heinousness. You may combine corruption, debauchery and all the forms
of degredation known to inventive genius of man, and cord them together
with strings drawn from maiden’s hearts, and paint the scene in human
blood bespangled with broken vows and seared consciences, and still it
will redden Heaven with revengeful blush and leave you blacken hell to
make it equal.”
Thomas Russell, an ally of the Hendersons, was brought to trial for
the murder. Here are sketches of certain persons present at the trial:
“One of The People’s witnesses was Miss Amanda Bulliner ... about
sixteen years old. She took the stand with a helpless and confiding
look, her voice was a little softened by emotion, her rose-left lips
curled delicately, but soon her clear, translucent eye lit up with a
brilliant lustre. The shadows of misery seemed to depart. Her soft,
round cheek dimpled and dimpled again, like the play [of?] waters in
the sun, in the lovely and touch [touching?] assembly of charms. Her
features were of classic regularity. Her presence seemed to shadow
the place. So pure, so truthful, so charming her actions, that all
pronounced her a most gentle, and most noble creature. Though never
a jewelled wreath may span the curls of her beautiful brow, yet,
happiness may as well erect its shrine around her, for Nature can no
further gifts bestow.... One of the witnesses was the famous Sarah
Stocks [John Bulliner and Russell had both courted her], who swore to
threats. Her contour is not as faultless as a Greek goddess, but her
form and features had caught some new grace from the times. Her eye was
as clear and cold as a stalactite of Capri. She wore a sigh, and there
is something in a sigh for everybody. But I will throw no shadow over
her, for life in her is as mysterious as in the rich belle; and when
the golden chariot of destiny rolls through the skies, she may take her
seat among the great.”
Yet all these charms arrayed against Russell could not convict him. He
was acquitted, and, though pursued by the Bulliners, got away. Fate,
however, tangled him in the snare of Milo Erwin’s prophecy. “If Thomas
Russell is guilty, it may be that the almighty sovereignty, love, was
too strong for him, and envy seized him, and John and not Davis [David]
was the one he wanted to kill. If he could have wrung this lady from
John Bulliner, and unstained her life, I doubt not if the shadow of
his own would not have again darkened it; and inasmuch as he did not,
it may be that the arrowy words wrung by the hand of passion from each
of them were destined to hang quivering in memory’s core till they
festered and bled, making an irremedial wound, shaped in the red-hot
forge of jealousy, and cured only by the exultant feelings of gratified
revenge. These little bubbles of joy that jet up from the tumultuous
waters of passion, soon evaporate, and leave but mingled dross and
shame to fester and canker the mind of its possessor, who ever after
leads a life of infamy and its accompanying wretchedness. Whoever
committed the murders is the guiltiest of them all. It was he who with
death first knocked at our portals, and with buck and ball opened the
flood gates of misery, and let murder rush with living tide upon our
people. And today his life is ruined, his hopes blasted, and sooner or
later he will come to sorrow, shame and beggary, and have the scorpion
thongs of conscience lashing his guilty bosom as he promenades the
sidewalks of destiny.”
Consider the plight of the Bulliner boys, thus denied justice by the
law. “Must they be driven to the bushes by this hard bargain, or be
placed for a lifetime at the mercy of assassins, with their hearts
enclosed in palisades of sorrow? They saw their father and brother shot
down by vandal hands, and their own lives threatened by fiends stalking
in midnight darkness.... What could they do but pick up the gauntlet
hurled into their faces, and give vent to anger long pent up?...
Embassadors were at an end. Words of menace and expostulation were
exchanged for the thunders of the shot gun.... The god of the bushes
had been invoked.”
