Andover is--or Andover was--like the lady to whom Steele gave
immortality in the finest and most famous epigram ever offered to
woman.
To have loved Andover; to have been born in Andover--I am brought up
short, in these notes, by the sudden recollection that I was _not_
born in Andover. It has always been so difficult to believe it, that I
am liable any day to forget it; but the facts compel me to infer that
I was born within a mile of the State House. I must have become a
citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his
Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary.
I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the
large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund
horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old--to
this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological
trustee--and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green,
so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her
father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play
upon.
What, I wonder, may be the earliest act of memory on record? Mine is
not at all unusual--dating only to two and a half years; at which time
I clearly remember being knocked down by my dog, in my father's area
in Boston, and being crowed over by a rooster of abnormal proportions
who towered between me and the sky, a dragon in size and capabilities.
My father always maintained that he distinctly remembered hearing the
death of Napoleon announced in his presence when he was one year and a
half old.
Is the humiliating difference between the instinctive selection of
Napoleon and that of the rooster, one of temperament or sex? In either
case, it is significant enough to lead one to drop the subject.
Next to having been born in a university town, comes the advantage--if
it be an advantage--of having spent one's youth there. Mr. Howells
says that he must be a dull fellow who does not, at some time or
other, hate his native village; and I must confess that I have not, at
all stages of my life, held my present opinion of Andover. There have
been times when her gentle indifference to the preoccupations of the
world has stung me, as all serenity stings restlessness. There have
been times when the inevitable limitations of her horizon have seemed
as familiar as the coffin-lid to the dead.
[Illustration: PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS'S STUDY.
Drawn from a photograph taken after Professor Phelps's death, when the
study had been somewhat dismantled.]
There was an epoch when her theology--But, nevertheless, I certainly
look back upon Andover Hill with a very gentle pleasure and heartfelt
sense of debt.
It has been particularly asked of me to give some form to my
recollections of a phase of local life which is now so obviously
passing away that it has a certain historical interest.
That Andover remains upon the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not
dispute; but the Andover of New England theology--the Andover of a
peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world
and all that was therein--will soon become an interesting wraith.
The life of a professor's daughter in a university town is always a
little different from the lives of other girls; but the difference
seems to me--unless she be by nature entirely alien to it--in favor of
the girl. Were I to sum in one word my impressions of the influences
of Andover life upon a robust young mind and heart, I should call them
_gentle_.
As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying
thought. As soon as we began to feel, we were aware of a neighborhood
that did not feel superficially; at least, in certain higher
directions. When we began to ask the "questions of life," which all
intelligent young people ask sooner or later, we found ourselves in a
village of three institutions and their dependencies committed to the
pursuit of an ideal of education for which no amount of later, or
what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than
Christian.
Such things tell. Andover girls did not waltz, or suffer summer
engagements at Bar Harbor, a new one every year; neither did they read
Ibsen, or yellow novels; nor did they handle the French stories that
are hidden from parents; though they were excellent French scholars in
their day.
I do not even know that one can call them more "serious" than their
city sisters--for we were a merry lot; at least, _my_ lot were. But
they were, I believe, especially open-hearted, gentle-minded girls.
If they were "out of the world" to a certain extent, they were, to
another, out of the evil of it. As I look back upon the little
drama between twelve and twenty--I might rather say, between two and
twenty--Andover young people seem to me to have been as truly and
naturally innocent as one may meet anywhere in the world. Some of
these private records of girl-history were so white, so clear, so
sweet, that to read them would be like watching a morning-glory open.
The world is full, thank Heaven, of lovely girls; but though other
forms or phases of gentle society claim their full quota, I never saw
a lovelier than those I knew on Andover Hill.
One terrible tragedy, indeed, befell our little "set;" for we had our
sets in Andover, as well as they of Newport or New York.
A high-bred girl of exceptional beauty was furtively kissed one
evening by a daring boy (not a native of Andover, I hasten to
explain), and the furore which followed this unprecedented enormity
it would be impossible to describe to a member of more complicated
circles of society. Fancy the reception given such a commonplace at
any of our fashionable summer resorts to-day!
On Andover Hill the event was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were
country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan)
social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy,
walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, any little
privilege which he might not have taken in her father's house, and
with her mother's knowledge? I never knew one. The case of which I
speak was historic, and as far as I ever knew, unique, and was that of
a victim, not an offender.
The little beauty to whom this atrocity happened cried all night and
all the next day; she was reported not to have stopped crying for
twenty-six hours. Her pretty face grew wan and haggard. She was too
ill to go to her lessons.
The teachers--to whom she had promptly related the
circumstance--condoled with her; the entire school vowed to avenge
her; we were a score of as disturbed and indignant girls as ever wept
over woman's wrongs, or scorned a man's depravity.
Yet, for aught I know to the contrary, this abandoned young man may
have grown up to become a virtuous member of society; possibly even
an exemplary husband and father. I have never been able to trace his
history; probably the moral repulsion was too great.
Yet they were no prigs, for their innocence! Andover girls, in the
best and brightest sense of the word, led a gay life.
The preponderance of young men on the Hill gave more than ample
opportunity for well-mannered good times; and we made the most of
them.
