peculiarly warm and beautiful light which on sunny days was present
in the three lower rooms--parlor, sitting-room, and dining-room--that
opened one into another.
This light, which had first to make its way past maples and a few
pear trees, entered, it seemed, with an especial graciousness,
touching softly and lingeringly the old mahogany as it went; and from
morning until late afternoon abode in the rooms with a kind of mellow
gentleness hardly to be described. There was something well-mannered,
unobtrusive, in its coming and going, as though it were conscious of
being a guest there; a kind of gracious enjoyment it seemed to take in
the place, noticeable in its gentle behaviors among the dark colors
and the old books, and in its manner of moving about delicately from
object to object, and pausing at last, as it always did, before the
tall pier-glass, as though it pleased it to reflect on the three long
rooms, doubled to twice their length, before it slipped away again past
the western windows and departed across the hills.
I have mentioned carefully the perpetual coming and going of the
sunlight because it seems to me symbolical of that coming and going
of guests which perpetually lighted the old house, lent it its chief
charm, and gave me my most memorable schooling. The educative value
of life has no uncertainty. These men and women who came and went as
guests were my first memorable lessons of life, and, as I take it, they
were lessons marvelously well adapted to the understanding and needs of
a little child.
I would not seem to undervalue the silent influence and worth of that
material loveliness which was often found in the old houses of that
day, and was evident in my own home; but I believe this alone could
have done little to educate me. Such loveliness was but a means to an
end. I would be loath to give great credit for my education to the
furniture, old and interesting as it was. The real credit is due,
first, to the customs of that time, which made hospitality one of the
first virtues; and, second, to the guests who, coming there, furnished
the house with its best opportunities, and incidentally--I beg you to
note that word--afforded me, there can be no doubt, the better part of
my education.
How far have we gone, "progressed," as we say, in a short span of
years! I am still a young woman, yet guests are not indeed what they
once were. There were poverty and riches in those days, too, but the
"high cost of living," that phrase forever turning up nowadays, was a
bad penny not yet coined, and guest-discouraging "flats" were anomalies
that my old home town rejected.
Guests came and stayed then as they do not now. Visiting was still in
those days one of the accomplishments of life; a gracious habit not
yet broken up by ubiquitous hotels, ten, fifteen, twenty stories high;
not yet rendered superfluous by trains every hour on the hour, or
old-fashioned by scudding automobiles which, like Aladdin Abushamut's
magic sofa, snatch up whole parties of people, and in the twinkling
of an eye set them down in new lands with hardly time for greeting or
farewell.
Life may be more provident, compact, convenient nowadays. I am not
prepared to dispute it. But of one thing I am certain: the modern child
in this almost guestless age has no such chance to acquire a broad
education out of school hours as had I, whose childhood flourished
when guests were the rule and the tinkling of the doorbell was more
likely than not to be a summons to a fine adventure in visitors.
Ah, there was an education! An education indeed! Its A B C was that
every child of the house should be delighted to be turned out of his or
her bed, to sleep four in a four-poster, or on a mattress on the floor,
so that one more guest might be given welcome. Its simple mathematics
were concerned mainly with the addition of guests, the eager
subtraction of one's own comforts, the multiplications of welcomes, and
the long divisions of all delights and pleasures, which by some kind
of higher calculus miraculously increased the meaning and richness of
life. Its geography, if any, was no geography at all, beyond the fact
that the guest-room was the sunniest and largest and best in the house,
and that exports from all the other rooms flowed into it and rendered
it the most desirable and the "most important city." As to history, it
consisted of people at all times and of all ages, and the traditions
of men and women of many types. It concerned itself, not with the
succession of kings and durations of dynasties so much as with a
succession of visitors and the probable length of their stay.
