AMERICAN THUMB-PRINTS
In shorter form “The New England Woman” appeared in _The Atlantic
Monthly_, and under other title and form “Up-to-Date Misogyny” and
“Plagiarizing Humors of Benjamin Franklin” in _The Bookman_, which
periodicals have courteously allowed republication
AMERICAN
THUMB-PRINTS
METTLE OF OUR
MEN AND WOMEN
BY
KATE STEPHENS
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Published April, 1905
_Electrotyped and Printed by
J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U. S. A._
IN MOST LOVING MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
NELSON TIMOTHY STEPHENS
WHOSE RARE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN AND OF LAW
WHOSE SENSITIVENESS TO JUSTICE
HUMAN KINDLINESS
AND FINE DISDAIN FOR SELF-ADVERTISEMENT
ARE STILL CHERISHED BY THE NOBLE FOLK
AMONG WHOM HE SPENT
THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE
AT WHOSE INSTANCE IN GREAT MEASURE
AND UPON WHOSE ADVICE
THE LAW SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY
SKETCHED IN THIS BOOK
WAS IN 1878
FOUNDED
CONTENTS
PAGE
PURITANS OF THE WEST 11
THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS 35
TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS 87
THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN 127
A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED 163
UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY 187
“THE GULLET SCIENCE” 215
PLAGIARIZING HUMORS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 287
PURITANS OF THE WEST
Let nouther lufe of friend nor feir of fais,
Mufe zow to mank zour Message, or hald bak
Ane iot of zour Commissioun, ony wayis
Call ay quhite, quhite, and blak, that quhilk is blak.
First he descendit bot of linage small.
As commonly God usis for to call,
The sempill sort his summoundis til expres.
JOHN DAVIDSON
If it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
PURITANS OF THE WEST
Of local phases of the American spirit, none has incited more
discussion than that developed in Kansas. The notion that the citizens
of the State are somewhat phrenetic in experimental meliorism; that
they more than others fall into abnormal sympathies and are led
by aberrations of the crowd--intoxications the mind receives in a
congregation of men pitched to an emotional key--this notion long ago
startled peoples more phlegmatic and less prone to social vagaries.
Closer consideration shows the Kansas populace distinctly simple in
mental habit and independent in judgment. Yet their old-time Grangerism
and Greenbackism, and their still later Prohibitionism, Populism,
and stay law have caused that part of the world not so inclined to
rainbow-chasing to ask who they as a people really are, and what
psychopathy they suffer--to assert that they are dull, unthinking, or,
at best, doctrinaire.
This judgment antedates our day, as we said. It was even so far back
as in the time of Abraham Lincoln, when Kansas was not near the force,
nor the promise of the force, it has since become. And it was in that
earlier and poorer age of our country when folks queried a man’s
suitability and preparedness for the senatorial office. Then when
Senatorship fell to General James Lane, and some one questioned the
Free-State fighter’s fitness for his duties, President Lincoln is said
to have hit off the new Senator and the new State with “Good enough for
Kansas!” and a shrug of his bony shoulders. Derogatory catchwords have
had a knack at persisting since men first tried to get the upper hand
of one another by ridicule, and the terse unsympathy and curl of the
lip of Lincoln’s sayings have kept their use to our day.
One outsider, in explaining any new vagary of the Kansans, suggests,
with sophomore ease, “The foreign element.” Another tells you,
convicting himself of his own charge, “It is ignorance--away out there
in the back woods.” “Bad laws,” another conclusively sets down. Opposed
to all these surmises and guesses are the facts that in number and
efficiency of schools Kansas ranks beyond many States, and that in
illiteracy the commonwealth in the last census showed a percentage of
2.9--a figure below certain older States, say Massachusetts, with an
illiterate percentage of 5.9, or New York, with 5.5. As to its early
laws, they were framed in good measure by men and women[1] of New
England blood--of that blood although their forebears may have pushed
westward from the thin soil of New England three generations before the
present Kansans were born. Again its citizens, except an inconsiderable
and ineffective minority, are Americans in blood and tradition.
It is in truth in the fact last named, in the American birth of the
people who gave, and still give, the State its fundamental key, that we
are to find the causes of Kansas neologism and desire for experiment in
every line that promises human betterment. It is a case of spiritual
heir-at-law--the persistence of what the great ecclesiastical
reactionist of our day has anathematized as “the American Spirit.”
For each new ism the Kansans have pursued has been but another form
and working in the popular brain of the amicus humani generis of the
eighteenth-century Revolutionists, or, as the people of their time and
since have put it, “liberty, equality, fraternity.”
Kansas was settled by Americans, American men and American women
possessed by the one dominating idea of holding its territory and its
wealth to themselves and their opinions. They went in first in the
fifties with bayonets packed in Bible boxes. All along railways running
towards their destination they had boarded trains with the future
grasped close in hand, and sometimes they were singing Whittier’s lines:
“We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom’s southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree
The rugged Northern pine!
