quality of reverence. The world has immemorially paid them in the
coin of lip-service for the privilege of using their sacredness as a
yoke. They are defrauded of their true power by the hands that waft
them hypocritical incense; bought off the ground where their influence
might be precious and permanent, by the compliment of a moment, or the
ceremony of a day. We pick up the fan of the first, and shoulder her
out of her partnership in our serious business of living. We build
temples for the second, that she may not gad about among our shops,
or trouble the doors of our houses. In the third, we do superstitious
homage to a mere accident of time, and feel free to neglect the genial
lesson of humanity which is eternal.
It is impossible not to reverence our forefathers--those grand old
fellows who, long before we rose, got up to build the fires, and shovel
the sidewalks of this world. The amount of work which they did was
immense; great was their poking and their pushing; their thrashing of
arms, and their blowing of fingers. If they sometimes made a compromise
with their job; if here and there they left the gutters uncleared, or a
heavy drift to thaw over under the sun of modern conscience, and flood
our streets with revolution; if they built some of their fires with
wet wood, which unto this day smokes the parlors, or even the inmost
bed-chambers of mankind,--let us remember how frosty the dawn was, how
poorly made were the tools and mittens of the period. All honor to
their work, and the will with which they went at it! But when we are
asked to regret the rising of the sun; to despise a time of day when
there are no more fires to build, no more walks to shovel; or, if such
anywhere remain, when there are snow-ploughs and patent-kindling to use
in their behoof--distinctly No!--a No as everlasting as Mr. Carlyle's,
and spelt with as big a capital.
The mistake of that great writer and minor disciple of the Belated-Owl
school to which he belongs, naturally arises, not from the
over-development of reverence, to which it is generally ascribed, but
from a constitutional divorce between the poetic imagination and the
power of analysis. The former faculty, by itself, results in impatience
with the meaner actualities of life,--a divine impatience in great
poets, a petulant in small ones. Lacking the latter faculty, such
persons are in the condition of a near-sighted man placed without chart
or compass at the helm of a free-going clipper. Making no allowance for
the fact that the blemished and the trivial disappear with distance,
and, ignorant of the direction in which humanity must steer, they put
out with disgust from a shore where every old clam-shell and rotten
wreck is as conspicuous to those, at least, who look for it as the
orange-groved cliffs, and the fair retiring stretches of greensward,
to voyage for some scarce descried Atlantis gemming the horizon ring
with an empurpled roundness born of vapor, time, and space. To such,
the future might be a noble course to lay; but that lies beyond the
horizon, and impatience is not consistent with faith. On, then, on
to the farthest visible,--but westward, while the grand fleet of
humanity sails last. Into shadow which drowns the petty details of
existence,--not toward a shore which shall be reached only by long
buffeting and weary watching, whose noble scenery, glorious with all
the temples and trophies of the latest age, shall bear unshamed the
scrutiny of the full-risen sun.
The application of scientific processes to the study of history has
revealed the steady amelioration of the race. The mail of chivalric
giants is brought out of romance's armory to the profane test of a
vulgar trying on, and, behold, it is too small for the foot-soldier of
to-day. Population everywhere increases, while the rates of mortality
diminish. The average longevity of the people of London is greater,
by something like twenty-five per cent., than it was a century ago.
The improvement of machinery is more and more lifting the yoke of
physical labor from the neck of man, leaving his mind freer to cope
with the higher problems of his own nature and the universe without.