I cannot say what enlightenment or learning or benefit the guests
themselves derived from these visits; though, if measured by
the frequent length of their sojourn, these must have been very
considerable; but I do know that we, the children of that household,
gained high benefits immensely educative; I know that we assimilated
much knowledge, and attained to much learning of a very high order,
intellectual and spiritual; and what is best of all, I know that in
that old home, antedating and long anticipating Madame Montessori and
her "Houses of Childhood," we learned with neither desk, blackboard,
nor semblance of schooling, and never for a moment so much as dreamed
that we were being taught.
This is not the place to enter on a discussion of the Montessori
method. Briefly Madame Montessori's chief tenets may be stated thus:
Liberty for the child; a careful education of the child's senses,
resulting in an extraordinary sense-control to which the child attains
without consciousness of learning.
The "didactic material" (frankly so called by the author of this
distinctive system of education) is material by means of which the
child's senses are trained. It consists of many parts. To name only a
few--there are one hundred and twenty-eight color-tablets; thirty-six
geometrical insets; three series of thirty-six cards; the "dimension
material" consists of nine cylinders, each differing from the rest in
height and diameter, ten quadrilateral prisms, ten four-sided striped
rods, and so on. This and much more is the equipment daily used in the
"Houses of Childhood."
The home of my childhood was bare, bare of such things. Neither cubes
nor cylinders were there that I remember, nor thermatic tests, nor
color-tablets, nor quadrilateral prisms; and yet--
What was there of especial value? There was, first of all, the
household. "The household," to quote Emerson further, "is a school of
power. There within the door learn the tragi-comedy of human life.
Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and
night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions
that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated
necessities can teach; here labor drudges, here affections glow, here
the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of
woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every
debt; the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is
Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and
Calamity, and Death, and Hope."
Didactic material enough, if one chooses to call it that. But, besides
all this, there were guests--guests who came and lingered, guests of
an almost incredible variety. By recalling a few of them I can best
explain somewhat of their influence on my life.
The first one I remember very clearly was a beautiful young
lady,--beautiful to me,--who spent I believe about six months with us.
I might have been a trifle over five years old. I remember her with
great exactness. Certain sparkling characteristics that she wore as
noticeably as the several heavy rings on her white hand, shine still
with surprising clearness in my memory.
She was slender. She affected overskirts. She wore elbow-sleeves, and
trains, though she could hardly have been over eighteen or nineteen.
Her hair was plastered on her fashionably high forehead in what were
then known as "water-waves."
On a collar of box-plaited lace she often wore a jet necklace, set in
gold, a kind of jewelry much in fashion at that time, I believe. Also I
remember that she had a pair of lemon-colored kid gloves; and on dress
occasions she wore heavy gold bracelets.
But these were all as trifles to the fact that she sang. That was
her crowning glory. My mother sang sweetly, too, the beautiful songs
of "her day": "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton," "Lightly the Troubadour,"
"Ye Banks and Braes," "The Gypsy's Warning," "Roll On, Silver Moon,"
"Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms"--and many more. When
she sang them, she played on the old Steck piano or softly plucked the
strings of the old Martin guitar--simple and trill-less accompaniments.
But you, Miss Lou Brooks! You, oh, you!--compounded of every creature's
best,--could sing the old and simple songs, if you chose, and very
graciously, for any one who asked for them; but better still if, left
to your own preference, you could take your seat how languidly at
the piano, how gracefully play a prelude in which the white jeweled
hands followed each other up and down the keyboard over and under, in
what moods and fancies, in what rippling runs and rapid arpeggios;
now lighting to flutter in a twinkling trill, with jewel-flash, like
whirring hummingbirds; now resting humble, two meek white doves, in the
long and waited-for preliminary pause. _Then_, you could break forth at
last into what burst of passion and fire of song!
I can close my eyes still and see her. I have not a good memory, but
the words come to me almost unerring across the past (and I have to
remind you that I was a little over five years old):--
"The stars shine o'er his pathway!
[_Long pause, with the white hands quivering on the pressed keys!_]
"The trees bend back their leaves,
[_Languid softness_]
"To guide him to the meadow
Among the golden sheaves;
[_Trills and expectancy!_]
"Where stand I, loving, longing,
And list'ning while I wait
To the nightingale's sweet singing,
Sweet singing to its mate.
