When I was thirteen years old I went to visit my Uncle Cephas. My
grandmother would not have parted with me even for that fortnight had
she not actually been compelled to. It happened that she was called to
a meeting of the American Tract Society, and it was her intention to
pay a visit to her cousin, Royall Eastman, after she had discharged the
first and imperative duty she owed the society. Mrs. Deacon Ranney was
to have taken me and provided for my temporal and spiritual wants
during grandmother's absence, but at the last moment the deacon came
down with one of his spells of quinsy, and no other alternative
remained but to pack me off to Nashua, where my Uncle Cephas lived.
This involved considerable expense, for the stage fare was three
shillings each way: it came particularly hard on grandmother, inasmuch
as she had just paid her road tax and had not yet received her
semi-annual dividends on her Fitchburg Railway stock. Indifferent,
however, to every sense of extravagance and to all other considerations
except those of personal pride, I rode away atop of the stage-coach,
full of exultation. As we rattled past the Waite house I waved my cap
to Captivity and indulged in the pleasing hope that she would be
lonesome without me. Much of the satisfaction of going away arises
from the thought that those you leave behind are likely to be
wretchedly miserable during your absence.
My Uncle Cephas lived in a house so very different from my
grandmother's that it took me some time to get used to the place. Uncle
Cephas was a lawyer, and his style of living was not at all like
grandmother's; he was to have been a minister, but at twelve years of
age he attended the county fair, and that incident seemed to change the
whole bent of his life. At twenty-one he married Samantha Talbott, and
that was another blow to grandmother, who always declared that the
Talbotts were a shiftless lot. However, I was agreeably impressed with
Uncle Cephas and Aunt 'Manthy, for they welcomed me very cordially and
turned me over to my little cousins, Mary and Henry, and bade us three
make merry to the best of our ability. These first favorable
impressions of my uncle's family were confirmed when I discovered that
for supper we had hot biscuit and dried beef warmed up in cream gravy,
a diet which, with all due respect to grandmother, I considered much
more desirable than dry bread and dried-apple sauce.
Aha, old Crusoe! I see thee now in yonder case smiling out upon me as
cheerily as thou didst smile those many years ago when to a little boy
thou broughtest the message of Romance! And I do love thee still, and
I shall always love thee, not only for thy benefaction in those ancient
days, but also for the light and the cheer which thy genius brings to
all ages and conditions of humanity.
My Uncle Cephas's library was stored with a large variety of pleasing
literature. I did not observe a glut of theological publications, and
I will admit that I felt somewhat aggrieved personally when, in answer
to my inquiry, I was told that there was no "New England Primer" in the
collection. But this feeling was soon dissipated by the absorbing
interest I took in De Foe's masterpiece, a work unparalleled in the
realm of fiction.
I shall not say that "Robinson Crusoe" supplanted the Primer in my
affections; this would not be true. I prefer to say what is the truth;
it was my second love. Here again we behold another advantage which
the lover of books has over the lover of women. If he be a genuine
lover he can and should love any number of books, and this
polybibliophily is not to the disparagement of any one of that number.
But it is held by the expounders of our civil and our moral laws that
he who loveth one woman to the exclusion of all other women speaketh by
that action the best and highest praise both of his own sex and of hers.
I thank God continually that it hath been my lot in life to found an
empire in my heart--no cramped and wizened borough wherein one jealous
mistress hath exercised her petty tyranny, but an expansive and
ever-widening continent divided and subdivided into dominions,
jurisdictions, caliphates, chiefdoms, seneschalships, and prefectures,
wherein tetrarchs, burgraves, maharajahs, palatines, seigniors,
caziques, nabobs, emirs, nizams, and nawabs hold sway, each over his
special and particular realm, and all bound together in harmonious
cooperation by the conciliating spirit of polybibliophily!
Let me not be misunderstood; for I am not a woman-hater. I do not
regret the acquaintances--nay, the friendships--I have formed with
individuals of the other sex. As a philosopher it has behooved me to
study womankind, else I should not have appreciated the worth of these
other better loves. Moreover, I take pleasure in my age in associating
this precious volume or that with one woman or another whose friendship
came into my life at the time when I was reading and loved that book.
The other day I found my nephew William swinging in the hammock on the
porch with his girl friend Celia; I saw that the young people were
reading Ovid. "My children," said I, "count this day a happy one. In
the years of after life neither of you will speak or think of Ovid and
his tender verses without recalling at the same moment how of a
gracious afternoon in distant time you sat side by side contemplating
the ineffably precious promises of maturity and love."
I am not sure that I do not approve that article in Judge Methuen's
creed which insists that in this life of ours woman serves a
probationary period for sins of omission or of commission in a previous
existence, and that woman's next step upward toward the final eternity
of bliss is a period of longer or of shorter duration, in which her
soul enters into a book to be petted, fondled, beloved and cherished by
some good man--like the Judge, or like myself, for that matter.
