othello, the furious driving of Jehu. One story was told
with endless iteration by the old-time neighbors who feel themselves
under no obligation to laboriously dig up a second story when the usual
one is the best and is so thoroughly characteristic. Thus all other
occurrences are suffered to fade from the community's recollection. When
a patriarch was returning from battle with his spoils, a priest, meeting
him, stretched forth his arms and blessed him. In this pose history's
snap-shot was taken. After thousands of years we find that he "abideth a
priest continually." Such men are the moral pivots of society. Their
claim on remembrance, like William the Silent, Charles the Bold, Richard
the Lion-Hearted turned upon one conspicuous thing and history will so
nail that one fact down and so hammer it that it is practically
impossible to effect a readjustment, as in the matter of Daniel
Webster's physical condition while making his Rochester speech and of
the obloquy cast upon Chief Justice Taney in the Dred-Scott decision,
that the negro "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect."
The learned judge never made that affirmation. His sympathies in the
recital were against, rather than with, the sentiment he named. In
revisiting the earth you find that history did not fasten upon the best
form of characterization and you try to argue. Oh never mind now, our
story is a good one; it will have to stand. It has been attacked
before.
_Personalities of Rarest Types_
The difficulty has been pointed out of recalling our childhood, exactly
as it was, for the reason that as we travel backward, we take our
present selves with us. Imagination is now less active, and so things
are shorn of their size and of their exaggerated features. On coming to
town we miss the lion of the place. Our juvenile Hall of Fame was
featured by the Sagamore of the tribe. In the good old days society had
its leader, its model, its dictator who would have led an army or
governed a kingdom. He merited the description by which the Norse sages
so often carried a meaning of high praise when they declared one to be
"not an every-day man." His individual life was less lost in the crowd.
His isolation reacted on his character. His residence was one of the
show places of the town. It was the resort for the itinerant politician,
holding out the glad hand, who was to speak in the evening, and was with
us to electioneer. In such a community it falls usually to one and the
self-same family to entertain. The house is known as the Quaker tavern,
or the Methodist tavern. Its hospitality is proverbial. It had its spare
room. This became locally quite famous for the celebrities it had
welcomed, before they had come to their later fame. Hospitality in this
form is the grace of small, remote, detached places. The minister's
house had a prophet's chamber, with a "bed and a table and a stool and a
candle-stick" so that when any "holy man of God" passed by he could turn
in thither. A minister's wife said plaintively that she never knew how
many she was cooking a meal for. On one occasion she had provided a
custard pie, more than ample, for the few she then had in mind. It was
however necessary later to cut it into six pieces and that,
notwithstanding the fact that it was imperative, by an unforseen
situation, for the mother herself and her daughter not to "care for any"
that day. The minister's family adopted a code of S. O. S. signals which
it would sound around F. H. B., "Family hold back," M. I. K., "more in
the kitchen." To the manse any minister, though a total stranger and
unannounced, could come with complete assurance. The itinerant and his
horse were now and then forced by a snow-storm to remain a few days
until the roads were broken up and settled.
_Poet of the One-Hoss Shay Said, "No Extra Charge"_
The lobby, in the earlier country tavern, was universally called the
bar-room. Travel was thus staging from one bar-room to another. The
tables were served by the village belles. Other employment, as in
factories or stores, did not then exist. The inn holder was a
conspicuous man. He picked up the news from the stage driver and his
passengers. When the old-fashioned Concord stage coach approached town
the four fine horses were slowed down into an easy pace for a few
furlongs but reaching the suburbs, the horses were given the word, and
the long whip was cracked and they dashed into town, making the arrival
peculiarly enlivening.
Presently the country landlord would appear on the long broad platform
to sound the summons to the table. This was done by the loud violent
ringing of a dinner bell, which was swung by a whole arm-movement on
both sides of the artist's body, and made to publish in double tones its
noisy welcome. The ringer's whole anatomy entered for the time being
into the contortion for producing sound.
