MASSACHUSETTS PURITANISM--THE YALE CLASS OF 1853
Massachusetts was in those days, that is, in the middle of the last
century, in the bonds of that inherited and unrelaxing Puritanism
which was her strength and her weakness. Darwin had not spoken. The
effort to reconcile science and theology--not religion--had only
begun. Agassiz's was still the voice most trusted, and he, with all
his scientific genius and knowledge, was on the side of the angels.
The demand for evidence had not yet overcome the assertion of
ecclesiastical authority in matters of belief. The spiritual
ascendancy of the New England minister was little, if at all,
impaired, and his political ascendancy had still to be reckoned with.
There were, I suppose, no two places in the world so much under the
dominion of one form or another of priestly rule as the six New
England States and Scotland; and therefore no two between which
spiritual and political resemblances were so close.
There were, however, influences which while less visible were
sometimes more potent. The pastor was the figurehead of a
Congregational Church; or, to use Phillips's simile, he was the {12}
walking-beam which the observer might think the propelling force of
the steamboat. "But," said Phillips, "there's always a fanatic down
in the hold, feeding the fires." The fanatics were the deacons.
They often had in them the spirit of persecution. They encroached
upon, and sometimes usurped, the rightful authority of the true head
of the Church, the pastor, in matters of faith and matters of conduct
alike. They constituted themselves the guardians of the morals of
the flock, the pastor and his family included. My father was a man
whose mind ran strongly toward Liberalism. He had nothing of the
inquisitor about him. But his deacons were possessed with a
school-mastering demon. They had the vigilance of the detective
policeman and a deep sense of responsibility to their Creator for the
behaviour of their fellow-men. Good and conscientious citizens all
of them, but indisposed to believe that men who held other opinions
than theirs might also be good. Their individual consciences were to
be the guide of life to the rest of the world. If they had not the
ferocity of Mucklewraith they had his intolerance. They would have
made absence from divine service a statutory offence, as the earlier
Puritans did. Two services each Sunday, a Sunday-school in between,
and prayer-meetings on Wednesdays--all these must be punctually
attended by us children, and were.
When a decision had to be taken about my going to college, I wished
to be sent to Harvard, {13} as every Massachusetts boy naturally
would. But Harvard was a Unitarian college, and the deacons
persuaded my father that the welfare of my immortal soul would be
imperilled if I was taught Greek and Latin by professors who did not
believe in a Trinitarian God. This spirit of theological
partisanship prevailed and I was sent to Yale. At that admirable
seat of learning there was no danger of laxity or heresy. The
strictest Presbyterianism was taught relentlessly and the strictest
discipline enforced. Chapel morning and evening, three or perhaps
four services on Sunday--in all let us say some eighteen separate
compulsory attendances on religious exercises each week. Would it be
wonderful if a boy who had undergone all this for four years should
consider that he had earned the right to relaxation in after days?
None the less willingly do I acknowledge my debt to Yale, a debt
which would have been heavier had I been more industrious. The
President of the University in our time was the Reverend Dr.
Wolseley--learned, austere, kindly, but remote. We boys saw little
of him except on a pedestal or in the pulpit. When he bade the class
farewell, he made us a friendly little speech and proposed a toast:
"The Class of 1853. I drink their healths in water. May their names
not be writ in water." Nor were they. Perhaps no class contained so
many members who have filled larger spaces for a longer time in the
public eye and the public press.
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There was Stedman, the poet and poet critic. He left poems which
will live forever, but no such body of poetical achievement as he
might have produced had not circumstances obliged him to devote to
business and to editorial work abilities superior to either. He is
not remembered pre-eminently as a poet of patriotism, but the only
poem of Stedman's included in Emerson's Parnassus is his "John Brown
of Osawatomie," written--was it not for _The Tribune_?--in November,
1859, while Brown lay in his Virginian jail waiting to be hanged.
Stedman, his genius flowering in a prophetic insight, warned them;
but his "Virginians, don't do it" rang unavailingly through the land;
and his
...Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
May trouble you more than ever when you've nailed
his coffin down
never reached the Virginian mind till Northern regiments sang their
way through Southern States to the tune of "John Brown's Body."
Stedman's range was wide. He set perhaps most value on his _Lyrics
and Idylls_. That was the title he gave to the volume of poems
published in London in 1879; selected by himself for his English
readers. His American friends will like to be reminded that the
first third of the volume is given to "American Lyrics and Idylls,"
including "Old Brown," and that tender monody on Horace {15} Greeley
which no _Tribune_ reader can have forgotten.
There was Charlton Lewis, an Admirable Crichton in his
versatility,--if the serious meaning of that name has survived Mr.
Barrie's travesty of it on the stage. We knew him at Yale as a
mathematician who played with the toughest problems proposed to us by
mathematical tutors and professors; whose very names I forget. We
knew him afterward as lawyer, insurance expert, Latin lexicographer,
journalist, financier, and editor of _Harper's Book of Facts_, the
best of all books of facts; but now, or when I last inquired, out of
print and not easily procurable. He understood cards also. Playing
whist, which I think was forbidden in college, he dealt to his
partner and two adversaries the usual miscellaneous hand; and to
himself, by way of jest, all thirteen trumps. When the enemy
remonstrated Lewis answered: "If you will specify any other order in
which it is mathematically more probable that the hands would be
distributed, I will admit that this is not the product of chance."