[Illustration: VIEW LOOKING FROM THE FRONT OF ELIZABETH STUART
PHELPS'S HOME IN ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]
Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were handed
breathlessly down to us, and cherished with awe. A lady of the
village, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported
to have refused nineteen offers of marriage. Another, still plainly
beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine
theologues in one winter. Neither of these ladies married. We watched
their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex,
not easily to be understood by a man. When we began to think how
many times they _might_ have married, the subject assumed sensational
proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied,
regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew--and
knew that the rest knew--that it was (to use the Andover phraseology)
not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute,
that an Andover girl passed through life alone. This little social
fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns,
had mingled effects upon impressionable girls. For the proportion of
masculine society was almost Western in its munificence.
Perhaps it is my duty to say just here that, if honestly put to
the question, I should admit that this proportion was almost too
munificent for the methods of education then--and still to an extent
now--in vogue.
A large Academy for boys, and a flourishing Seminary for young men,
set across the village streets from two lively girls' schools, gave
to one observer of this little scholastic world her first argument for
co-education.
I am confident that if the boys who serenaded (right manfully) under
the windows of Abbott Academy or of "The Nunnery," or who tied
their lady's colors to the bouquets that they tossed on balconies of
professors' houses, had been put, class to class, in competition with
us, they would have wasted less time upon us; and I could not deny
that if the girls who cut little holes in their fans through which one
could look, undetected and unreproved, at one's favorite Academy boy,
on some public occasion, had been preparing to meet or pass that boy
at Euclid or Xenophon recitation next morning, he would have occupied
less of their fancy. Intellectual competition is simpler, severer, and
more wholesome than the unmitigated social plane; and a mingling of
the two may be found calculated to produce the happiest results.
"Poor souls!" said a Boston lady once to me, upon my alluding to a
certain literary club which was at that time occupying the enthusiasm
of the Hill. "Poor souls! I suppose they are so starved for society!"
We can fancy the amusement with which this comment would have been
received if it had been repeated--but it never was repeated till this
moment--in Andover.
For Andover had her social life, and knew no better, for the most
part, than to enjoy it. It is true that many of her diversions took on
that religious or academic character natural to the place. Of village
parish life we knew nothing, for our chapel was, like others of its
kind, rather an exclusive little place of worship. We were ignorant
of pastoral visits, deacons, parochial gossip, church fairs, and what
Professor Park used to call "the doughnut business;" and, though we
cultivated a weekly prayer-meeting in the lecture-room, I think its
chief influence was as a training-school for theological students
whose early efforts at public exhortation (poor fellows!) quaveringly
besought their Professors to grow in grace, and admonished the
families of the Faculty circle to repent.
But we had our lectures and our concerts--quite distinct, as orthodox
circles will understand, from those missionary festivals which went, I
never discovered why, by the name of Monthly Concerts--and our
Porter Rhets. I believe this cipher stood for Porter Rhetorical; and
research, if pushed far enough, would develop the fact that Porter
indicated a dead professor who once founded a chair and a debating
society for young men. Then we had our anniversaries and our
exhibitions, when we got ourselves into our organdie muslins or best
coats, and listened to the boys spouting Greek and Latin orations in
the old, red brick Academy, and heard the theological students--but
here this reporter is forced to pause. I suppose I ought to be ashamed
of it, but the fact is, that I never attended an anniversary exercise
of the Seminary in my life. It would be difficult to say why. I think
my reluctance consisted in an abnormal objection to Trustees. So far
as I know, they were an innocent set of men, of good reputations and
quite harmless. But I certainly acquired, at a very early age,
an antipathy to this class of Americans from which I have never
recovered.
Our anniversaries occurred, according to the barbaric custom of the
times, in the hottest heat of August; and if there be a hotter place
in Massachusetts than Andover was, I have yet to simmer in it. Our
houses were, of course, thrown open, and crowded to the shingles.
I remember once sharing my tiny room with a little guest who would not
have the window open, though the thermometer had stood above ninety,
day and night, for a week; and because she was a trustee's daughter,
I must not complain. Perhaps this experience emphasized a natural lack
of sympathy with her father.
At all events, I cherished a hidden antagonism to these excellent and
useful men, of which I make this late and public confession. It seemed
to me that everybody in Andover was afraid of them. I "took it out" in
the cordial defiance of a born rebel.
Then we had our tea-parties--theological, of course--when the students
came to tea in alphabetical order; and the Professor told his best
stories; and the ladies of the family were expected to keep more or
less quiet while the gentlemen talked. But this, I should say, was of
the earlier time.
And, of course, we had the occasional supply; and as for the clerical
guest, in some shape he was always with us.
I remember the shocked expression on the face of a not very eminent
minister, because I joined in the conversation when, in the absence
of my father's wife, the new mother, it fell to me to take the head of
the table. It was truly a stimulating conversation, intellectual, and,
like all clerical conversations, vivaciously amusing; and it swept
me in, unconsciously. I think this occurred after I had written "The
Gates Ajar."
This good man has since become an earnest anti-suffragist and opposer
of the movement for the higher education of women. I can only hope he
does not owe his dismal convictions to the moral jar received on that
occasion; and I regret to learn that his daughter has been forbidden
to go to college.
[Illustration: DR. EDWARDS A. PARK, FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN
THEOLOGY IN ANDOVER SEMINARY.