Every institution is said to be the lengthened shadow of some
personality. It was a happy thought that gave those men the title of
fathers of their country. The term is very significant of their
munificence or of some real thing that made them kings in the hearts of
men. Those names are enshrined in some academy, or other school, or
bank, or business house, or attached to some central conspicuous street.
A return to the residence discovers that imagination had given it a part
of its size and that its proportions were carried over from the local
prominence of its occupant. "I saw an angel standing in the sun," said
St. John. Position gives size. A man who stands near a camp fire
projects portentous dimensions on space behind him. The aristocracy of
such a man sometimes was certainly not in his dress. He wore the
old-fashions, walked in the old ways, and was a revelation of things
that had passed away. He wore a heavy, tall, silk cylinder hat in which
he carried a bandana handkerchief, valuable papers, and a large
pocket-book that was wrapped round with a thin band of leather that was
passed under a succession of loops. We used to call him a gentleman of
the old school. We used to secretly wonder how he escaped the flood.
_Links with the Past_
When he adopted his style of dress his apparel was the last word in
fashion. It suited his taste, was becoming, comfortable, and
satisfactory. His course was consistent. He adhered to it and kept right
on. Toward the last of his career he depended somewhat upon it to make
him a marked man. Such an individual with obsolete manners was, like
Melrose Abbey, impressive in its decay. In his age, disliking changes,
his distrustful mind would cling to what was nearest to him, his
appearance. He did not see why his style of dress should be interfered
with. He made no reckoning with time. That item alone gives a rude
awakening to a recruit. In a call for troops he was passed by. Again in
a call for troops he is summoned. He is substantially what he felt
himself before to be, only time, simply time has passed and he is
twenty-one and takes a new relation to his own parents and to his
country and to his fortune. The city of Washington used to contain a set
of pensioned admirals, retired army officers and officials, who still
wore the hall marks of their life when at its climax. The simple
revolution of the earth made them fossils and relics and reminders that
the procession of which they had been honored members had now for the
greater part turned the corner and passed out of view. Sometimes an old
man and his wife, tall and antique in appearance, resembling Abraham and
Sarah of old, are distinguished chiefly for looking "like the afternoon
shadow of other people."
_Boys Did Not Know What to Make of Them_
On revisiting the earth the old albums are the first things inevitably
brought out and was there ever anything more grotesque and unearthly
than that which is shown in their hideous, faded contents? A woman, in
those days, so deformed her fine form, that the wonder was expressed,
and the surprise, that with that make-up she ever got a husband.
When de Tocqueville was in this country looking for evidences of
democracy in America, he frankly states in the introduction to his
epoch-making book that he saw more than there was. Impossible. You
cannot find what does not exist, yet his untruth is the exact
unqualified truth. He that seeketh findeth. He plainly saw signs of
democracy before he left the company's dock as he landed from the ship.
He saw it too at the hotel. It takes a big volume to tell all the tokens
he discovered. If he had been accompanied by a twin brother, different
in heart, in sympathies, and in his specialty he could in turn have
found money kings, railroad kings, kings of fortune, landlords, laborers
in a stand-up fight with capitalists. McAllister found a social set
limited in number to four hundred. A real estate man takes a different
view of the Hawthorne house or of Independence Hall or the Old South
Church from the antiquarian. Dr. W. J. Dawson knew a man who sailed with
Napoleon but could tell of him later but two items, one of which had
some reference to silk hosiery, that his mind probably revolted at, as
extravagant or as prudish. Of the same incident, some said it thundered,
others said an angel spake. An artist and a banker traveled together
abroad and on hearing their recital you would suppose they visited
different lands.