This is enough to justify my claim for Milo Erwin’s book, but I must
cite one anti-climax from the sequel touching Marshall Crain, who
joined the vendetta and was later hanged for murder. “Soon after,
Marsh’s wife entered his cell, and he took her on his knees and
embraced her.... Her eyes glittered with a metallic gleam, and the soft
curl of her lips was lost in a quiver of despair. Her’s was a deadly
pallor. It was the incandescence, and not the flame of passion, that
was burning in her inmost being. She would burst out into shrieks of
great anguish, and then subside into sobs. She dreaded the heaving of
her own bosom—dreaded the future and the world. If she could have died
she would have been happy and holy in the hope of mercy. To be torn
from a love made holier by past sorrows, was an insult to the attribute
of Heaven. Marsh was in his sock feet, with a pair of jeans pants on,
and a ragged jeans coat. He looked care-worn, and shed a few tears.”
AT THE SATURDAY CLUB
Few clubs have had a more distinguished membership than the Saturday
Club of Boston, not even Dr. Johnson’s, to which the Saturday often
compared itself in its golden days. It had Boston’s best learning,
best poetry, best wit, best philanthropy, best statesmanship, and only
lacked Boston’s best fashion because it had no great fondness for the
Cotton Whigs of Beacon Street. Its origins were predominantly literary.
As early as 1836 there had been a sort of informal organization which
held a “Symposium” now and then, and which Emerson enjoyed for all
that it was very clerical and that he said its seal might well be “two
porcupines meeting with all their spines erect.” This organization
languished, however, and Emerson—who here appears as very hungry
for companions—and his friend Samuel Gray Ward planned in 1849 a
Town-and-Country Club. This also languished under that name; but in
the fifties two clubs grew up, existing side by side and more or
less interlocking. The Magazine or Atlantic Club, purely literary,
gradually faded, or rather gave way to the _Atlantic_ dinners; the
Saturday Club, for which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership
and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no small part by
Horatio Woodman’s special talent as high steward of the feasts, held
on the last Saturday of each month except July, August, and September.
Some such civilizing influence must have been needed in a group among
whom Woodman’s introduction of mushrooms as a food seemed a startling
novelty. According to Emerson’s journal Dwight was chosen to experiment
first with the unfamiliar delicacy, and he amiably reported: “It tastes
like a roof of a house.”
Something more than the fact that the publishers have made Edward
Waldo Emerson’s _The Early Years of the Saturday Club_ somewhat in
the likeness of _The Education of Henry Adams_ keeps reminding one of
that other book, though Adams, nipping critic of orthodox Boston, is
nowhere mentioned. The horribly dreary Boston world of Adams’s second
chapter assuredly did not exist for the Saturday men, a body so festive
that when Agassiz returned from Brazil in the summer of 1866, Lowell,
Holmes, Fields, and the rest “joined hands, made a ring, and danced
around him like a lot of boys, while Mr. Emerson stood apart, his face
radiant.” In fact, no more genial chronicle of New England in negligee
has been written. The Pundits were a long way from the Frog Pond
when the Adirondack Club, most of its members then or later members
of the Saturday Club as well, went to its first camp in 1858. Holmes
would not leave the daily felicities of the Hub, and Longfellow, also
no frontiersman, gave as excuse for staying at home the report that
Emerson was taking a gun, though in fact Emerson never touched man or
beast with a bullet. But Emerson was enchanted with the transcendental
paradise which he found in the wilderness; and Lowell, younger and
robuster, climbed a pine tree over fourteen feet in girth and sixty
feet to the lowest branch.