An answer to which there was no answer. He delighted in puzzling
minds less acute and less scientific than his own. Few men have had
a more serviceable brain than his, or known better how to use it; and
his power of work knew no limit.
There was Mr. Justice Shiras of the United States Supreme Court.
There was Fred Davies, a dignitary of the Church--in whom
professional decorum never extinguished a natural sense of {16} fun
and good-fellowship. There was, and happily still is, Andrew White,
historian, writer of books, President of Cornell University,
Ambassador, and, in a forgetful moment, one of President Cleveland's
commission to determine the boundary line between a British colony
and a foreign state; neither of whom had asked him to draw it. There
was Isaac Bromley, one of the world's jesters who make life amusing
to everybody but themselves; whom all his colleagues on _The Tribune_
valued for qualities which were his own and not ours. Not the least
of the many eulogies which death brought him was the testimony of
those who knew him best, that his humour was good-humoured.
The most casual reader must have noticed how various are the talents
and characters among the hundred and six graduates of 1853. There
are many more. There is Wayne MacVeagh, the most delightful of
companions, counsel in great causes all his life, Attorney-General of
the United States, Ambassador to Rome, one of the men who paid least
respect to social conventionalities, yet in Washington a central
figure in society. But neither law nor society gave full scope for
the restless energy of his mind. During all the later years I have
known MacVeagh he has been a thinker, serious, daring, too often
unsound. His reading has been largely among books dealing with those
new social problems which vex the minds of men, often needlessly, and
disturb clear brains. Novelties interested him; and the drift of his
thoughts was toward radical reconstruction {17} and toward one form
or another of socialism. He espoused new opinions with vehemence;
and sometimes reverted with vehemence to the old. We met again in
London some five and twenty years ago. MacVeagh delivered to a
little company at lunch a brief but reasoned and rather passionate
discourse against our diplomatic service in Europe. When I suggested
that we had none, he retorted:
"But we have Ministers and Legations and though some of our Ministers
are good and able men, they are wasted. No Minister is needed. All
the business of the United States in Europe could be done and ought
to be done by Consuls, and all the Legations ought to be abolished,
and the Ministers recalled."
I forget just how long it was after this outburst that MacVeagh was
appointed Minister to Constantinople; and accepted and served; with
credit and distinction, and afterward more efficiently still as
Ambassador to Rome.
He had a pretty wit in conversation, and a power of repartee before
which many an antagonist went down. A celebrated American _causeur_
once attacked him as a Democrat. "Yes," answered MacVeagh, "I am a
Democrat and know it. You are a Democrat and don't know it. You
have just been made President of a great railroad corporation. The
stock sells to-day at a hundred and twenty; but before you have been
President three years, you will have brought it within reach of the
humblest citizen."
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An unfulfilled prophecy, but that is what makes prophecy so useful as
an instrument of debate. Only time can prove it false.
These men and many more gave distinction to the class. Randall
Gibson, of Louisiana, afterward Confederate General and United States
Senator, cannot be omitted from the briefest catalogue. He was one
of a small band of Southerners at Yale. When you came to know him
you understood what the South means by the word gentleman; and by its
application of the title to the best of its own people, or to the
ruling class in the South as a whole. Already, of course, and even
in this younger brood, the clash of interests and sentiments, the
"prologue to the omen coming on," the strained relations between
South and North, were visible, and vexatious enough in social
intercourse. Randall Gibson was saturated with Southern ideas, and
perhaps had the prejudices of his race, but he kept them to himself
or did not impart them to us of the North. He lived in the upper
air, yet he looked down on nobody. There was no more popular man,
yet no man who held himself so completely aloof from the
familiarities common enough as between classmates.
In after life, from the havoc of war and other causes, he suffered
much and bore disaster with courage. He was a man with reference to
whom it is possible, and was always possible, to use the much-abused
word chivalrous, with the certainty it could not be misunderstood.
When he died {19} there passed away a beautiful example of a type
common in literature, rare in life, rarest of all in this generation,
the grand seigneur.
There was lately an Englishman, Earl Spencer, whom Randall Gibson
resembled: slightly in appearance, closely in those essential traits
which go to the making of character. The same urbanity; the same
considerateness to others; the same loyalty of nature; the same
shining courage; the same unfailing effort to conform to high ideals.
Both men had the pride of race and of descent. In both it turned to
fine effects. I have known Lord Spencer to submit--I may be forgiven
this distant allusion--to what can only be called an extortion rather
than engage in a legal controversy he thought undignified, yet out of
which he would have come victorious. I have known Randall Gibson to
accept the verdict of fate, the award of undeserved adversity, rather
than defend himself when his success might have exposed his comrades
to censure. The world may call it in both of them quixotic, but the
world would be a much better place to live in if quixotry of this
sort were commoner than it is. Neither of these two men railed
against the world, or complained of its ethical standard. All they
did was to have each a standard of his own and to govern their own
lives accordingly.
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