Not as a matter of platform enthusiasm and optimist poetry, but of
office statistics, do we know that the world is an easier and better
place to live in, and that a man is luckier to be born into it,
than in the day of the fathers. So much has changed, and changed for
the better. That analysis, which the Carlylists lack, reveals still
other changes worked by the course of time in the phenomena of the
race,--such changes as concern the habits of society, the styles of
literature, the systems of political economy and commercial order, the
tenets of philosophy, the schools of art, the forms of government and
religion. This analysis further reveals that, while all these functions
of life are in their nature endlessly mutable, the organic man, from
whom, under all variations, they get their _vis viva_, remains from
age to age eternally the same. While each successive generation has
its fresh, particular business on the earth,--something to do for
the race, which succeeding generations will not have the time, even
as prior generations had not the light, to do,--something which is
wanted right away,--something for which it was sent and for which
the whole machine-shop of time had been shaping the material to be
worked by its special hand,--analysis discloses that the capital upon
which every business is to be carried on undergoes neither increase
nor diminution. There is just as much faith, just as much courage,
just as much power in the world as there ever was. They do not show
themselves in Runnymedes, because Runnymede has been attended to; nor
in wondrous Abbot Sampsons, because monkery is mainly cured. They
are not manifest in martyred Edwardses, because at this day Edwards
could call a policeman; nor in burning Cranmers, because society has
made a phenomenal change in her method with martyrs and shuts them
in a refrigerator, where once she chained them to a stake. They do
not appear in French Revolutions, because the world has grown through
a second American Revolution, grander than the first, and a great
representative native has plucked Liberty out of the fire without one
scorch of license on her garments. They seek no outlet in crusade, for
Jerusalem has been made of as little consequence as Barnegat, by the
fulfilment of the promise,--
"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet in
Jerusalem, worship the Father, ... when the true worshippers shall
worship him in spirit and in truth."
I have a little butcher, who is Coeur de Lion in the small. He does not
split heads nor get imprisoned in castles, but has the same capricious
force, the same capacity for affront-taking, the same terribleness
of retribution, and the same power of large, frank forgiveness which
belonged to the man who broke the skulls of the Saracens and pardoned
his own assassin. I went to school to Frederick the Great. He did not
take snuff nor swear in high Dutch, and it was his destiny to be at
the head, not of an army of men, but of one hundred as unmanageable
boys as ever played hawkey or "fought pillows" in the dormitory.
His solution of difficulties was as prompt, his decisions were as
inexorable, he had as irascible a temper and as admirable a faculty of
organization as his Prussian prototype's. Calvin and Servetus discuss
their differences at my dinner-table; the former possesses all his
old faith in the inscrutable; the latter all his ancient tendency to
bring everything alleged to the tribunal of science, and I may add that
Calvin has as little doubt as ever of the propriety of having Servetus
cooked,--only he postpones the operation, and expects to see it done
without his help. I am acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney, the courtly
knight and the melodious poet. The chivalry with which he jousted at
Kenilworth and fought at Zutphen are hourly needed in the temptations
and harassments of a broker's office, and many's the hard day through
which it has borne him with honor. The pen which he devotes to the
Muses is as facile as in the Arcadian time,--though the sturdy lance he
used to set in rest is substituted by another pen, of the fat office
type, consecrated to the back of gold certificates and the support of
an unmediævally expensive family.
Looking in all directions round the world, I find the old
nobleness,--the primeval sublimities of love and courage, faith and
justice, which have always kept humanity moving, and will keep it to
the end. In no age has the quantity of this nobleness been excessive,
but so much of it as exists is an imperishable quantity. It is a good
interred with no man's bones; it is the indispensable preventive of the
world's annihilation. Carlyle has been praised for the epigrammatic
assertion that nothing can be kept without either life or salt. This
is true, but not the whole truth; salt will keep beeves, but as for
nations and races which have lost their savor, wherewithal shall they
be salted? The fact that mankind survive at all is the proof that
ages have not tainted them with putrescence. Things live only by the
good that there is in them, and the interests to which they appeal;
the fields which open to man, in our own day, are so much vaster and
massier than they were in the day of our fathers, that the tax on the
activities of the race could not be met by our capital of life if we
had lost one particle of the good which supported them.