Singing!--Singing! [_The last, soft like an echo_]
Swe-e-eet singing to-oo its mate!"
[_More trills and arpeggios to send shivers of delight over you--then
in a new measure._]
"Come, for my arms are empty,
Come for the day is long.
Turn the darkness into glory;--
The sorrow into song!"
[_More pauses of which you were glad--then a beginning again of all
delight._]
"I hear his footfall's music;
I feel his presence near,
All my soul responsive answers
And tells me he is here!
O stars, shine out your brightest!
[_This with eyes cast to where the stars should have been_]
"O nightingale, sing sweet;--
To guide him to me waiting
And speed his flying feet;--
To guide him to me waiting,
And speed his flying feet!"
This was what they did in a world outside the walls of my childish
experience!--they sang like that!--of such things! I did not know what
it meant save in some incomplete half-lunar way; but its effect drew
me, and, like the seasons and tides of the moon, changed the face of
the earth for me.
Further, it should be noted that I heard this song, not only on one
occasion, not detached, isolated, as at a concert. Here was nothing
paid for cold-bloodedly at a box-office; here was something all woven
in with the daily chance of life. I heard the song many a time. I might
come upon it unexpected when I woke from my nap. I might be drawn from
my toys by it to the more desirable pleasure of standing big-eyed by
the piano while such glory as this rolled around about me; or eat my
bowl of bread and milk in the early evening to the accompaniment of it;
or try to keep the Sandman on my pillow from throwing the last handful
of sand until the final note of it was sung.
Miss Brooks was, I believe, the daughter of an army officer. She had
lived in various parts of the world; common on her lips were tales of a
life wholly different from that which I knew.
To my eyes, water-waves and all, she was incredibly beautiful.
Moreover,--and here you see the fine discriminating points which
children make,--she was engaged; already selected; chosen; set apart! I
cannot tell you what glamour that lent her in my eyes. Child-psychology
is not a thing that always can be reduced to measurement of reflexes
and the like. I responded to all this by some unmeasured law of the
soul. This knowledge and appreciation of her--or of her type, if you
prefer--was as distinct and yet intangible a thing as the light of the
prism. The sun fell on her and was changed to color. I could not touch
or define her charm, but it was there; and the color and wonder of it
seemed to fall across me too as I sat near her, and upon my sun-browned
hands, if they touched her, until I could see colored jewels of rings
on them too, as there might be, and as I hoped there would be some day.
I thought then that I was fond of her. Certainly her word was law to
me. I know that I used to run my little legs tired to wait upon her.
Her smiles and favors were precious to me as only the favors of the
beautiful and the gifted can be to a little child. The tap of her fan
on my cheek or my hand satisfied me altogether with life.
But I was too near her then to judge of her fairly. I know now the
truth of the matter. I have never seen her since. The glamour of her
presence no longer colors and impedes the white truth. She was _not_
the most beautiful young lady in the world, as I so generously took
her to be. She was _not_ the only person in the world who could play
dazzling accompaniments, and sing to melt one's soul, and make one a
stranger to one's self. She was not the only one in the universe who
knew the dim and lovely secret chambers of a little child's nature.
She was after all, only, indeed, by courtesy, Miss Lou Brooks. For she
was less and more than all this: she was a guest; a passing influence;
an ineffaceable impression; a glorious experience; a far adventure in
new lands; a glimpse into other worlds unknown; a new planet swum into
my ken. She was a magic mirror held up to me--one in which I could
for the first time clearly see myself as I might be; she was a glass
of fashion, a mould of form. In her I saw moving evidences of a world
more wonderful than any of my fancy; she was a passing guest in the
house, yes, but a permanency in the scheme of things--a very piece
of life itself; and the knowledge of her, an acquirement in learning
and an acquisition in education. The educative value of life has no
uncertainty.