This theory is not an unpleasant one; I regard it as much more
acceptable than those so-called scientific demonstrations which would
make us suppose that we are descended from tree-climbing and bug-eating
simians. However, it is far from my purpose to enter upon any argument
of these questions at this time, for Judge Methuen himself is going to
write a book upon the subject, and the edition is to be limited to two
numbered and signed copies upon Japanese vellum, of which I am to have
one and the Judge the other.
The impression I made upon Uncle Cephas must have been favorable, for
when my next birthday rolled around there came with it a book from
Uncle Cephas--my third love, Grimm's "Household Stories." With the
perusal of this monumental work was born that passion for fairy tales
and folklore which increased rather than diminished with my maturer
years. Even at the present time I delight in a good fairy story, and I
am grateful to Lang and to Jacobs for the benefit they have conferred
upon me and the rest of English-reading humanity through the medium of
the fairy books and the folk tales they have translated and compiled.
Baring-Gould and Lady Wilde have done noble work in the same realm; the
writings of the former have interested me particularly, for together
with profound learning in directions which are specially pleasing to
me, Baring-Gould has a distinct literary touch which invests his work
with a grace indefinable but delicious and persuasive.
I am so great a lover of and believer in fairy tales that I once
organized a society for the dissemination of fairy literature, and at
the first meeting of this society we resolved to demand of the board of
education to drop mathematics from the curriculum in the public schools
and to substitute therefor a four years' course in fairy literature, to
be followed, if the pupil desired, by a post-graduate course in
demonology and folk-lore. We hired and fitted up large rooms, and the
cause seemed to be flourishing until the second month's rent fell due.
It was then discovered that the treasury was empty; and with this
discovery the society ended its existence, without having accomplished
any tangible result other than the purchase of a number of sofas and
chairs, for which Judge Methuen and I had to pay.
Still, I am of the opinion (and Judge Methuen indorses it) that we need
in this country of ours just that influence which the fairy tale
exerts. We are becoming too practical; the lust for material gain is
throttling every other consideration. Our babes and sucklings are no
longer regaled with the soothing tales of giants, ogres, witches, and
fairies; their hungry, receptive minds are filled with stories about
the pursuit and slaughter of unoffending animals, of war and of murder,
and of those questionable practices whereby a hero is enriched and
others are impoverished. Before he is out of his swaddling-cloth the
modern youngster is convinced that the one noble purpose in life is to
get, get, get, and keep on getting of worldly material. The fairy tale
is tabooed because, as the sordid parent alleges, it makes youth
unpractical.
One consequence of this deplorable condition is, as I have noticed (and
as Judge Methuen has, too), that the human eye is diminishing in size
and fulness, and is losing its lustre. By as much as you take the
God-given grace of fancy from man, by so much do you impoverish his
eyes. The eye is so beautiful and serves so very many noble purposes,
and is, too, so ready in the expression of tenderness, of pity, of
love, of solicitude, of compassion, of dignity, of every gentle mood
and noble inspiration, that in that metaphor which contemplates the
eternal vigilance of the Almighty we recognize the best poetic
expression of the highest human wisdom.
My nephew Timothy has three children, two boys and a girl. The elder
boy and the girl have small black eyes; they are as devoid of fancy as
a napkin is of red corpuscles; they put their pennies into a tin bank,
and they have won all the marbles and jack-stones in the neighborhood.
They do not believe in Santa Claus or in fairies or in witches; they
know that two nickels make a dime, and their golden rule is to do
others as others would do them. The other boy (he has been christened
Matthew, after me) has a pair of large, round, deep-blue eyes,
expressive of all those emotions which a keen, active fancy begets.
Matthew can never get his fill of fairy tales, and how the dear little
fellow loves Santa Claus! He sees things at night; he will not go to
bed in the dark; he hears and understands what the birds and crickets
say, and what the night wind sings, and what the rustling leaves tell.
Wherever Matthew goes he sees beautiful pictures and hears sweet music;
to his impressionable soul all nature speaks its wisdom and its poetry.
God! how I love that boy! And he shall never starve! A goodly share
of what I have shall go to him! But this clause in my will, which the
Judge recently drew for me, will, I warrant me, give the dear child the
greatest happiness:
"Item. To my beloved grandnephew and namesake, Matthew, I do bequeath
and give (in addition to the lands devised and the stocks, bonds and
moneys willed to him, as hereinabove specified) the two mahogany
bookcases numbered 11 and 13, and the contents thereof, being volumes
of fairy and folk tales of all nations, and dictionaries and other
treatises upon demonology, witchcraft, mythology, magic and kindred
subjects, to be his, his heirs, and his assigns, forever."