GENIUS LOCI
I
Otis and Shaw were great, and the qualities that made them so,
particularly those of Shaw, were indigenous to the soil. It is
interesting to look through a book like Freeman’s “Cape Cod,” and
study there the portraits of the men who built this unique community.
They are often singularly handsome, with a fine, well-bred,
upstanding air. They, preëminently, are not villagers, but men of
the world who know their world well and have considered its works.
Perhaps in every face, whether it has beauty of line or the homely
ruggedness graved by generations of positive character, the dominant
feature is a certain poise of mind: these men would think, and then
judge; they would look at you straight, and it would be difficult for
you to conceal your purpose. It would be easier to be persuaded than
to persuade them; and in the end it is probable that your yielding
would be justified in wisdom. From such characters could be drawn a
composite that might fitly be the _genius loci_; and lest its secret
charm elude us and Cape Cod appear no more than a pleasing sandy
offshoot of New England, we should do well to learn of him. He is, as
we see him, in essence a follower of the sea: one who pursues romance
to mould it to everyday use. For a closer aspect it may be convenient
to place him in the eighteen-forties, or earlier, at latest the
fifties, in the great days of the clippers.
On the old sailing-vessel there was a constant duel, to challenge
the temper of him, between a man’s wit and the lambent will of the
sea. And although the steamship has a romance and daring of its
own—a puny hull that carries forth upon the waters a little flare of
flame to wage the old warfare—it was with sails aloft and no wires
from shore that a lad then, who had the gift of using the decisive
moment, would best find a career. The master of a ship was master in
the markets ashore, and there, or afloat, he must be quick to seize
fortune as it came. It is said of such a one that “he had the air,
as he had the habit, of success.” He was no reckless adventurer, but
aimed to earn an honest living as soberly as any stay-at-home, for
whom, and also, perhaps, for fishermen on the Banks, he may have
had some easy condescension. He was the aristocrat of the sea. When
adventure met him by the way, so much the better if young blood ran
hot; but the majority were shrewd cool merchants who sold and bought
where their judgment pointed them. They were expert in seamanship
because that was one of the tools of their trade; and when they
turned a tidy profit on some voyage, they bought shares in the ships
they sailed, or others, investing in a business whose every turn was
familiar to them, until they could leave the sea to become farmers,
or ship-chandlers, or East India merchants. If the seaman founded a
house in the city, he sent his boys to college, and took one or two
of them into his office to train them as merchants; and in not many
decades the same absorbing hazard of trade was to be carried on by
other means, or, if by ocean traffic, “steam-kettle sailors” were
servants of the counting-rooms ashore.
But our _genius loci_, who was familiar with the cities of the
world, chose for his home the town where he was born. When fortune
warranted, he married a wife, and built in the village a house that
was adorned, voyage after voyage, with a gradual store of treasures
from Europe and the East. His women-folk wore the delicate tissues of
foreign looms, and managed the farm when he was away, and practised
intellectualities; they cooked, sewed, painted, accomplished a dozen
small arts with exquisite care. They were ready for the relaxations
of society when ships made port, and the village swung to the tune of
a larger world. The seafarer loved them with a reticence called for
by the custom of the day, and with a tender chivalry that might be
the envy of any time.
There is a pretty story of one old captain—men commanded their ships
at twenty and were old at forty—whose treasure was a little daughter.
She had a maimed foot that must undergo a cruel cure, and for a
bribe she had been promised dancing-lessons, the dearest wish of her
childish heart. Her ordeal passed, the captain kept faith with her.
Through a long winter, while he waited for his ship, in starlight
or snow he set the child upon his shoulder and bore her to the hall
where the old fiddler taught the boys and girls their steps, and
there danced with her, envied because of such attendance, until the
foot grew strong and she, who had been shy from the misfortune that
had marked her difference in the children’s world, blossomed into the
merriest little jade of all the company.
And for him, all the watery highways he must travel were only the
road to lead him home. There, his adventure achieved, he lived
healthily upon the produce of his farm; poverty, the city kinsman was
ready to aver, his only fault. But he had more than enough for the
life he had chosen; his manners were as polished and his speeches
fine as if he trod the pavement instead of driving about his beloved
country roads—he had paced too many miles of deck to walk a rod
ashore. He had rich memories, and discrimination in choosing the
elements essential to happiness. What should a man need more? And
when the end came, and in the graveyard with an outlook to blue water
from the hillside where the willows drooped low, he lay beside her
whom he loved best, the epitaph there might be, for her: “During a
long life she performed all her duties with fidelity and zeal, and
died in the triumph of Christian faith and resignation.” And for him:
“His integrity of character gave him an honorable distinction among
his fellow citizens: his private virtues endeared him to all: his end
was peace.”
II
We do well, now and again, to make friends with another time than our
own; and by good fortune some of us, then, may find a path to the
Cape of pines and dunes where lay a township recreated for us in
twilight stories by the nursery fire. Here peaked-roof houses look
out over “the lilac trees which bear no fruit but a pleasant smell,”
willow and silvery poplars meet above the road, and here genial
spirits populate the brave old time—days when deep-water sailors
hailed the little town as home, and women, demure, pure-faced,
neat-footed, kept the houses as spotless as their hearts.