_Heroes and Fine Old Gentlemen_
One of the curiosities of history was the great game of
follow-my-leader, that the whole community used to play. Under the hat
of the great man of the village was a brain large enough for the ruler
of a nation. He seemed the peer of a Bismarck in executive force. We
have had since a high grade of general education but then we had a
giant. He had an individuality peculiar and surprising. His mental
traits were exceptional. The dominant features of his character were
energy, industry, and courage. He was an able, genial, hard-working man,
a treasure and a blessing, but giving some evidence of rusty mental
machinery and of being belated in the world's history and of absolute
inability to train a successor. A modern, typical exhibition of the
relation of the big man to the town was given at Three Oaks, Michigan,
when Admiral Dewey gave a cannon to the committee that after the Spanish
war was arranging a memorial to the dead soldiers and sailors. It was
offered to the city that in proportion to its population would make the
largest contribution to the monument. Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and
San Francisco all vied with each other. The case turned on the clear
swung conception of one master mind. It would never be possible, Mr. E.
K. Warren observed, "to rouse all the inhabitants of a large city to
give to such a cause," but every man, woman and child in Three Oaks would
give a dime or a dollar on condition that he himself gave a thousand
times the amount. The people owe a debt of gratitude to such a man, a
marked individual specimen of human worth, with a character of his own,
who plays the part of fountain to their reservoir. There is a fine
reflex influence in being what the New Testament calls "a lover of good
men." There is nothing better that can enter the human soul than
admiration and reverence for high character. They are the crown of our
moral nature. One element in them is appreciation. It was a fine
training for boys to show and feel deference. This is one thing that a
boy does not bring into the world with him. It is not natural to look
up.
_Sounds a Characteristic Note_
We live in an age of interrogation when all things are questioned, not
only as to their right to exist, but particularly as to their right in
any degree to rule. Every age has its own lesson and adds its own
peculiar gift to those preceding it. Are we better or worse? This only I
know that these men were beacon lights to the young, illuminating their
path and beckoning them on, and deserve to be enshrined in a perpetual
and revered remembrance. From all this there has come a reaction.
Congressmen and legislators have not lowered in grade, far from that, as
the elimination of the bar from the capital would be one of many
evidences, but the public intelligence has risen so that they,
relatively, seem to have descended. Instead of a century plant the usual
attraction now is a garden. A great social revival has been abroad; the
people are getting together. There is now more concerted action. In the
business world individuals are forming alliances. Interests are being
confederated. As the community spirit comes to consciousness the
individuality of men diminishes. Society forms into clubs, chambers of
commerce, and into boards of directors in which men are less marked
individually and much, even of their personality, is concealed by the
extravagant multiplication of societies and institutions and meetings of
every kind. The churches have pretty nearly lost the individual, since
the introduction of team work, itself a blessing, but the individual has
withered. He is leveled down and smoothed out by the necessity of acting
only in conjunction with groups.
_Some Incongruities of Character_
The Arabian Nights would make queer history, yet they would prove a wet
fuse and fail to kindle the mind if they did not suggest actual
experience. Who is your "old man" that sticks to your shoulders putting
you in Sinbad's class? Each village carries its unconventional
character. He gives a touch of color to the place. Rip Van Winkle, an
old drunkard, who slept for twenty years in the Catskills was a great
favorite with the children. They would shout for joy whenever he
approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, and
taught them to fly kites. He was surrounded by a troop of them. He had a
distinct individuality. He was a hero, with all his characteristics well
marked. A person on revisiting the earth misses such a striking familiar
figure in the neighborhood. We saw Mrs. Van Winkle beat up old Rip with
a broom-stick, but although she was a clean, tidy, thrifty person who
kept her house swept and garnished in spite of her improvident husband,
in the estimation of the boys she was not to her well-known husband a
companion character.
"Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean."
Young eyes are sharply drawn to persons so dissimilar in their tastes.
Children are quick to see that this very difference in taste produced a
peculiar situation. Our early life is peopled with distinctive and
marked characters and they have gone along with us through life. It is
the peculiar outstanding people that, like a burr, stick to the memory.