feather beds had been emptied there. There is less crowing and
apparently more time given to meditation and introspection. The old
rooster and his harem are now in undress, and a hint has been given that
domestic eggs will be scarce for the next month. A young chick that
learned to crow hardly more than a month ago, and eats from the hand
with fine audacity, has just begun to balance his accounts. He is in
full dress--his first suit, as it were--and is not subject to the
moulting process at present. But having been under the tyranny of the
patriarch who has now lost his tail, the younger one calls him to
account daily. There is a hint of retributive justice here. All tyrants
ought to have some part of their accounts settled in this world. By way
of example, it might be better if the settlements were very complete.
After all, there are very few tyrants who manage to get out of the world
without a partial accounting with humanity. Now and then, it is measure
for measure, the tyrant having his heaped up a little by way of
emphasis. That last reflection is made clearer by the way that young
rooster, in his juvenile dress, persists in settling his grievances. He
knows nothing of the quality of magnanimity, which suggests that when an
adversary has had a sound drubbing he should be let off with a mild
regret that any such chastening had been necessary. There is little
probability that the quality of mercy will be strained at present.
Although, when a tramp called at the kitchen door, unkempt, belated and
besotted, the compassionate Bridget set him out a generous breakfast.
But when he complained that the coffee was not hot, the quality of mercy
was strained which withheld the firing of the poker and coal scuttle at
his head. The asceticism of the modern tramp, and the delicacy and
exacting nature of his tastes, constitute the latest problem in
sociology. It is strange, too, that his moulting season should last the
year round. His laying off season never ends. His gains are in inverse
proportion to his industry. It might be well to inquire whether there is
not a secret profit in cultivating incapacity for work. This Christian
Bedouin gets all he needs without effort. But daily I see a man who has
acquired ten millions, and wants more. I know not which is the better
off. The one appears to be going forward to an eternity of wants.
Suppose this capacity for wanting things to increase in geometrical
ratio--it may be necessary to mortgage the universe for his convenience.
The other is going back on the track, lightening the dead weight as he
goes, shedding his superfluous clothes by the wayside, getting down to
the level of a ruminating animal, rejoicing in the fragrance of hay
stacks at night and the freedom of hospitable kitchens by day. If there
is nothing better than to delve for clothes and wooden palaces, it were
as well that there should be more moulting. Who knows but the tramp
reposing in the sun, his blood enriched thereby, his person made a
little more fragrant by the redolence of the hay stack, may not gain a
fresh stock of vitality quite needful for this languishing world? The
profoundest philosopher of modern times surprised the world with a
treatise devoted mainly to clothes. It is not given to know the day on
which the profounder philosopher will come and surprise the world by
showing the absurdity of clothes worn in conformity to any conventional
requirements. Society is forever moulting, putting off and on, and is
not happy. But the Patagonian covers his epidermis with mud to protect
him from cold, and is happy, at least there is no evidence to the
contrary. After all, there was a savor of health in the cynicism which
inspired the sturdy old Greek to live in his tub when at home, and to
hunt for an honest man with a lantern in the open day. It is nowhere
stated that he found him.
There is an ancient Spanish custom of planting the seed of fruit which
has been eaten. It is a way of pronouncing a benediction for the good
received--not in empty words, but by a thoughtful and beneficent act.
One has eaten of the fruit that another has planted, and he is glad; he
will also plant that another may eat. Were that custom perpetuated the
world over, evermore there would be fruit by the wayside. The highways
and byways would not be cursed with barrenness and dust, but fringed
with the mulberry and apple, with silent salutations for every weary
traveler who would put forth his hand and eat. What matters it that the
tree planted to-day shall never overarch and protect you from the
smiting sun?--shall never drop its golden fruit by your side? Shall we
not read by the light of eternal day that every tree thus planted has
brought its benediction to the world? Is it little that others had
planted for us, that we should forget to plant again? The patriarch
entertained an angel unaware. How many angels might be entertained by
one goodly orchard? Or, at least, such as by grace of speech, of mind,
and manner, have already received the divine stamp. The heavens have no
message for the destroyer; but they have one of peace for those who
plant and build wisely on the earth.