* * * * *
“Upbearing, like the Ark of old,
The Bible in our van,
We go to test the truth of God
Against the fraud of man.”
In exalted mood they had chanted this hymn as their trains pulled into
stations farther on in their journey, and the lengthening of the day
told them they were daily westering with the sun. They had carried it
in their hearts with Puritan aggressiveness, with Anglo-Saxon tenacity
and sincerity, as their steamers paddled up the muddy current of the
Missouri and their canvas-covered wagons creaked and rumbled over the
sod, concealing then its motherhood of mighty crops of corn and wheat,
upon which they were to build their home. They were enthusiasts even
on a road beset with hostiles of the slave State to the east. Their
enthusiasm worked out in two general lines, one the self-interest of
building themselves a home--towns, schools, churches,--the other the
idealism of the anti-slavery faith. They were founding a State which
was within a few years to afford to northern forces in the struggle
centring about slavery the highest percentage of soldiers of any
commonwealth; and their spirit forecast the sequent fact that troops
from the midst of their self-immolation would also record the highest
percentage of deaths.
They came from many quarters to that territorial settlement of theirs,
but the radical, recalcitrant stock which had nested in and peopled the
northeastern coast of our country was in the notable majorities from
Western States--from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa; and from New
England, New York, and Pennsylvania also. Some came, indeed, who could
trace no descent from Puritan or Quaker or Huguenot forebear. But there
was still the potent heirship of spirit.
To these men nature gave the gift of seeing their side of the then
universal question. She added a living sympathy with workers, and an
acute sense of the poverty and oppression which humanity at large is
always suffering from those who take because they have power. A free
discussion of slavery and their opposition to slave-holding had put
this deep down in their hearts.
Each man of them--and each woman also--was in fixed principle and
earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not yet
before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the spirit--the
ideal the pioneer must ever see--and holding the present and actual as
but a mote in the beam from that central light.
From a more humorous point of view, each man was clearly a Knight
of La Mancha stripped of the mediæval and Spanish trapping of his
prototype. His Dulcinea--an unexampled combination of idealism
and practicality--his much-enduring wife, upon whose frame and
anxious-eyed face were stamped a yearning for the graces of life.
Her fervor, with true woman strength, was ever persistent. “I always
compose my poems best,” said one of the haler of these dames whose
verses piped from a corner of the University town’s morning journal,
“on wash-day and over the tub.”
These were the conditions of those men and women of the fifties and
early sixties to less lifted, more fleshly souls. The old enthusiasm
that lighted our race in 1620 and many sequent years in Massachusetts
Bay, and the old devotion that led the Huguenots and other oppressed
peoples to our Southern coasts and on “over the mountains,” were
kindled afresh. And the old exaltation of the descendants of these many
peoples--the uplifting that made way for and supported the act of the
Fourth of July in 1776--rose anew. The flame of an idea was in the air
heating and refining the grossest spirits--and the subtle forces of
the Kansans’ vanguard were far from the grossest.
Once in their new home these men and women lived under circumstances
a people has almost never thriven under--circumstances which would
prey upon every fibre of calmness, repose, and sober-mindedness, and
possibly in the end deprive their folk of consideration for the past
and its judgments. “Govern the Kansas of 1855 and ’56!” exclaimed
Governor Shannon years after that time. “You might as well have
attempted to govern the devil in hell.” “Shall the Sabbath never
immigrate,” cried a Massachusetts woman in 1855 in a letter to friends
at home, “and the commandments too?”
Among this people was little presence of what men had wrought. As in
the early settlements of our Atlantic seaboard, all was to be made,
everything to be done, even to the hewing of logs for houses and
digging of wells for water; and in Kansas pressure for energy and time
was vastly increased over those earlier years by the seaboard. The
draughting of laws for controlling a mixed population, with elements
in it confessedly there for turbulence and bloodshed, was for a time
secondary to shingle-making.
Such primitive efforts were more than a generation ago--in fact, fifty
years. But the spirit with which those early comers inaugurated and
carried on their settlement did not perish when the daily need of
its support had passed away. It still abode as a descent of spirit,
meaning an inheritance of spirit, a contagion of spirit, and to its
characteristic features we can to-day as easily point--to its human
sympathies and willingness for experiment--as to the persistence of
a physical mark--the Bourbon nose in royal portraits, say, or the
“Austrian lips” of the Hapsburg mouth. Its evidences are all about you
when you are within the confines of the present-day Kansans, and you
are reminded of the Puritanism which still subordinates to itself much
that is alien in Massachusetts; or you think of the sturdy practicality
of the early Dutch which still modifies New York; or you may go farther
afield and recall the most persistent spirit of the Gauls of Cæsar,
novis plerumque rebus student, which to our time has been the spirit of
the Gauls of the Empire and of President Loubet.
The Kansan has still his human-heartedness and his willingness to
experiment for better things. Exploded hypotheses in manufacture,
farming, and other interests scattered in startling frequency over the
vast acreage of his State, testify to these traits.
