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Transcriber’s Notes
This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’
from December, 1912. The table of contents, based on the index from
the November issue, has been added by the transcriber.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but
punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages
in English dialect and in languages other than English have not been
altered. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the corresponding
article.
Specific font styles have been marked by using the following special
characters:
italics: _underscores_
bold: =equals signs=
small caps: ~tildes~
underlined: +plus signs+
The caret symbol (^) denotes a following superscript character.
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Christmas·Number
[Illustration]
THE CENTURY
ILLUSTRATED
MONTHLY
MAGAZINE
THE CENTURY CO▴UNION SQUARE▴NEW YORK
FRANK H. SCOTT, ~President~, WILLIAM W. ELLSWORTH,
~Vice-President and Secretary~, DONALD SCOTT,
~Treasurer~, ~Union Square, New York~.
Copyright, 1912, by The Century Co.]
(Title Registered U. S. Pat. Off.)
[Entered at N.Y. Post Office as Second Class Mail Matter
[Illustration]
The highest expression of beauty and charm combined with utility and
worthiness will be found in any gift bearing the Berkey & Gay shopmark.
The pieces to furnish a bedroom, library or dining room would
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you can say: “This is
_For Your Children’s Heirlooms_
The Berkey & Gay shopmark means as much on furniture as “Sterling” on
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With the displays on their floors in connection with our portfolio
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Our de luxe book, “Character in Furniture” gives an interesting
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illustrated in color from oil paintings by Rene Vincent. We will mail
a copy to you direct for fifteen two-cent stamps. And, as a help to
you in your making of gifts, we will gladly mail you our special new
book entitled “Entertaining Your Guests,” which is descriptive of
single pieces that are particularly appropriate.
[Illustration: _This inlaid mark of honor identifies to you each Berkey
& Gay piece_]
Berkey & Gay Furniture Co.
174 Monroe Ave., Grand Rapids, Michigan
~The Century Magazine~
~Vol. LXXXV~ DECEMBER, 1912 No. 2
THE CHRISTMAS TREE ON CLINCH
(DOINGS ON PERILOUS)
BY LUCY FURMAN
Author of “Mothering on Perilous,” etc.
WITH PICTURES BY F. R. GRUGER
Copyright, 1912, by ~The Century Co.~ All rights reserved.
One Saturday morning in October the head-workers and some of the
teachers of the Settlement School on Perilous were unpacking barrels
and boxes on the front porch of the “big house,” a wagon having come
in from the railroad the previous day. Christine Potter, the newest
and youngest teacher, looked up from a box of books to see an odd
procession approaching along the road. A yellow mare, bearing a small
woman with an infant in arms, and a tiny child behind, was followed by
a half-grown mule colt, on which rode three little girls, while a small
yellow colt trotted sedately in the rear. At the school gate the party
halted. The yellow colt flung his four legs in as many directions and
began to frisk about his mother; the riders dismounted and came up the
walk.
The woman came straight to the heads, her eager face beaming under the
black sunbonnet, inevitable badge of the married woman.
“Don’t you know me?” she inquired--“little Anne Goodloe that was, from
the head of Clinch? Don’t you mind the summer, ten year’ gone, you sot
up a tent over there, and I holp you with the singing and gatherings?”
Yes, indeed, the heads remembered, and gave Anne a hearty welcome,
asking a volley of questions about her family. But these she cut short.
“Women,” she said, “all that will keep. Let me first get off my mind
what I come for. Before I lose another minute I crave to enter these
young uns of mine on the highroad to l’arning in this here fine school.
I have heared you write ’em down in a book, and take as they come; and
many’s the time I have woke with a nightmare, dreaming my offsprings
was writ down too late to get a show. I want you to put ’em down
immediate’. Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, stand forth!”
The four small girls drew up in line before their mother, their blue
sunbonnets forming an exact stairway.
“Six, four and a half, three, and going on two is their ages,”
continued Anne, “and my man-child here, too--John Jeems, four
month’,--don’t pass over him.”
One of the heads wrote down the names and ages; then she inquired:
“And the last name--your married name?”