When I look at the fathers, I recollect that courage and love, faith
and justice, have no swallowing horizon, while all that is petty and
base succumbs in one generation to the laws of perspective. It is
pleasanter thus. At the grave of the old schoolmaster who flogged us,
we remember the silver hair and the apple he gave us once,--never the
rattan. "We had fathers after the flesh who corrected us, and we gave
them reverence," nothing but reverence, when we leaned with tearful
eyes over their vacant chairs. If I have ever quarrelled with my
friend, when he can return to me no more, I make up with his memory
by canonizing him. The tendency to do thus is among the loveliest and
divinest things in our nature. But it is a still lovelier and diviner
thing to anticipate the parallax of time and look upon the present with
the same loving, teachable, and reverent eyes, which shall be bent upon
it from the standpoint of coming generations. He to whom the beauty and
nobleness of his own time are, throughout all that he deplores in it
and in himself, the conspicuous objects of love and veneration,--who
extends the allowance of the dead to the faults of the living,--from
whom no personal disappointments can ever take away his faith in the
abiding divinity of his kind,--need never fear that his judgment of
the fathers will be a churlish and disrespectful one. The only object
which such a man can have in recalling the vices and defects of older
generations is to establish their kinship with his own, to prove his
era's legitimacy against philosophers who find only pettiness in the
present and grandeur in the past. If he cannot make them see the good
side by which the modern family receives blood from the ancient, there
shall not be any bend sinister on his escutcheon because he neglects
to show them the bad one, though he would rather vindicate his lineage
the other way. To him the organic unity of mankind, throughout all
generations, is dearer than the individual reputation of any one of
them.
Having the faith of this organic unity he can look at the errors of
the forefathers without pain. They lessen neither his love nor his
respect for them. Who is there that would care to know king David only
as a very respectable Jew, in a Sunday-school book, who was always
successful, invariably pious, and passed his time wholly in playing
hymns on a harp with a golden crown upon his head? To almost all young
readers, and many an old one, the vindictive psalms seem a shocking
inexplicability in the sacred canon. The philosopher, however, feels
with the illiterate preacher, "It is a comfort to us poor erring
mortals, my brethren, to remember that on one occasion even, David,
beloved of the Lord, said not only, 'I am mad,' but 'I am fearfully and
wonderfully mad?'" Not that it would be any comfort to us if that were
all we possess of him; but we also have the record of his getting over
it. I once knew a little boy who learned to swear out of the psalms,
and it must be acknowledged that of good round curses there is in no
tongue a much fuller armory. Conscientious persons, who want to damn
their enemies without committing sin, no doubt often sit down and read
an execratory psalm with considerable relief to their minds. Not in
this spirit do men skilled in human nature peruse the grand rages of
the many-sided fighting bard; not because they would cloak their errors
with the kingly shadow of his own, do they rejoice that he exists for
us to-day just where the rude, large simplicity of his original Hebrew
left him, and that tame-handed biography has never been able to pumice
him down into a demi-god. They are glad because these things prove him
human and imitable. If his stormy soul triumphed over itself; if he
could be beloved of the Infinite at a moment when the surges of both
outer and inner vicissitude seemed conspiring to sweep him away, then
we cease to hear his swearing or the clamor of his despair; and to us,
whose modern spirits are not exempt from flood and hurricane, his grand
voice chants only cheer down the centuries, and we know that there is
love caring and victory waiting for us also in our struggle, since we
are not the lonely anomalies of time.
As with David so with all the men of the past,--it gives us no pain
to find that they were not a whit nearer perfection than ourselves.