It is a notable fact that all the deciduous trees, as well as all the
rose bushes which are within the range of suburban observation, have a
dormant season about mid-summer. Neither the sun, the south wind, nor
water at the roots, can wholly prevent this intervening period of rest.
In their own time and way they awake, as it were, to newness of life. In
this dormant season they are storing energy for a new development. It is
drawn from the sun, the atmosphere, and the nursing earth. When they
have accumulated fresh stores there is a new wealth of blossom and
foliage. Something analogous to this divine order reaches over from
matter to mind. There are dormant seasons--periods of infertility--when
the chemistry of heaven and earth is needed to overcome this barrenness.
The artist dreams and touches not the fresh canvas on his easel. The
poet wanders aimlessly in wider pastures, content to see the bees come
and go, and the lupins and wild poppies nod to each other on the
hillside. It is the ruminant season, when it is needful that one should
digest what has been stored up within. Doth not the land lying in summer
fallow gain new fertility? The unclothed land going so near to
barrenness shall surely be clothed upon in the coming spring-time. It is
well now if one may lie down and dream that the heavens were studded for
him alone; and that the west wind of autumn, bearing the perfume of a
hundred orchards, comes to him from a land of eternal fruitage. Even now
the young leaves are starting on the rose bushes; the period of second
growth has already begun. The pear begins to blush under the rays of a
September sun; and a strange lily among the ineffable white of the
callas, has gone all aflame, as if sainthood and bleeding martyrdom were
never far apart.
LITERATURE AND ART.
LITERATURE AND ART.[B]
If one may find by the way-side in early springtime so much as a
harebell or dandelion, a springing blade of grass or an unfolding bud,
as much real satisfaction may be drawn from these scant treasures as
from the more abounding fullness of summer, or the mellow ripeness of
autumn. In all that relates to education, literature and art, it is
early springtime here. What would you have more than some wayside
evidences of the serene summer yet to follow, and an intellectual
fruitage, of which the gold and purple of the vintage are but the
faintest symbols? What is a quarter of a century in the life of a
commonwealth, to the rounded centuries which have matured the great
universities of Europe, or even the two centuries which have enriched
Harvard and Yale? The canvas tents of '49, pitched on the sandy slopes
of the peninsula, promised no great city, no perfected system of common
schools, no academies and seminaries, and no university planted at
Berkeley, in sight from a city of more than a quarter of a million
inhabitants. The dissolving gravel beds of a placer mine and the arid
plains, were neither symbols of permanence nor of bread. What could you
expect in this stress of humanity, even though the agglomerated
community were not lacking in some of the best and bravest of all lands?
There can be no beginning of a commonwealth until a Divine Providence
begins to set the solitary in families. Homes, children, the economies
of domestic life, the commonwealth of husband and wife, the law of the
household, and that human providence which grows tender and thoughtful
with each young and dependent life--these are precedent conditions of
the future state.
It was most fitting that a graduate of one of the oldest colleges in the
country should have opened the first public school in California. Thomas
Douglas, a graduate of Yale College, began a public school in San
Francisco on the 3d day of April, 1848. It was a good beginning. But
when a few months later nearly the whole population had, drifted away to
the mines, Douglas was left high and dry on the sand hills.
All true scholarship has breadth and catholicity. Let not ours be
impeached by ignoring what others have done in the domain of letters and
science. The fact is none the less significant, that the public school,
with its canvas roof, and three scholars, in 1849, is crowned by the
University of California to-day.
