to his readers and a privilege for himself. To them he is bound to
present all the essential facts, authenticated, illustrated, and
carefully disposed in their natural relations. For himself, having done
this, he is at liberty to construct his own theory, to follow his own
philosophy, and to pronounce judicial decisions. The highest exaction to
be made of an historian, and the loftiest function which he could claim
to exercise, are expressed in these two conditions. The noble privilege
and opportunity secured in the latter condition are the only adequate
reward for the drudgery of the labor required in the former. It would
be foolish to raise a question whether it be more essential for an
historian to be faithful in his narration or to be wise in his comments.
Only the statement we have made will serve to remind us how essential
the philosophy of human nature is to throw life into a record of old
annals.
The two books in our hands, where their specific themes are identical,
substantially accord in their relation of facts,--allowing for a few
exceptional cases,--but they differ widely in their philosophy. Very
much of the fresh interest which both of them will create in their
respective subjects will be found in the collisions of their philosophy.
Dr. Palfrey had a favorable opportunity for undertaking to write anew
the history of New England. Those who have yet to acquaint themselves
with that history say there was no occasion for this reiterated labor.
If such persons will merely read over his notes, without wasting any of
their precious time upon his text, they will discover their mistake.
There are in those notes matters new even to adepts. All the recent
materials which have been lavishly contributed from public and private
stores by public and private researches amount in sum and in importance
to an actual necessity for their digest and incorporation into a new
history. Dr. Palfrey has used these with a most patient fidelity, and
his references to them and his extracts from them convey to his readers
the results of an amount of labor which the most grateful of them will
not be likely to overestimate. While he speaks to us in his text, he
allows those whom we most wish to hear to speak to us in his rich and
well-chosen excerpts from a mountain-heap of authorities.
The Dedication of the volume to Dr. Sparks has in it a rare felicity,
which is to be referred to two facts: first, that the writer had some
peculiarly touching and grateful things to say; and, second, that
he knew how to say them in language fitted to the sentiment. In his
Preface, he announces his purpose with its plan, refers us to his
authorities and sources, and recognizes his obligations to individual
friends. Some of the choicest matters in his Notes are the results of
his own personal research in England.
The limit which he sets for himself will carry forward his History to
the time of the English Revolution, thus embracing our annals during the
vitality of our first Charter. That Charter, its origin, transfer, and
subsequent service as the basis of government, the reiterated efforts
to wrest it, and the persistent resolution to hold it, give to it a
symbolic significance which warrants the dating of an epoch by it. Dr.
Palfrey regards our local political existence as commencing from the
hour in which that document, with its official representatives, reached
these shores. We have seen criticisms disputing this position, but, as
we think, not even plausible, still less effective to discredit it. We
must have an incident, besides a _punctum temporis_, for our start in
government; and where could we find a better one than that on which the
whole subsequent course and character of the government depended? We
go, then, for the old Charter, and for the setting up of a jurisdiction
under it here. It was an admirable and every way convenient document;
good for securing rights, impotent as impairing liberties. It comforted
the "Magistrates" to have it to fall back upon, when its provisions
harmonized with their purposes; nor did they allow themselves to be
embarrassed by it, when it appeared that some of their purposes were
not fully provided for in it. That Charter got wonderfully aired and
invigorated on its ocean-passage. The salt water agreed with its
constitution. In a single instance, at least, it falsified the old
maxim,--_Coeium, nun animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt_. That was
a marvellous piece of parchment. So far as Massachusetts was concerned,
the Declaration of Independence was interlined upon it in sympathetic
ink.
We hardly know of fifty octavo pages anywhere in which so much
investigation and labor condense their results so intelligibly into such
useful information as in each of the first two chapters of this volume.
The first is devoted to the Physical Geography of the Peninsula of
New England, its Natural History, and its Aborigines; the second is a
summary sketch of the Early Voyages and Explorations. In this we find
the most discriminating view which we have ever seen of the marvellous
adventures of John Smith,--so happily and suggestively described as the
"fugitive slave" who was "the founder of Virginia." The notes on the
credibility and authenticity of the narrations connected with his name
are admirable. In reading these two chapters, one must muse upon
the wilderness trampings and the ocean perils of the keen-set and
all-enduring men who furnished the material for these high-seasoned
pages.
"Puritanism in England" is, of course, the author's starting-point. Here
he finds his men and their principles. A partial reformation is the most
mischievous influence that can work in society. It unsettles, but is not
willing to rebuild, even when it can learn how to do so. Reaction and
excess are the Scylla and Charybdis of its perils. Compromise is the
very essence of a partial reformation; and compromise in matters of
moral and religious concern, where it is not folly, is crime. Where any
party has been in earnest in a strife, there is no honest end at which
it can rest till it reaches the goal of righteousness. The active
element of Puritanism was the persistency of a religious party in
pursuing a purpose which was yielded up, at a point short of its full
attainment, by another branch of the party, which up to that point had
made common cause with them. To speak plainly, the English Puritans
regarded their former prelatical and conformist associates as traitors
to a holy cause. They had engaged together in good faith in the work of
reformation. They had suffered together. When the time came for triumph,
a schism divided them; and the more zealous smarted from wounds
inflicted by the lukewarm. It appeared that the Prelatists had been
looking to ends of state policy, while the Puritans kept religion in
view. The Conformists thought their ends were reached when Roman prelacy
was set aside, and certain local ecclesiastical changes had been
effected; but the real Puritans wanted to get and to establish the
essential Gospel.
Dr. Palfrey tells this story concisely, but emphatically. He takes two
stages of the Puritan development in England, from which to deduce
respectively the emigration to Plymouth and to Massachusetts Bay.
Stopping at intervals to make intelligible the perplexities connected
with the patents and charters, his narrative is thenceforward
continuous, admitting new threads to be woven into it as the pattern
and the fabric both become richer. For the first time we have the full
connection presented in solid history between the Scrooby Church and
Plymouth Colony. And the tracing is beautifully done. An artist may find
his paintings in these pages. Our poets may here find themes which will
be the more tempting and rewarding, the more closely they are held
to severe historic verity. They will find, that, after all, the most
promising materials for the imagination to deal with are facts. The
residence of the exiles in Holland, their debates and arrangements with
respect to a more distant remove, the ocean passage, the first forlorn
experiences during two winters at Plymouth, are vividly presented. The
paragraph, on page 182, beginning, "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us
a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the
sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon
the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering
beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene
as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in
the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have
been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain
their wilfulness of spirit?" The question is answered now differently
from what it would have been then. We have used one wrong word about
those exiles, in speaking of them as _cowering_ under their woes. They
did not _cower_, but _breasted _them.
After another most pregnant and exhaustive episode on Puritan politics
in England, Dr. Palfrey brings in that thread of his story on which is
strung the fortune of Massachusetts. It is here that Englishmen will
find explained some of our vaunting views of the importance of our
annals. Dr. Palfrey, in this and in other chapters, traces with skill
and exactness the course of public measures and events in England,
through kingly tyrannies and popular resistance, which ended by
harmonizing the institutions of the mother country for a little while
with those which had sprung up in this wilderness. He soon comes upon
ticklish matters, but his touch and hold are firm, because he feels sure
that he is dealing with men who understood themselves, and who were
at least resolute and honest, to whatever degree they may have erred.
Probably, like many of us who are aware that we could not possibly have
lived comfortably with our ancestors, he feels all the more bound on
that account to set their memory in the light of their noblest and least
selfish ends. He is stout and unflinching in his championship of those
ancestors: he sees in their experiment a lofty ideal; he vindicates
their policy in the measures for realizing it; nor does he withhold
apologetic or vindicatory words where "unmeet persons" among the whites
or Indians stood in the way of it.
Henceforward Dr. Palfrey has to follow out each thread of his story
by itself, as by-and-by he will have to gather them into one cord. He
traces the developments of months and years in the original settlements,
and pursues them as they lead him to new territory in the Northeast
and the Southwest, into Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Another
episode on the opening of the Civil War at home, which invited a large
return of the exiles, and a record of the original confederacy of the
New England Colonies, bring us to the present close of his labors. May
they be speedily continued! and may we enjoy the reality, as we now do
the promise of them!
We turn now to Mr. Arnold's book. The field which it traverses is
narrower as regards space, but its spirit is large and generous, and its
subject-matter is of the loftiest significance. If the writer does not
indulge us with many disquisitions, it is not from lack of ability.
Wherever, as in his moralizings upon King Philip's War, and in his
incidental comments upon the peculiarities and temper of his prominent
men, he allows us to meet his own mind, he is uniformly wise and
interesting. He stands by Rhode Island as does Dr. Palfrey by
Massachusetts; and seeing that for a far longer period than the two
books run on together the two Colonies were at strife, we are glad to
have before us both the ways in which the story may be told. There are
various sharp judgments on Massachusetts men and principles in the Rhode
Island book. The argument is in good hands on either side.
Mr. Arnold begins with the first occupation of Rhode Island by white
men, and conducts his narrative to the close of the century. His
research has been faithful. His style is chaste, forcible, and often
picturesque. He has seen the world widely, and he knows human nature.
He understands very well what a place of honor and what a well-proved
assurance of safety distinctive Rhode Island principles have attained.
The issue, having been found so triumphant, has dignified to the
historian the early, humble, and bewildering steps and processes through
which it was reached. The narrative on his pages is the most distracting
one ever written in the annals of civilized men. Every conceivable
element of strife, discord, agitation, alarm, dissension, and bitterness
is to be found in it,--redeemed only by a prevailing integrity,
right-mindedness, and right-heartedness in all the leading spirits. Each
man in each of the towns composing the original elements of the Colony
was a whole "democratie" in himself, and generally a "fierce" one.
Disputed boundaries with both the other Colonies, and an especial and
continuous feud with Massachusetts,--unruly spirits, bent upon working
out all manner of impracticable theories,--the oddest and most original,
as well as the most obstinate and indomitable dreamers and enthusiasts,
furnished some daily nutriment to dissension with their neighbors or
among themselves. Men of mark, like Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton,
Governor Arnold, and William Harris, appear equally competent for
fomenting strife of a sort to threaten every essential element of civil
society, and for averting all permanent harm while putting on trial the
most revolutionary theories. On page 337, Mr. Arnold has a note most
characteristic of a large portion of his whole theme, as covering both
his men and their measures. Many of the documents, of an official
character, written by citizens, towns, or rulers in Rhode Island, were
of such a sort in language and matter, that the town of Warwick did not
think them fit for the public records, and so enjoined that the clerk
should keep them in a file by themselves. This was known as "the
Impertinent File," and, more profanely, but not less appropriately,
as "the Damned File." A certain "perditious letter," written by Roger
Williams himself, serves as the nucleus of this deposit; and we read of
another of the documents as being as "full of uncivil language as if it
had been indited in hell."
Mr. Arnold picks his way through all these dissensions, and finds a full
reward in the nobleness of the men and the principles with which he has
in the main to deal. His only abatement of praise to Roger Williams
is on account of his bitter feud with William Harris. He repels,
as slanderous, the imputations founded on alleged interpolations
restricting religious liberty in the code, and cast at Roger Williams
for undue severity to Quakers and for favoring Indian slavery.
Randolph's visit, Andros's administration, the suspension and resumption
of the Charter, bring him out into broader matters, which he treats with
frankness and skill.