We do not regret their superseded customs, nor wish them restored in
the living age. He who takes them from the time of which they are
a congruous part and seeks to import them into a day which has no
explanatory relevance to them, so far from showing them reverence,
is like a man who, to compel the recognition of his grandfather's
tombstone, strips it of its moss, scrubs it with soap and sand, and
sets it up on Broadway among signs and show-cases. Their opinions
are not final with us, because every age brings new proofs, and
every generation is a new court of appeal. Their business methods
are framed upon a hypothesis which does not include the telegraph
or the steam-engine. Where a man can persuade his correspondents to
send their letters by the coach and their goods by the freight-wagon,
he may adjust himself very comfortably to the good old way by which
his grandfather made a fortune and preserved his health to a great
age. Until he gets his mail weekly and answers it all in a batch,
recuperating from that labor by the sale of merchandise, one box to an
invoice, he is simply absurd to lament over the rapidity with which
fortunes are made at this day, and eulogize the "sure and slow" process
by which a lifetime whose sole principle was the avoiding of risks
attained the same object. As if the whole problem of life were not how
to secure, as quick as possible, all the material good necessary for
living, in order to leave the kind free for all its higher functions of
self-development and discipline. As if money were not a mere expression
of the extent to which a man has subordinated the forces of the world
to his own use,--a thing, therefore, which naturally comes quicker to a
generation which has taken all the great atmospheric and imponderable
couriers into its service!
The true use of ancestors is not slavish; we do not want them for
authority, but for solace. If my grandfather could come back, he
certainly would be too much of a gentleman to sit down on my hat
or put his feet on my piano; and how much less would he crush my
convictions or trample on my opinions! He would be equally too
much of a business-man to interfere in the responsibilities of any
practical course I might take, when he had not looked into the
books of the concern, taken account of its stock, or consulted the
world's market-list for an entire generation. He would do what any
man would be proud to have his grandfather do,--take the easiest
and most distinguished chair at the fireside, and tell us night by
night, the story of his life. What roars of laughter would applaud
his recollection of jokes uttered by some playmate of his boyhood.
They would seem so droll to us at the distance of a hundred years,
though a contemporary might have uttered them without raising a smile
on our faces. What mingling of tears and laughter would there be when
he related some simple little family drama,--its pathos depending on
incidents as slender as the death of Auld Robin Gray's cows, but like
the wonderful song, in which those animals have part interest, going
unerringly to the fountains of the human heart! How would we double
up our fists, how red would we grow in the face when he told us, in
the most unadorned, dispassionate way, about the cruel creditor who
foreclosed a mortgage on him and turned him and our grandmother into
the street, just after the birth of their first child, our father; and
when he came to the passage where the kind friend steps in and says,
"here are five hundred dollars,--pay me when you are able," how many
girls there would be sobbing, and men violently blowing their noses!
If we had belonged to the period of the foreclosure and been next-door
neighbors to the mortgagor, the thing might have impressed us simply
as the spectacle of a young couple with a baby who couldn't meet their
quarterly payments, and were obliged to curtail their style of living.
The thing still happens, and that is the way we look at it. But when
grandpapa relates it, nothing in the domestic line we ever saw upon the
stage seems half so touching. The littlest school-boy feels a roseate
fascination hovering around the dogs that went after squirrels with
that venerable man when he wore the roundabout of his far-off period;
there is glamour about the mere fact that then, as now, there were
dogs, and there were squirrels; and as the grandchild hears of the
boughs which hung so full, the crisp leaves which crackled so frostily
those many, many falls ago--a strange delight comes over him, and he
seems to be going out chestnutting in the morning of the world.
What we want of one, we want of all the grandfathers of the
race,--their story. Their value is that they take the experience of
human life, and hold it a sufficient distance from us to be judged
in its true proportions. That experience in all ages is a solemn and
a beautiful, a perilous, yet a glorious thing. We are too near the
picture to appreciate it, as it appears in our own day, though all its
grand motives are the same. We rub our noses against the nobilities
and cannot see them. The foreground weed is more conspicuous than the
background mountain. When the grandfathers carry it from us, and hang
it on the wall of that calm gallery where no confusing cross-lights
of selfish interest any longer interfere, the shadows fall into their
proper places, the symbolisms of the piece are manifest, and above
all minor hillocks, above all clouds of storm, unconscious of its
earthquake struggles and its glacier scars, Human Nature stands an
eternal unity, its peak in a clear heaven full of stars. We recognize
that unity and all things become possible to us, for thereby even the
commonest living is glorified.
AT EVE.
AT EVE.
