SCHOLAR AND SOLDIER.
Harrington lived in Chambers street, not far from where he had left the
carriage, and strode on over the pavement of Cambridge street to his
house, drawing in deep breaths of the delicious, cool, spring air, and
thinking with a rapt heart of Muriel.
It was a perfect day. The long thoroughfare sloping gently, and narrowing
away into distance, with its descending row of irregular, motley
buildings of brick and wood, and its lines of passengers, was fresh
and salient in the morning sunlight. Blown from the country, wafts of
woodland odors, balmy as the breath of Muriel, floated softly to his
sense. Flowing out of the west, the morning wind, light as the lips of
Muriel, touched his cheeks, and the young man’s heart and blood were full
of love and spring.
O, blessed magic of one little moment, which had repaired what hours
and days undid! Her breath had breathed upon his sense, her lips had
met his cheek, and therefore, all thought that she loved another, all
evidence that her soul was not in secret, firm alliance with his own, had
vanished in the flash of rapture which filled his being. And more—the
phantoms which surrounded him had vanished too. Born servant and soldier
of mankind, he was often made to feel how powerless he was in the great
social war of the many against the one; and at such times, to his spirit,
as to that of many a lover of men, came gloomy spectres from the world of
complicated wo and wrong. From the grim-grotesque, sad, turbulent scene
of the morning street; from the low room of the fugitive’s humbleness
and anguish, and the futile generosity of the patrician girl; from the
cloud on the horizon of his soul, where glimmered the image of the coming
hunter; from the whole dark consciousness of a social order leagued
against the poor and weak, the invading phantoms had poured like midnight
ghosts around him. But they were all gone, and again there was strength
and morning in his soul. The spring day was sweet and beautiful; perfume
and victory coursed through his veins; the noble face of his beloved
bloomed in his heart; her wild-rose mouth had touched him like the envoy
of a costly kiss; her fragrant breath had shot his blood with ecstasy;
and past and future melted into the rich passion of the present hour,
which had renewed his manhood and left him with the pulse and thews of a
Crusader.
Flushed and throbbing with the bliss of his thought of Muriel, he reached
his dwelling. It was an old, three-storied, quaintly-fashioned brick
house, with green blinds, windows and window-panes smaller than those of
modern date, and in the centre, up three stone steps, a door with a brass
knocker, and a brass plate below it, on which was engraved the name,
E. Z. FISHER. The house breathed in an air fragrant with lilacs, whose
clumped green and purple bloomed pleasantly over the top of a close board
fence, with a gate in it, which extended from the left hand side of the
tenement to the blind side-wall of the adjoining dwelling, and inclosed a
yard within which abutted from the main building a wing of two stories.
In this wing dwelt Harrington; the rest of the house was occupied by the
Captain and his family.
He opened the gate and entered the yard, which was in fact a small
garden. A planked footway led from the gate to the two wooden steps of
the door in the wing, and a similar footway crossed this, and crooked
around the side of the abutment. Lilac bushes were planted against the
fence and the blind wall of the dwelling on the left, and there were
shrubs and flowers on either side of the door, and around the wall of the
wing. It was a pleasant spot, full of fragrance and retiracy.
Without pausing, Harrington unlocked his door and entered his study. It
was a square room, cool and quiet, lit by two green-curtained front
windows which looked on the garden, and containing several hundred
volumes on shelves, row above row, on three sides of the apartment. In
the centre was a table loaded with books and papers, and an arm-chair.
Four or five choice engravings hung in spaces between the book-shelves,
and on one side, on a pedestal, was a noble bust of Lord Bacon. A set of
foils and masks hung across the mantel, and a huge pair of dumb-bells lay
on the floor in a corner. A carpet of green baize, an old sofa between
the windows, and a few chairs, completed the furniture of the room, whose
only other noticeable feature was a slanting step-ladder on one side,
leading up by a trap in the ceiling into Harrington’s bed-chamber.
Throwing himself into his arm-chair, the young scholar took from a
drawer, and pressed to his lips, a little bunch of withered herbs, which
Muriel had held in her hand one evening two or three weeks before, and
given him at parting. Their dry balsamic odor stole softly to his brain,
freighted with the thought of the white hand that gave them, and closing
his eyes, he abandoned himself to ecstatic dreams.
In a few minutes, a barrel-organ began to play outside his gate. It was a
peculiarly sweet instrument—some people in the region of Beacon Hill may
remember it as the one they used to follow from street to street on balmy
summer evenings, so loth were they to part with its melody. Harrington
was fond of all barrel-organs that were at all melodious—the poor man’s
opera, he used to call them, associating them with the delight they gave
to little children and the dwellers in poor houses, and always pleased
to have them bring Italy into the street, as some one has felicitously
phrased it. The organist, sure of his reward whenever his patron was
at home, came often to the house. On this occasion, Harrington had no
sooner heard the first notes, than he twisted up some change in paper,
and opening the door, tossed it over the gate. The instrument stopped in
the midst of the tune, and while the man was picking up the largesse,
Harrington opened his windows, and resumed his chair to enjoy the music.
