The Easy Chair went up lately to the hills to enjoy the annual dinner
at Arcadia. It is a summer feast which tradition assigns to some old
academy in those parts, supposed to have been founded by a pastor of
the village in the days before railroads, when there was no path to
Arcadia except that which is still sometimes pursued. It is a winding
sylvan way through woods and by singing streams and solitary farms,
and as you drive slowly on you feel yourself penetrating farther and
farther into a rural seclusion to which the modern world has hardly
found its way, and where you might expect to surprise a peaceful
community of ancient New England, as in threading the remoter recesses
and heights of the Catskill you might come upon a party of Hendrik
Hudson's crew.
In this loneliness of the hills the young pastor, who was in delicate
health and unmarried, relieved the sombre severity of clerical life by
teaching a few boys and girls. By that fond indirection he brightened
with fresh air and natural music and sunshine the dry routine of his
unmated days. For the cheerless solemnity of the life of the country
clergy in those times it is hard to imagine. The missionaries to East
London tell us that the peculiar characteristic of that vast region,
swarming with human beings, is want of entertainment. The people there
do not laugh. They have no diversion. There is nothing pleasant to see
or to hear. It is a huge stone mill in which human life is ground up
in an endless and barren monotony of hard work.
It is odd to trace any resemblance to it in a life so different; but
the old-fashioned Calvinistic divine in his small country parish,
revolving in an actual world of petty details, and in another world of
grim theological speculation and absorption in the contemplation of
death, must have seldom smiled. The young pastor was bound by no vow
of celibacy, but he knew that his life must be brief, and he gladly
surrounded himself with children in the guise of pupils, and when he
died he left a Bible to his church, a small sum for the education of
heathen youth in America, some manuscript sermons to his parents, and
the rest of his little property to found an academy for godly youth.
This at least is the tradition. But when Silvertongue came once to the
dinner he put the story aside airily as a pleasant fiction, and
averred that the annual feast was instituted simply to glorify two
legendary friends of the town and enjoy them forever. This had a sound
that contrasted not inaptly with the seriousness of the hills, and
suggested an origin not unlike that of the feasts in the Lacedemonian
worship of the Dioscuri. Still another theory which is like to grow
with time associates it with the memory of two strangers of benignant
aspect, who appeared suddenly in the village like the gray-haired
regicide at Hadley, and aiding the towns-people not with a sword, but
with a bounty, departed. They are all pleasant tales. But the earliest
tradition is likely to be the truest. It was the good pastor who sowed
the modest seed which has now sprung up a hundred-fold.
This year the text of the afternoon, for the dinner begins at one
o'clock, was the report of the census that the town is declining in
population. The guests were a company of the people of the hills. They
came from a circuit of a score of miles. The dinner is served cold,
and the guests feast
"In summer, when the days are long,
On dainty chicken, snow-white bread,"
and by two o'clock the blue gauze is spread over the remnants, the
benches are turned so that the whole company faces the speakers, and
then speech begins.
It was the verdict of the hills upon the report of the census that if
the number of individuals is decreasing, the number of families is
not. The ancient quiverfuls are disappearing, and the tale of children
in a family is diminishing. But the general welfare of the family
itself is increasing, while the marvellous facilities of communication
bring all resources into the hills, and the remote little village of
the old pastor is practically becoming a suburb.
If a higher general welfare prevails, what matter if the population
somewhat declines? Quality is better than quantity. If, as a Senator
of Massachusetts says, the people of the hills are merely descending
into the valleys, who can complain if they bring with them the simple
and hardy virtues which grow upon the hills like the great
agricultural staples? Let the census say what it will, statistics need
not frighten until they show a decadence of character as well as a
decline of population. If, however, character is decaying, if the
primary conditions of that fundamental life of the country are
changing, a general change may be anticipated. But in Arcadia those
signs do not yet appear. Whether there are more or fewer persons than
there were fifty years ago, the comfort, the resources, the
opportunities are constantly greater. Undoubtedly they bring their
dangers and disadvantages. But the same steady force of character that
dealt with the old difficulties can deal with the new.
Perhaps the trouble lies less in the depletion of the hills than in
the surfeit of the shore. The dragon of the glittering scales that
threatens American youth and maidens may be rather Sybaris by the sea
than Arcadia on the hills. It may be also rather the annual
half-million of utter aliens that come from other lands, strange to us
in everything that fosters a homogeneous national life, rather than
the hundreds who come down morally as well as numerically from the
uplands nearer heaven.
So in the larger academy which the young pastor unconsciously founded
the various voices of suggestion, experience, and reflection spoke. It
was a rural feast, an Arcadian holiday, such as the Swedish poet
Tegner might have sketched in simple and melodious measure, or Grecian
artists carved upon a frieze.
Then in the late and beautiful afternoon, and later in the light of
the full moon, the guests dispersed, weaving the fragmentary hints of
speech into completer views and purposes of patriotic life, as the
children of the fairies wove the scattered shreds of gold into shining
garments. Slowly over the hills by every bowery road, towards loftier
Goshen and Hawley, and higher Chesterfield, and Plainfield where
Byrant sang to the Water-fowl, down winding ways to Buckland and
Charlemont and Zoar, eastward to Conway and Deerfield and remoter
Sunderland, and all the wide valley of the Connecticut, the pilgrims
wended homeward.