Still, the Club dined more than it picnicked. While it unfortunately
had no systematic Boswell, not a few of its good sayings are brought
together in the record, particularly as taken down by Emerson in his
omnivorous journal. There is Tom Appleton’s praise of horse-chestnuts:
“I have carried this one in my pocket these ten years, and in all
that time have had no touch of rheumatism. Indeed, its action is
retrospective, for I never had rheumatism before.” And the same wit
commented as follows upon a sad defect in the economy of nature:
“Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery; and the common black duck, if
it ate the wild celery, is just as good, only, damn ’em, they won’t
eat it.” Once William Morris Hunt was asked if he would like to see
a Japanese vase or cup which Norton had just received. “Like to see
it?” Hunt exclaimed. “By God, it’s one of those damned ultimate
things.” Felton, kept from a meeting by illness, “horizontally but ever
cordially” wrote that he was “living on a pleasant variety of porridge
and paregoric.” Holmes, referring to the immense vitality of Agassiz,
said: “I cannot help thinking what a feast the cannibals would have
if they boiled him.” Judge Hoar declared he valued the Book of Common
Prayer for its special recognition of his native town: “O God who art
the Author of good and the lover of Concord.” Holmes, no beauty,
declared: “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than
an ornament.” Longfellow, vexed at seeing plover on the table in
May, 1858, “proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game laws thus
violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive
Slave Law.” Whittier complained to Lowell over some delay in connection
with a poem sent to the _Atlantic_: “Let me hear from thee some way.
If thee fail to do this, I shall turn thee out of thy professor’s
chair, by virtue of my new office of overseer.” To commentators who
tamper with Shakespeare’s text, Lowell felt “inclined to apply the
quadrisyllablic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta”; Felton
identified the brother of Agis as Eudamidas.
A characteristic conversation between Holmes and Hawthorne goes thus:
“Holmes said quickly ‘I wish you would come to the Club oftener.’ ‘I
should like to,’ said Hawthorne, ‘but I can’t drink.’ ‘Neither can
I.’ ‘Well, but I can’t eat.’ ‘Nevertheless, we should like to see
you.’ ‘But I can’t talk, either.’” Actually, Hawthorne hardly ever
spoke at the Club, preferring to sit next to Emerson or Longfellow
and to let the other speak for him. Once, however, he spoke to
amusing effect. Anthony Trollope, a guest, had roared out that only
England produced good peaches or grapes. Lowell reports: “I appealed
to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a
moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off
rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he
said: ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to
describe to me what he meant by a peach, and he described something
very like a cucumber.’” A brilliant letter from the elder Henry James
still further visualizes Hawthorne at the Club: “He has the look all
the time, to one who doesn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds
himself in a company of detectives. But in spite of his rusticity, I
felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish.... It was so pathetic
to see him, contented, sprawling Concord owl that he was and always
has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected
to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny
Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that
no person should dare to ask him a question ... eating his dinner and
doing absolutely nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord
den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an
owl couldn’t remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a
canary.”
Some of these things were not actually uttered at the Club, but they
pretty accurately represented its conversation. An abridgment would
have to be almost as long as the book to do full justice to its wealth
of material; it would have to repeat countless literary incidents: such
as the fact that Lowell for a long time tried to find out something
of Forceythe Willson, only to discover him living in Cambridge within
two hundred yards of Elmwood; that E. J. Reed, the Chief Constructor of
the British Navy, thought Longfellow had written “the finest poem on
shipbuilding that ever was or probably ever will be written”; and that
one of the members said Emerson’s “good word about a man’s character is
like being knighted on the field of battle.” No one, indeed, emerges
from the history in such noble proportions or in such an agreeable
light as Emerson. Nor is this due to any partiality of his son. The
truth plainly appears that even in the company of Agassiz and Hoar
and Holmes and James and Lowell and Norton, Emerson was the spiritual
master of the Club. Sumner, on the other hand, though heartily
praised in a good many pages, simply refuses to seem attractive. He
had the vices of manner for which Boston is too famous—its egotism,
its insolence, its complacency. The early history of the Saturday
Club goes far toward proving that fame unjust. Its members at least
can be called inhuman only in the sense that they were honourable,
conscientious, busy, temperate, and kind much beyond the common run
of men conspicuously talented. And they lacked neither mirth nor
fellowship. Why are their books on the whole not as good as themselves?
Did the thinness of the product of most of them come from Puritan
inhibitions? The history of the Saturday Club unconsciously emphasizes
a discrepancy, for the men who wrote the gentle, pure, noble, but not
too rich or varied classics of New England were themselves men of
pretty full blood and high hearts.
THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE
To what is due the fact, which can hardly be denied, that the great
older magazines no longer dominate the fields of journalism and
literature in the United States as they once did? Many answers may be
given, and all have been given by observers of varying predilections:
that the tide of proletarian vulgarity has risen; that the levels of
art have fallen; that public taste demands more violent stimulants;
that the non-English elements of our national composition are asserting
themselves as never before; that a sharper critical temper has invaded
the atmosphere; that the Bolsheviki are among us, red and raging;
that our democracy has just begun to live. Each of these is but
explanation from one angle. Speaking as historian, I see in that shift
of leadership the end of an epoch, the period from about 1870 to 1910
which may be called the Silver Age of our literature.
It is no essential contradiction of that title that during the era
there throve such glorious barbarians as Whitman and Mark Twain; they
came from a class and a region which flowered later than the Shantung
of the nation, the New England of the image-breaking Emerson, the
philosophical hired man Thoreau, the transcendental critic and artist
Hawthorne, the fighting Quaker Whittier, the many-tongued translator
Longfellow, the jolly Cantabrigian Lowell, the festive Bostonian
Holmes. Nor is it a contradiction that at the end of the century came
such a rollicking philosopher as William James or such a silken ironist
as George Santayana, or such naturalistic young men as Stephen Crane
and Frank Norris and Jack London, or such a multitudinous cynic and
sentimentalist as O. Henry; or even that during the era lived those
three terrible infants of the Adams family, Charles Francis 2d, Henry,
and Brooks, to flay the era and all its inherited conceptions. The
background and the prevailing colour of the age were still silver. It
was then that reminiscence began to enrich the texture of our literary
past. Most of the epigones—Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frank B.
Sanborn, for instance—devoted a good part of their lives to writing
about the lives of the protagonists. Holmes, of the greater line,
wrote memoirs of Emerson and Motley; Howells, later but greater too,
gave us dozens of precious memorial essays. Our classics settled into
comfortable positions to wait till some revolution should spill them
out. Washington as chief national hero gave way to Lincoln, whom the
Silver Age softened and sweetened until his angularities hardly showed.
The old flaming ardours about manifest destiny considerably cooled,
not so much because the national humility was stronger but because
there was a stronger sense of decorum current. Poetry was dainty and
smooth and rounded as never before in this country. The short story
after many experiments straitened itself to a few prevailing types of
a distinctly native form and substance. The novel, with Howells as
choragus, even subdued Mark Twain from the extravagance of his earlier
burlesques to the suaver annals of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc;
and it taught the drama that reality had a place on the stage as well
as in books. Our essayists grew lighter and gayer, not without a
good deal of orthodoxy and a gusto which somehow seemed to have been
trained upon sweet cider, but still mellow and kindly and urbane.
After the faun Thoreau, the sage John Burroughs! Scholarship grew to
Alexandrian proportions; dissertations showed their heads. At the best,
these silver qualities all tended towards art; at the worst they bred
dilettantism and languor.
Now such unaccustomed qualities as dilettantism and languor in the
midst of a nation which had plunged into furious industrial competition
and was beginning to cherish imperialistic schemes without quite
realizing what it was about, hardly belonged to the setting. In the
Silver Age this discrepancy had seemed not to matter very greatly, for
the reason that the opinion of the day held that after all a fairly
decisive cleavage exists between art and affairs. The trouble began
when a more strenuous generation arose and demanded that literature
perform a larger, or at any rate a different, share in the national
work. It is a hot and impatient generation, not tolerant of its elders.
It damns the gentle tradition by calling it genteel. It suspects it
of lukewarmness, accuses it of prudery, and believes it to have been
verbose and trivial. The older magazines were essentially the children
of that Silver Age which is now under indictment. The question seems to
be whether they can renounce their old virtues, now become sins, and
acquire the new virtues, which certainly would have been sins in their
proper day.
