so esteemed a decade or so before. There was a great deal of black in
all the fabrics as was then the fashion (now it would be vermilion
and verdigris green); chintz curtains with a black background and a
splashingly-colored design of wreaths and strange large birds; black
satin sofa-pillows, with stiff quilled ruffles in brilliant colors
to match the birds. The shades of the electric lights (which were
of course designed to make them look like candles) were ornamented
with cut-out black silhouettes of nude ladies with extremely long
legs. The furniture was either all “antique” or had been doctored to
look as though it were. A large, dark, carved chest stood against a
wall--to contain what it was difficult to conjecture. The chairs had
the correct kind of legs and backs and arms, that is, the kind that
had not yet been copied sufficiently to spoil it for the discerning
taste; and the straight, curiously-shaped table was at least two jumps
ahead of anything shown at that time even by the most enterprising
department-store. The walls, in accordance with the order of the
day, were for the most part smartly and knowingly bare, with a
few permissible reproductions of Chinese landscapes; one a tall,
narrow study of bamboo shoots, another a long, narrow study of snowy
mountains, depicted in three or four lines (this year it would be, I
suppose, an 1858 panel by Jolly).
I sat down in what looked like the most comfortable of the
distinguished chairs, my feet on one of the correctly Oriental rugs,
and looked dispiritedly about me for some sign of living taste in all
that tastefully arranged room. There was plenty of taste shown there;
but it smelled so of the pages of an expensive magazine printed on
highly-glazed paper, that presently, as I sat there, despairing of
my race, I felt my own body take on the same flat, two-dimensional
unreality. Well, that is the sort of flat and unreal creatures human
beings are when it comes to taste, I reflected.
There was not, so far as I could see, one single object in that room
(and God knows there were plenty of objects in it!) which rang out with
the clear, brave note of a thing chosen because it gives pleasure.
Everything about me wore a large, invisible but plainly legible
placard, setting forth that it was there because it was “the thing”;
and that the instant “the thing” was something else it would be cast
out and replaced with something else as meaningless as itself in the
life of the owner.
The whole expensive show was perched on the branch of other people’s
opinions, and was ready to fall to the ground as soon as that branch
waved in the wind of a new fashion. There was not one object which
suggested what you might think would be the first, simple, hearty,
healthy instinct of prospering humanity, the desire to surround itself
with what it likes. No, in its abject consistency, the room shamelessly
proclaimed that its ambition was to be well thought of by “people in
the know” and not at all to please the family who had paid for it and
had to live with it.
Docility in human beings is always a dreadful quality, but docility
in matters of taste is shameful. I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what
looked like a Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remembered.
But an ordinary private family would be as little likely to own a
real Chardin as a real Veermeer. I reflected that as soon as it was
discovered not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent off to
the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful canvas, apparently by some
one of the period who had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as
we do. If it looked so much like a Chardin that only the X-ray could
tell the difference, why wasn’t it as good as a Chardin? I fell into a
meditation on the hideous ways of collectors of pictures, blasphemers
against the Holy Ghost of Art that they are. Ostensibly they buy
pictures because they love good paintings (I am not referring to art
_dealers_!). A collector sees a small canvas, said to be a Teniers,
and is ready to pay a fantastic price for it, enough to endow a school
for all time. Some expert with a chemical test proves that it is not a
Teniers. It is the same picture as before, the very same; but now the
lover of good art would not hang it on his walls, if it were given to
him.
What kind of a race is that to belong to, I asked myself plaintively.
They don’t want beauty, they don’t want art, they haven’t even the
plain courage that any dog or monkey has, to want what they want. They
want what other people pretend to want.
I got up restlessly, crossed over to the other side of the room,
turned my eyes to the side I had left, and was electrified. There
in the center of the wall, next to a small reproduction of a Madhu
camel-fight, was a large canvas, a solidly painted, honest, dark,
sentimental Jules Breton. I gazed at it with profound thankfulness.
