Silently, with dreamy languor, the fleecy snow is falling. Through
the windows, flowery with blossoming geranium and heliotrope,
through the downward sweep of crimson and muslin curtain, one
watches it as the wind whirls and sways it in swift eddies.
Right opposite our house, on our Mount Clear, is an old oak, the
apostle of the primeval forest. Once, when this place was all
wildwood, the man who was seeking a spot for the location of the
buildings of Phillips Academy climbed this oak, using it as a sort
of green watch-tower, from whence he might gain a view of the
surrounding country. Age and time, since then, have dealt hardly
with the stanch old fellow. His limbs have been here and there
shattered; his back begins to look mossy and dilapidated; but,
after all, there is a piquant, decided air about him, that speaks
the old age of a tree of distinction, a kingly oak. To-day I see
him standing, dimly revealed through the mist of falling snows;
to-morrow's sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs--all
rose color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months,
and spring will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath,
and break out once more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps,
into a vernal crown of leaves. I sometimes think that leaves are
the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find
their life's experience recorded in them. Our oak! what a crop of
meditations and remembrances must he have thrown forth, leafing
out century after century. Awhile he spake and thought only of red
deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in
his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell,
weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery
ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and
all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things, that live in the
gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific
light, laid out and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest
days!--when blue jay, and yellowhammer, and bobolink made his leaves
merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly
dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering,
fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down
trees, scaring bobolinks--and Andover, as men say, began to be
settled.
Stanch men were they--these Puritan fathers of Andover. The old
oak must have felt them something akin to himself. Such strong,
wrestling limbs had they, so gnarled and knotted were they, yet so
outbursting with a green and vernal crown, yearly springing, of
noble and generous thoughts, rustling with leaves which shall be for
the healing of nations.
These men were content with the hard, dry crust for themselves,
that they might sow seeds of abundant food for us, their children;
men out of whose hardness in enduring we gain leisure to be soft
and graceful, through whose poverty we have become rich. Like
Moses, they had for their portion only the pain and weariness of
the wilderness, leaving to us the fruition of the promised land.
Let us cherish for their sake the old oak, beautiful in its age as
the broken statue of some antique wrestler, brown with time, yet
glorious in its suggestion of past achievement.
I think all this the more that I have recently come across the
following passage in one of our religious papers. The writer
expresses a kind of sentiment which one meets very often upon this
subject, and leads one to wonder what glamour could have fallen
on the minds of any of the descendants of the Puritans, that they
should cast nettles on those honored graves where they should be
proud to cast their laurels.
"It is hard," he says, "for a lover of the beautiful--not a
mere lover, but a believer in its divinity also--to forgive the
Puritans, or to think charitably of them. It is hard for him to keep
Forefathers' Day, or to subscribe to the Plymouth Monument; hard to
look fairly at what they did, with the memory of what they destroyed
rising up to choke thankfulness; for they were as one-sided and
narrow-minded a set of men as ever lived, and saw one of Truth's
faces only--the hard, stern, practical face, without loveliness,
without beauty, and only half dear to God. The Puritan flew in
the face of facts, not because he saw them and disliked them, but
because he did not see them. He saw foolishness, lying, stealing,
worldliness,--the very mammon of unrighteousness rioting in the
world and bearing sway,--and he ran full tilt against the monster,
hating it with a very mortal and mundane hatred, and anxious to see
it bite the dust that his own horn might be exalted. It was in truth
only another horn of the old dilemma, tossing and goring grace and
beauty, and all the loveliness of life, as if they were the enemies
instead of the sure friends of God and man."
Now, to those who say this we must ask the question with which
Socrates of old pursued the sophist: What is beauty? If beauty be
only physical, if it appeal only to the senses, if it be only an
enchantment of graceful forms, sweet sounds, then indeed there might
be something of truth in this sweeping declaration that the Puritan
spirit is the enemy of beauty.
The very root and foundation of all artistic inquiry lies here.
What is beauty? And to this question God forbid that we Christians
should give a narrower answer than Plato gave in the old times
before Christ arose, for he directs the aspirant who would discover
the beautiful to "consider of greater value the beauty existing
_in the soul_, than that existing in the body." More gracefully
he teaches the same doctrine when he tells us that "there are two
kinds of Venus (beauty); the one, the elder, who had no mother, and
was the daughter of Uranus (heaven), whom we name the celestial;
the other, younger, daughter of Jupiter and Dione, whom we call the
vulgar."
Now, if disinterestedness, faith, patience, piety, have a beauty
celestial and divine, then were our fathers worshipers of the
beautiful. If high-mindedness and spotless honor are beautiful
things, they had those. What work of art can compare with a lofty
and heroic life? Is it not better to be a Moses than to be a Michael
Angelo making statues of Moses? Is not the life of Paul a sublimer
work of art than Raphael's cartoons? Are not the patience, the
faith, the undying love of Mary by the cross, more beautiful than
all the Madonna paintings in the world. If, then, we would speak
truly of our fathers, we should say that, having their minds fixed
on that celestial beauty of which Plato speaks, they held in slight
esteem that more common and earthly.
Should we continue the parable in Plato's manner, we might say
that the earthly and visible Venus, the outward grace of art and
nature, was ordained of God as a priestess, through whom men were
to gain access to the divine, invisible One; but that men, in their
blindness, ever worship the priestess instead of the divinity.
Therefore it is that great reformers so often must break the shrines
and temples of the physical and earthly beauty, when they seek to
draw men upward to that which is high and divine.
Christ says of John the Baptist, "What went ye out for to see? A
man clothed in soft raiment? Behold they which are clothed in soft
raiment are in kings' palaces." So was it when our fathers came
here. There were enough wearing soft raiment and dwelling in kings'
palaces. Life in papal Rome and prelatic England was weighed down
with blossoming luxury. There were abundance of people to think of
pictures, and statues, and gems, and cameos, vases and marbles,
and all manner of deliciousness. The world was all drunk with the
enchantments of the lower Venus, and it was needful that these men
should come, Baptist-like in the wilderness, in raiment of camel's
hair. We need such men now. Art, they tell us, is waking in America;
a love of the beautiful is beginning to unfold its wings; but what
kind of art, and what kind of beauty? Are we to fill our houses
with pictures and gems, and to see that even our drinking cup and
vase are wrought in graceful pattern, and to lose our reverence for
self-denial, honor, and faith?
Is our Venus to be the frail, ensnaring Aphrodite, or the starry,
divine Urania?