Anne watched their faces expectantly as she replied:
“Talbert.”
“Talbert!” they exclaimed in one astonished voice.
“I allowed it would take your breath to hear that John Goodloe’s
daughter had married Jeems Talbert’s son,” Anne said, smiling.
“When we were over on Clinch the Goodloes and Talberts were mortal
enemies. There was constant trouble between them, and not a Talbert
would ever come inside our tent simply because it was on Goodloe land.”
“Yes,” said Anne; “forty year’ they have been at war--ever since Paw
and Jeems fell out over a gal, and shot each other all up.”
Christine had gathered the sunbonnets, and placed a chair for Anne,
who now sat down, smoothed and recoiled her abundant yellow hair, and
proceeded to give her man-child his dinner, the little girls ranging
themselves silently on a bench, still in step formation, and gazing
about them with big eyes and bobbing pigtails.
“There was some little shooting going on when we were there,” continued
the heads, “and five years previous the two eldest sons had killed each
other in an engagement.”
“Yes,” replied Anne; “that was a mighty sorry time when the boys on
both sides got sizable enough to take up their paps’ war--a sorry time
it was for both Goodloes and Talberts.” She sighed deeply.
“Doubtless they made peace later, or you would not have married a
Talbert?”
[Illustration: Drawn by F. R. Gruger. Half-tone plate engraved by R. C.
Collins
“‘’TWA’N’T LONG BEFORE I KNOWED HE WAS THE ONLIEST BOY I WOULD EVER
MARRY’”]
“No, they hain’t never made peace; but there never was no war betwixt
me and Luke. We was the youngest on both sides, and I allus did think
Luke was the prettiest boy that ever rid a nag. When we would be out
hunting the cows, I never regretted when I met up with him, though
of course we wouldn’t speak or let on to see. But one day when we
had passed in the road unseeing that a-way, we both turned back to
look. Luke he blushed, and I laughed. ‘Goodloes hain’t pizen,’ I says.
‘Neither is Talberts,’ he says; and from that time we would stop and
pass a few words when there wa’n’t nobody in sight. ’T wa’n’t long
before I knowed he was the onliest boy I would ever marry, and him the
same of me. Of course I never told nobody but granny, and she holp us
off; she allus did contend that Goodloes and Talberts never ought to be
nothing but friends, paw and Jeems having been raised like own brothers.
“Well, maybe you think there wa’n’t a general commotion when me and
Luke run off. Paw and Jeems b’iled and raged scandalous, for men lamed
and maimed up like them, and it looked like the war would be fit all
over ag’in. Luke had took his logging money and bought a piece of
ground from his paw right j’ining ours, and raised a house on it, so we
had a roof over our heads; but nary a foot did a Goodloe or a Talbert
set in it, or so much as look our way in passing, for over a year.
But me and Luke we never seed no slights, and allus spoke civil and
cheerful to all we met, and in time they begun to drap in, first one
side and then t’other. Then when my young uns come along, paw he would
sa’nter down now and then to see ’em, and finally Jeems he stumped up
on his crutch a time or two, which pleased me a sight, and I had hopes
of their meeting peaceable and maybe patching up the war, like granny
says she knows they pine to in their hearts, now they are both widows,
and getting along in years, and lonesome. But when my man-child come,
what did I do but spile everything by naming him John Jeems, atter
both; sence which I hain’t had a glimp’ of neither.
“But though the feeling keeps up, there hain’t been to say no active
warfare betwixt paw and Jeems sence Luke and me married, and no bad
shootings amongst the sons and sons-in-law, like there used to be at
Christmas and election-time. Four year’ gone, a five-month district
school started up two mile’ down Clinch from us, and both Goodloe
and Talbert young uns has been a-going, and has got acquainted and
friendly, which has sort of swaged down their payrents; so you might
say the war is ended with everybody now but Jeems and paw.