The more histories we have from the pens of competent writers, even
though they go over the same ground, the more lively and interesting
will the pages be. We need not fear that like fidelity and ability in
the use of the same materials by different writers will reduce our
modern histories to a dead level of uniform narration. None but those
well-skilled in our annals are aware what scope they afford, not only
for special pleas, but also for honest diversity of judgment, in viewing
and pronouncing upon many test-points vital to the theme. Indeed, when
the historic vein shall have been exhausted, it will be found that there
is more than a score of special and contested points, in each of our
first two centuries, admirably suited for monographs. We have but to
compare a few pages in each of the two excellent works now in our hands,
to see how men of the highest ability, of rigid candor, and scrupulous
fidelity in the use of the same materials, while spreading the same
facts before their readers, may tell different tales, varying to
the whole extent of the diversity in their respective judgments and
moralizings. We can easily illustrate this assertion from the pages
before us. Though Dr. Palfrey stops more than a half-century short of
the date to which Mr. Arnold carries us, the former indicates exactly
how and where he will be at issue with the latter, even to the end of
the story common to both of them. So strong and clear is Dr. Palfrey's
avowal of fealty to the honorable and unsullied fame of the founders of
Massachusetts, that he will not be likely, on any later page, to qualify
what he has already written. It happens, too, that the points in which
any two of our historians would be most disposed to part in judgment lie
within the space and the years common to both these writers. We can but
indicate, in a very brief way, some of the more salient divergences
between them, and we must preface the specification by acknowledging
again the high integrity of both.
Dr. Palfrey writes, unmistakably, as a man proud of his Massachusetts
lineage. He honors the men whose enterprise, constancy, persistency,
and wise skill in laying foundations have, in his view, approved their
methods and justified them, even where they are most exposed to a severe
judgment. He wishes to tell their story as they would wish to have it
told. They stand by his side as he reads their records, and supply him
with a running comment as to meaning and intention. Thus he is helped to
put their own construction on their own deeds,--to set their acts in the
light of their motives, to give them credit for all the good that was in
their purposes, and to ascribe their mistakes and errors to a limitation
of their views, or to well-founded apprehensions of evil which they had
reason to dread. Under such pilotage, the passengers, at least, would
be safe, when their ship fell upon a place where two seas met. Now
Massachusetts and Rhode Island were in stiff hostility during the period
here chronicled. The founder of Rhode Island and nearly all of its
leading spirits had been "spewed out of the Bay Colony,"--and the
institutions which the Rhode Islanders set up, or rather, their seeming
purpose to do without any _institutions_, constituted a standing
grievance to the rigid disciplinarians of Massachusetts. Indeed, we have
to look to the relations of annoyance, jealousy, and open strife, which
arose between the two Colonies in the ten years following 1636, for
the real explanation of the severity visited upon the Quakers in
Massachusetts in the five years following 1656. These early Quakers,
when not the veritable persons, were the ghosts of the old troublers of
"the Lord's people in the Bay." Gorton, Randall Holden, Mrs. Dyer, and
other "exorbitant persons," who had been found "unmeet to abide in this
jurisdiction," could not be got rid of once for all.
Mr. Arnold glories in the early reproach of Rhode Island. He finds its
title to honor above every other spot on earth in the phenomena which
made it so hateful to Massachusetts. In every issue raised between it
and the Bay Colony from the very first, and in every element of its
strife, he stands stoutly forth as its champion, and casts scornful
reflections, though not in a scornful spirit. Wherever our two
historians have the same point under treatment, we discern this
antagonism between them,--never in a single case manifesting itself in
an offensive or bitter way, but tending greatly to give a brisk and
quickening vigor to their pages. Arnold claims that a perfectly
democratical government and entire religious freedom are "exclusively
Rhode Island doctrines, and to her belongs the credit of them both." He
might afford to give Massachusetts the appreciable honor of having been
the indirect means of opening those large visions to the eyes of men
who certainly were a most uncomfortable set of citizens while under
pupilage. Mr. Bancroft had previously written thus:--"Had the territory
of Rhode Island corresponded to the importance and singularity of the
principles of its early existence, the world would have been filled with
wonder at the phenomena of its history."[B] It was only because the
State was no larger that it was a safe field for the first trial of such
principles. And it has often proved, that, the larger the principle,
the more circumscribed must needs be the field within which it is first
tested. It was well that the first experiments on the capabilities of
steam were tried by the nose of a tea-kettle. Seeing that most of the
early settlers of Rhode Island had very little property, and scarce
anything of what Christendom had previously been in the habit of
regarding as religion, the territory was the most fitting place for the
trial of revolutionary principles. Mr. Arnold says, very curtly, but
very truly,--"No form of civil government then existing could tolerate
her democracy, and even Christian charity denied her faith." (p. 280.)
The wonder of the world, however, would have been more curiously engaged
in watching what legislation for religion could possibly have devised
for a community made up of all sorts of consciences. The little State
deserves the honor claimed for her. But had she any alternative course?
[Footnote B: BANCROFT'S _History of the United States._ I. 380.]
Mr. Arnold, we think, defines with more sharp and guarded accuracy
than does Dr. Palfrey the ruling aim and motive of the founders of
Massachusetts. An historian of Massachusetts, knowing beforehand through
what a course of unflinching and resolute consistency with their first
principles he is to follow her early legislators, has reason to limit
their aim and motive at the start, that he may not assume for them more
than he can make good. Especially if he intend to palliate, and, still
more, to justify, some of the severer and more oppressive elements of
their policy, he will find it wise to qualify their purpose within the
same limitations which they themselves set for it. Dr. Palfrey parts
with an advantage of which he afterwards has need to avail himself, when
he states the motive of the exiles too broadly, as a search for a place
in which to exercise liberty of conscience. He speaks of these exiles
as recognizing in "religious freedom a good of such vast worth as to be
protected by the possessor, not only for himself, but for the myriads
living and to be born, of whom he assumes to be the pioneer and the
champion." (p. 301.) This large and unqualified claim might be advanced
for the founders of Rhode Island, but it cannot be set up for the
founders of Massachusetts. Whoever asserts it for the latter commits
himself most unnecessarily to an awkward and ineffective defence of them
in a long series of restrictive and severe measures against "religious
freedom," beginning with the case of the Brownes at Salem, and including
acts of general legislation as well as of continuous ecclesiastical and
judicial proceeding. Winthrop tells us that the aim of his brotherhood
was "to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity here." The
General Court repeatedly signified its desire to have a draft of laws
prepared which might be "agreeable to the word of God." Now either
of these statements of the ruling purpose of the colonists, as then
universally understood and interpreted, was inconsistent with what we
now understand by "freedom in religion," or "liberty of conscience."
What were regarded as "the pure ordinances of Christ" could not have
been set up here, nor could such laws as were then considered as
"agreeable to the word of God" have been enacted here, without impairing
individual freedom in matters of religion. Indeed, it was the very
attempt to realize these objects which occasioned every interference
with perfect liberty of conscience. The fathers of Massachusetts avowed
their purpose to be, not the opening of an asylum for all kinds of
consciences, but the establishment of a Christian commonwealth. Their
consistency can be vindicated by following out their own idea, but not
by assigning to them a larger one.
Mr. Arnold, as we have said, is more sharply guarded in his statement of
the aim of the founders of the Bay Colony in this respect; and it is
all the more remarkable that he does not give them the benefit of the
recognized limitation. He defines for them a restricted object, but he
judges them by a standard before which they never measured themselves,
and then condemns them for short-comings. He tells us distinctly that
the motives of the exiles "were certainly not those assigned them by
Charles I., 'the freedom of liberty of conscience'" (p. 10); that
"they looked for a home in the New World where they might erect an
establishment in accordance with their peculiar theological views. 'They
sought a faith's pure shrine,' based on what they held to be a purer
system of worship, and a discipline more in unison with their notions
of a church. Here they proceeded to organize a state, whose civil code
followed close on the track of the Mosaic Law, and whose ecclesiastical
polity, like that of the Jews, and of all those [Christian governments?]
then existing, was identified with the civil power. They thus secured,
what was denied them in England, the right to pursue their own form of
religion without molestation, and in this the object of their exile was
attained." (p. 11.) And again, Mr. Arnold says,--"They founded a colony
for their own faith, without any idea of tolerating others." (p. 44.) All
this is admirably said. It is precisely what the exiles would wish might
be said of them in all the histories of them; for it is what they said
of themselves, in defining their own object; it was, further, what they
felt in their hearts to be their object, more intensely than they could
give it utterance. But the object is at once seen to be limited within
the fearful license of religious freedom. The Scriptural and legislative
fetters on such liberty were too repressive not to amount to an
essential qualification of it. "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," Ward of
Ipswich, made a clean breast for himself and his contemporaries, when he
numbered among the "foure things which my heart hath naturally detested:
Tolerations of diverse Religions, or of one Religion in segregant
shapes. He that willingly assents to this, if he examines his heart by
daylight, his conscience will tell him he is either an Atheist, or
an Heretigal, or an Hypocrite, or at best a captive to some lust.
Poly-piety is the greatest impiety in the world." With such frank
avowals on the part of those who had borne so much in the attempt to
make themselves comfortable in their exile to these hard regions, that
they might here try to work out their harder problem, it is a great deal
too severe a standard for judging their acts which is set up for them in
the fancied principle of religious liberty. We wonder that Mr. Arnold
withholds from them the benefit of his and their own clear limitation of
the principle,--a limitation so severe, as, in fact, to constitute quite
another principle. Was it at all strange, then, that they should deal
resolutely with Roger Williams, on account of "the firmness with which,
upon every occasion, he maintained the doctrine, that the civil power
has no control over the religious opinions of men."? (p. 41.) It was for
no other purpose than to engage the civil power for a pure religion that
they were dwelling in poor huts on these ocean headlands, and sustaining
their lives upon muscles gathered on the shore after the receding of the
tide.
Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Arnold hold and utter quite opposite judgments about
the treatment of Roger Williams by Massachusetts. The latter, having
stated more definitely than the former the limited aim of our colonists,
which was utterly inconsistent with toleration in religion and with
laxity in civil matters, nevertheless considers the men of Massachusetts
unjustifiable in their course toward the founder of Rhode Island. Dr.
Palfrey, on weaker grounds than those allowed by Mr. Arnold, thinks
their most stringent proceedings perfectly defensible. He regards Mr.
Williams as an intruder, whose opinions, behavior, and influence were
perilous alike to the civil and the religious peace of the colonists;
and he holds the colonists as not chargeable with any breach of the
laws of justice or of mercy in sending out of their jurisdiction, into
another patch of the same wilderness, a man all whose phenomena were of
the most uncomfortable and irritating character. We confess that our
reading and thinking identify our judgment on this matter with that
of our own historian. There can be no question but that Roger
Williams--whether he was thirty-two years old, as Mr. Arnold thinks,
or, as Dr. Palfrey judges, in his twenty-fifth year, when he landed
here--was, in what we must call his youth, seeing that he lived to an
advanced age, a heady and contentious theorizer. Our fathers could not
try more than one theory at a time; and the theory they were bent upon
testing naturally preceded, in the series of the world's progressive
experiments, the more generous, but, at the same time, more dangerous
one which he advanced; and their theory had a right to an earlier and
a full trial, as lying in the way of a safe advance towards his bolder
Utopianism. The mild Bradford and the yet milder Brewster were glad when
Plymouth was rid of him. His first manifestation of himself, on
his arrival here, requires to be invested with the halo of a later
admiration, before it can be made to consist with the heralding of
an apostle of the generous principles of toleration and charity in
religion. Winthrop had recorded for us his refusal "to join with the
congregation at Boston." This had been understood as referring to an
unwillingness on the part of Williams to enter into communion with the
church. But from a letter of his which has come to light within the
year, it seems that he had been invited, previously to the arrival
of Cotton, to become teacher of the church. And on account of what
constraint of soul-liberty did he decline the office? Because the
members of that church "would not make a public declaration of their
repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they
lived there"! The good man lived to grow milder and more tolerant of the
whims and prejudices and convictions of his fellow-men, through a
free indulgence of his own. And, what is more remarkable, he found it
necessary to apply, in restraint of others, several of the measures
against which he had protested when brought to bear upon himself. He
came to discover that there was mischief in "such an infinite liberty of
conscience" as was claimed by his own followers. The erratic Gorton was
to him precisely what the legislators of Massachusetts had feared that
he himself would prove to be to them. He publicly declared himself in
favor of "a due and moderate restraint and punishing" of some of
the oddities of the Quakers. In less than ten years after he had so
frightened Massachusetts by questioning the validity of an English
charter to jurisdiction here, he went to England on a successful errand
to obtain just such a document for himself and his friends.