Possibly, the pioneer educators builded better than they knew. Douglas,
the master of arts of Yale, setting the first stakes in the sand
hills--Marvin, the first State Superintendent of Public Schools, who,
having made a campaign against the Indians, turned over his emoluments
to the school fund--Brayton, who conducted for years the most successful
preparatory school in the State, a brave, patient and lovable man, whose
life went out all too soon in the midst of his noble work--Durant, who,
beginning at the foundations, saw the University with the clear vision
of a prophet, and lived to see the fruition of his hopes--the gentle
and profound scholar, the dignified president, the wise and firm civil
magistrate, who, in the richness of his intellect, the purity of his
soul, and the steadfastness of his friendship, was more than president,
magistrate, or scholar. Tompkins, as a legislator and as regent, worked
with unflagging zeal for the University, and fitly crowned that work by
endowing, out of his moderate fortune, the first professorship. When he
had made his last public speech in behalf of the institution for which
he had wrought so well, it remained for him to enter into the sacred
guild of those pioneers who had gone a little before. Gilman, the second
president, whose organizing mind grasped every detail of the University,
who wrought effectively for it by day, and planned wisely for it by
night--a man of rare executive ability, who seemed half unconscious of
his own power to influence men in behalf of the great interests for
which he wrought. Let it be said of him that he bore himself in his high
office with a patience and dignity befitting the Christian gentleman and
accomplished scholar. Such a man rarely misses his place, because he is
a citizen of the world of letters. It is here for a few years, and on
the other side of the country for more. But here or there, I think he
will never need a better testimonial than that which his work will
offer.
Some good work has also been done in a scientific way. The geological
survey of this State was arrested by the impatience of the people for
immediate results. The topographical survey alone, than which nothing
better has ever been done in this country, was more than an equivalent
for the entire outlay. There will come a time when the practical value
of such an enterprise will be better understood. The physical problems
in a single State like California could not be solved in half a century.
Was it well to ask a scientific commission to solve them, and publish
the results in a few months?
The public journal, as a factor in education, is here, as elsewhere, the
outgrowth of our civilization. It embodies the passions, caprices and
enterprises of the community. In its best estate it gives the history of
the world for one day. In its poorest estate it is content with a patent
outside, the puffing of some mountebank, and the abuse of rivals. But at
the close of this quarter century, the only complete history of the
rise and progress of this commonwealth is that which the newspapers
contain. I have seen an artist sketch an accurate likeness of his friend
on his thumb-nail. But the modern newspaper every day sketches the
likeness, the pulse, and the throbbing heart of the civilized world.
Just as the ideal state is something far in advance of the actual, so
the ideal newspaper is something far better than exists on this side of
the continent. Here, as elsewhere, it is largely the product of
steamships, railroads and telegraphs. But the journal of the future
will, after all, be very much what the community makes it. It is the
child of civilization, going forward with the community to a better
condition, or going backward with it to coarseness and barbarism. The
best newspaper a hundred years ago was a poor affair. A hundred years
hence, the journal of to-day will probably be viewed with as much
interest for what it lacks, as for what it contains.
Our ideal newspaper will pander to no mean prejudices. It will be no
generator of slang phrases. It will not murder honest English. It will
have ripe and well-digested opinions. It will not truckle to base men.
It will not sneer at religion. It will keep its editorial columns above
all just suspicion of purchase. It will leave garbage in the gutter. It
will assail no man unjustly, nor fear to defend any man or interest
because he or it may be obscure or unpopular. No good citizen will fear
the honest journal of the future, and no bad man will like it.
Observe how the outer bark of the madrono and eucalyptus, with the
coming of every Summer, bursts, rolls up, and falls to the ground as so
much rubbish. That is a sign of expanding life. A great deal of
newspaper rubbish to-day is a sign of growth. The outer rind and husk of
things fall to the ground by that vital force which is continually
developing a larger and nobler life in the community. No man will
hereafter go to the head of this profession without fair scholarship, a
wide range of observation, a large capacity, to deal in a general way
with human affairs, and that keen insight which catches the spirit and
essence of this on-going life. Most difficult of all is a certain power
of statement which no school can teach, and without which the highest
plane of the journalist cannot be reached. Your long story will not be
heard. The world is waiting for the man of condensation. Tell it in few
words. If one can master this high eclecticism of thought and statement,
I know of no more promising field for young men to-day than journalism.
If one cannot, the potato field, in a season of blight, is quite as
promising.
Without this broader culture for the journalist, there will be great
danger that the exigencies of his work will make him a superficial man.