There was not an extenuating circumstance. It was his usual peasant
girl, done with his usual pseudo-realism, with her usual bare feet,
every muddy toe conscientiously drawn, and it had darkened to the usual
Breton gloom. It swore at the top of its voice at all the knowing,
Orientalized, simplified, subtle things about it, and my heart leaped
up to hear it swear. For it sounded like a living voice.
Here was something that must have been bought some time ago (for nobody
can actually have bought a Breton recently), which must have been hung
on the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had not been banished
when the style had changed!
And yet the rest of the room told me unmistakably that the owner of
that room knew as well as any one else what was now thought of that
Breton by people “in the know.”
Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. Never before had I
thought to admire so ardently the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface
of a Breton. But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no reason
for its presence except that somebody liked it enough to keep it in
spite of what other people thought. Well, now--I took heart--maybe the
situation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps we may have a
live national taste in art, twenty or more generations later on. If
there was _any_body not an artist himself, who had the honesty and
courage which must be at the foundation of anything alive in artistic
taste, why perhaps....
Just then a dreadful possibility came into my mind--perhaps it had been
a wedding present from a wealthy uncle not to be offended?
On this my host and hostess came in. As we talked of the object of my
visit (which had nothing to do with art) I was constantly spying on the
expression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half-despairingly
to the sound of their voices, watching feverishly every turn of
expression in their kind, honest faces. I had never seen them before
that day and probably shall have no occasion to see them again. But I
often think of them and wonder about them. They really looked as though
they might be capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no longer
in fashion. Perhaps they _had_ kept that Breton on their walls out of
sheer, honest, brave, artistic integrity....
But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems.
ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD
b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874
Of course I never saw her. She died years before I was born. But she
left behind her a portrait so full of her personality that no living
figure is more human to me than my great-grandmother.
I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece,
showing her as a withered old woman in a frilled cap, which is now the
only tangible sign of her existence left in her old home. No; that
might have been any withered old woman in a frilled cap.
There is another portrait of my great-grandmother not done on canvas
with oils. Here are some of the strokes which one by one, at long
intervals, as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me.
When I was about eight years old, I went out one day to watch old
Lemuel Hager, who came once a year to mow the grass in the orchard back
of the house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ringing steel of
his scythe, he looked down at me and remarked: “You favor the Hawley
side of the family, don’t you? There’s a look around your mouth sort
o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother--no--my sakes, you must be her
great-granddaughter! Wa’l--think of that! And it don’t seem more’n
yesterday I saw her come stepping out same’s you did just now; not so
much bigger’n you are this minute, for all she must have been sixty
years old then. She always was the _littlest_ woman. But for all that
she marched up to me, great lummox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true,
what I hear folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of school
without having learned how to read?’ And I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to
tell the truth, I never did seem to git the hang of books, and I never
could seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’
“And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of eighteen in the town
_I_ live in is a-goin’ to grow up without he knows how to read the
Declaration of Independence,’ says she. And she made me stop work for
an hour--she paid me just the same for it--took me into the house, and
started teaching me.
“Great land of love! if the teacher at school had ’a’ taught me like
that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I felt as though she’d cracked a hole
in my head and was just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel.
And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found out ’twas my eyes
the trouble. I’m terrible near-sighted. Well, that was before the
days when everybody wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs for
me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She just grabbed up a sort of
magnifying-glass that she used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes
were kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I’ll take bigger
stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches don’t matter so much as
reading for an American citizen.’
“Well, sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to practice to home
with my magnifying-glass, and it was years before I could git by the
house without Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to me,
that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in for a minute and let me
hear you read.’ Sometimes it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’
thinkin’ she could make everybody stand ’round. And sometimes it made
me laugh, she was so old, and not much bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I
l’arned to read, and I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t
never set down in the evening and open up the Necronsett ‘Journal’
without I think of Aunt Almera Canfield.”