Our two historians, with all the facts before them, honestly stated too,
but diversely interpreted, stand in open antagonism of judgment about
the proceedings of Massachusetts against the Antinomians. That bitter
strife--_Dux foemina facti_--was in continuation of the issue opened by
Roger Williams, though it turned upon new elements. Here, again, Mr.
Arnold stands stoutly for the partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, who moved
towards the new home in the Narragensett country. He sees in the strife,
mainly, a contest of a purely theological character, leading on to a
development of democratical ideas, (p. 66.) Dr. Palfrey insists that
it would be unjust to allege that the Antinomians were dealt with for
holding "distasteful opinions on dark questions of theology," and
affirms that they were put down as wild and alarming agents of an
"immediate anarchy." (pp. 489, 491.) In this matter, also, our own
judgment goes with our own historian. And the very best confirmation
that it could have is found in the fact, that the prime movers in the
most threatening stage of that dire conflict afterwards made ample
confession of their heat, their folly, and their outrages,--approving
the stern proceedings under which they had suffered. Wheelwright,
especially, in whose advocacy the cause of his sister-in-law first
assumed so threatening an aspect, most humbly avowed his sin and
penitence.
One more very curious illustration of the divergence of judgment in our
two new historians may be instanced. They have both written, as became
them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the
soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the
romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor
and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity
of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and
forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues
of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them
another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart;
but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the loss of any
element of manhood or of the higher ingredients of humanity. But Mr.
Arnold pitches his requiem to a different strain. He reproduces and
refines the romance which Dr. Palfrey would dispel. He exalts the Indian
character; gathers comforts and joys and pleasing fashionings around
their life; enlarges the sphere of their being, and asserts in them
capacity to fill it. The wigwam of Massasoit is elegantly described by
Mr. Arnold as "his seat at Mount Hope," (p. 23,)--and pungently, by
Dr. Palfrey, as "his sty," in whose comfortless shelter, Winslow and
Hopkins, of Plymouth, on their visit to the chief, had "a distressing
experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality." (pp. 183,
184.) Arnold tells us, the Indians "were ignorant of Revelation, yet
here was Plato's great problem of the Immortality of the Soul solved
in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the
West." (p. 78.) But Palfrey, knowing nothing of what his contemporary
was writing, had already put into print this sentence:--"The New England
savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of
thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain." (p. 49.)
Here are strange variances of judgment. But how much more of interest
and activity lives in the mind, both of writers and readers, when
history is written with such divergent philosophies and comments! Nobly,
in both cases before us, have the writers done their work, and heartily
do we render our tribute to them.
DRIFTING.
My soul to-day
Is far away,
Sailing the Vesuvian Bay;
My wingèd boat,
A bird afloat,
Swims round the purple peaks remote:--
Round purple peaks
It sails, and seeks
Blue inlets and their crystal creeks,
Where high rocks throw,
Through deeps below,
A duplicated golden glow.
Far, vague, and dim,
The mountains swim;
While on Vesuvius' misty brim,
With outstretched hands,
The gray smoke stands
O'erlooking the volcanic lands.
Here Ischia smiles
O'er liquid miles;
And yonder, bluest of the isles,
Calm Capri waits,
Her sapphire gates
Beguiling to her bright estates.
I heed not, if
My rippling skiff
Float swift or slow from cliff to cliff;--
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.
Under the walls
Where swells and falls
The Bay's deep breast at intervals,
At peace I lie,
Blown softly by,
A cloud upon this liquid sky.
The day, so mild,
Is Heaven's own child,
With Earth and Ocean reconciled;--
The airs I feel
Around me steal
Are murmuring to the murmuring keel.
Over the rail
My hand I trail
Within the shadow of the sail,
A joy intense,
The cooling sense
Glides down my drowsy indolence.
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Where Summer sings and never dies,--
O'erveiled with vines,
She glows and shines
Among her future oil and wines.
Her children, hid
The cliffs amid,
Are gambolling with the gambolling kid;
Or down the walls,
With tipsy calls,
Laugh on the rocks like waterfalls.
The fisher's child,
With tresses wild,
Unto the smooth, bright sand beguiled,
With glowing lips
Sings as she skips,
Or gazes at the far-off ships.
Yon deep bark goes
Where Traffic blows,
From lands of sun to lands of snows;--
This happier one,
Its course is run
From lands of snow to lands of sun.
Oh, happy ship,
To rise and dip,
With the blue crystal at your lip!
Oh, happy crew,
My heart with you
Sails, and sails, and sings anew!
No more, no more
The worldly shore
Upbraids me with its loud uproar!
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise!
ROBA DI ROMA.
ENTRANCE.
It was on the 6th of December, 1856, that I landed with my family at
Civita Vecchia, on my return for the third time to Rome. Before we could
make all our arrangements, it was too late to think of journeying that
day towards the dear old city; but the following morning we set forth in
a rumbling, yellow post-coach, with three horses, and a shabby, gaudy
postilion,--the wheels clattering, the bells on the horses' necks
jingling, the cock's-plumes on their heads nodding, and a half-dozen
sturdy beggar-brats running at our side and singing a dismal chorus of
"_Dateci qualche cosa_." Two or three half-baiocchi, however, bought
them off, and we had the road to ourselves. The day was charming, the
sky cloudless, the air tender and with that delicious odor of the South
which so soothingly intoxicates the senses. The sea, accompanying us for
half our way, gleamed and shook out its breaking surf along the shore;
and the rolling slopes of the Campagna, flattered by sunlight, stretched
all around us,--here desert and sparkling with tall skeleton grasses
and the dry canes' tufted feathers, and here covered with low, shrubby
trees, that, crowding darkly together, climbed the higher hills. On
tongues of land, jutting out into the sea, stood at intervals lonely
watch-towers, gray with age, and at their feet shallow and impotent
waves gnashed into foam around the black, jagged teeth of half-sunken
rocks along the shore. Here and there the broken arches of a Roman
bridge, nearly buried in the lush growth of weeds, shrubs, and flowers,
or the ruins of some old villa, the home of the owl, snake, and lizard,
showed where Ancient Rome journeyed and lived. At intervals, heavy
carts, drawn by the superb gray oxen of the Campagna, creaked slowly
by, the _contadino_ sitting athwart the tongue; or some light wine
_carrettino_ came ringing along, the driver fast asleep under its tall,
triangular cover, with his fierce little dog beside him, and his horse
adorned with bright rosettes and feathers. Sometimes long lines of mules
or horses, tied one to another's tail, plodded on in dusty procession,
laden with sacks;--sometimes droves of oxen, or _poledri_, conducted
by a sturdy driver in heavy leathern leggings, and armed with a
long, pointed pole, stopped our way for a moment. In the fields, the
_pecoraro_, in shaggy sheep-skin breeches, the very type of the mythic
Pan, leaned against his staff, half-asleep, and tended his woolly
flock,--or the _contadino_ drove through dark furrows the old plough of
Virgil's time, that figures in the vignettes to the "Georgics," dragged
tediously along by four white oxen, yoked abreast. There, too, were
herds of long-haired goats, rearing mid the bushes and showing their
beards over them, or following the shepherd to their fold, as the
shadows began to lengthen,--or rude and screaming wains, tugged by
uncouth buffaloes, with low heads and knotted knees, bred among the
malaria-stricken marshes.
Half-way to Rome we changed horses at Palo,--a little grim settlement,
composed of a post-house, inn, stables, a line of straggling
fishermen's-huts, and a desolate old fortress, flanked by four towers.
This fortress, which once belonged to the Odescalchi family, but is now
the property of the Roman government, looks like the very spot for
a tragedy, as it stands there rotting in the pestilential air, and
garrisoned by a few stray old soldiers, whose dreary, broken-down
appearance is quite in keeping with the place. Palo itself is the site
of the city of Alsium, founded by the Pelasgi, in the dim gloom of
antiquity, long before the Etruscans landed on this shore. It was
subsequently occupied by the Etruscans, and afterwards became a favorite
resort of the Roman nobility, who built there the splendid villas of
Antoninus, Porcina, Pompeius, and others. Of the Pelasgic and Etruscan
town not a vestige remains; but the ruined foundations of Roman villas
are still to be seen along the shore. No longer are to be found there
the feasts described by Fronto,[A] of "fatted oysters, savory apples,
pastry, confectionery, and generous wines in faultless transparent
goblets,"--nor would it now be called "a voluptuous seaside retreat";
but good lobsters are still abundant there, and one can get a greasy
beefsteak, black bread, an ill-cooked chicken, and sour wine, at only
about twice their market value. The situation is lovely, with the sea
washing in along the rounded rim of the coast, close up to the door of
the inn; and on a sunny day, when the white wings of feluccas may be
seen gleaming far off on the blue Mediterranean, and the fishermen are
drawing their nets close into shore, it seems as if it might really be
made "a voluptuous seaside retreat," but for the desolating malaria
which renders it dangerous to rest there for a single night.
[Footnote A: _De Feriis Alsensibus_, Epist. III. See Dennis's _Etruscan
Antiquities_, Vol. I.]
Here, of course, we stopped as short a time as possible; and then,
bidding adieu to the sea, struck inland over the Campagna to Rome. The
country now grows wild, desolate, and lonely; but it has a special charm
of its own, which they who are only hurrying on to Rome, and to whom it
is an obstruction and a tediousness, cannot, of course, perceive. It
is dreary, weird, ghostly,--the home of the winds; but its silence,
sadness, and solitude are both soothing and impressive. After miles and
miles up and down, at last, from the crest of a hill up which we slowly
toiled with our lumbering carriage and reeking horses, we saw the dome
of St. Peter's towering above the city, which as yet was buried out of
sight. It was but a glimpse, and was soon lost. The postilion covered
the worn-out lace of his shabby livery with a heavy cloak, which he
flung over his shoulder to keep out the dampening air, gave a series of
wild flourishes with his whip, broke into guttural explosions of voice
to urge along his horses, and on we went full-gallop. The road grew more
and more populated as we approached the city. Carriages were out for a
drive, or to meet friends on their way from Civita Vecchia; and on
foot was many a little company of Romans, laughing and talking. At the
_osterías_ were groups seated under _frasche_, or before the door,
drinking _fogliette_ of wine and watching the passers-by. At last,
toward sundown, we stopped at the Porta Cavalleggieri, where, thanks to
our _lascia passare_, we were detained but a minute,--and then we were
in Rome. Over us hung the great bulging dome of St. Peter's, golden
with the last rays of sunset. The pillars of the gigantic colonnade
of Bernini, as we jolted along, "seemed to be marching by," in broad
platoons. The fountains piled their flexile columns of spray and waved
them to and fro. The great bell clanged from the belfry. Groups wandered
forth in the great Piazza. The old Egyptian obelisk in the centre
pointed its lean finger to the sky. We were in Rome! This one moment of
surprised sensation is worth the journey from Civita Vecchia. Entered by
no other gate, is Rome so suddenly and completely possessed. Nowhere is
the contrast so instantaneous and vivid as here, between the silent,
desolate Campagna and the splendor of St. Peter's, between the burrows
of primitive Christianity and the gorgeousness of ecclesiastical Rome.
After leaving the Piazza, we get a glimpse of Hadrian's Mole, and of the
rusty Tiber, as it hurries, "_retortis littore Etrusco violenter undis_"
as of old, under the statued bridge of St. Angelo,--and then we plunge
into long, damp, narrow, dirty streets. Yet--shall I confess it?--they
had a charm for me. Twilight was deepening into dark as we passed
through them. Confused cries and loud Italian voices sounded about me.