“I been a-going to that district school myself sence it took up. From
the time you women was over on Clinch I got me a big hankering for
l’arning. Jeems Talbert had sont Luke away to school two term’, and
when we was married, to see him read and write and figure, and me not
able to tell a from izzard, went ag’in the grain terrible. No Goodloe
don’t like to be outdone by a Talbert. So when the school started,
though I were a’ old married woman of nineteen, I gathered up my young
uns and lit in for l’arning, riding back and forth to school on Cindy
and her mule colt. Luke he made cradles for the babes to lay in at
school, and the scholars holp me mind ’em, and they never give a’
hour’s trouble. Minervy here she started on the road to knowledge at
five days old,--time was precious, and I couldn’t stay away,--and now
at three she knows all her a b c’s. And I am able to read and write
and figure as good as Luke, and can read every word of that Testament
you give me, and hain’t neglected my cooking or spinning or weaving
neither.”
Having made sure that Anne would remain to dinner, the heads resumed
their work, leaving Christine to entertain the guest. The interesting
fact was soon established that the two were almost of an age, both
being twenty-three, with birthdays in August.
“Just as good as twins,” exclaimed Anne, delightedly. Then she sighed,
and looked wistfully at Christine’s girlish face. “But you that fair
and tender you don’t look sixteen,” she said, “and me a’ old woman!”
Later she asked, “When a woman don’t marry at fourteen or fifteen or
anyhow sixteen, how does she put in her time? What is there for her to
do?”
“Many girls put in their time as I did,” replied Christine. “After
finishing school, I spent four years in college, then I traveled in
Europe for a year, then my father said I knew little more than an
infant about actual life, and ought to do some real work for a while to
find out; so I came here, where I hope I am learning.”
When the dinner bell rang, Christine found great pleasure in taking
Anne to the table and in watching her eager scrutiny of room, children,
manners, service.
[Illustration:
Drawn by F. R. Gruger Half-tone plate engraved by R. Varley
“‘JEEMS AND JOHN, THE MESSAGE COMES TO YOU THIS BRIGHT CHRISTMAS DAY
STRAIGHT FROM THE TONGUE OF ANGELS.’” (SEE PAGE 171)]
At two o’clock Anne announced that she must depart, as it would be
necessary to reach the half-way stop-over place, nine miles distant, by
night.
“My young uns sets a nag uncommon’ well, from such constant practice
going to school,” she said; “but I consider nine mile’ is about enough
for ’em to travel in a day. And now,” she continued, flashing a smile
at Christine, “being as we’re twins, I do hope you will use your
endeavors to make me a visit before long. Seems like I have a mighty
near feeling for you.”
A sudden thought came to Christine.
“Would you like me to come over and have my Christmas tree at your
house?” she asked. “Father has promised that I may have one.”
“I don’t rightly know what a Christmas tree is,” said Anne, “but I will
be proud to have you any time or season.”
Christine explained that a Christmas tree is simply a small evergreen
tree on which at Christmas time presents and candy are hung for the
children.
“I should like to have the tree at your house, and invite all the
children, and older people, too, in the neighborhood,” she said.
“I can answer for the young uns turning out if there’s pretties and
rarities to see,” said Anne; “but the grown-ups is different. There
hain’t nobody but Goodloes and Talberts on the head of Clinch, and I
misdoubt if they’ll gather under one roof. But I’ll do my best, and
give ’em all a’ invite.”
Letters passed between the two later, Anne sending the names and ages
of the children of the neighborhood, Christine giving directions for
making strings of popcorn and holly-berries for the adornment of the
tree.
* * * * *
Before day on Christmas morning, Christine, accompanied by Howard
Cleves, a big boy from the school, set forth for the head of Clinch,
the great “pokes” of Christmas things slung across the saddles standing
out like panniers from the sides of the two nags. As they wound up the
mountain-side above Perilous Creek, the whole east awoke and flushed
with joy in memory of the day.
The eighteen miles were long and difficult and lonely; the mountains
folded in and out, dazzling white where they caught the sunlight, deep
blue in the shadows. Occasionally in a hollow or beside a frozen stream
appeared a small log-house, tight-shut against the cold, the only sign
of life or cheer the thin column of smoke rising straight from its
chimney. Once or twice the travelers met parties of young men and boys
riding with jugs and pistols, doing their utmost to celebrate the day,
but always suddenly quiet at sight of Christine.