He has to this day kept his receptivity of mind. Even now he scorns a
consideration for fine distinctions. He still loves a buoyant optimism.
And for all these reasons he often and readily grants faith to the
fellow who amuses him, who can talk loud and fast, who promises much,
and who gets the most notices in his local dailies. He is like the
author of Don Juan, inasmuch as he “wants a hero,” and at times he is
willing to put up with as grievous a one as was foisted upon the poet.
In the end, however, he has native bed-rock sense, and as his politics
in their finality show, he commonly measures rascals aright. But in his
active pursuit and process of finding them out he has offered himself
a spectacle to less simple-minded, more sophisticated men.
Some years ago, in a grove of primeval oaks, elms, and black-walnuts
neighboring the yellow Kaw and their University town, those settlers of
early days held an old-time barbecue. The meeting fell in the gold and
translucence of the September that glorifies that land. Great crowds
of men and women came by rail and by wagon, and walking about in the
shade, or in the purple clouds that rose from the trampings of many
feet and stood gleaming in the sunshine, they were stretching hands to
one another and crying each to some new-discovered, old acquaintance,
“Is this you?” “How long is it now?” “Thirty-five years?” “You’ve
prospered?” and such words as old soldiers would use having fought a
great fight together--not for pelf or loot but for moral outcome--and
had then lost one another for many a year.
Moving among them you would readily see signs of that “possession of
the god” the Greeks meant when they said ἐνθουσιαμóς. Characteristic
marks of it were at every turn. There was the mobile body--nervous,
angular, expressive--and a skin of fine grain. There was the longish
hair, matted, if very fine, in broad locks; if coarse, standing about
the head in electric stiffness and confusion--the hair shown in the
print of John Brown, in fact. There were eyes often saddened by the
sleeplessness of the idealist--eyes with an uneasy glitter and a vision
directed far away, as if not noting life, nor death, nor daily things
near by, but fixed rather upon some startling shape on the horizon.
The teeth were inclined to wedge-shape and set far apart. There was a
firmly shut and finely curved mouth. “We make our own mouths,” says Dr.
Holmes. About this people was smouldering fire which might leap into
flame at any gust of mischance or oppression.
This describes the appearance in later decades of the corporate man of
the fifties and early sixties--
“to whom was given
So much of earth, so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.”
A sky whose mystery and melancholy, whose solitary calm and elemental
rage stimulate and depress even his penned and grazing cattle, has
spread over him for more than a generation. With his intensity and his
predisposition to a new contrat social he and his descendants have been
subjected to Kansas heat, which at times marks more than one hundred in
the shade, and to a frost that leaves the check of the thermometer far
below zero. He and his children, cultivators of their rich soil, have
been subject to off-years in wheat and corn. They have endured a period
of agricultural depression prolonged because world-wide. They have been
subject, too, to the manipulation of boomers.
Most lymphatic men--any Bœotian, in fact, but it is long before his fat
bottom lands will make a Bœotian out of a Kansan--most lymphatic men
ploughing, planting, and simply and honestly living would be affected
to discontent by the thunder of booms and their kaleidoscopic deceit.
Clever and sometimes unprincipled promoters representing more clever
and unprincipled bond-sellers in Eastern counting-houses sought to
incite speculation and lead the natural idealist by the glamour of
town-building, and county-forming booms, railway and irrigation booms,
and countless other projects.
They played with his virtuous foibles and fired his imagination.
He gave himself, his time, his men, his horses, his implements for
construction; his lands for right of way. He hewed his black walnuts
and elms into sleepers, and sawed his bulky oaks for bridges. He
called special elections and voted aid in bonds. He gave perpetual
exemption from taxes. Rugged enthusiast that he was he gave whatever
he had to give,--but first he gave faith and altruistic looking-out
for the interests of the other man. Great popular works still
abiding--cathedrals in Europe are perhaps the most noted--were put up
by like kindling of the human spirit.
His road was made ready for sleepers, and funds for purchasing iron he
formally handed the promoters,--since which day purslane and smartweed
and golden sunflowers have cloaked the serpentine grades which his own
hands had advanced at the rate of more than a mile between each dawn
and sunset.
One direct relation and force of these inflated plans to the Kansan
have been that they often swerved and controlled the values of his
land, and the prices of those commodities from which a soil-worker
supports a family hungry, growing, and in need of his commonwealth’s
great schools. And the man himself, poor futurist and striver after the
idea, with a soul soaring heavenward and hands stained and torn with
weed-pulling and corn-husking!--his ready faith, his tendency to seek a
hero, his brushing aside of conservative intuition, his meliorism, his
optimism, his receptivity to ideas, his dear humanness--in other words,
his charm, his grace, his individuality, his Americanism--wrought him
harm.