Children were screaming,--men howling their wares for sale. Bells were
ringing everywhere. Priests, soldiers, _contadini_, and beggars thronged
along. The _Trasteverini_ were going home, with their jackets hanging
over one shoulder. Women, in their rough woollen gowns, stood in the
doorways bare-headed, or looked out from windows and balconies, their
black hair shining under the lanterns. Lights were twinkling in the
little cavernous shops, and under the Madonna-shrines far within them. A
funeral procession, with its black banners, gilt with a death's-head
and cross-bones, was passing by, its wavering candles borne by the
_confraternità_, who marched carelessly along, shrouded from head to
foot in white, with only two holes for the eyes to glare through.
It was dirty, but it was Rome; and to any one who has long lived in Rome
even its very dirt has a charm which the neatness of no other place ever
had. All depends, of course, on what we call dirt. No one would defend
the condition of some of the streets or some of the habits of the
people. But the soil and stain which many call dirt I call color, and
the cleanliness of Amsterdam would ruin Rome for the artist. Thrift and
exceeding cleanness are sadly at war with the picturesque. To whatever
the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is
so prosaic as the rawly new. Fancy for a moment the difference for
the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their
peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their
jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement
has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now
sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their sides, or
clinging and making a home in the clefts and crevices of decay, were to
be smoothed to a complete level, and whitewashed over into one uniform
and monotonous tint. What a gain in cleanliness! what a loss in beauty!
One old wall like this I remember on the road from Grotta Ferrata to
Frascati, which was to my eyes a constant delight. One day the owner
took it into his head to whitewash it all over,--to clean it, as some
would say. I look upon that man as little better than a Vandal in
taste,--one from whom "knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out."
Take another modern instance: substitute for the tiled roofs of Rome,
now so gray, tumbled, and picturesque with their myriad lichens, the
cold, clean slate of New York, or the glittering zinc of Paris,--should
we gain or lose? The Rue de Rivoli is long, white, and uniform,--all new
and all clean; but there is no more harmony and melody in it than in the
"damnable iteration" of a single note; and even Time will be puzzled
to make it picturesque, or half as interesting as those old houses
displaced in the back streets for its building, which had sprouted up
here and there, according to the various whims of the various builders.
Those were taken down because they were dirty, narrow, unsightly. These
are thought elegant and clean. Clean they certainly are; and they have
one other merit,--that of being as monotonously regular as the military
despotism they represent. But I prefer individuality, freedom, and
variety, for my own part. The narrow, uneven, huddled Corso, with here
a noble palace, and there a quaint passage, or archway, or shop,--the
buildings now high, now low, but all barnacled over with balconies,--is
far more interesting than the unmeaning uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli.
So, too, there are those among us who have the bad taste to think it a
desecration in Louis Napoleon to have scraped the stained and venerable
old Nôtre Dame into cleanliness. The Romantic will not consort with the
Monotonous,--Nature is not neat,--Poetry is not formal,--and Rome is not
clean.
These thoughts, or ghosts of thoughts, flitted through my mind, as the
carriage was passing along the narrow, dirty streets, and brought with
them after-trains of reflection. There may be, I thought, among the
thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the
common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as
special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a sketch of many
things, which wise and serious travellers have passed by as unworthy
their notice, might be interesting. Every ruin has had its score of
_immortelles_ hung upon it. The soil has been almost overworked by
antiquarians and scholars, to whom the modern flower was nothing, but
the antique brick a prize. Poets and sentimentalists have described to
death what the antiquaries have left;--some have done their work so
well that nothing remains to be done after them. Everybody has an
herbarium of dried flowers from all the celebrated sites, and a
table made from bits of marble collected in the ruined villas. Every
Englishman carries a Murray for information and a Byron for sentiment,
and finds out by them what he is to know and feel at every step.
Pictures and statues have been staled by copy and description, until
everything is stereotyped, from the Dying Gladiator, with his "young
barbarians all at play," and all that, down to the Beatrice Cenci, the
Madame Tonson of the shops, that haunts one everywhere with her white
turban and red eyes. All the public and private life and history of the
ancient Romans, from Romulus to Constantine and Julian the Apostle, (as
he is sometimes called,) is properly well known. But the common life
of the modern Romans, the games, customs, habits of the people,
the everyday of To-day, has been only touched upon here and
there,--sometimes with spirit and accuracy, as by Charles McFarlane,
sometimes with great grace, as by Hans Christian Andersen, and sometimes
with great ignorance, as by Miss Waldie. This is the subject, however,
which has specially interested me, and a life of several years in Rome
has enabled me to observe many things which do not strike the hurried
traveller, and to correct many false notions in regard to the people
and place. To a stranger, a first impression is apt to be a false
impression; and it constantly happens to me to hear my own countrymen
work out the falsest conclusions from the slightest premises, and
settle the character and deserts of the Italians, all of whom they mass
together in a lump, after they have been just long enough on the soil to
travel from Civita Vecchia to Rome under the charge of a courier, when
they know just enough of the language to ask for a coachman when they
want a spoon, and when they have made the respectable acquaintance,
beside their courier, of a few porters, a few beggars, a few
shopkeepers, and the _padrone_ of the apartment they hire.
No one lives long in Rome without loving it; and I must, in the
beginning, confess myself to be in the same category. Those who shall
read these slender papers, without agreeing to the kindly opinions
often expressed, must account for it by remembering that "Love lends a
precious seeing to the eye." My aim is far from ambitious. I shall not
be erudite, but I hope I shall not be dull. These little sketches may
remind some of happy days spent under the Roman sky, and, by directing
the attention of others to what they have overlooked, may open a door
to a new pleasure. _Chi sa?_ The plainest Ranz des Vaches may sometimes
please when the fifth symphony of Beethoven would be a bore.
CHAPTER II.
STREET-MUSIC IN ROME.
Whoever has passed the month of December in Rome will remember to
have been awakened from his morning-dreams by the gay notes of the
_pifferari_ playing in the streets below, before the shrines of the
Madonna and Bambino,--and the strains of one set of performers will
scarcely have ceased, before the distant notes of another set of
pilgrims will be heard to continue the well-known _novena_. The
_pifferari_ are generally _contadini_ of the Abruzzi Mountains, who, at
the season of Advent, leave their home to make a pilgrimage to Rome,--
stopping before all the wayside shrines, as they journey along, to pay
their glad music of welcome to the Virgin, and the coming Messiah. Their
song is called a _novena_, from its being sung for nine consecutive
days,--first, for nine days previous to the Festa of the Madonna,
which occurs on the 8th of December, and afterwards for the nine days
preceding Christmas. The same words and music serve, however, for both
celebrations. The _pifferari_ always go in couples, one playing on the
_zampogna_, or bagpipe, the bass and treble accompaniment, and the other
on the _piffero_, or pastoral pipe, which carries the air; and for the
month before Christmas the sound of their instruments resounds through
the streets of Rome, wherever there is a shrine,--whether at the corners
of the streets, in the depths of the shops, down little lanes, in the
centre of the Corso, in the interior courts of the palaces, or on the
stairways of private houses.
Their costume is extremely picturesque. On their heads they wear conical
felt hats adorned with a frayed peacock's feather, or a faded band of
red cords and tassels,--their bodies are clad in red waistcoats, blue
jackets, and small-clothes of skin or yellowish homespun cloth,--skin
sandals are bound to their feet with cords that interlace each other up
the leg as far as the knee,--and over all is worn a long brown or blue
cloak with a short cape, buckled closely round the neck. Sometimes, but
rarely, this cloak is of a deep red with a scalloped cape. As they stand
before the pictures of the Madonna, their hats placed on the ground
before them, and their thick, black, dishevelled hair covering their
sunburnt brows, blowing away on their instruments or pausing to sing
their _novena_, they form a picture which every artist desires to paint.
Their dress is common to nearly all the peasantry of the Abruzzi, and,
worn and tattered as it often is, it has a richness and harmony of tint
which no new clothes could ever have, and for which the costumes of the
shops and regular models offer a poor substitute. It is the old story
again. The new and clean is not so paintable, not so picturesque, as the
tarnished and soiled. The worn blue of the cloak is softened by the dull
gray of the threads beneath,--patches of various colors are often let
into the jacket or breeches,--the hat is lustreless from age, and rusty
as an old wall,--and the first vivid red of the waistcoat is toned by
constant use to a purely pictorial hue. Besides, the true _pifferaro_
wears his costume as if it belonged to him and had always been worn by
him,--so that it has none of that got-up look which spoils everything.
From the sandals and corded leggings, which, in the Neapolitan dialect,
are termed _cioce_, the _pifferari_ are often called _ciociari_.
Their Christmas pilgrimages are by no means prompted by purely religious
motives, though, undoubtedly, such considerations have some weight with
them, the common peasantry being a religiously inclined people, and
often making pilgrimages simply from a sense of duty and propriety. But
in these wanderings to Rome, their principal object is to earn a little
money to support them during the winter months, when their "occupation
is gone." As they are hired in Rome by the owners of the various houses
adorned with a Madonna-shrine (of which there are over fifteen hundred
in the city) to play before them at the rate of a paul or so for each
full _novena_, and as they can easily play before thirty or forty a day,
they often return, if their luck is good, with a tolerable little sum
in their pockets. Besides this, they often stand as models, if they are
good-looking fellows, and thus add to their store; and then again, the
_forestieri_ (for, as the ancient Romans called strangers _barbari_,
so their descendants call them _foresters_, wood-men, wild-men)
occasionally drop _baiocchi_ and pauls into their hats, still further to
increase it.
Sometimes it is a father and son who play together, but oftener two old
friends who make the pilgrimage in pairs. This morning, as I was
going out for a walk round the walls, two admirable specimens of the
_pifferari_ were performing the _novena_ before a shrine at the corner
of the street. The player of the _zampogna_ was an old man, with a sad,
but very amiable face, who droned out the bass and treble in a most
earnest and deprecatory manner. He looked as if he had stood still,
tending his sheep, nearly all his life, until the peace and quiet of
Nature had sunk into his being, or, if you will, until he had become
assimilated to the animals he tended. The other, who played the
_piffero_, was a man of middle age, stout, vigorous, with a forest of
tangled black hair, and dark quick eyes that were fixed steadily on the
Virgin, while he blew and vexed the little brown pipe with rapid runs
and nervous _fioriture_, until great drops of sweat dripped from its
round open mouth. Sometimes, when he could not play fast enough to
satisfy his eagerness, he ran his finger up and down the vents.
Then, suddenly lowering his instrument, he would scream, in a strong
peasant-voice, verse after verse of the _novena_, to the accompaniment
of the _zampogna_. One was like a slow old Italian _vettura_ all
lumbered with luggage and held back by its drag; the other panting and
nervous at his work as an American locomotive, and as constantly running
off the rails. Both, however, were very earnest at their occupation. As
they stood there playing, a little group gathered round. A scamp of a
boy left his sport to come and beat time with a stick on the stone step
before them; several children clustered near; and two or three women,
with rosy infants in their arms, also paused to listen and sympathize.
At last the playing ceased. The _pifferari_ took up their hats and
looked smilingly round at us.
"Where do you come from?" I asked.
"_Eh!_" said the _piffero_, showing all his teeth, and shrugging his
shoulders good-naturedly, while the other echoed the pantomime.
"_Dal Regno_"--for so the Abruzzi peasants call the kingdom of Naples.
"And do you come every year?"
"_Sì, Signore. Lui_" (indicating his friend) "_ed io_" (pointing to
himself) "_siam' compagni per trenta tre anni. E siam' venut' a Roma per
far la noven' ogn' anno."[B]
[Footnote B: "He and I have been companions for thirty-three years, and
every year we have come to Rome to play the _novena_."]
To this the old _zampogna_ bent his head on one side, and said,
assentingly,--"_Eh! per trenta tre anni._"--
And, "_Ecco_," continued the _piffero_, bursting in before the
_zampogna_ could go on, and pointing to two stalwart youths of about
twenty-two or-three years of age, who at this moment came up the
street with their instruments,--"These are our two sons. He is
mine,"--indicating one with his reversed thumb; "and that other is
his,"--jerking his head towards his companion. "And they, too, are going
to play in company, as we do."