About half-past one they drew up before Luke Talbert’s house on Clinch,
and Anne, Luke, and the four little girls gave Christine the warmest of
welcomes. After being thawed and fed, she glanced about the two rooms
of the house with some surprise and disappointment.
“I see you haven’t put up the tree yet,” she said.
Anne looked puzzled.
“Hain’t put the tree up?” she repeated. “Why, it’s already up--up and
growing back here in the gyarden.” She led the way to the back porch.
There, beyond the tall palings of riven oak, in the very center of
the small, sloping garden, its delicate branches garlanded with snowy
popcorn and scarlet berries, was a splendid young hemlock, apparently
rejoicing in its vigor and beauty and in the sacred use to which it was
being put.
Christine was dumb for an instant.
“Hain’t it right?” Anne inquired anxiously.
“Yes, beautiful, the loveliest I ever saw,” answered Christine.
“Usually people cut down the Christmas tree and set it up in the house;
but how much more appropriate to have it living and growing!”
“It was such a pretty little tree I wouldn’t let Luke cut it when we
cleared the land,” said Anne; “I told him I would plant my gyarden
round it. Granny she allus liked it, too. She come down yesterday and
holp me cap corn and string berries. She’s powerful keen to see the
doings to-day, and aims to fetch paw along if she can.”
Two fires were already burning, one to the right, one to the left of
the tree, and large piles of wood stood beside them in the snow. “Luke
allowed the folks would freeze to death if we never fixed to warm ’em
abundant’,” Anne explained.
Then Christine and Anne and Luke and Howard set to work to fasten
on Christmas bells, tinsel, bags of candy, dolls, and lighter gifts,
climbing up on chairs when necessary. The oranges and heavier things
were stacked below the tree. There was no need to take out the candles,
with the glorious sunshine streaming all around.
“I warned the young uns not to show their faces before three,” said
Anne, “but they are that wild I look for ’em any minute.” She had
scarcely spoken the words before a dozen small excited faces peered
through the palings. Picking up a stick of wood, Anne sallied forth.
“Shoo, you feisty young uns, you!” she cried, “get along into that
house there! Anybody that shows a face outside till called don’t get
nary single pretty.”
Before she could return to the tree again, another crowd of children
had collected at the palings, and the rout had to be repeated.
“And I see ’em a-coming as far as eye can reach,” she reported, “up
Clinch and down Clinch, Talberts and Goodloes, both young and old. Of
course I knowed the young would turn out, but the older ones wouldn’t
make no promise, though I could see they was terrible curious to behold
a Christmas tree. They’ll be mad as hops over being shut up that a-way;
but they had no business to come so soon. And I hain’t aiming to take
no chances on their raising a quarrel, neither: I’m locking Goodloes in
one house and Talberts in t’ other, with the door fastened between.”
From this time Anne was busily occupied meeting visitors and diverting
them to the two “houses” (rooms). Once a little old lady who had just
dismounted from behind a gaunt, grizzled man dodged past Anne and ran
into the garden. “I am just bound to see how it looks,” she said. “Oh,
hain’t it a sight for cherubim!” She stood in an ecstasy of delight,
hands clasped, withered little face shining within the quilted woolen
sunbonnet, small body all alertness beneath the heavy homespun shawl.
“Now, Granny, you get right back in that house there with paw,”
admonished Anne. “You have brung him thus far; but if he sees any
Talberts, or gets wind of a whole passel being locked up in t’ other
house, you know he’ll be off like a shot.”
Granny turned sorrowfully away.
“That’s p’int’ly true,” she admitted, hastening into the Goodloe room
after her tall, stoop-shouldered son.
For a few minutes longer the sky seemed to rain Goodloes and Talberts.
Both rooms must have been filled to bursting. Then, just as the tree
was completed, and Anne was about to call out the guests, there was a
last arrival. A heavy-set man, with a crutch under one arm, rode slowly
into the yard, peering carefully about the house and over the palings
as he came.