The habit will grow upon him of touching merely the surface of things.
He will come to think that, as his journal is only for the day, his
errors are for the day also. The habit of careful investigation and
exactness of thought and statement, will be discarded for random guesses
and the temporary expedients of the hour. Nothing but the balancing
influence of generous culture will arrest this lapsing tendency. It will
be disclosed in platitudes and commonplaces; in writing against space,
and in that dreadful amplitude which buries a thought under a mountain
of verbiage.
One cannot fail to note that the newspaper has been gradually
encroaching on the domain of literature. It has absorbed monthly
magazines or forced publishers to resort to illustrations--to a sort of
picture-book literature for grown-up children. It has driven the
lumbering quarterlies into smaller fields and diminished their relative
importance. The average citizen craves the news from a journal having
the very dew of the morning and of the evening upon it. It must come to
him damp and limp, bringing whatever is best at the smallest possible
cost. The newspaper is the herald of the new era. Its errand must be
swift, its statements compact, and its thought eclectic and
comprehensive.
Three thousand years ago, one of the grand old prophets spoke
mysteriously of the "living spirit in the wheels." Was it other than the
modern newspaper thrown off by the pulsing of the great cylinder press?
But observe that through yonder Golden Gate, which the sun and the stars
and the lamps of men glorify day and night, the devil-fish comes sailing
up, and is no whit concerned whether his accursed _tentacula_ close
around saint or sinner. Is it not the fittest symbol of a public journal
conducted by ignorant and unscrupulous men? Rather would you not choose,
as a more fitting symbol of the ideal journal, one of the small
globules of quicksilver which you shall find on any of these encircling
hills, so powerless to draw to it an atom of filth or rubbish, but ever
attracting the smallest particle of incorruptible silver and gold?
It can hardly have escaped notice that California, during this
quarter-century, has produced more humorists, and more of that
literature which is essentially humorous, than all the rest of the
country. It may be difficult to trace to any outward sources the
inspiration of so much wit. Does it lie in the odd contrasts and strange
situations which so often confront the observer here? Nor has this
facetiousness depended at all for its development upon any degree of
prosperity. In fact, the boldest and bravest challenge which has ever
been given to adverse fortune here, has been by the gentle humorists who
have suffered from her slings and arrows. It is said: "Cervantes smiled
Spain's chivalry away." But these modern satirists made faces at bad
fortune; they lampooned her and defied her to do her utmost. The more
miserable they ought to have been, the happier they were. They found a
grotesque and comic side to the most sober facts. They were facetious
when there was small stock in the larder and smaller credit at the
banker's. They smiled at the very grimness of evil fortune until she
fled, and, in doing this, they half-unconsciously tickled the midriff of
the world. A ripple of laughter ran over the surface of society. It
sometimes made slow progress when it here and there met a mountain of
obtuseness. But wit is wit; and what difference does it make if, failing
to see the point, some people laugh next year instead of this? I will
not be distressed because my friend does not, to this day, see how the
immortal "Squibob" conquered his adversary at San Diego by falling
underneath him and inserting his nose between his teeth. Nor does it
greatly concern me that he does not assent to the proposition that John
Phoenix, having made a national reputation by editing the San Diego
_Herald_ for one week, was the greatest journalist of modern times. If
reputation is the measure of greatness, Phoenix is to this day without
a peer. He made the very desert sparkle with his wit. He was a humorous
comet, shooting across the dull horizon of pioneer life. Men looked up
and wondered whence it came and whither it had gone.
Possibly, there is something favorable to the play of humor in a greater
freedom from conventional limitations. If one grows into this larger
liberty, or is translated into it, a flavor of freshness comes to
pervade all the intellectual life. A certain spontaneity of expression,
a spring, a rioting song of gladness, are some of the signs of this more
abounding life. In homely phrase, we say there is a flavor of the soil
about it. It might, therefore, have been necessary that Mark Twain
should sleep on this soil, and should have a wide range of pioneer
experiences, before he could become the prince of grotesque humorists.