"For thirty-three years more, let us hope," said I.
"_Eh! speriamo_," (Let us hope so,) was the answer of the _piffero_, as
he showed all his teeth in the broadest of smiles. Then, with a motion
of his hand, he set both the young men going, he himself joining in,
straining out his cheeks, blowing all the breath of his body into the
little pipe, and running up and down the vents with a sliding finger,
until finally he brought up against a high, shrill note, to which he
gave the full force of his lungs, and, after holding it in loud blast
for a moment, startled us by breaking off, without gradation, into
a silence as sudden as if the music had snapped short off, like a
pipe-stem.
On further conversation with my _ciociari_, I found that they came
yearly from Sora, a town in the Abruzzi, about one hundred miles from
Rome, making the journey on foot, and picking up by the way whatever
trifle of copper they could. In this manner they travelled the whole
distance in five days, living upon onions, lettuce, oil, and black
bread. They were now singing the second _novena_ for _Natale_, and, if
one could judge from their manner and conversation, were quite content
with what they had earned. I invited them up into my room, and there
in the pleasantest way they stunned us with the noise of both their
instruments, to the great delight of the children and the astonishment
of the servants, for whom these common things had worn out their charm
by constant repetition. At my request, they repeated the words of the
_novena_ they had been singing, and I took them down from their lips.
After eliminating the wonderful _m-ms_ of the Neapolitan dialect, in
which all the words lay imbedded like shells in the sand, and supplying
some of the curious elisions with which those Abruzzi Procrusteans
recklessly cut away the polysyllables, so as to bring them within the
rythmic compass, they ran thus:--
"Verginella figlia di Sant' Anna,
Nella ventre portasti il buon Gesù.
Si parturisti sotto la capanna,
E dov' mangiav'no lo bue e 1' asinello.
"Quel Angelo gridava: 'Venite, Santi!
'Chè andato Gesù dentro la capanna,
Ma guardate Vergine beata,
Che in ciel in terra sia nostr' avvocata!
"San Giuseppe andava in compagnia,
Si trovò al partorir di Maria.
La notte di natale è notte santa--
Lo Padre e 1' Figliolo e lo Spirito Santo.
'Sta la ragione che abbiamo cantato;
Sia a Gesù bambino rappresentata."
The sudden introduction of "_Quel Angelo_" in this song reminds us of a
similar felicity in the romantic ballad of "Lord Bateman," where we are
surprised to learn that "_this Turk_," to whom no allusion had been
previously made, "has one lovely daughter."
The air to which this is sung is very simple and sweet, though
monotonous. Between the verses and at the close, a curious little
_ritornello_ is played.
The wanderings of the _pifferari_ are by no means confined to the Roman
States. Sometimes they stray "as far away as Paris is," and, wandering
about in that gay capital, like children at a fair, play in the streets
for chance _sous_, or stand as models to artists, who, having once been
to Rome, hear with a longing Rome-sickness the old characteristic sounds
of the _piffero_ and _zampogna_. Two of them I remember to have heard
thus, as I was at work in my studio in Paris; and so vividly did they
recall the old Roman time, that I called them in for a chat.
Wonderful was their speech. In the few months of their wandering, they
had put into their Neapolitan dough various plums of French words,
which, pronounced in their odd way, "suffered a change into something
peculiarly rich and strange." One of them told me that his wife had just
written to him by the hand of a _scrivano_, lamenting his absence, and
praying him to send her his portrait. He had accordingly sent her a
photograph in half-length. Some time afterwards she acknowledged the
receipt of it, but indignantly remonstrated with him for sending her a
picture "_che pareva guardando per la fenestra_" (which seemed to be
looking out of the window,) as she oddly characterized a half-length,
and praying to have his legs also in the next portrait. This same
fellow, with his dull, amiable face, played the role of a ferocious
wounded brigand dragged into concealment by his wife, in the studio of
a friend next door; but, despite the savagery and danger of his
counterfeited position, he was sure to be overpowered by sleep before he
had been in it more than five minutes,--and if the artist's eye left him
for a moment, he never failed to change his attitude for one more fitted
to his own somnolent propensities than for the picture.
The _pifferari_ are by no means the only street-musicians in Rome,
though they take the city by storm at Christmas. Every day under my
window comes a band of four or five, who play airs and concerted pieces
from the operas,--and a precious work they make of it sometimes! Not
only do the instruments go very badly together, but the parts they play
are not arranged for them. A violone grunts out a low accompaniment to a
vinegar-sharp violin which saws out the air, while a trumpet blares in
at intervals to endeavor to unite the two, and a flute does what it
can, but not what it would. Sometimes, instead of a violone, a hoarse
trombone, with a violent cold in the head, snorts out the bass
impatiently, gets ludicrously uncontrollable and boastful at times, and
is always so choleric, that, instead of waiting for the _cadenzas_ to
finish, it bursts in, knocks them over as by a blow on the head, roars
away on false intervals, and overwhelms every other voice with its
own noisy vociferation. The harmonic arrangements are very odd. Each
instrument seems to consider itself ill-treated when reduced to an
accompaniment or bass, and is constantly endeavoring, however unfitted
for it, to get possession of the air,--the melody being, for all
Italians, the principal object. The violin, however, weak of voice as
it is, always carries the day, and the other instruments steal
discontentedly back to their secondary places, the snuffy old violone
keeping up a constant growl at its ill luck, and the trombone now and
then leaping out like a tiger on its prey.
Far better and more characteristic are the ballad-singers, who generally
go in couples,--an old man, dim of sight, perhaps blind, who plays the
violin, and his wife or daughter, who has a guitar, tamborello, or at
times a mandolin. Sometimes a little girl accompanies them, sings
with them, and carries round a tin box, or the tamborello, to collect
_baiocchi_. They sing long ballads to popular melodies, some of
which are very pretty and gay, and for a _baiocco_ they sell a sheet
containing the printed words of the song. Sometimes it is in the form of
a dialogue,--either a love-making, a quarrel, a reconciliation, or a
leave-taking,--each singer taking an alternate verse. Sometimes it is a
story with a chorus, or a religious conversation-ballad, or a story of a
saint, or from the Bible. Those drawn from the Bible are generally
very curious paraphrases of the original simple text, turned into the
simplest and commonest idioms of the people;--one of them may be found
in the Appendix to Goethe's "Italienische Reise." These Roman ballads
and popular songs, so far as I am able to learn, have never been
collected. Many of them do not exist in print, and are only traditional
and caught from mouth to mouth. This is particularly the case with those
in the Romanesque dialect, which are replete with the peculiar wit
and spirit of the country. But the memory of man is too perilous a
repository for such interesting material; and it is greatly to be wished
that some clever Italian, who is fitted for the task, would interest
himself to collect them and give them a permanent place in the
literature of his language.
But to return to our ballad-singers, whom we have left in the middle of
their song, and who are now finishing. A crowd has gathered round them,
as usual; out of the windows and from the balconies lean the occupants
of the houses near by, and the _baiocchi_ thrown by them ring on the
pavement below. With rather Stentorian voices they have been singing a
dialogue which is most elaborately entitled a "Canzonetta Nuova, sopra
un marinaro che da l' addio alla sua promessa sposa mentre egli deve
partire per la via di Levante. Sdegno, pace, e matrimonio dilli medesimi
con intercalare sull' aria moderna. Rime di Francesco Calzaroni." I give
my _baiocco_ and receive in return a smiling "Grazie" and a copy of the
song, which is adorned by a wood-cut of a ship in full sail.
Here is another, of a moral character, containing the sad history of
Frederic the Gambler, who, to judge from the wood-cut accompanying the
Canzonetta, must have been a ferocious fellow. He stands with his legs
wide apart, in half-armor, a great sash tied over his shoulder and
swinging round his legs, an immense sword at his side, and a great
hat with two ostrich-feathers on his head, looking the very type of a
"swashing blade."
The singers of longer ballads carry about with them sometimes a series
of rudely-executed illustrations of different incidents in the story,
painted in distemper and pasted on a large pasteboard frame, which is
hung against a wall or on a stand planted behind the singer in the
ground. These he pauses now and then in his song to explain to the
audience, and they are sure to draw a crowd.
As summer comes on and the evenings grow warm, begin the street
serenades,--sometimes like that of Lindoro in the opening of the
"Barbiere di Sevilla," but generally with only one voice, accompanied by
a guitar and a mandolin. These serenades are, for the most part, given
by a lover or friend to his _innamorata_, and the words are expressive
of the tender passion; but there are also _serenate di gelosia_, or
satirical serenades, when the most impertinent and stinging verses are
sung. Long before arriving, the serenaders may be heard marching up the
street to the thrum of their instruments. They then place themselves
before the windows of the fair one, and, surrounded by a group of men
and boys, make proclamation of their love in loud and often violent
tones. It seems sometimes as if they considered the best method of
expressing the intensity of their passion was by the volume of their
voice. Certainly, in these cases, the light of love is not hidden under
a bushel. Among the Trasteverini, particularly, these serenades are
common. Some of them are very clever in their improvisations and
imitations of different dialects, particularly of the Neapolitan, in
which there are so many charming songs. Their skill in improvisation,
however, is not generally displayed in their serenades, but in the
_osterias_, during the evenings of the _festas_ in summer. There it is
that their quickness and epigrammatic turn of expression are best seen.
Two disputants will, when in good-humor and warmed with wine, string off
verse after verse at each other's expense, full of point and fun,--the
guitar burring along in the intervals, and a chorus of laughter saluting
every good hit.
In many of the back streets and squares of the city, fountains jet out
of lions' heads into great oblong stone cisterns, often sufficiently
large to accommodate some thirty washerwomen at once. Here the common
people resort to wash their clothes, and with great laughter and
merriment amuse themselves while at their work by improvising verses,
sometimes with rhyme, sometimes without, at the expense of each other,
or perhaps of the passerby,--particularly if he happen to be a gaping
_forestiere_, to whom their language is unintelligible. They stand on
an elevated stone step, so as to bring the cistern about mid-height of
their body, and on the rough inclined level of its rim they slash and
roll the clothes, or, opening them, flaunt them into the water, or
gather them together, lifting their arms high above their heads, and
always treating them with a violence which nothing but the coarsest
material can resist. The air to which they chant their couplets is
almost always a Campagna melody. Sharp attacks are given and as sharp
_répliques_ received, in exceeding good-humor; and when there is little
wit, there is sure to be much laughter. The salt is oftentimes pretty
coarse, but it serves its purpose.
A remarkable trait among the Italians is the good-nature with which
they take personal jokes, and their callousness to ridicule of personal
defects. Jests which would provoke a blow from an Anglo-Saxon, or wound
and rankle in the memory for life, are here taken in good part. A
cripple often joins in the laugh at his own deformity; and the rough
carelessness with which such personal misfortunes are alluded to is
amazing to us of a more sensitive organization. I well remember the
extreme difficulty I once had in breaking an Italian servant of the
habit of announcing an acquaintance, whose foreign name he could not
pronounce, and who had the misfortune to be humpbacked, as "_quel
gobbo_" (that hunchback). He could not understand why he should not call
him a _gobbo_, if he was a _gobbo_; and in spite of all I could do, he
would often open the door and say, "_Signore, quel gobbo desidera farle
una visita_," (that hunchback wishes to make you a visit,) when "_quel
gobbo_" was right on his heels. The Italians are also singularly free
from that intense self-consciousness which runs in our English
blood, and is the root of shyness, awkwardness, and affectation.
