1882.
IN beginning his tender and charming paper upon
Washington Irving and Macaulay, Thackeray recalls the beautiful story of
which he was so fond, of Sir Walter Scott's last words to his son-in-law
Lockhart: "Be a good man, my dear; be a good man." It was a soft
autumnal day. The windows were wide open. The low sound of the rippling
Tweed stole into the chamber. The most renowned and the most widely
beloved of living men lay dying, after a career of admiration and
adulation, and of gratified ambition almost unexampled, and in the clear
and serene light of the moment that shows things as they are, the one
lesson and moral garnered by that marvellous life is spoken in the
simple words, "Be a good man, my dear." ...
There are men whose simplicity and dignity and strength and purity of
character, whose sound judgment and supreme common-sense, dispose of
sophistry and artifice in all relations and pursuits, as surely and
completely as the sun dries the dew. They are gentlemen, because they
know other men only as men, touching electrically whatever of manhood
there may be in them, and whose contact is a silent and consuming rebuke
of pretence and falsehood. Whatever his own advantage or attraction or
position or grace, the man of this quality takes hold of the reality in
other men, man meeting man, as when the grave William of Orange, in his
plain serge coat, met the brilliant Philip Sidney in his gold-flowered
doublet, and neither was troubled by the clothes of the other.
Such a man lately died. The mingled strength and simplicity and
sweetness of his nature, the lofty sense of justice, the tranquil and
complete devotion to duty, the large and humane sympathy, not lost in
vague philanthropic feeling, but mindful of every detail of relief--the
sound and steady judgment, the noble independence of thought and perfect
courage of conviction, the blended manliness and modesty of a life which
was unstained, and of a character which seemed without a flaw, all
belonged to what we call the ideal man.
Passing from college to the counting-room of a great commercial
business, his sagacity, energy, and executive power were all brought
into successful action. He went to Europe and to the West Indies, but
much of the spirit of trade and many of its practices were uncongenial
to him, and he quietly withdrew, despite wonder and affectionate
remonstrance, to lead his own life in his own way. By taste and
temperament an out-door man, he made his home in the rural neighborhood
of Boston, busy with country cares and various studies, but interested
chiefly in helping other men. He was allied by sympathy more than by
much previous actual association with the founders of Brook Farm. But
when they chose the site for their enterprise not far from his house,
he was soon in the pleasantest relations with the leaders, for their
spirit and purpose were in harmony with his own. He was a parishioner
and warm personal friend of Theodore Parker, who lived near him, and his
keen common-sense and mastery of practical affairs were most useful to
Parker as to Ripley. Indeed, the hospitality of such a man for every
generous endeavor and for all new and humane ideas was a happy augury
for the philanthropic pioneers, because it seemed to promise the final
approval and adhesion to their cause of the most conservative and
substantial sentiment of the community.
Such a man was, of course, an abolitionist in the days when the name was
as repugnant to what is called "society" as the name Christian was to
the Jewish Sanhedrim or Methodist to the English Establishment a century
and a half ago. He generously aided the cause, which seemed to him that
of practical Christianity and of American patriotism, and he held most
friendly relations with its chief representatives, who were ostracized
and denounced. But his sympathy was not an abstract regard for man
rather than for men, and his interest in the effort to help a race and
to forecast a happier social organization did not dull his heart or
close his hand to the necessities of his neighbor. His life, indeed, was
a prolonged charity, but a charity directed by a singularly calm and
shrewd judgment. His exhaustless generosity was not the sport of wayward
impulse. It was not a well-meaning weakness, but a wise force which
helped others to help themselves, but knew also when such self-help was
impossible.
Yet the strength and reserve and independence of his character were such
that the man was never lost in the reformer. His fine nature
instinctively asserted his own individuality. He quietly shunned the
wearisome artificiality of society, but he did not merge his own home in
the general home of his friends and neighbors at Brook Farm, and his
house was always a glimpse of the social refinement and grace, the
mental and moral charm, to which the dreams of social regeneration and
the elaborate fancies of Fourier pointed--fancies which greatly
interested him as hints of a happier social order.
Long absence with his family in Europe, and a long and final residence
upon Staten Island, only matured and developed the man, in whom not only
was there no guile, but in whom even the most intimate eye could not
note a fault. Clarendon might have studied from him his portrait of
Falkland: "his inimitable sweetness of, and delight in, conversation;
his flowing and obliging humanity; his goodness to mankind; and his
primitive simplicity and integrity of life." Disinclined to public life
of every kind, he was yet full of the highest public spirit, and it was
but natural that his only son should have been selected by Governor
Andrew to command the first colored regiment that marched from
Massachusetts in the war. In his young person all that was best in the
New England youth of his time, all the strength of the elder colonial
and Revolutionary day, blended with all the grace and tenderness and
gentleness of its modern life, the stern old Puritan softened into a
humaner Bayard, was typified. It was the flower of Essex that two
hundred years ago was withered in the fatal Indian ambush in the
Deerfield Meadows. It was the flower of New England that fell upon a
hundred redder fields within a score of years.
But no sorrow could fatally chill a faith which was reflected in the
perpetual summer of the father's presence and temperament. The frank
urbanity of his greeting, the hearty grasp of his hand, the lofty
simplicity of his courtesy, were but the signs of that unwasting
freshness of sympathy which held him true to the ideals and aims of
earlier life. His helping hand reached invisibly into a hundred homes,
and upheld a hundred faltering lives. But, besides this, as president of
the Freedman's Aid Association his administrative skill and his wise
benevolence enabled him to bear a most effective part in the great
settlement of the war. His invincible modesty and scorn of ostentation
veiled his beneficent activities, public and private. But nothing could
veil the pure and steadfast and unwearying devotion to the well-being of
other men. Kindly but firmly he protected his own seclusion, and he
permitted no man, in Emerson's phrase, to devastate his day. The
freshness of feeling which keeps the heart young was unwasted to the
end. His full life brimming purely to the sea reflected heaven as
clearly when at last it mingled with the main as when it ran a limpid
rivulet from its spring. Young and old, man and boy, he was still the
simplest, noblest, most devoted, best. How truly he was the man that
every thoughtful man secretly wishes he might be, those only know who
knew Francis George Shaw.