[Illustration]
"It is almost time for John to come home, I guess," and the young wife
rose from her sewing and put the tea-kettle over the bright fire on
the clean-swept hearth. Then she pulled the table out into the middle
of the floor, right to the spot where she knew the setting sun would
soon shine through the latticed window; for John loved to see the light
play upon the homely cups and saucers, and pewter spoons; he said it
reminded him of the fairy stories, where they ate off gold dishes. She
went about her work swiftly, but very quietly. Once there had been a
time when the little cottage rang early and late with the sound of her
glad voice. But then a pair of little feet crept over the floor, and a
tiny figure had raised itself up by the very table whose cloth was now
so smooth and unruffled by the small awkward hands.
When Margery had put the golden butter, the jug of cream, and the slice
of sweet honey on the table, she went to the door to look for John. A
narrow path, skirted on one side by waving corn-fields, on the other
by pastures and orchards, stretched from the cottage down to the
broader road that led to the village. The sun was already low in the
sky, and threw across the path the shadow of the old apple-tree that
stood beside the house. Margery remembered how full of pink and white
blossoms the tree had been that spring when she first came here as
John's bride, and how they showered down like snow, while now a ripe
apple occasionally dropped from the branches with a heavy plump.
"Here comes John at last," she said in a low voice, as she saw him
approaching from the village. He was yet a considerable distance off,
but Margery's bright eyes discerned that he was not alone. Beside
him walked a girl, whom Margery had known already while they were
both children. Mary was called handsome by the village lads; but she
was poor, and she and her father helped to do field work, on the
neighboring farms, in the busiest seasons of the year.
As she and John advanced, Margery noticed that they seemed engaged in
earnest conversation. Then John stood still and gave her his hand. The
girl seized it eagerly and put it to her lips, and looking up at him
once, turned around and walked back to the village, while John hastened
on with longer steps.
Margery's lips quivered. She did not wait for John at the door, but
turned back into the house, and was busied at the hearth when he came
in.
"Well, wify, how goes it this evening?" he asked in his cheery voice,
which always reminded Margery of the time when he used to add, "And how
is my little pet darlint?" and pick the baby up from the floor. The
tones of his voice had grown almost kinder and more cheerful since, if
that were possible, though he always gazed around the room with a vague
kind of look, as if he half-expected to see the baby toddle up to him
from some corner.
"Thank you, John, all goes as well as usual. You are late to-night."
"Yes, there was something to detain me," he said, as he took down the
tin-basin and filled it with water, to wash his sunburnt face and
hands. A shadow flitted over Margery's face, but it was gone again
when they sat down to table. It was still light enough to see without
a candle, though the golden sunbeams John loved so much had faded long
ago. He talked cheerily of the crops, and of harvest-time, and of the
excellent prospects for the coming winter. There was no occasion for
Margery to say much, and she was glad of it.
Then she quickly cleared the table, and John sat down by the hearth,
lighted his pipe, and laid his evening paper across his knee to be read
afterwards by candle-light. While Margery washed the dishes there was
no sound in the room but the clatter of the cups and spoons, and the
monotonous ticking of the old-fashioned clock in the corner. Margery
sometimes glanced over at John, who sat smoking and looking into the
fire. At last he got up, lit the candle, and, going up to Margery,
he asked, "What's the matter, Margery? You are uncommonly silent
to-night."
She stopped in her work, and hung the towel over her arm.
"John," she said, looking straight at him, with a strange light in her
brown eyes, and her face rather pale, "I want to go home."
An expression half of pain, half of astonishment, came into John's
honest face. He too was a shade paler, and the candle trembled a little
in his hand as he asked,--
"Is the house too lonely again, Margery? You did say you wanted to go
home for a spell, after, after--but I thought you had got contented
again."
She had turned away from him as she answered,--
"Yes, John, the house is lonely again. I see the little hands on all
the chairs, and hear the little feet crawling over the floor;" but
there was something of coldness in her tone, very unlike the pleading
voice in which she had once before made the same request.