Let Montessori children in "Houses of Childhood" feel of wooden circles
and quadrangles and be taught with care the words "round," "square";
let them touch sandpaper and know thereby "this is rough," or linen and
apprehend "this is smooth." I, a child of the same age, needed nothing
of such information. I knew smooth and rough more nearly by the mere
chance touch of my play-roughened hand on her fine satiny one; I, of a
like age, wholly lacking in cubes and cylinders and color-slabs, was
learning nevertheless to discriminate between short and long, heavy
and light, were it but by dread of her departure, or the length of her
train.
Put beside Miss Lou Brooks and all that she taught me and revealed to
me any didactic material you may choose, and I wonder if it compares
with her. Place beside her most of the lessons learned from books. The
rule of three is useful, but I would not exchange her for it. I might
do without my multiplication-tables, and indeed do get along without
them fairly well, never having learned the seven, eight, and nine
tables properly. But these I take to be but subordinate things--pawns,
or, at the very best, but bishops and knights of the game, limited to
move in certain lines without deviation, and not to be compared with
a queen, who can move here or there at will, taking, disconcerting,
winning, and setting the whole of life into new relations.
I have named Miss Lou Brooks first because she made the first strong
impression on me; but she was only one of many not less memorable. She
was indeed but one star in a certain notable constellation of guests,
which shone in one quarter of my heavens.
Belonging to the same constellation, though of a different magnitude,
was the young German army officer, for instance, who came all the way
from Germany, where my brother in his _Wanderjahr_ had met him. His
visit was short, but the glory of it enduring. I was not yet seven. I
remember how he rose out of respect for me when I entered the room; how
he clicked his heels together and stood formal and attendant; how he
drew out my chair for me at the table, and saw me seated with all the
respect due an empress. To be allowed to come and sit in my brief piqué
dress at table with him and his shoulder-straps was an essay in form
and a treatise on self-respect.
As brilliant a star, but of a steely blue radiance, was the
physician-scientist, Doctor Highway. He would be classified readily
now as a Christian gentleman of highest honor, brilliant gifts, and
scientific attainments. But the name scientist was not in those days
worn so easily. Huxley and Darwin were old but yet alive, as were many
who still believed them to be emissaries of the devil.
Doctor Highway loved truth, he hated falsehood, and this with so much
fervor and so little compromise that he was pointed out by some as an
atheist. He was perpetually inviting argument, but he, or she, had
courage who accepted the invitation. Once, when he expatiated on the
marvels of mechanical music-boxes, an older sister of mine, in her
early teens, ventured boldly into the open with the tentative remark
that, wonderful as such music might be, might it not nevertheless lack
soul?
I can see him still. He jerked sharply in his chair. He flung his
penetrating glance at her and at her only. He said, with a sharpness
that had all the effect of anger, "_What do you mean by SOUL_!!"
You have seen a too bold rabbit scuttle into a hole at the near sound
of a gun. My sister to outward appearances was still there; but to
outward appearances only. She was indeed gone, vanished, obliterated,
annihilated--disappeared as effectually as though the earth had
swallowed her up. I have no record of the time when she again ventured
into the open, but I would be willing to think it was not for years.
I remember supper-tables at which his conversations and brilliancy
presided. I remember sharp revolutionary statements that fell from him
as to Jonah and the whale, the flood; geological testimony as to the
length of time consumed in the creation of the world; all given with
his fine clear face lit up with a kind of righteous indignation, and
his hand brought down at last so that the glass and silver and myself
jumped suddenly.
No thunderbolt fell on the house those nights, though I watched for
it with anxious waiting. Sometimes I think his was the beginning of
my own courage; for whatever moral bravery was in me rose, I think,
to honor this greater courage of his--a subaltern saluting a superior
officer. When he was by I listened, fascinated. In these long years
since he is gone, I too have loved truth; and I could wish for him now,
sometimes, that the too-complacent guests and cutlery and glassware
of our modern dinner-tables might be so startled and shocked by the
thunder of as righteous a sincerity.