Our corporate man, loving, aspiring, working, waiting, started out
with a nervous excitability already given. He was a man with a bee
in his bonnet. He was seeking ideal conditions. Originally he was a
reactionist against feudal bondage, the old bondage of human to human
and of human to land. Later his soul took fire at the new bondage of
human to wage and job. He would have every man and woman about him as
free in person as he was in idea.
What wonder then that he or his descendent spirit in the midst of
agricultural distress enacted a mortgage equity or stay law, and
determined that that law should apply to mortgages in existence at
the passage of the act! He it is of the all-embracing Populism, the
out-reaching Prohibitionism, the husband-man-defensive Grangerism.
Shall we not humanly expect him, and those suffering the contagion
of his noble singleness, to clutch at plans for a social millennium?
“Heaven is as easily reached from Kansas,” wrote an immigrant of 1855,
“as from any other point.”
He values openly what the world in its heart knows is best, and like
all idealists foreruns his time. The legend is always about him of
how the men and women of the early fifties hitched their wagon to a
star--and the stars in his infinity above are divinely luminous and
clear. His meliorism--which would lead his fellows and then the whole
world aright--is nothing if not magnificent.
But although he grubs up the wild rose and morning-glory, ploughing his
mellow soil deep for settings of peach and grape, and supplants the
beauty of the purple iris and prairie verbena with the practicalities
of corn and wheat, he has yet to learn the moral effect of time
and aggregation--that a moon’s cycle is not a millennium, a June
wind fragrant with the honey of his white clover not all of his fair
climate, and that a political colossus cannot stand when it has no
more substantial feet than the yellow clay which washes and swirls in
the river that waters his great State. In reality his excess of faith
hinders the way to conditions his idealism has ever been seeking.
The Kansan is, after all, but a phase--a magnificent present-day
example and striving--of the mighty democratic spirit which has
been groping forward through centuries towards its ideal, the human
race’s ideal of ideals. In his setting forth of the genius of his
people for democracy and the tendency of his blood for experiment and
reform--according to that advice to the Thessalonians of an avaunt
courier of democracy, to prove all things and hold fast to that which
is good--he is led at times upon miry, quaggy places and by the very
largeness of his sympathies enticed upon quicksands which the social
plummet of our day has not yet sounded.
THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
No university has anywhere ever become a great influence, or anything
but a school for children, which was not wholly or almost wholly in the
hands of the faculty or teaching body. _The faculty is the teaching
body._ If you have the right sort of faculty, you have a university
though you have only a tent to lecture in. If, on the other hand, you
try to make a university out of a board of sagacious business men
acting as trustees, and treat the professors simply as “hired men,”
bound to give the college so many hours a week, you may have a good
school for youths, but you will get no enlightening influence or force
out of it for the community at large.
A writer in _The Nation_, 1889
THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS
During a great national struggle for human rights, Laurel Town was
touched by the high seriousness which rises from sincerity to the idea
of human liberty and the laying down of lives in defence of that idea.
Its baptism and its early years were thus purely of the spirit.
A miniature burg, it snuggles upon broad, fat lands, semicircling the
height that rises to the west. From the hill-top the tiny city is
half-buried in green leaves. Looking beyond and to the middle distance
of the landscape, you find rich bottoms of orchard and of corn, and the
Tiber-yellow waters of a broad river running through their plenty.
First immigrants to this country--those who came in back in the
fifties--discovered the hill’s likeness to the great Acropolis of
Athens, and determined that upon it, as upon the heights of the
ancient city of the golden grasshopper, the State’s most sacred temple
should be built. Thus were inspired library and museum, laboratories
and lecture-rooms, of the University of Hesperus, whose roofs are
gleaming in the vivid air to-day just as in some ancient gem a diamond
lying upon clustering gold sends shafts of light through foliations of
red metal.
The brow of this hill beetles toward the south, but instead of the blue
waters of the Saronic Gulf which Sophocles in jocund youth saw dancing
far at sea, Hesperus students sight hills rolling to the horizon, and
thickets of elms and poplars fringing Indian Creek, and instead of the
Pentelic mountains in the northeast they catch the shimmering light
of the green ledges and limestone crests of the northern edge of the
valley the river has chiselled.
But how, you ask--thinking of the fervor of the immigrants of 1854
and ’55--how did this university come into being? In stirring and
tentative times. The institution was first organized by Presbyterians,
who later accepted a fate clearly foreordained, and sold to the
Episcopalians. This branch of the church universal christened the
educational infant Lawrence University, after a Boston merchant, who
sent ten thousand dollars conditioned as a gift on a like subscription.
The institution to this time was “on paper,” as these founders said
of early towns--that is, a plan, a scheme, a possibility. It finally
became the kernel of the University of Hesperus when the State accepted
from Congress a grant of seventy-two square miles of land.
“There shall be two branches of the University,” the charter reads, “a
male and a female branch.” In clearer English, the institution was to
be open to men and women.