Unconsciousness is the secret of grace, freedom, and simplicity. We
never forget ourselves. The Italians always forget themselves. They are
sometimes proud, very seldom vain, and never affected. The converse
peculiarity follows, of course. Having no self-consciousness, they are
as little sensitive to their defects as vain of their charms. The models
who come to the studios, and who have been selected for their beauty,
despite the silent flattery incident to their very profession, and
the lavish praise they constantly hear expressed, are always simple,
natural, and unaffected. If you tell them they are very beautiful, they
say, _"Ma che?"_ deprecatorily, or perhaps admit the fact. But they are
better pleased to have their dress admired than their faces. Of the
former they are vain, of the latter they are not. For the most part, I
think they rather wonder what it is we admire in them and think worthy
of perpetuating in stone or color. The other day I was so much struck
with the ear of a model, from whom I was working, that I said to
her,--"You have, without exception, the most beautiful ear I ever saw."
She laughed somewhat derisively, and said, _"Ma che?"_--"It does not
seem to give you any pleasure," I continued, "to know that you have a
very handsome ear."--_"Che mi importa,"_ answered she, _"se sia bello o
brutto? È sempre lo stesso, brutto o bello, bello o brutto. Ecco!"_[C]
--"You don't care, then, whether you are handsome or ugly?"--_"Eh! cosa
a me m'importa,--se sono brutto o bello non so,--a me è lo stesso."_
This was all I could get from her.
[Footnote C: "What do I care whether it is handsome or ugly? It's all
the same to me,--ugly or handsome,--handsome or ugly. There!"]
But to return to our washerwomen. In every country-town a large
washing-cistern is always provided by the authorities for public use,
and, at all hours of the day, the picturesque figures of the peasants
of every age, from the old hag, whose skin is like a brown and crumpled
palimpsest, (where Anacreontic verses are overwritten by a dull, monkish
sermon,) to the round, dark-eyed girl, with broad, straight back and
shining hair, may be seen gathered around it,--their heads protected
from the sun by their folded _tovaglia_, their skirts knotted up behind,
and their waists embraced by stiff, red _busti_. Their work is always
enlivened by song,--and when their clothes are all washed, the basket
is lifted to the head, and home they march, stalwart and majestic, like
Roman caryatides. The sharp Italian sun shining on their dark faces and
vivid costumes, or flashing into the fountain, and basking on the gray,
weed-covered walls, makes a picture which is often enchanting in its
color. At the Emissary by Albano, where the waters from the lake are
emptied into a huge cistern through the old conduit built by the ancient
Romans to sink the level of the lake, I have watched by the hour
together these strange pictorial groups, as they sang and thrashed
the clothes they were engaged in washing; while over them, in the
foreground, the great gray tower and granary, once a castle, lifted
itself in strong light and shade against the peerless blue sky, while
rolling hills beyond, covered with the pale green foliage of rounded
olives, formed the characteristic background. Sometimes a _contadino_,
mounted on the crupper of his donkey, would pause in the sun to chat
awhile with the women. The children, meanwhile, sprawled and played upon
the grass, and the song and chat at the fountain would not unfrequently
be interrupted by a shrill scream from one of the mothers, to stop a
quarrel, or to silence a cry which showed the stoutness of their little
lungs.
The cobblers of Rome are also a gay and singing set. They do not
imprison themselves in a dark cage of a shop, but sit _"sub Jove"_ where
they may enjoy the life of the street and all the "skyey influences."
Their benches are generally placed near the _portone_ of some palace, so
that they may draw them under shelter when it rains. Here all day they
sit and draw their waxed-ends and sing,--a row of battered-looking boots
and shoes ranged along on the ground beside them, and waiting for their
turn, being their only stock in trade.
They commonly have enough to do, and, as they pay nothing for shop-rent,
every _baiocco_ they get is nearly clear profit. They are generally as
poor as Job's cat; but they are far happier than the proprietor of that
interesting animal. Figaro is a high ideal of this class, and about as
much like them as Raffaello's angels are like Jeames Yellowplush. What
the cobblers and Figaro have in common is song and a love of scandal.
One admirable specimen of this class sits at the corner of the Via
Felice and Capo le Case, with his bench backed against the gray wall. He
is an oldish man, with a long, gray beard and a quizzical face,--a sort
of Hans Sachs, who turns all his life into verse and song. When he comes
out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in
verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of
himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he
changes into song everything and every person that passes before him.
Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be
chronicled and sarcastically commented on in his verse. So he sits all
day long, his mind like a kaleidoscope, changing all the odd bits of
character which chance may show him into rhythmic forms, and chirps and
sings as perpetually as the cricket. Friends he has without number, who
stop before his bench, from which he administers poetical justice to
all persons, to have a long chat, or sometimes to bring him a friendly
token; and from the dark interior of his drawer he often brings forth an
orange, or a bunch of grapes, or handful of chestnuts, supplied by them,
as a dessert for the thick cabbage-soup which he eats at _mezzo giorno_.
In the busiest street of Rome, the pure Campagna song may often be heard
from the throat of some _contadino_, as he slowly rumbles along in his
loaded wine-cart,--the little dog at his side barking a sympathetic
chorus. This song is rude enough, and seems in measure founded upon the
Church chant. It is in the minor key, and consists ordinarily of two
phrases, ending in a screaming monotone, prolonged until the breath of
the singer fails, and often running down at the close into a blurred
chromatic. No sooner is one strain ended than it is suddenly taken up
again in the _prestissimo_ time and "slowed" down to the same dismal
conclusion. Heard near, it is deafening and disagreeable. But when
refined by distance, it has a sad and pleasant effect, and seems to
belong to the place,--the long wail at the close being the very type
of the melancholy stretches of the Campagna. In the same way I have
frequently thought that the _Jodeln_ of the Swiss was an imitation of
the echo of the mountains, each note repeated first in octave, or fifth,
and then in its third below. The Campagna song is to be heard not only
in the Campagna, but everywhere in the country,--in the vineyards,
in the grain-fields, in mountain and valley, from companies working
together, and from solitary _contadini_,--wherever the influence and
sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt. The moment we get into Tuscany,
on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be
lost. It was only the other day, at nightfall, that I was sauntering
out on the desolate Campagna towards Civita Vecchia. The shadows were
deepening and the mists beginning to creep whitely along the deep
hollows. Everything was dreary and melancholy enough. As I paused to
listen to the solitude, I heard the grind of a distant invisible cart,
and the sound of a distant voice singing. Slowly the cart came up over
the crest of the hill, a dark spot against the twilight sky, and mounted
on the top of a load of brushwood sat a _contadino_, who was singing to
himself these words,--not very consolatory, perhaps, but so completely
in harmony with the scene and the time that they struck me forcibly:--
"E, bella, tu non piangera-a-a-i,
Sul giorno ch'io saro mor-or-or-to-o-o-o-o-o."[D]
[Footnote D:
"And, dearest, you will never weep for me-e-e-e,
The day when I shall be no mo-o-o-ore."]
Whether this constant habit of song among the Southern people, while at
their work, indicates happiness and content, I will not undertake to
say; but it is pleasanter in effect than the sad silence in which we
Anglo-Saxons perform our tasks,--and it seems to show a less harassed
and anxious spirit. But I feel quite sure that these people are more
easily pleased, contented with less, less morose, and less envious of
the ranks above them, than we are. They give little thought to the
differences of caste, have little ambition to make fortunes or rise out
of their condition, and are satisfied with the commonest fare, if they
can get enough of it. The demon of dissatisfaction never harries them.
When you speak to them, they answer with a smile which is nowhere
else to be found. The nation is old, but the people are children
in disposition. Their character is like their climate, generally
sunny,--subject to violent occasional storms, but never growling life
away in an uncomfortable drizzle of discontent. They live upon Nature,
--sympathize with it and love it,--are susceptible to the least touch
of beauty,--are ardent, if not enduring, in their affectations,--and,
unless provoked and irritated, are very peaceful and amiable. The flaw
in their nature is jealousy, and it is a great flaw. Their want of truth
is the result of their education. We who are of the more active and busy
nations despise them for not having that irritated discontent which
urges us forward to change our condition; and we think our ambition
better than their supineness. But there is good in both. We do
more,--they enjoy more; we make violent efforts to be happy,--invent,
create, labor, to arrive at that quiet enjoyment which they own without
struggle, and which our anxious strife unfits us to enjoy when the means
for it are obtained. The general, popular idea, that an Italian is
quarrelsome, and ill-tempered, and that the best are only bandits in
disguise, is quite a mistake; and when studied as they exist out of the
track of travel, where they are often debased and denaturalized, they
will be found to be simple, kind-hearted, and generous.
A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC.
Yes, my dear Dolorosus, I commiserate you. I regard your case, perhaps,
with even sadder emotions than that excellent family-physician who has
been sounding its depths these four years with a golden plummet, and
has never yet touched bottom. From those generous confidences which, in
common with most of your personal acquaintances, I daily share, I
am satisfied that no description can do justice to your physical
disintegration, unless it be the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds
with which Mr. Addison winds up Cato's Soliloquy. So far as I can
ascertain, there is not an organ of your internal structure which is
in its right place, at present, or which could perform any particular
service, if it were there. In the extensive library of medical almanacs
and circulars which I find daily deposited by travelling agents at my
front door, among all the agonizing vignettes of diseases which adorn
their covers, and which Irish Bridget daily studies with inexperienced
enjoyment in the front entry, there is no case which seems to afford a
parallel to yours. I found it stated in one of these works, the other
day, that there is iron enough in the blood of twenty-four men to make
a broadsword; but I am satisfied that it would be impossible to extract
enough from the veins of yourself and your whole family to construct a
crochet-needle for your eldest daughter. And I am quite confident,
that, if all the four hundred muscles of your present body were twisted
together by a rope-maker, they would not furnish that patient young
laborer with a needleful of thread.
You are undoubtedly, as you claim, a martyr to Dyspepsia; or if you
prefer any other technical name for your disease or diseases, I will
acquiesce in any, except, perhaps, the word "Neurology," which I must
regard as foreign to etymological science, if not to medical. Your case,
you think, is hard. I should think it would be. Yet I am impressed by
it, I must admit, as was our adopted fellow-citizen by the contemplation
of Niagara. He, you remember, when pressed to admire the eternal plunge
of the falling water, could only inquire, with serene acquiescence in
natural laws, "And what's to hinder?" I confess myself moved to similar
reflections by your disease and its history. My dear Dolorosus, can
you acquaint me with any reason, in the heavens above or on the earth
beneath, why you should _not_ have dyspepsia?
My thoughts involuntarily wander back to that golden period, five years
ago, when I spent one night and day beneath your hospitable roof. I
arrived, I remember, late in the evening. The bed-room to which you
kindly conducted me, after a light but wholesome supper of doughnuts and
cheese, was pleasing in respect to furniture, but questionable in regard
to physiology. The house was not more than twenty years old, and the
chamber must therefore have been aired within that distance of time, but
not, I should have judged, more recently. Perhaps its close, oppressive
atmosphere could not have been analyzed into as many separate odors
as Coleridge distinguished in Cologne,--but I could easily identify
aromatic vinegar, damp straw, lemons, and dyed silk gowns. And, as each
of the windows was carefully nailed down, there were no obvious means of
obtaining fresh air, save that ventilator said to be used by an eminent
lady in railway-cars,--the human elbow. The lower bed was of straw, the
upper of feathers, whose extreme heat kept me awake for a portion of the
night, and whose abundant fluffy exhalations suggested incipient asthma
during another portion. On rising from these rather unrefreshing
slumbers, I performed my morning ablutions with the aid of some
three teacupsful of dusty water,--for the pitcher probably held that
quantity,--availing myself, also, of something which hung over an
elegant towel-horse, and which, though I at first took it for a child's
handkerchief, proved on inspection to be "Chamber Towel, No. 1."