A rich light gush of lilac fragrance which seemed to blend with the
brilliant melody of the polacca the organ played, poured in at the open
windows, and melted into his mood. He sat softly beating with his hand
the dance of the tune, with the debonair image of Muriel floating in
melody through his fancy. She came again, expressed in a tenderer mood,
as the music changed to a strain of yearning and dreamful sweetness,
like a poem of deep love. Then followed one of the negro melodies of the
day, a simple and mournful air, with notes of anguish, and still she was
present in his mind linked with a shadowy remembrance of the wrongs and
sorrows of the race to whose low estate her heart stooped so often to
help and console. Soul in soul, he moved with her through the rich and
melancholy maze of the succeeding music—a sombre and sumptuous Italian
romanza, crowded with slow passion and tumult, with notes that swelled
and poured athwart the central theme, like some dim innumerable host of
love and sorrow gathering and forming, and dividing again in baffled
and harmonious disorder. Air upon air came after, and sinking away, the
listener lost for awhile their melody and meaning, and only knew that
they were sweet and sad; till rising from reverie he heard the last of
a solemn and tender strain like some delicious psalm of death and life
immortal.
It ceased; there was a pause, and the world’s hopes and struggles surged
in upon his kindled spirit, as the organ rolled forth in golden sweetness
the martial and mournful andante of the Marseillaise. The French hymn
of liberty, whose sombre and fiery tonal morning burst once on the
birth-throes of Democracy, like the light of God upon the chaos of the
globe! He never heard it without emotion, and now it rushed into his
soul, dilating and expanding into vast orchestral harmonics. His eye
gleamed and bright color lit his face as he listened to the triumphal
terror and glory of the thrilling strain. On and on it swept in cadences
of tears and fire; down and down it darkened in weird and burning melody,
fraught with the passion of all human wrongs; and rising into the pealing
cry of the battle-summons, and flowing into the proud, heroic tones of
mournful rapture which seem to exult for the dead who die for man, it
melted away.
Harrington sat, flushed and throbbing, in the fragrant silence of the
room. The organ had ceased and gone, and he was alone. Gradually the
tumult of his spirit sank into golden calm, and with the charm of the
music still lingering in his mind, he put the faded herbs into the
drawer, and prepared to begin his tasks.
His unfinished article was the first thing to be attended to, and he got
it out and set to work upon it. The article, as Muriel had said, he was
writing for money, for Harrington’s means sometimes ran low. His mother
dying six years before, when he was nineteen, had left him her little
property, including this house. The house he rented to Captain Fisher,
and this rent, added to the interest of the money his mother had left
him, gave him a yearly income of about six hundred dollars. An economical
and selfish man might have got on well enough on these receipts; but
Harrington, though economical enough, was anything but selfish, and
between his own expenses and his pecuniary outlay for others, he
sometimes found himself in want of money. On these occasions he was wont
to interrupt his studies to write for certain periodicals till he wrote
himself into funds again. What he wrote sold well, and his pen was in
demand; but philosophy, Hegel said, has nothing to do with dollars, and
Harrington evidently thought scholarship had not either, for when he had
once filled the gap in his finances, back he went to his studies, and the
magazine editor did not live who could tempt him from them into another
contribution.
For he was a scholar born, and in this room he kept alive the traditions
which have made the name of Harrington dear to scholarship and man. It is
a shining name in literature and history, and bears the recorded honors
due to names linked with the memory of human pleasure or the cause of
human service. There was one Harrington in the days of the Eighth Henry—a
polished poet, who surpassed the verse of his time. There was another,
his child, the darling of Queen Elizabeth, a sprightly wit and poet, who
sunned his muse in the brightness of the bright Britannic days, wrought
well for belle-lettres and history, and gave his country her first
English version of the fan and fire of Ariosto. There was still another,
the Oxford scholar of a later age, of whom the chronicle records that he
was a prodigy in the common law, a person of excellent parts, honest in
dealing, and of good and generous nature. There was one more, loftier far
than these, whose mighty pulses beat for liberty and justice, the brave
Utopian of Sidney’s time, who aimed to lay the deep foundations of the
perfect and immortal state—James Harrington, the author of Oceana. And
among the rest, skilled or famed in law and science and poetry, there was
yet another, James Harrington’s true brother by a closer tie than that of
blood—the stout jurist of Vermont, who spoke the decision of her Supreme
Court on the demand of a slave claimant, decreeing that his title to a
man was not good till he could show a bill of sale from the Almighty God.
That was Judge Harrington, and by that decree he earned his right to a
statue from mankind.