He got up suddenly from the very soil which in its secret laboratory
colors the olive and the orange, and began to make the world laugh. With
a keen sense of the symmetry and harmony of things, he had a keener
perception of all the shams and ridiculous aspects of life. His pungent
gospel of humor is as sanitary as a gentle trade-wind. He knew a better
secret than the old alchemists. Every time he made the world laugh he
put a thousand ducats into his pocket. But never until he had slept in
his blankets, had been robbed on the "Divide," and had learned the
delicate cookery of a miner's cabin, could he do these things. But now
he cannot even weep at the tomb of his ancestor, Adam, without moving
the risibles of half the world. He has also a finer touch and flavor,
not of the rankest soil, but of that which gives the aroma and delicate
bouquet to the rarest mountain-side vintage. When this man had tried his
wit on a Californian audience and had won an approving nod, he had an
endorsement that was good in any part of the English-speaking world.
Of a more subtile wit and a finer grain was Harte, who did his best work
as a humorist in California. All his earlier triumphs were won here. His
subsequent indorsement in a wider field was only an affirmation of this
earlier public judgment.
Sometimes in the thicket one may come upon a wild mocking bird which is
running up the gamut of its riotous burlesque upon the song of every
other bird, and the sound of every living thing in the forest. But when
all this is done, that mocking bird will sometimes give out a song which
none other can match with its melody. As much as this, and more, lay
within the range of this poet-satirist. His mocking had, however, a
deep and salient meaning in it. When Truthful James rises to explain in
what respect Ah Sin is peculiar, he has a higher purpose than merely to
show the overreaching cunning of this bronzed heathen,
"With a smile that was child-like and bland."
So long as Ah Sin and his race could be plucked and despoiled at will,
he provoked no antagonisms. But when he overmatched the sharpness of his
spoilers, we have this tale, with its moral:
"Then I looked up at Nye;
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,
And said, 'Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!'
And he went for that heathen Chinee."
Every demagogue in the State, who had rung the changes on the evils of
cheap labor, felt the thrust; and it is doubtful if one of them has
forgiven Harte to this day.
The dogmatism and intolerant assumption which sometimes become rampant
in scientific societies, is thus punctured by Truthful James, in his
description of "The Society upon the Stanislaus:"
"But first I would remark that it is not a proper plan
For any scientific gent to whale his fellow-man,
And if a member don't agree with his peculiar whim,
To lay for that same member for to 'put a head' on him."
When Jones undertook to prove that certain fossil bones were from one of
his lost mules, then the trouble began:
"Now I hold it is not decent for any scientific gent
To say another is an ass--at least to all intent;
Nor should the individual who happens to be meant,
Reply by heaving rocks at him, to any great extent.
"Then Abner Dean of Angel's raised a point of order, when
A chunck of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen,
And he smiled a sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.
"For in less time than I write it every member did engage
In a warfare with the remnants of the paleozoic age;
And the way they heaved those fossils in their anger was a sin,
Till the skull of an old mammoth caved the head of Thompson in."
When the supposed pliocene skull, found in Calaveras County, had
developed a good deal of scientific quackery, Harte, in his "Geological
Address," makes the skull declare that it belonged to Joe Bowers, of
Missouri, who had fallen down a shaft. For six months thereafter no
theorist was able to discuss the character of that fossil with a sober
countenance. No Damascus blade ever cut with keener stroke than did the
blade of this satirist, even when it was hidden in a madrigal or
concealed in some polished sentence of prose.
As a humorist, he appreciated humor in others. When Dickens died, not
another man in all the length and breadth of the land contributed so
tender and beautiful a tribute to his memory as did Harte in his poem of
"Dickens in Camp." The rude miners around the camp-fire drop their cards
as one of them draws forth a book:
"And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
And as the fire-light fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the master
Had writ of 'Little Nell.'
"Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy--for the reader
Was youngest of them all--
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall.
"The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp with 'Nell' on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way.
* * * * *
"Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire,
And he who wrought that spell--
Ah! towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!
"Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory,
That fills the Kentish hills.