Seeds of the convictions which admitted women to instruction had
long been germinating, even before the independence of women was
practically denied by the great Reformation. The idea was in the
mind of our race when we were north-of-Europe barbarians. It found
sporadic expression all through our literature. It is back of Chaucer
in annals of the people and later in such chroniclers as Holinshed.
Bishop Burnet, historian of his “Own Time,” and also Fuller, he of the
human “Worthies,” determined that “the sharpness of the wit and the
suddenness of the conceits of women needed she-schools.” Later Mary
Woolstonecraft wrote: “But I still insist that not only the virtue but
the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not
in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral but rational
creatures, ought to endeavor to acquire human virtues by the same means
as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half-being.”
And that moral and prudent sampler, Hannah More, declared: “I call
education not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but
that which tends to confirm a firm and regular system of character.”
A score of the names of these fore-workers for human liberty are known
to us. But the names that are not known!--the pathos of it! that we
cannot, looking below from our rung in the ladder, tell the countless
who have striven, and fallen striving, that we are here because they
were there, and that to them, often unrecognized and unthanked, our
opportunities are due. They foreran their times, and their struggle
made ours possible.
“’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!”
But the immediate thought or impulse to make our Western State
institutions co-educational, to give to the daughters the collegiate
leisure and learning of the sons--to whom or to what shall we trace
this idea! They used to explain it in Hesperus by telling you, “The
people about us are for the most part New Englanders in blood, you
know, perhaps not one, certainly not more than two generations removed
to more genial lands, and still retaining the rigor and tenacity and
devotion to principle of that stock.” But one naturally answered this
by saying, “In New England they did not in the fifties and sixties give
their daughters the educational opportunities they gave their sons.
In those decades there were attempts at women’s colleges outside New
England, but none in the neighborhood of Williams, Dartmouth, Amherst,
Harvard, or Yale.”
The better reason is the historic--noted in every movement of our
Aryan race. In this is found what New England civilization has
done, not in Hesperus alone, but in Wisconsin, in California, in
Minnesota, and wherever else it has united with other forces, and lost
the self-consciousness and self-complacency which in our generation
are distinguishing and abiding traits upon its own granitic soil.
Prejudices which eat energy and dwarf activity colonists have commonly
left behind, whether they have entered the swift black ship of the sea
or the canvas-covered wagon of the prairie. This was said of those who
sailed westward and built up ancient Syracuse some twenty-six centuries
agone, and it is true also of the colonists of these later days.
The drawing up of the charter of the University of Hesperus shows how
humanly, simply, and freely State building may be done. Judge Chadwick,
of Laurel Town, gives the candid narrative:
“In the spring of 1864 the Misses Chapin and Miss Elizabeth Watson,
who had established a school here, and who were anxious that the
University should be organized, besought Governor Robinson to see that
it was done. He, or they (or perhaps but one of them), came to me and
insisted that I should go to the capital and secure the passage of an
act organizing the University. The session of the Legislature was near
its close. I went to the capital. In the State library I hunted up
the various charters of similar institutions, and taking the Michigan
University charter for my guide, drafted the act to organize the
University of the State.... Judge Emery was the member of the House....
I do not remember who was the Senator.... I gave the draft to Judge
Emery, who introduced it into the house, and by suspension of the rules
got it through. It went through the Senate in the same way, and was
approved by the governor--Carney.”
But the seed of fire from which this University sprang in the days
when men were fighting for unity, for an idea--this you cannot
understand without a word about the brilliant essence that enwraps you
in that land--Hesperus air and light. This ether no man can describe.
It is as clear as a diamond of finest quality, and each infinitesimal
particle has a thousand radiant facets. You think to take it in your
hand. It is as intangible as a perfume, as illusive as the hopes of
man’s ultimate perfection. The colors of liquid rose are hidden in
it and the glow of gold, and it gives flame to the dullest matter.
It glances upon a gray tree-trunk, and the trunk glitters in purple
and silver-white. It is so limpid and dry that a hill or a bush, or a
grazing sheep far away, stands out in clear relief. It vitalizes. It
whispers of the infinite life of life. Like the sea, it presses upon
you a consciousness of illimitability and immeasurable strength. It is
“most pellucid air,” like that in which the chorus of the “Medea” says
the Athenians were “ever delicately marching.”
It is as like the atmosphere of Italy as the sturdy peach-blossoms
which redden Hesperus boughs in March are like the softer
almond-flowers. The same indescribable grace and radiance are in both
essences. But there are the Hesperus blizzards--vast rivers of icy
air which sweep from upper currents and ensphere the softness and
translucent loveliness of the earth with such frosts as are said to
fill all heaven between the stars.
Under such dynamic skies young men and women have been gathering now
these forty years--before the September equinox has fairly quenched
the glow of summer heat. During a long æstivation a sun burning in
an almost cloudless heaven has beaten upon them day by day. The glow
has purified and expanded their skin, has loosened their joints, and
clothed them in the supple body of the south. Through the darkness of
the night ten thousand stars have shone above their slumbers, and wind
voices out of space have phu-phy-phis-pered through secretive pines and
rolled tz-tz-tz upon the leathery leaves of oaks. Such days and nights
have been over them since the wild grape tossed its fragrant blossoms
in damp ravines in the passion of May.