I remember, as I entered the breakfast-room, a vague steam as of frying
sausages, which, creeping in from the neighboring kitchen, obscured
in some degree the six white faces of your wife and children. The
breakfast-table was amply covered, for you were always what is termed
by judicious housewives "a good provider." I remember how the beefsteak
(for the sausages were especially destined for your two youngest
Dolorosi, who were just recovering from the measles, and needed
something light and palatable) vanished in large rectangular masses
within your throat, drawn downward in a maelstrom of coffee;--only
that the original whirlpool is, I believe, now proved to have been
imaginary;--"that cup was a fiction, but this is reality." The
resources of the house also afforded certain very hot biscuits or
breadcakes, in a high state of saleratus;--indeed, it must have been
from association with these, that certain yellow streaks in Mr. Ruskin's
drawing of the rock, at the Athenaeum, awakened in me such an immediate
sense of indigestion;--also fried potatoes, baked beans, mince-pie, and
pickles. The children partook of these dainties largely, but without
undue waste of time. They lingered at table precisely eight minutes,
before setting out for school; though we, absorbed in conversation,
remained at least ten;--after which we instantly hastened to your
counting-room, where you, without a moment's delay, absorbed yourself in
your ledger, while I flirted languidly with the "Daily Advertiser."
You bent over your desk the whole morning, occasionally having
anxious consultations with certain sickly men whom I supposed to be
superannuated bookkeepers, in impoverished circumstances, and rather
pallid from the want of nutritious food. One of them, dressed in rusty
black, with a flabby white neckcloth, I took for an ex-clergyman; he was
absorbed in the last number of the "Independent," though I observed, at
length, that he was only studying the list of failures, a department to
which, as it struck me, he himself peculiarly appertained. All of these,
I afterwards ascertained from your office-boy, were eminent capitalists;
something had gone wrong in the market,--not in the meat-market, as I
should have supposed from their appearance, but in the money-market. I
believe that there was some sudden fall in the price of indigo. I know
you looked exceedingly blue as we walked home to dinner.
Dinner was ready the instant we opened the front door. I expected as
much; I knew the pale, speechless woman who sat at the head of your
table would make sure of punctuality, if she died for it. We took our
seats without a word. The party was smaller than at breakfast. Two of
the children had staid at school, having their luncheon-baskets well
filled from the cold remains of breakfast. Your eldest girl, Angelina,
aged ten, one of those premature little grown women who have learned
from the cradle that man is born to eat pastry and woman to make it,
postponed her small repast till an indefinite future, and sat meekly
ready to attend upon our wants. Nathaniel, a thin boy of eight,
also partook but slightly, having impaired his appetite, his mother
suspected, by a copious luncheon of cold baked beans and vinegar, on
his return from school. The two youngest (twins) had relapsed to their
couches soon after breakfast, in consequence of excess of sausage.
You were quite agreeable in conversation, I remember, after the first
onset of appetite was checked. You gave me your whole theory of the
indigo crisis, with minute details, statistical and geographical, of
the financial condition and supposed present location of your principal
absconding debtors. This served for what is called, at public dinners,
the intellectual feast; while the carnal appetite was satisfied with
fried pork, ditto roasted, strong coffee, turnips, potatoes, and a good
deal of gravy. For dessert, (at which point Nathaniel regained his
appetite,) we had mince-pie, apple-pie, and lemon-pie, the latter being
a structure of a two-story description, an additional staging of crust
being somehow inserted between upper and under. We lingered long at that
noon meal,--fifteen minutes, at the very least; for you hospitably said
that you did not have these little social festivals very often,--owing
to frequent illness in the family, and other causes,--and mast make the
most of it.
I did not see much of you during that afternoon; it was a magnificent
day, and I said, that, being a visitor, I would look about and see the
new buildings. The truth was, I felt a sneaking desire to witness the
match-game on the Common, between the Union Base-Ball Club, No. 1, of
Ward Eleven, and the Excelsiors of Smithville. I remember that you
looked a little dissatisfied, when I came into the counting-room, and
rather shook your head over my narrative (perhaps too impassioned) of
the events of the game. "Those young fellows," said you, "may not _all_
be shiftless, dissipated characters, _yet_,--but see what it comes
to! They a'n't content with wasting their time,--they kill it, Sir,
actually kill it!" When I thought of the manly figures and handsome,
eager faces of my friends of the "Union" and the "Excelsior,"--the
Excelsiors won by ten tallies, I should say, the return match to come
off at Smithville the next month,--and then looked at the meagre form
and wan countenance of their critic, I thought to myself, "Dolorosus, my
boy, you are killing something besides Time, if you only knew it."
However, indigo had risen again, and your spirits also. As we walked
home, you gave me a precise exhibit of your income and expenditures for
the last five years, and a prospective sketch of the same for the next
ten; winding up with an incidental delineation of the importance, to a
man of business, of a good pew in some respectable place of worship. We
found Mrs. D., as usual, ready at the table; we partook of pound-cake
(or pound-and-a-half, I should say) and sundry hot cups of a very
Cisatlantic beverage, called by the Chinese epithet of tea,--and went,
immediately after, to a prayer-meeting. The church or chapel was much
crowded, and there was a certain something in the atmosphere which
seemed to disqualify my faculties from comprehending a single word that
was spoken. It certainly was not that the ventilators were closed, for
there were none. The minister occasionally requested that the windows
might be let down a little, and the deacons invariably closed them again
when he looked the other way. At intervals, females were carried out, in
a motionless condition,--not, as it appeared, from conviction of sin,
but from faintness. You sat, absorbed in thought, with your eyes closed,
and seemed not to observe them. I remember that you were very much
shocked when I suggested that the breath of an average sinner exhausted
atmospheric air at the rate of a hogshead an hour, and asked you
how much allowance the laws of the universe made for the lungs of
church-members? I do not recall your precise words, but I remember that
I finally found it expedient, as I was to leave for home in the early
train, to spend that night at the neighboring hotel, where I indulged,
on an excellent mattress, in a slumber so profound, that it seemed
next morning as if I ought, as Dick Swiveller suggested to the single
gentleman, to pay for a double-bedded room.
Well, that is all over now. You have given up business, from ill health,
and exhibit a ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five.
Your dreams of the forthcoming ten years have not been exactly
fulfilled; you have not precisely retired on a competency, because the
competency retired from you. Indeed, the suddenness with which your
physician compelled you to close up your business left it closed rather
imperfectly, so that most of the profits are found to have leaked out.
You are economizing rather strictly, just now, in respect to everything
but doctors' bills. The maternal Dolorosa is boarding somewhere in the
country, where the children certainly will not have more indigestible
food than they had at home, and may get less of it in quantity,--to
say nothing of more air and exercise to aid digestion. They are not,
however, in perfect condition. The twins are just getting up from
scarlet fever; Nathaniel has been advised to leave school for a time;
and something is thought to be the matter with Angelina's back.
Meanwhile, you are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills,
holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a
trip to the Bermudas.
You are learning, through all this, the sagest maxims of resignation,
and trying to apply them. "Life is hard, but short," you say;
"Providence is inscrutable; we must submit to its mysterious decrees."
Would it not be better, my dear Dolorosus, to say instead, "Life is
noble and immortal; God is good; we must obey his plain laws, or accept
the beneficent penalties"? The rise and fall of health are no more
accidental than the rise and fall of indigo; and it is the duty of those
concerned in either commodity to keep their eyes open, and learn the
business intelligently. Of the three proverbial _desiderata_, it is as
easy to be healthy as to be wealthy, and much easier than to be wise,
except so far as health and wisdom mean the same thing. After health,
indeed, the other necessaries of life are very simple, and easily
obtained;--with moderate desires, regular employment, a loving home,
correct theology, the right politics, and a year's subscription to the
"Atlantic Monthly," I have no doubt that life, in this planet, may be as
happy as in any other of the solar system, not excepting Neptune and the
fifty-five asteroids.
You are possibly aware, my dear Dolorosus,--for I remember that you
were destined by your parents for the physician of your native
seaside village, until you found a more congenial avocation in curing
mackerel,--that the ancient medals represented the goddess Hygeia with a
serpent three times as large as that carried by Aesculapius, to denote
the superiority of hygiene to medicine, prevention to cure. To seek
health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he
were Pandora, and carried hope at the bottom of his medicine-chest, is
really rather unpromising. This perpetual self-inspection of yours,
registering your pulse thrice a day, as if it were a thermometer and
you an observer for the Smithsonian,--these long consultations with
the other patients in the dreary parlor of the infirmary, the morning
devoted to debates on the nervous system, the afternoon to meditations
on the stomach, and the evening to soliloquies on the spine,--will do
you no good. The more you know, under these circumstances, the worse
it will be for you. You will become like Boerhaave's hypochondriacal
student, who, after every lecture, believed himself to be the victim of
the particular disease just expounded. We may even think too much about
_health_,--and certainly too much about _illness_. I solemnly believe
that the very best thing that could be done for you at this moment,
you unfortunate individual, would be to buy you a saddle-horse and a
revolver, and start you tomorrow for the Rocky Mountains, with distinct
instructions to treat any man as a Border Ruffian who should venture to
allude to the subject of disease in your presence.
But I cannot venture to hope that you will do anything so reasonable.
The fascinations of your present life are too overwhelming; when an
invalid once begins to enjoy the contemplation of his own woes, as you
appear to do, it is all over with him. Besides, you urge, and perhaps
justly, that your case has already gone too far, for so rough a tonic.
What, then, can I do for you? Medicine I cannot offer; for even your
respectable family-physician occasionally hints that you need something
different from that. I suspect that all rational advice for you may be
summed up in one prescription: Reverse instantly all the habits of your
previous physical existence, and there may be some chance for you. But,
perhaps, I had better enter more into detail.
Do not think that I am going to recur to the painful themes of doughnuts
and diet. I fear my hints, already given, on those subjects, may wound
the sensitive nature of Mrs. D., who suffers now such utter martyrdom
from your condition that I cannot bring myself to heap further coals
of fire on her head, even though the coals be taken from her own very
ineffectual cooking-stove. Let me dwell rather on points where you
have exclusive jurisdiction, and can live wisely or foolishly, at your
pleasure.
It does not depend on you, perhaps, whether you shall eat bread or
saleratus, meat or sole-leather; but it certainly does depend upon
yourself whether you shall wash yourself daily. I do not wish to be
personal, but I verily believe, O companion of my childhood! that,
until you began to dabble in Hydropathy, you had not bestowed a sincere
ablution upon your entire person since the epoch when, twenty years ago,
we took our last plunge together, off Titcomb's wharf, in our native
village. That in your well-furnished house there are no hydraulic
privileges beyond pint water-pitchers, I know from anxious personal
inspection. I know that you have spent an occasional week at the
sea-shore during the summer, and that many people prefer to do up their
cleanliness for the year during these excursions; indeed, you yourself
have mentioned to me, at such times, with some enthusiasm, your daily
sea-bath. But I have been privately assured, by the other boarders, that
the bath in question always consisted of putting on a neat bathing-dress
and sitting awhile on a rock among the sea-weed, like an insane merman,
with the highest waves submerging only your knees, while the younger
Dolorosi splashed and gambolled in safe shallows behind you. Even that
is better than nothing, but--Soul of Mohammed!--is that called bathing?
Verily, we are, as the Turks declare, a nation of "dirty Franks," if
this be the accepted definition.
Can it be possible that you really hold with the once-celebrated Mr.
Walker, "The Original," as he was deservedly called, who maintained,
that, by a correct diet, the system became self-purifying, through an
active exhalation which repelled impurity,--so that, while walking on
dusty roads, his feet, and even his stockings, remained free from dust?
"By way of experiment, I did not wash my face for a week; nor did any
one see, nor I feel, the difference." My deluded friend, it is a fatal
error. Mr. Walker, the Original, may have been inwardly a saint and a
sage, but it is impossible that his familiar society could have been
desirable, even to fools or sinners. Rather recall, from your early
explorations in Lemprière's Dictionary, how Medea renewed the youth of
Pelias by simply cutting him to pieces and boiling him; whereon my Lord
Bacon justly remarks, that "there may be some boiling required in the
matter, but the cutting to pieces is not needful." If you find that the
water-cure agrees with your constitution, I rejoice in it; I should
think it would; but, I implore you, do not leave it all behind you when
you leave the institution. When you return to your family, use your very
first dollars for buying a sponge and a tin-hat, for each member of the
household; and bring up the five children to lead decent lives.