Whatever was best and greatest in the works and days of the ancestral
Harringtons, seemed likely to be renewed and excelled by the young
scholar who bore their name. Primarily, he was a Baconist. There
stood the bust of Bacon on the pedestal in his library, and to him it
was the treasure of treasures. Wentworth used to say jestingly, that
Harrington was a heathen and worshipped an idol. For the idol, however,
Wentworth himself, with Muriel, was responsible. Harrington had been
sadly disappointed in not being able to find any bust of Verulam at the
statuary’s; so Wentworth and Muriel had collected the various portraits
of the great Chancellor, moulded from them a bust in clay, somewhat
larger than life, cast it in plaster, and one day Harrington, entering
his study, was astonished and enraptured at finding the bust there on
its pedestal. It was a magnificent success, and well embodied the noble
sagacity, the tender and gentle sweetness, the regal compassion and calm,
massive intellectuality, which appear in Bacon’s enormous brow and face
of princely majesty, as the painters of his time have pictured him.
Harrington now loved Bacon with tenfold ardor, and Harrington’s love for
Bacon was something wonderful. It was absolutely a personal attachment,
and there was no surer way to rouse him than to speak disparagingly of
Verulam. He put him above all authors or men. He spoke of him as the
flower of the human race. He resented any imputation on his fame, scouted
at the modern aspersions upon him of Lord Campbell, Macaulay and others,
as baseless and infamous slanders, and altered Pope’s epigrammatic line,
which he thought the seed-cone of the whole modern libel, to read “the
wisest, brightest, _noblest_ of mankind.” With a standing promise to
his friends to put the evidence together some day in demonstrable form,
having already, he said, begun to make notes to that end, he meanwhile
rested in the broad assertion that Bacon’s downfall was the work of the
conservatism of his time—that the conservators of social abuses had
smelt out his concealed democracy and socialism, trumped up the charge
of malfeasance in office against him, ruined and defamed him in his life
and flung the mire of a traditionary calumny on his tomb. It was another
of Harrington’s heresies that Bacon in the seventeenth century aimed to
do for the world what Fourier aimed to do in the nineteenth. This, he
insisted, was the key to his works and life—this the torch by which they
were to be read and interpreted. It was evident that Harrington had a
very pretty affair on his hands, should he ever venture to publish an
idea so heretical. The sin of connecting the world-honored Verulam with
the man whom modern society has endowed, as Muriel said, with hoofs and
horns and a harpoon tail, and of asserting that either or both had meant
to bring the kingdom of God upon the earth, would be only less than the
effort of both or either to so interfere with our highly respectable
institutions.
However this may be, Harrington’s heart was anchored on the idea, and
with this faith in him, he studied his Bacon, together with Montaigne and
Shakspeare, who, he thought, or seemed to think—for on this point he was
mysteriously non-committal—were in the interest of the Baconian design.
Possibly, he might yet come to different conclusions, for he was young;
and, like Sterne’s Pilgrim, had just begun his journey, and had much to
learn.
Meanwhile he pursued his studies, though with the full consciousness
that there was no accredited career open to him. To a man who held
unpopular convictions as he did; no more a Christian of the modern sort
than Christ was; no more a patriot of the modern sort than Sidney was;
no more a believer in the modern order of society than Bacon and Fourier
were; despising the Government as an engine of force and fraud; refusing
assent to the Constitution, and allegiance to the Union, because in his
view they legalized and fortified the crime and ruin of Slavery—to such
a man the church, the bar, the bench, the senate, the official station
of any kind were all closed. But Harrington had a solemn instinct at
his heart, that the time was coming when his country would rise against
slavery and social wrong and call upon her outlawed sons for their best
service. Against that day he prepared himself to do his part, whatever
it might prove to be. In his conception of it, the utter annihilation
of slavery was first in the programme. This involved the possibility of
civil war. It might come between the dark millions of the South and the
Government. It might come between the Government’s pro-slavery liegemen
and the freemen of the North. In either case, Harrington was pledged to
serve liberty, and that his service might be efficient, he had begun the
study of military science, and had the best text books, such as those of
Mahan, Kinsley, Thiroux and Knowlton, together with the chief standard
works relating to warfare, from the Commentaries of Cæsar to the volumes
of Durat-Lasalle. To this end also went his varied practice with Bagasse
in the school of arms, with rifle practice elsewhere. Hoping, too, that
the period of social reconstruction would come in his own time or follow
hard upon it, he was preparing to add his thought to bring it on, or
shape his thought to guide it when it should come, and to this end were
his scholastic labors. His shelves might have hinted as much. There were
the works of the masters of law and government, and of those who have
studied and schemed for society, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Cicero,
Justinian, Grotius, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Puffendorff, Henricius, Milton,
Sidney, Harrington, Pothier, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bacon, Montesquieu,
Bentham, Burke, St. Simon, Fourier, Compte—legists, jurists, scholiasts,
works of practice and theory, statements of codes, and books that are
the seed of codes. With them works of exact science in all its branches,
and works of history, biography, poetry, travel and fiction, classic and
modern—for it was Harrington’s design to grasp the thought and life of
all the ages.
So toiled he. No dilettante litterateur; no student forgetful of his time
and kind, or gaining lore to fortify or gild oppression;—but kinsman to
the golden blood of the gallant scholars to whose graves the heart brings
its laurels and its tears. No scholar, either of the modern sort, which
stores the brain and saps the arm—but of the large Elizabethan type,
training his body in every manly exercise, training his mind in equal
skill and power. Such was the budding promise of Harrington.