[Illustration: THE PASTURE BARS]
From month on to month, the village might have been a colony forsworn
by world and men; but when the Flying Cloud or Halcyon made port,
it brimmed with life eager to have its due before next sailing-day.
From the cap’n’s mansion on Main Street to the low-eaved house
whose oldest son swung his hammock in the fo’c’s’le, doors opened
with an easy welcome. This home had sent a mate, that a cabin boy,
another would never see again the brave fellow who had been lost off
Mozambique. They had been as sons to the “old man,” who on the planks
of his ship was patriarch or despot as character should determine;
but now all were equal by the freemasonry of home. Sea-chests gave
up their treasure, and bits of ebony and jade were added to mantel
curios, an ivory junk spread its crimson sail beside the Tower of
Pisa, a spirited portrait of the Leviathan entering the port of
Malaga was hung opposite the waxen survival of Aunt Jane’s funeral
wreath. And in shaded parlors the fragrance of sandalwood and
attar-of-rose and the spicy odor of lacquer mingled with the breath
of syringa wafted in from the garden.
Then there was an interchange of high festivities among the cap’n’s
families when French china, latticed with gold, set off Belfast
damask, and the silver tea-service, which Cap’n Jason had brought
from Russia in ’36, stood cheek by jowl with East Indian condiment
and English glass. Amid the rustle of lustrous satin and silk the
guests gathered about the board, and cups were stood in cup-plates
while tea was sipped from saucers poised in delicately crooked
fingers. Conversation swung easily around the world, from adventures
in the Spanish Main to a dinner at “Melbun” on the English barque
whose captain they had greeted in every harbor of the globe where
trade was good; and they recalled with Homeric jest the ball at
Singapore when many friendly ships rode at anchor in the bay.
But it was on a Sunday that the town blossomed as sweetly as any
rose in June, when wives and sweethearts, in silks and fairy _peñas_
and wraps heavy with patient embroideries of the East, made their
way to the village church where a second mate led the hymns with his
flute and the cap’n droned after on a viol. “There is a land mine
eye hath seen” swelled into a joyous chorus of treble and rumbling
bass, while men thought of the sultry day at Surinam when they had
longed for the “blissful shores” of home. And as the parson made his
prayer for “those who go down to the sea in ships,” they pitied the
poor fellows whose guidepost was a compass as cheerfully as if they
themselves were to dare no perils greater than the Big Channel in
the bay. Church over, the road was aflutter with rainbow color. And
sunburnt beaux in tight white trousers, blue coats, agonizing stocks,
and top-hats rakishly a-tilt, peered under the arc of leghorn bonnets
where moss-rosebuds nestled against smoothly banded hair, while
beneath his surtout and her mantilla or pelisse the hearts beat out
their mating-tune.
III
All of us have our land of refuge: for one it is a town, or a house
endeared by its remembered atmosphere of simplicity and health;
another needs but to cross the threshold of a room where sits the
being who has been the best friend of every year; a third has only
the land of dreams to people at his will. And one refreshes the
ideals of his youth, perhaps, or seeks to wipe out with forgetfulness
the scar of some old sin; others, faint with terror for the fate of
ships that drift in black seas of hate and lust, find the comfort of
cleared vision and steadier brain.
The nation has its land of renewal in the genius of our fathers.
Those early Pilgrims, the first immigrants, had by nature the spirit
of democracy. They recognized what one man owes another: they were
“tied to all care of each other’s good.” They were prepared for
growth and change. With good John Robinson, they kept an open mind,
nor did they believe that God had “revealed his whole will to them.”
“It is not possible,” they held, “that full perfection of knowledge
should break forth all at once.” For their Fundamentals, they took
over the best body of law that the time afforded, but with no rigid
mind: they adapted and added to the law of their fathers with
a flexibility that gave genuine freedom to men of their day and
promised freedom to the future. The laws they passed were calculated
to ensure a man’s loyalty, and to help him live straight. “Government
exists that men may live in happy homes,” might have been their
dictum. They were entirely human: they enjoyed the free life of the
open, and feasting, and the sober perfection of their dress; they
liked a fair fight and no favor; they liked best of all a man’s job,
and labored unswervingly to bring to pass their ideal of what life
should be. Their feet were on the ground, and they exulted in the
fact that their vision reached beyond the clouds. If it be true that
“no country can escape the implication of the ideas upon which it
was founded,” it were well that our feet should be set on that same
ground of vigorous simplicity and faith, our vision, though with
another aspect than theirs, reach above the clouds. They passed on an
inheritance of sane and clear and just thought that we should do well
to use: that, and belief in the progressive revelation of truth. And
by happy chance the spot they chose for home—New England, Plymouth,
the dunes and meadows of the Cape—typifies their very spirit: the
homely beauty, the invigorating atmosphere, the health of salt winds
and cleansing of the sea.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 37 Changed: muncipal laws of their own
to: municipal laws of their own
pg 102 Changed: Martha’s Vineyard had been fonnd
to: Martha’s Vineyard had been found