Then, again, consider the fact that our lungs were created to consume
oxygen. I suppose that never in your life, Dolorosus, did those
breathing organs of yours inhale more than one half the quantity of air
that they were intended to take in,--to say nothing of its quality. Yet
one would think, that, in the present high prices of other food, you
would make the most of the only thing you can put into your mouth
gratis. Here is Nature constantly urging on us an unexceptionable
atmosphere forty miles high,--for if a pressure of fourteen pounds to
the square inch is not to be called urging, what is?--and yet we not
only neglect, but resist the favor. Our children commonly learn to spell
much better than they ever learn to breathe, because much more attention
is paid to the former department of culture. Indeed, the materials are
better provided; spelling-books are abundant; but we scarcely allow them
time, in the intervals of school, to seek fresh air out of doors, and
we sedulously exclude it from our houses and school-rooms. Is it
not possible to impress upon your mind the changes which "modern
improvements" are bringing upon us? In times past, if a gentleman
finished the evening with a quiet cigar in his parlor, (a practice I
deprecate, and introduce only for purposes of scientific illustration,)
not a trace of it ever lingered to annoy his wife at the
breakfast-table; showing that the draft up the open chimney had wholly
disposed of it, the entire atmosphere of the room being changed during
the night. Now, on the other hand, every whiff lingers persistently
beside the domestic altar, and betrays to the youngest child, next
day, the parental weakness. For the sake of family example, Dolorosus,
correct this state of things, and put in a ventilator. Our natures will
not adapt themselves to this abstinence from fresh air, until Providence
shall fit us up with new bodies, having no lungs in them. Did you ever
hear of Dr. Lyne, the eccentric Irish physician? Dr. Lyne held that no
house was wholesome, unless a dog could get in under every door and a
bird fly out at every window. He even went so far as to build his house
with the usual number of windows, and no glass in the sashes; he lived
in that house for fifty years, reared a large family there, and no death
ever occurred in it. He himself died away from home, of small-pox, at
eighty; his son immediately glazed all the windows of the house, and
several of the family died within the first year of the alteration. The
story sounds apocryphal, I own, though I did not get it from Sir Jonah
Barrington, but somewhere in the scarcely less amusing pages of Sir John
Sinclair. I will not advise you, my unfortunate sufferer, to break every
pane of glass in your domicile, though I have no doubt that Nathaniel
and his boy-companions would enter with enthusiasm into the process; I
am not fond of extremes; but you certainly might go so far as to take
the nails out of my bed-room windows, and yet keep a good deal this side
the Lyne.
I hardly dare go on to speak of exercise, lest I should share the
reproach of that ancient rhetorician who,--as related by Plutarch, in
his Aphorisms,--after delivering an oration in praise of Hercules, was
startled by the satirical inquiry from his audience, whether any one
had ever dispraised Hercules. As with Hercules, so with the physical
activity he represents,--no one dispraises, if few practise it. Even
the disagreement of doctors has brought out but little skepticism on
this point. Cardan, it is true, in his treatise, "Plantae cur Animalibus
diuturniores," maintained that trees lived longer than men because
they never stirred from their places. Exercise, he held, increases
transpiration; transpiration shortens life; to live long, then, we need
only remain perfectly still. Lord Bacon fell in with this fancy, and
advised "oily unctions," to prevent perspiration. Maupertuis went
farther, and proposed to keep the body covered with pitch for this
purpose: conceive, Dolorosus, of spending threescore years and ten in
a garment of tar, without even the ornament of feathers, sitting
tranquilly in our chairs, waiting for longevity! In more recent times,
I can remember only Dr. Darwin as an advocate of sedentary living. He
attempted to show its advantages by the healthy longevity attained by
quiet old ladies in country-towns. But this is questioned by his critic,
Dr. Beddoes, who admits the longevity, but denies the healthiness;
he maintains that the old ladies are taking some new medicine every
day,--at least, if they have a physician who understands his business.
Now I will not maintain, with Frederick the Great, that all our systems
of education are wrong, because they aim to make men students or clerks,
whereas the mere shape of the body shows (so thought King Frederick)
that we are primarily designed for postilions, and should spend most of
our lives on horseback. But it is very certain that all the physical
universe takes the side of health and activity, wooing us forth into
Nature, imploring us hourly, and in unsuspected ways, to receive her
blessed breath into body and soul, and share in her eternal youth. For
this are summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, given; for this do
violet and bloodroot come, and gentian and witch-hazel go; for this do
changing sunsets make yon path between the pines a gateway into heaven;
for this does day shut us down within the loneliness of its dome of
light, and night, lifting it, make us free of the vast fellowship of
stars; for this do pale meteors wander nightly, soft as wind-blown
blossoms, down the air; for this do silent snows transform the winter
woods to feathery things, that seem too light to linger, and yet too
vast to take their flight; for this does the eternal ocean follow its
queen with patient footsteps round earth's human shores; for this does
all the fair creation answer to every dream or mood of man, so that we
receive but what we give;--all is offered to us, to call us from our
books and our trade, and summon us into Nature's health and joy. To
study, with the artist, the least of her beauties,--to explore, with the
man of science, the smallest of her wonders,--or even simply to wander
among her exhaustless resources, like a child, needing no interest
unborrowed from the eye,--this feeds body and brain and heart and soul
together.
But I see that your attention is wandering a little, Dolorosus, and
perhaps I ought not to be surprised. I think I hear you respond,
impatiently, in general terms, that you are not "sentimental." I admit
it; never within my memory did you err on that side. You also hint that
you never _did_ care much about weeds or bugs. The phrases are not
scientific, but the opinion is intelligible. Perhaps my ardor has
carried me too fast for my audience. While it would be a pleasure, no
doubt, to see you transformed into an artist or a _savant_, yet that is
scarcely to be expected, and, if attained, might not be quite enough.
The studies of the naturalist, exclusively pursued, may tend to make a
man too conscious and critical,--patronizing Nature, instead of enjoying
her. He may even grow morbidly sensitive, like Buffon, who became so
impressed with the delicacy and mystery of the human organization, that
he was afraid to stoop even to pick up his own pen, when dropped, but
called a servant to restore it. The artist, also, becomes often narrowed
and petty, and regards the universe as a sort of factory, arranged to
turn out "good bits of color" for him. Something is needed to make us
more free and unconscious, in our out-door lives, than these too wise
individuals; and that something is best to be found in athletic sports.
It was a genuine impulse which led Sir Humphrey Davy to care more for
fishing than even for chemistry, and made Byron prouder of his swimming
than of "Childe Harold," and induced Sir Robert Walpole always to open
his gamekeeper's letters first, and his diplomatic correspondence
afterwards. Athletic sports are "boyish," are they? Then they are
precisely what we want. We Americans certainly do not have much boyhood
under the age of twenty, and we must take it afterwards or not at all.
Who can describe the unspeakable refreshment for an overworked brain,
of laying aside all cares, and surrendering one's self to simple bodily
activity? Laying them aside! I retract the expression; they slip off
unnoticed. You cannot embark care in your wherry; there is no room for
the odious freight. Care refuses to sit behind the horseman, despite the
Latin sentence; you leave it among your garments when you plunge into
the river, it rolls away from the rolling cricket-ball, the first whirl
in the gymnasium disposes of it, and you are left free, as boys and
birds are free. If athletic amusements did nothing for the body, they
would still be medicine for the soul. Nay, it is Plato who says
that exercise will almost cure a guilty conscience,--and can we be
indifferent to this, my fellow-sinner?
Why will you persist in urging that you "cannot afford" these
indulgences, as you call them? They are not indulgences,--they are
necessaries. Charge them, in your private account-book, under the heads
of food and clothing, and as a substitute for your present enormous
items under the head of medicine. O mistaken economist! can you afford
the cessation of labor and the ceaseless drugging and douching of your
last few years? Did not all your large experience in the retail-business
teach you the comparative value of the ounce of prevention and the pound
of cure? Are not fresh air and cold water to be had cheap? and is not
good bread less costly than cake and pies? Is not the gymnasium a more
economical institution than the hospital? and is not a pair of skates a
good investment, if it aids you to elude the grasp of the apothecary? Is
the cow Pepsin, on the whole, a more frugal hobby to ride than a good
saddle-horse? Besides, if you insist upon pecuniary economy, do begin
by economizing on the exercise which you pay others for taking in your
stead,--on the corn and pears which you buy in the market, instead of
removing to a suburban house and raising them yourself,--and in the
reluctant silver you pay the Irishman who splits your wood. Or if,
suddenly reversing your line of argument, you plead that this would
impoverish the Irishman, you can at least treat him as you do the
organ-grinder, and pay him an extra fee to go on to your next neighbor.
Dolorosus, there is something very noble, if you could but discover it,
in a perfect human body. In spite of all our bemoaning, the physical
structure of man displays its due power and beauty when we consent to
give it a fair chance. On the cheek of every healthy child that plays in
the street, though clouded by all the dirt that ever incrusted a young
O'Brien or M'Cafferty, there is a glory of color such as no artist ever
painted. I can take you to-morrow into a circus or a gymnasium, and show
you limbs and attitudes which are worth more study than the Apollo or
the Antinous, because they are life, not marble. How noble were Horatio
Greenough's meditations, in presence of the despised circus-rider! "I
worship, when I see this brittle form borne at full speed on the back
of a fiery horse, yet dancing as on the quiet ground, and smiling in
conscious safety."
I admit that this view, like every other, may be carried to excess.
We can hardly expect to correct our past neglect of bodily training,
without falling into reactions and extremes, in the process. There is
our friend Jones, for instance, "the Englishman," as the boys on the
Common call him, from his cheery portliness of aspect. He is the man who
insisted on keeping the telegraph-office open until 2, A.M., to hear
whether Morrissey or the Benicia Boy won the prize-fight. I cannot say
much for his personal conformity to his own theories at present, for he
is growing rather too stout; but he likes vicarious exercise, and is
doing something for the next generation, even if he does make the club
laugh, sometimes, by advancing theories of training which the lower
circumference of his own waistcoat does not seem to justify. But
Charley, his eldest, can ride, shoot, and speak the truth, like an
ancient Persian; he is the best boxer in college, and is now known to
have gone to Canada _incog._, during the vacation, under the immediate
supervision of Morris, the teacher of sparring, to see that same fight.
It is true that the youth blushes, now, whenever that trip is alluded
to; and when he was cross-questioned by his pet sister Kate, (Kate
Coventry she delights to be called,) as to whether it wasn't "splendid,"
he hastily told her that she didn't know what she was talking about,
(which was undoubtedly true,)--and that he wished he didn't, either. The
truth is, that Charley, with his honest, boyish face, must have been
singularly out of place among that brutal circle; and there is little
doubt that he retired from the company before the set-to was fairly
begun, and that respectable old Morris went with him. But, at any rate,
they are a noble-looking family, and well brought up. Charley, with all
his pugilism, stands fair for a part at Commencement, they say; and
if you could have seen little Kate teaching her big cousin to skate
backwards, at Jamaica Pond, last February, it would have reminded you
of the pretty scene of the little cadet attitudinising before the great
Formes, in "Figaro." The whole family incline in the same direction;
even Laura, the elder sister,--who is attending a course of lectures on
Hygiene, and just at present sits motionless for half an hour before
every meal for her stomach's sake, and again a whole hour afterwards for
her often (imaginary) infirmities,--even Laura is a perfect Hebe in
health and bloom, and saved herself and her little sister when the boat
upset, last summer, at Dove Harbor,--while the two young men who were
with them had much ado to secure their own elegant persons, without
rendering much aid to the girls. And when I think, Dolorosus, of this
splendid animal vigor of the race of Jones, and then call to mind the
melancholy countenances of your forlorn little offspring, I really think
that it would, on the whole, be unsafe to trust you with that revolver;
you might be tempted to damage yourself or somebody else with it, before
departing for the Rocky Mountains.