“My Lord! Luke, if there hain’t your paw!” cried Anne, breathlessly. “I
made sure he wouldn’t come. Help him down and bring him right here, and
don’t let on there’s any Goodloes in fifty mile’!” She placed a chair
by the left-hand fire, and hither, on his crutch, Jeems Talbert was
piloted, all the time gazing in fascination upon the tree.
The next instant garden gate and house doors were flung open, and the
guests streamed out, young and old with eyes glued to the dazzling
tree. Last of all came granny, her arm in that of her son, John
Goodloe, whose one remaining eye was so intently fixed upon the tree
that he had almost reached it before he saw his blood-enemy, Jeems
Talbert, rise on his crutch not five feet distant, surprise and rage in
his eyes. Both men stiffened and glared; the hand of each instinctively
moved toward his hip-pocket; a gasp ran through the crowd. Granny’s
cracked old voice rang out sharply:
“John, Jeems, hain’t you got no manners? Do you aim to spile the
woman’s Christmas tree?”
The appeal to chivalry had its effect. Still glaring, the two enemies
backed away, each to a fire.
The general uneasiness and apprehension abated somewhat when Christine
stepped out in front of the tree, Anne’s Testament in her hand, and
began to read, in her earnest, tender voice, the story of the first
Christmas. As she proceeded, there was absolute silence. Not a person
whispered, not a child stirred, not a baby winked. Faces became rapt,
astonished, awed. The white, everlasting hills themselves appeared to
hearken. “And Joseph also went up ... to Bethlehem ... to be taxed
with Mary his espoused wife.... And she brought forth her firstborn
son, ... and laid him in a manger.... There were in this same country
shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by
night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of
the Lord shone round about them, ... and the angel said unto them, Fear
not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall
be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a
Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.... And suddenly there was with the
angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory
to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
Christine and Howard lifted up their voices in “Hark the Herald Angels
Sing,” then, beginning with the youngest,--there was one infant even
newer than John Jeems, a Goodloe baby of three weeks,--Anne and Luke
read off the names and handed out the gifts. To children who had not
seen a store doll or toy before, the simple things were marvels indeed.
For every girl, little or big, there was a doll; for every boy, a toy
of some kind; every person received an orange and a tarleton bag of
candy; every family a large Christmas-bell. And at the last, at Anne’s
suggestion, the smaller bells and ornaments and tinsel were stripped
from the tree, in order that no one should go away without a “pretty.”
For granny there was a handsome Bible, none the less joyfully received
that she could not read a word of it. But even as she clasped it, her
eyes wandered to the dolls.
“Who would ever believe there was such pretty poppets in all this
world!” she exclaimed, hearing which, Christine laid the prettiest
poppet of all in her arms. At this, three or four other old ladies
crowded about granny in such voluble delight that Christine was glad
she had enough dolls left over to present to them.
Nor, in the general largess, was the “stranger within the gates”
forgotten. The tree held for Christine a fine pair of mittens from
granny, a most beautiful woven coverlet from Anne, and a rosy apple
each from Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, and John Jeems.
The scene was indeed a happy one. Absorbed in the joy of their
offspring, and in their own gratified love of the beautiful, Goodloes
and Talberts mingled freely, and melted into friendliness and
cordiality. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert alone stood apart, each by
his fire, eying gloomily his orange and poke of candy.
Suddenly granny, laying her “pretty poppet” in Christine’s arms,
stepped forward in front of the tree and raised a hand for silence.
“Friends, Talberts and Goodloes,” she began, in a wavering old voice
which took on strength as she proceeded, “we find ourselves gathered
to-day in onlooked-for and, I may say, onpossible fashion, refreshing
our mortal eyes with the sight of this here wonderly tree, and our
immortal sperrits with the good tidings the fotch-on woman has just
read us out of the Book. I never heared just that particular scripture
read before, or if so I never kotch its full meaning. Of course I
knowed Christ had come to earth ’way back yander in old, ancient days
some time or ’nother; but I never heared tell of his coming to _all
men_. From what the preachers said, I got the idee he just come for to
snatch a few elect favor-rites out of the hell to which all the rest of
us was predestinated, whether or no; and consequent’, I never tuck no
great interest in him, or felt particular’ grateful. Even if I had had
the assurance of being one of the elect myself, which I never, I still
would have worried a sight over them which was bound to be lost, not
seeing no justice, let alone mercy, in it.