JOHN BURROUGHS
John Burroughs long seemed old to many of his readers, but measured
by anything but mere linear years he was older than he seemed to most
of them. Measured, for instance, by reference to the fame of Whitman,
Burroughs went back to the days when he was a clerk in the Treasury,
and Whitman, then likewise a Government clerk, was dismissed from his
post by a Secretary of the Interior who now survives in the memory
of his nation chiefly by reason of this episode. Burroughs wrote the
earliest book ever written about his greatest friend, and for more
than half a century he neither forgot nor long neglected to praise
Whitman’s large sanity and seerlike wisdom. Measured by the reputation
of Thoreau, of whom it was easy for the most casual to perceive that
Burroughs was in some fashion a disciple, he went back so far that he
had been seventeen when _Walden_ came into the world, and he began
himself to write about birds and green fields before Thoreau died.
And measured by a line even longer than the fame of either Whitman
or Thoreau, Burroughs went back so nearly to the origins of American
literature that he saw the Catskills, of which he was to remain the
particular singer and annalist, within three or four years after
Irving, heretofore acquainted with them only from the deck of a Hudson
River boat, had first visited the neighbourhood already sacred to the
quite mythical but also immortal spook of Rip Van Winkle.
To mention Irving is to suggest a comparison actually more fruitful
than that which some thousands of pens have recently made between
Burroughs and Thoreau. The bland old man whose beard was latterly as
well known in these States as that of Bryant in its day, had hardly
anything in common, except an affectionate concern for external
nature, with the dry, hard, vivid Yankee who acted out his anarchistic
principles on the shores of Walden Pond and fiercely proclaimed
the duty of civil disobedience to all men who might find the world
travelling along false paths. Burroughs had in him too much of the milk
of American kindness to thrive in a comparison with an authentic genius
like Thoreau, who might not be half the naturalist that Burroughs
was but was twice the poet and a dozen times the pungent critic of
human life. Nor, in another direction, does Burroughs appear to much
advantage by comparison with Whitman, who had a cosmic reach and a
prophetic lift and thrust that never visited Slabsides. Rather, for
all Burroughs employed a modern idiom and took to the country instead
of staying snugly in town, he points back to the earlier tradition
of smoothness and urbane kindness and level optimism which Irving
practised. Did Burroughs not but a few weeks before his death take
a mild exception to the “naked realism” of Howells? In that phrase
a very old school speaks. Perhaps we shall in the long run remember
best that Burroughs annually made one of an odd triumvirate of campers
which included besides him Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. Let us,
for the sake of seeing the group in its true perspective, call Mr.
Ford the village blacksmith who happens to have the fortunate touch
of Midas; let us call Mr. Edison the village inventor who happens
to have the touch of a mechanical Merlin; let us call Burroughs the
village naturalist who to his native instincts adds the winning gift of
language and makes himself heard, as his friends do by their machines,
outside the village.
BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE
There is a broad house of life and there is a narrow house of life.
What marks the broad house is not so much the breadth of the walls
within which its people live nor the height of the deeds they do or of
the passions they experience; rather it is the insulation—as it may
be called—which protects their nerves against the agony of too rough
contact. Custom is the larger part of this insulation. In the broad
house men and women grow unconcerned about irritating things with which
they are familiar. The minor imbecilities of their relatives and their
companions do not pain them greatly. They do not tug at leashes or
kick against pricks or cry over spilt milk or strain at gnats. They
can live in the presence of their own thoughts without discomfort. And
when custom is not enough to keep the insulation stout, change of scene
or mood or occupation mends it. In the broad house memory is not very
long. When the occupants begin to feel stifled they stir about and soon
forget. When they begin to brood they expose themselves to laughter
or excitement and pull themselves together. When they have been bored
beyond a certain point they turn to a new job and get lost in it. From
too much thinking they take refuge in sleep or liquor.