One day I was sent over to Mrs. Pratt’s to get some butter, and found
it just out of the churn. So I sat down to wait till Mrs. Pratt should
work it over, munching on a cookie, and listening to her stream of
talk--the chickens, the hail-storm of the other day, had my folks
begun to make currant jelly yet? and so on--till she had finished and
was shaping the butter into beautiful round pats. “This always puts
me in mind of Aunt Almera,” she said, interrupting an account of how
the men had chased a woodchuck up a _tree_--who ever heard of such a
thing? “Whenever I begin to make the pats, I remember when I was a girl
working for her. She kept you right up to the mark, I tell you, and you
ought to have seen how she lit into me when she found out some of my
butter-pats were just a little over a pound and some a little less. It
was when she happened to have too much cream and she was ‘trading in’
the butter at the store. You’d have thought I’d stolen a fifty-cent
piece to hear her go on! ‘I sell those for a pound; they’ve got to _be_
a pound,’ says she, the way she always spoke, as though that ended it.
“‘But land sakes, Mis’ Canfield,’ says I, all out o’ patience with her,
‘an ounce or two one way or the other--it’s as likely to be more as
less, you know! What difference does it make? _Nobody_ expects to make
their pats just a pound! How could you?’
“‘How could you? How could you?’ says she. ‘Why, just the way you make
anything else the way it ought to be--by keeping at it till it _is_
right. What other way is there?’
“I didn’t think you could do it. I _knew_ you couldn’t; but you always
had to do the way Mis Canfield said, and so I began grumbling under my
breath about high-handed, fussy old women. But she never minded what
you _said_ about her, so long as you did your work right. So I fussed
and fussed, clipping off a little, and adding on a little, and weighing
it between times. It was the awfulest bother you ever saw, because it
spoiled the shape of your pat to cut at it so much, and you had to
start it over again every time.
“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, how soon I got the hang of it! She’d
made me think about it so much, I got interested, and it wasn’t any
time at all before I could tell the heft of a pat to within a fraction
of an ounce just by the feel of it in my hand. And I never forgot it.
You never do forget that kind of thing. I brought up my whole family on
that story. ‘Now you do that spelling lesson just exactly _right_,’
I’d say to my Lucy, ‘just the way Aunt Almera made me do the butter
pats!’”
I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, trying to make a willow
whistle, when the janitor came along and opened the door. “The Ladies’
Aid are going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he explained,
getting out a broom. I wandered in to visit with him while he swept and
dusted the pleasant little community sitting-room where our village
social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair and wiped off the
frame of the big portrait of Lincoln. “Your great-grandmother gave
that, do you know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the broom for
a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did you ever hear how Aunt Almera
got folks stirred up to do something about this room? Well, ’twas so
_like_ her! The place used to be the awfulest hole you ever saw. Years
ago they’d used it to lock up drunks in, or anybody that had to be
locked up. Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began to take
prisoners down there. But nobody did anything to this room to clean it
up or fix it. It belongs to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do
anything that they think they can put off on the town. The women used
to talk a lot about it--what a nice place ’twould be for socials, and
how ’twould keep the boys off the streets, and how they could have
chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this room was fixed up.
But whose business was it to fix it up? The town’s of course! And of
course nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there is _to_
the town. No, they just jawed about it, and kept saying ‘wa’n’t the
selectmen shiftless because they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the
selectmen didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in the law
about using tax money to fix up rooms for sociables, is there? And
those were awful tight times, when money came hard and every cent of
tax money had to be put to some good plain use. So the selectmen said
_they_ couldn’t do anything. And nobody else would, because it wasn’t
anybody’s business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put upon and
made to do more than his share. And the room got dirtier and dirtier,
with the lousy old mattress the last drunk had slept on right there
on the floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden boxes,
and dust and dry leaves that had blown in through the windows when the
panes of glass were broken--regular dumping-ground for trash.