“But now comes the woman, and reads out of the scripture that the
angels theirselves laid down and declared that unto _all men_ was
borned a Saviour, that the tidings of joy was for _all_. Which, though
it takes me by surprise, is the very best and most welcomest news that
ever fell upon my years. Yes, glory to God! _all men_,--not only the
elect, not only the upright, but the very low-downest and dog-meanest,
the vilest and needingest and most predestinated, is all took in. Now
that’s the kind of a Saviour my heart has allus called for; that’s the
kind I have laid awake of nights longing to hear tell of; and now at
last the news has come, ’pears like my bosom will bu’st with the joy I
hain’t able to utter.
“And that hain’t the only good tidings we have heared this notable
day. That selfsame angel, and a multitude more, sang together in that
Christmas sky, ‘Peace on earth, good-will toward men.’ O friends and
chillens, words indeed fails me when I try to tell what powerful good
news that is to me. For if ever a woman has craved peace and pursued
it, if ever a woman has had her fill of bloodshed and warfare, and her
heart tore and stobbed by violence and contention, I am that woman.
Yes, for forty year’ I hain’t opened my eyes a single morning without
fear of what the day might bring forth; my soul and body has been wore
to a frazzle by anxiousness and tribulation. All you Talberts and
Goodloes under the shadow of my voice know well what I mean, for all
of you has staggered under the same burden. Yes, I’ll be bound there
hain’t one here but has had his ’nough of war and strife, and is ready
to welcome the good Christmas news to-day, and forgit whether he’s a
Goodloe or a Talbert.
“Not a one, that is, but two. Surveying all around and about me, I
don’t behold but two faces here that hain’t decked out, like the
love-lie tree, with Christmas joy and peace. John Goodloe and Jeems
Talbert is onliest humans in all this gathering that wears gloom and
darkness on their countenance.
“John and Jeems, I am minded to speak out my full thought to you two
boys here and now, if I die for it. I’m a-going to unbottle my mind
and feelings, now I got you together, which God knows hain’t likely
to happen ag’in. And I aim to speak to you, Jeems, just as free as to
my son John, for the time was when you was every grain as dear to me
as a son, and I never knowed no difference betwixt the two of you.
Yes, when your pore young maw died at your birth, and you was left a
leetle, pindling, motherless babe, not scarce able to cry, it was me,
your nighest neighbor, that tuck you in and keered for you, that worked
over you and prayed over you, tryin’ to keep life in your puny leetle
body. Many’s the hour you and John have laid in my arms together, him
a-sucking one breast and you t’other; and if the milk run short, he
was the one that done without, being a week older and a sight stronger
than you. And I would set, looking on you both, not able to tell which
I loved the best. For him I had love, but for you both love and pity.
Yes, I loved you pine-blank as good as John; I may say you was both my
firstborns. And when your paw got him a new woman, it was with weeping
and wailing and rebelling that I give you up; I reckon I’ll never git
over the hurt of it. But even atter that, having fell into the hands of
a step-maw, you was allus a-running back to me; my house was home to
you; you knowed where to find understanding of your leetle troubles,
sympathy for your hurts, and comfort for your stummick. I allow you
hain’t forgot them batches of gingercake I used to keep cooked up for
you and John?”
Jeems made no reply; but he swallowed perceptibly, and the hand on his
crutch twitched nervously.