There was also--how warmly contrasted with Doctor Highway!--the young
Byronic musician with the extraordinary tenor voice. He was the pride
of his family, and to their dismay was resolved to go on the opera
stage. He treated me as an equal and, dispensing largesse, wrote in
my autograph book one day, in a fine stirring hand: "Music my only
love, the only bride I'll ever claim." Later, it is true, he seemed to
have repented his resolve and forgotten the album, for I believe that
he claimed some two brides besides music; but this did not alter his
educational value; that remained unspoiled.
There was, too, that great flashing fiery star, Mrs. Rankin, at work
at the time of her visit on a drama, "Herod and Mariamne." She had a
mannish face; she wore heavy rings on somewhat mannish hands, and was,
no doubt,--it is now revealed to me,--an unclassified suffragette, born
untimely, denied, cut off by the custom of those days from the delights
of militancy, foredoomed to pass out of life with never the joy of
smashing a single window.
She talked much of injustice. She had a big voice and a small opinion
of men. This it is not unreasonable to suppose they reciprocated with a
still more diminutive opinion of her.
One might think from all this that she should have been a pamphleteer.
She was not. She was by all odds and incongruities a poetess, driven by
the inexorable muse to daily sessions with Mariamne. Mariamne! Ah, what
a subject for her--for _her_!
She must have absolute quiet. She must be undisturbed. During her stay
we would romp in from our play to find my mother with a finger on her
lips. Above stairs Mrs. Rankin might be pacing her room, declaiming, to
the hearing of her own judicial ear only, the speeches of Mariamne,
delivered in the voice of Herod, and the speeches of Herod, in a voice
that should have been that of Mariamne. I can still hear the long pace
and stride overhead.
Lest her type seem too strange, perhaps, it was explained to us, what
Plato explained long ago, that a poet is rapt wholly out of himself and
is as one possessed of the gods.
Then, too, which brought her nearer to our sympathies, my mother
conveyed to us the more homely knowledge that Mrs. Rankin had had much
unhappiness in her life; some Herod of her own, I believe. This secured
to her our more willing respect and laid on us more than the ordinary
obligation of courtesy. This virtue on our part was obliged to be its
own reward, for there was no other that I can recall.
These people, you will note, were not bound to us by ties of blood.
They were rather relations, rich or poor relations, of the spirit. I am
bound also to tell of other guests than these: of those who by virtue
of tradition and blood we more wontedly call "our own"; men and women
of my mother's and father's families; aunts and uncles and "relatives,"
as we say.
But before I pass on to these, there is need to mention one more, at
least, of the relations of the spirit--that one to me most memorable
of them all; the young dramatist-poet, with his flying tie and his
heavy hair, to whose romantic name--Eugene Ashton--I would how gladly
have prefixed the title "Cousin" had I but been entitled to it; who
was nevertheless cousin-german to the spirit of me, or closer still, a
kind of brother-of-dreams. He had been into distant countries of the
soul--that was clear by a far-away look in his eyes. I used to sit
wordless and well-behaved in his presence, but I slipped my soul's hand
in his, very friendly, the while; I wandered far with him into realms
of fancy, and counted his approval and the merest glance he gave me as
very nearly the most desirable thing I could attain to.
I can see him still, and those gray eyes of his, as young as the young
moon and as many centuries old; I can still hear his very noble voice,
reciting from time to time, as he was wont to do, some of his own
verses. Or I can see him leaning forward, his gracious body bending
into the firelight, to talk over with my sympathetic mother his plans
for recognition and fame.
How little we guessed that his life was even then near to its setting!
When one sees the morning star in the dawn, or Hesper in the twilight,
hanging limpid, golden, one does not wonder will its glory be long or
short; so much it holds one with its immortal loveliness, that little
thought is given to the near-by day, or the night which shall quench it.
The other stars, Miss Lou Brooks, Mrs. Rankin, and the rest, shone long
and high in the firmament of my childhood; but the mellow light of
the gifts of Eugene Ashton, like the more splendid Hesper, hung low,
already low on the horizon.