“Well, one morning bright and early--I’ve heard my mother tell about it
a thousand times--the first person that went by the Town Hall seen the
door open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, and there was
little old Aunt Almera, in a big gingham apron, her white hair sticking
out from underneath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning away
to beat the band. She looked up, saw him standing and gaping at her,
and says, just as though that was what she did every day for a living,
‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’
“He went away kind of quick, and told about her over in the store, and
they looked out, and sure enough out she come, limping along (she had
the rheumatism _bad_) and dragging that old mattress with her. She drug
it out in front to a bare place, and poured some kerosene on it and set
fire to it; and I guess by that time every family in the street was
looking out at her from behind the window-shades. Then she went back
in, leaving it there burning up, high and smoky, and in a minute out
she came again with her dustpan full of trash. She flung that on the
fire as if she’d been waiting all her life to have the chance to get
it burned up, and went back for more. And there she was, bobbing back
and forth all the fore part of the morning. Folks from the Lower Street
that hadn’t heard about it would come up for their mail, and just stop
dead, to see the bonfire blazing and Aunt Almera limping out with
maybe an old broken box full of junk in her arms. She’d always speak
up just as pleasant and gentle to them--_that_ made ’em feel queerer
than anything else. Aunt Almera talking so mild! ‘Well, folks, how are
you this morning?’ she’d say. ‘And how are all the folks at home?’ And
then _slosh!_ would go a pail of dirty water, for as soon as she got
it swept out, didn’t she get down on her creaking old marrow-bones and
scrub the floor! All that afternoon every time anybody looked out,
splash! there’d be Aunt Almera throwing away the water she’d been
scrubbing the floor with. Folks felt about as big as a pint-cup by that
time, but nobody could think of anything to do or say, for fear of what
Aunt Almera might say back at them, and everybody was always kind o’
slow about trying to stop her once she got started on anything. So they
just kept indoors and looked at each other like born fools, till Aunt
Almera crawled back home. It mighty nigh killed her, that day’s work.
She was all crippled up for a fortnight afterwards with rheumatism. But
you’d better believe folks stirred around those two weeks, and when she
was out and around again there was this room all fixed up just the way
’tis now, with furniture, and the floor painted, and white curtains to
the windows, and all. Nobody said a word to her about it, and neither
did she say a word when she saw it--she never was one to do any crowing
over folks--once she’d got her own way.”
The hassocks in our pew began to look shabby, and my aunt brought
them home from church to put fresh carpeting on them. They suggested
church, of course, and as she worked on them a great many reminiscences
came to her mind. Here is one: “I used to love to ride horseback, and
grandmother always made father let me, although he was afraid to have
me. Well, one summer evening, right after supper I went for a little
ride, and didn’t get home till about half-past seven. As I rode into
the yard I looked through the open windows, and there was grandmother
putting her bonnet on; and it came to me in a flash that I’d promised
to go to evening prayers with her. I was a grown-up young lady then,
but I was scared! You did what you’d promised grandmother you would,
or something happened. So I just fell off my horse, turned him out in
the night pasture, saddle and all, and ran into the house. Grandmother
was putting on her gloves, and, although she saw me with my great
looped-up riding skirt on and my whip in my hand, she never said
a word nor lifted an eyebrow; just went on wetting her fingers and
pushing the gloves down on them as though I was ready with my best hat
on. That scared me worse than ever. I tore into my room, slipped off my
skirt, put on another right over my riding trousers, slammed on a hat,
threw a long cape around me, and grabbed my gloves. As the last bell
began to ring and grandmother stepped out of the house, I stepped out
beside her, all right as to the outer layer, but with the perspiration
streaming down my face. I’d hurried so, and those great thick riding
trousers were so hot under my woolen skirt! My! I thought I’d die! And
it was worse in the church! Over in our dark, close corner pew there
wasn’t a breath of air. It must have been a hundred by the thermometer.