These students have come from all kinds of homes, from meagre town
houses, from the plainest and most forlorn farm-houses, and from other
houses laden and bursting with plenty--and plenty in Hesperus is always
more plenty than plenty anywhere else. Many of these young people have
been nurtured delicately, but a large number have doubtless tasted the
bitterness of overwork and the struggle of life before their teens.
Perhaps their parents came to Hesperus newly wedded, or in the early
years of married life with a brood of little children. If their coming
was not in the stridulous cars of some Pacific or Santa Fé railway,
then it was over the hard-packed soil in most picturesque of pioneer
fashions--a huge canvas-covered wagon carrying the family cook-stove,
beds, and apparel, and, under its creaking sides, kettles for boilers,
pails for fetching water from the nearest run, and axes to cut wood
for evening fires. Every article the family carried must answer some
requirement or use. The horses, too, have their appointed tasks, for,
the journey once accomplished, they will mark off the eighty acres the
family are going to pre-empt, and afterwards pull the plough through
the heavy malarious sod.
On the seat of the wagon the wife and mother, wrapped in extremes of
cold in a patchwork quilt, at times nursed the baby, and in any case
drove with a workmanlike hand. John Goodman was sometimes back with
the collie, snapping his blacksnake at the cattle and urging them on.
But oftenest father and mother were up in the seat, and boy and girl
trooping behind in barefooted and bareheaded innocence, enjoying happy
equality and that intimate contact with the cows which milky udders
invite.
Now this, or some way like this, was the introduction of a quota of
Hesperus men and women to their fat earth and electric atmosphere.
It is therefore not to be wondered at that these young people come
to their University with little of the glamour nourished by delicate
environment and the graces of life. Their earliest years have been
spent upon the bed-rock of nature wrestling with the hardest facts
and barest realities. They have suffered the deprivations and the
unutterable trials of patience and faith which the world over are the
lot of pioneers; and they have had the returns of their courage.
Every self-respecting man and boy has been, perhaps still is, expected
to do the work of two men. Every woman and girl to whom the god of
circumstance had not been kind must be ready to perform, alike and
equally well, the duties of man or woman--whichever the hour dictated.
“Hesperus,” says an unblushing old adage of the fifties--“Hesperus is
heaven to men and dogs and hell to women and horses.”
But from whatever part of the State the students come to their
University, he and she commonly come--they are not sent. The
distinction is trite, but there is in it a vast difference. In many
cases they have made the choice and way for themselves. They have
earned money to pay their living while at school, and they expect,
during the three, four, or five years they are in their intellectual
Canaan, to spend vacations in work--in harvesting great wheat-fields
of Philistia, or in some other honest bread-winning. They are so close
to nature, and so radiantly strong in individuality, that no one of
them, so far as rumor goes, has ever resorted to the commonest method
of the Eastern impecunious collegian for filling his cob-webbed purse
with gold. The nearest approach I know to such zeal was the instance
of the student who slept (brave fellow) scot-free in an undertaker’s
establishment. He answered that functionary’s night-bell. Then he
earned half-dollars in rubbing up a coffin or washing the hearse;
adding to these duties the care of a church, milking of cows, tending
of furnaces, digging of flower-beds, beating of carpets, and any other
job by which a strong and independent hand could win honest money for
books and clothing and food. It was as true for him now as when Dekker,
fellow-player with Shakespeare and “a high-flier of wit even against
Ben Jonson himself”--to use Anthony à Wood’s phrase--when Dekker sang--
“Then he that patiently want’s burden bears,
No burden bears, but is a king, a king.
O sweet content, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace,
Honest labor bears a lovely face,
Then hey nonny, nonny; hey nonny, nonny.”
To one young man, whose course was preparing him for studies of Knox’s
theology upon Knox’s own heath, a harvest of forty acres of wheat
brought a competence, as this arithmetic will show: 40 × 50 × $0.50
= $1000. He planted, he said, in the early days of September, before
leaving for college, and cut the grain after commencement in June.
The blue-green blades barely peeped through the glebe during winter.
When springtime came, and the hot sun shone upon the steaming earth,
and the spirit of growth crept into the roots, an invalid father--the
young planter being still in academic cassock--kept the fences up and
vagrant cows from mowing the crop under their sweet breath. Other men
often told of like ways of earning not only college bread but also
college skittles.
Women students had commonly not so good a chance at wresting German
lyrics or Plato’s idealism from a wheat-furrow. Report of such
advantages at least never reached my ear. But this may be due to
the fact that women are reticent about the means of their success,
while men delight to dwell upon their former narrow circumstances and
triumphant exit from such conditions.