I was so hot I just had to do something or die! There weren’t but a
few people in the church, and nobody anywhere near our corner, and it
was as dark as could be, back in our high pew. So when we knelt down
for the General Confession I gathered the cape all around me, reached
up under my full skirt, unbuttoned those awful riding trousers, and
just cautiously slipped them off. My! What a relief it was! Grandmother
felt me rustling around and looked over sharp at me, to see what I
was doing. When she saw the riding trousers, she looked shocked, and
frowned; but I guess I must have looked terribly hot and red, so she
didn’t say anything.
“Well, I knew it was an awful thing to do in church, and I was so
afraid maybe somebody _had_ seen me, although old Dr. Skinner, the
rector, was the only one high enough up to look over the pew-top, and
he was looking at his Prayer Book. But I felt as mean as though he’d
been looking right at me. Well, he finally got through the prayers and
began on the First Lesson. It was something out of the Old Testament,
that part about how the Jews went back and repaired the broken walls
of Jerusalem, each one taking a broken place for his special job, and
then how they got scared away, all but a few, from the holes in the
walls they were trying to fix up. Dr. Skinner always read the Lessons
very loud and solemn, as though he were reading them right at somebody,
and he’d sort of turn from one to another in the congregation with his
forefinger pointed at them, as if he meant that just for them. What
_do_ you suppose I felt like when he turned right towards our corner
and leaned ’way over and shook his finger at me, and said in a loud,
blaming tone, ‘But Asher continued and _abode_ in _his_ breaches!’ I
gave a little gasp, and grandmother turned towards me quick. When she
saw the expression on my face (I guess I must have looked funny), she
just burst right out into that great laugh of hers--ha! ha! ha! She
laughed so she couldn’t stop, and had to actually get up and go out
of church, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. We could hear her
laughing as she went down the walk outside!
“You’d have thought she’d be mortified, wouldn’t you? _I_ was mortified
almost to death! But she wasn’t a bit. She laughed every time she
thought of it, for years after that. It was just like her! She did love
a good laugh! Let anything happen that struck her as funny, and she’d
laugh, no _matter_ what!”
Later on, as we carried the hassocks back to the church and put them in
our pew, my aunt said, reflectively, looking round the empty church:
“I never come in here that I don’t remember how grandmother used to
say the Creed, loud and strong--she always spoke up so clear: ‘From
thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the
Holy Ghost: The Holy Catholic Church: The Communion of Saints: The
Forgiveness of sins--’ and then she’d stop dead, while everybody went
on, ‘The Resurrection of the body;’ and then she’d chime in again,
‘And the Life everlasting, Amen.’ You couldn’t help noticing it, she
took the greatest pains you should. But if anybody said anything about
it she always said that she didn’t believe in the resurrection of the
body, and she wasn’t going to _say_ she did. Sometimes the ministers
would get wrought up, especially the young ones, and one of them went
to the bishop about it, but nobody ever did anything. What _could_ you
do? And grandmother went right on saying the Creed that way to the day
of her death.”
On the hundredth anniversary of the organization of our parish there
were, of course, great doings in the way of centenary celebrations.
Many of the old rectors came back to visit, and to make after-dinner
talks and to preach at special services. One of the most interesting of
these old men was the Reverend Mr. Jason Gillett, who had been rector
for a year shortly after the Civil War, when he was a young man just
out of the Theological Seminary. He had since become well-known, one
might say famous (in church circles at least) for his sermons of a
fervor truly evangelical (so it was said), delivered in a voice noted
for its harmony and moving qualities. We had often read about his
preaching, in the Church papers. He had brought up from decay several
old parishes and had founded one of the finest and most thriving in
Chicago.
There was a stir when his return for a day was announced, and the
morning when he preached, the church was crowded to the doors. He
proved to be a spiritual-faced, white-haired, handsome old man,
equipped with fine eyes and beautiful hands as well as his famous
voice. He preached a sermon which held every one in the church
breathlessly attentive. I noticed that his stole was exquisitely
worked in gold thread, and after the service, when the Altar Guild
were putting things away, we saw that his surplice was of extremely
fine material, with a deep band of embroidery about the hem. “Loving
lady-parishioners,” conjectured one of the Guild, holding it up.