Some Hesperus girl may have made money in hay, and indeed have made
the hay as charmingly as Madame de Sévigné reports herself to have
done--and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of
the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sévigné relates. Now and
then a young woman did say that she was living during her studies
on funds she herself had earned. One doughty maiden, “a vary parfit,
gentil knight,” her face ruddy with healthy blood, her muscles firm and
active--such a girl said one day, in extenuation of her lack of Greek
composition, that “her duties had not permitted her to prepare it.”
“But that is your duty, to prepare it,” I answered. “Are you one of
those students who never allow studies to interfere with ‘business’?”
“No,” she said, quickly; “but let me tell you how it happened. The
boarding-house where I stay is kept by a friend of my mother. She
offers me board if I will help her. So I get up at five in the morning
and cook breakfast, and after I have cleaned up I come up here. In
the afternoon I sweep and dust, and it takes me till nearly dark. The
evening is the only time I have for preparing four studies.”
What became of this girl, you ask? She married a professor in an
Eastern college.
It is well to reiterate, however, in order to convey no false
impression of Hesperus sturdiness and self-reliance, that
many, probably a majority, of the students were supported by
their natural protectors. But it is clear that there is more
self-maintenance--self-reliance in money matters--at the Hesperus
University than in any college generally known in the East, and that
the methods of obtaining self-succor are at times novel and resultant
from an agricultural environment. In evidence that there are students
more fortunate--one should rather say more moneyed, for the blessings
of money are not always apparent to the inner eye--are the secret
societies which flourish among both men and women. The club or society
houses, for the furnishing of which carte blanche has been given the
individual humanely known as interior decorator, see not infrequently
courtesies from one Greek letter society to another, then and there
kindly wives of the professors matronizing.[2]
An early introduction into the battle of life breeds in us humans
practicality and utilitarianism. Most unfortunately it disillusions. It
takes from the imaginativeness which charms and transfigures the early
years of life. In the University of Hesperus one found the immediate
fruit of this experience in the desire of the student, expressed before
he was thoroughly within the college gates, of obtaining that which
would be of immediate practical advantage to himself. He demanded what
the Germans call brodstudien, and sometimes very little beyond the
knowledge which he could convert into Minnesota wheat or some other
iota of the material prosperity which surges from east to west and
waxes on every side of our land. How strenuously one had to fight this
great impulse! and against what overwhelming odds! It was a reacting of
King Canute’s forbiddance to the sea, and, like that famous defeat, it
had its humors.
You could see so plainly that this demon of practicality had been
implanted by want, and privation, and a knowledge drunk with the
mother’s milk, that the struggle of life on that untested soil was a
struggle to live; you could see this so plainly that you often felt
constrained to yield to its cry and urgency.
And the weapons at hand to fight it were so few! Materialism on
every hand. And it was plain, also, that here was but an eddy in the
wave--that the impulse toward brodstudien was undoubtedly but a groping
forward in the great movement of the half-century that has endowed
realschulen from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, and is perhaps but
the beginning of the industrial conquest of the world--in its first
endeavors necessarily crippled, over-zealous and impotent of best works.
Yet in the face of every concession there came anew to your conscience
the conviction, haunting unceasingly, of the need of the idea in
academic life, of the need of the love of study for its own sake, of
a broader education of the sympathies, of greater activity in the
intangible world of thought and feeling--desires of souls “hydroptic
with a sacred thirst.” To these alone did it behoove us to concede, for
through the spirit alone could the “high man” sustainedly lift up his
heart--
“Still before living he’d learn how to live--
No end to learning.
Earn the means first--God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.
Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes,--
Live now or never!’
He said, ’What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes,
Man has Forever.’”
The ratio of Hesperus students who chose the old form of scholastic
training, called through long centuries the Humanities, was some
little time ago not more than one-fifth of those in the department of
literature and arts. Since the number was so small--all departments
would then hardly count five hundred students--the growth was favored
of that most delightful feature of small-college life, friendship
between instructor and undergraduate. Such offices often grew to
significant proportions during a student’s four collegiate years. All
genialities aided them; and nothing sinister hindered.
The young folks’ hearts were as warm as may be found upon any generous
soil, and they held a sentiment of personal loyalty which one needed
never to question. They went to their University, after such longing
and eagerness, so thoroughly convinced that there was to be found the
open sesame to whatever in their lives had been most unattainable,
that their first attitude was not the critical, negative, which one
notices in some universities deemed more fortunate, but the positive
and receptive. If they did not find that which to their minds seemed
best, had they not the inheritance of hope?--a devise which Hesperus
earth and air entail upon all their children, and upon which all are
most liberally nurtured.
Then the Hesperus youth had a defect, if one may so put it, that
aided him materially to a friendly attitude with his instructors. He
was, with rare exceptions, as devoid of reverence for conventional
distinctions as a meadow-lark nesting in last year’s tumble-weed
and thinking only of soaring and singing. In this, perhaps, is the
main-spring of the reason why nearly every student, either through
some inborn affinity or by election of studies, drifted into genial
relations with some member of the faculty.
The pleasantest part of my day’s work used to be in the retirement of
the Greek study and from eight to nine in the morning. Never a student
of mine who did not come at that hour for some occasion or need. One
man snatched the opportunity to read at sight a good part of the
Odyssey. Another took up and discussed certain dialogues of Plato.
Another who aimed at theological learning studied the Greek Testament
and the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” Others came in to block
out courses of work. Still others were preparing papers and gathering
arguments, authorities, and data for debating societies and clubs.
In that hour, too, a sympathetic ear would hear many a personal history
told with entire frankness and naïveté. One poor fellow had that
defect of will which is mated at times with the humorous warmth which
the Germans call gemüth, and the added pain of consciousness of his
own weakness. Another clear-headed, muscular-handed, and ready youth
measured his chances of getting wood to saw,--“just the exercise he
needed, out of doors,”--horses to groom, and the city lamps to light,
to earn the simple fare which he himself cooked. Many a pathetic story
found tongue in that morning air, and times were when fate dropped
no cap of recognition and granted no final victory. In hearing the
details of hope deferred, of narrow estate and expansive ambition, you
longed for the fabled Crœsus touch which turned want to plenty, or,
more rationally, you projected a social order where the young and inapt
should not suffer for the sins of others, but be within the sheltering
arms of some sympathetic power.
There was the mildness of the chinook to this social blizzard, however,
for groups moved even in the dewy hour of half-past eight toward the
open door of the Greek lecture-room, laughing at the last college joke
or secret society escapade, and forecasting who would be the next
penitent before the council. Also certain youths and maids, between
whom lay the engagement announced by a ring on the heart-finger--these
one might see hanging over and fingering--
“Vor Liebe und Liebesweh”--
volumes lying upon my table, and in their eagerness and absorption
of the world in two, dog-earing the golden edges of ever-living
Theocritus. And why not? Such entanglements in the web of love oftenest
differed in no way from the innocence and simplicity of the pristine
Daphnes and Coras. They were living again, the Sicilian shepherd and
shepherdess, and wandering in the eternally virid fields of youth. The
skies and trees and waters were merely not of Trinacria. But Hesperus
heavens omitted no degree of ardor.
And had you seen her, you would never have blamed the youth for loving
the college maid. She has the charm abloom in the girlhood of every
land, and most of all in this of ours. Physically she differs little
from her sister in Eastern States. Her form is as willowy. She has,
except in the case of foreign-born parents, the same elongated head and
bright-glancing eye. Her skin sometimes lacks in fairness owing to the
desiccating winds of the interior; but there is the same fineness of
texture.
Power of minute observation and a vivacious self-reliance are
characteristics of the girl of the University of Hesperus--and, indeed,
of the girl throughout the West. She sees everything within her
horizon. Nothing escapes her eye or disturbs her animated self-poise.
She has not the Buddhistic self-contemplation the New England girl is
apt to cultivate; nor is she given to talking about her sensations
of body and moods of mind. I never heard her say she wanted to fall
in love in order to study her sensations--as a Smith College alumna
studying at Barnard once declared. She rarely pursues fads. Neither
is she a fatalist. And she never thinks of doubting her capacity of
correct conclusions upon data which she gathers with her own experience
of eye and ear. From early years she has been a reasoner by the
inductive method, and a believer in the equality and unsimilarity of
men and women. Undeniably her mental tone is a result of the greater
friction with the world which the girl of the West experiences in
her fuller freedom. Conventionalism does not commonly overpower the
individual--social lines are not so closely defined--in those States
where people count by decades instead of by centuries.
And what is said of this University girl’s observing faculties is
in nowise untrue of her brother’s. Nature, the most Socratic of all
instructors and the pedagogue of least apparent method, seems actually
to have taught him more than his sister, as, in fact, the physical
universe is apt to teach its laws more clearly to the man than to the
woman, even if she hath a clearer vision of the moral order. Perhaps
the man’s duties knit him more closely to physical things.
With clear, far-seeing eyes--for plenty of oxygen has saved them from
near-sightedness--a Hesperus boy will distinguish the species of hawk
flying yonder in the sky, forming his judgment by the length of wing
and color-bars across the tail. I have heard him comment on the tarsi
of falcons which whirled over the roadway as he was driving, and from
their appearance determine genus and species. He knows the note and
flight of every bird. He will tell you what months the scarlet tanager
whistles in the woods, why leaves curl into cups during droughts, and a
thousand delicate facts which one who has never had the liberty of the
bird and squirrel in nowise dreams of.
And why should he not? All beasts of the prairie and insects of the
air are known to him as intimately as were the rising and setting
stars to the old seafaring, star-led Greeks. During his summer the
whip-poor-will has whistled in the shadow of the distant timber, and
the hoot-owl has ghosted his sleep. He has wakened to the carol of the
brown thrush and the yearning call of the mourning dove, as the dawn
reached rosy fingers up the eastern sky.