“You and John,” continued granny, “was allus together in your boy-time
in all your pranks and antics; when I whupped one, I knowed it was
safe to whup t’ other, and I done it glad’ and generous’, for your
future profit. And as you begun, you kep’ on. In your teens, if one
sneezed, t’ other kotch his breath. And finally when you got up to be
tall, pretty boys, sprouting mustaches and dashing around on nags,
you was just as onseparable, doing all your rambling and drinking and
gallivanting together, even down to falling in love with the same
gal. Yes, that ’ere pretty leetle jade, Nance Bolling, I can see her
now,--these store-poppets reminds me pine-blank of her,--just as
beautiful, just as empty-headed and hollow-hearted. Well, Nance she
left nothing undone to agg you both on, and foment jealousy and hate in
your hearts, and then, when she had you plumb beside yourselves, she
sot you to fight it out. You fit it out, to that extent Jeems has gone
through life on a crutch, and John with one eye and one lung; and while
you was laid up with your wounds, Nance upped and run off with another
boy, God help him! But did that restore you to your nateral senses and
feelings? Did you rise up clothed in your right mind and ashamed of
your conduct? Far from it! You riz up b’iling with rage, thirsting for
blood, black in the face with that fierce hate which springs only from
the root of love. You that had once lived closer than brothers, sot in
to layway and ambush and kill, and to rid the earth of one another. You
will both bear me out in saying it hain’t the fault of neither that t’
other draws the breath of life to-day.
“And even when you had both forgot Nance time out of mind, and tuck
you two of as nice women as the wind ever blowed on, you still
cherished deadly hatred in your hearts, and handed it down to your
innocent offsprings as they come along, so that as they growed up they
holp you in your devilment, and there was war betwixt every man and boy
that bore the name of Goodloe and Talbert, shootings every Christmas
and election, and battles and ambushings at odd times, till I allow
there hain’t a man here that hain’t got a lot of scars to show. And
the worst come fifteen years gone, when your two oldest, as likely and
handsome a pair as ever drawed breath, and with young wives and babes
depending on them, fit the terriblest battle of all, and fell both with
six bullets in ’em, stone-dead. Yes, having nothing ag’in’ each other,
they died, a living sacrifice to the hatred in your hearts. Jeems,
John, it was a costly price to pay. I seed John, and heared of Jeems,
aging twenty-year’ in a week. The fight was right smart took out of
both of you, though the pride wa’n’t; you continued to go about with
hate in your eyes and guns in your pockets.
“John and Jeems, you know it’s the truth I’m a-laying down when I say
it is pride, and naught but pride, that stands betwixt you now at
this present time. You know well you hain’t neither of you forgot, or
can forget, them fair early days when you was nigher than brothers,
and never had a thought you couldn’t share, and that it is them very
ricollections that has give’ such a keen edge to your hate. You know
well that, being sixty year’ old now, and considable past your youth,
and widows at that, with many of your acquaintance’ drapped off and
gone, you would both injoy fine having a boyhood friend and brother to
set by the fire and talk old times with. I know myself how lonesome it
is to git old and outlive everybody.
“Jeems and John, the message comes to you this bright Christmas day
straight from the tongue of angels, ‘Peace and good-will’; no more
hate, no more pride, no more projeckin’ and devilment, but ‘Peace on
earth, good-will toward men.’ I charge you both, boys, hearken to the
words, put by your stubbornness, tromple on your pride; for Christ’s
sake and your old mother’s, be j’ined together ag’in in brotherly love!”
The two grizzled, scarred men were staring across the intervening space
now into each other’s eyes, fixedly, painfully, awfully, as though
they saw ghosts. Suddenly the hand of Jeems dropped to his hip-pocket,
he drew forth his revolver, and flung it far up on the mountain-side.
John’s pistol rose almost simultaneously in the opposite direction.
Then, with working faces, the two advanced and silently clasped hands.
Weeping and shouting, little granny caught the big men to the shrunken
bosom from which they had once drawn life. Goodloes fell on the
necks of Talberts; men embraced and wrung hands solemnly, women wept
hysterically on one another’s shoulders, children cried, not knowing
why; Anne and Luke shed happy tears on the face of little John Jeems
between them.
After a long while granny released the two men from her clasp, held
them at arms’-length a moment, looking at them hungrily and joyously,
and then laid a hand on the arm of each.
“Come along home now, boys,” she said; “it’s a-gitting on late, and I
allow you’ll both injoy a good batch of gingercake for supper.”
[Illustration]
HENRI BERGSON
PRONOUNCED “THE FOREMOST THINKER OF FRANCE”
HIS PERSONALITY, HIS PHILOSOPHY, AND HIS INFLUENCE[1]
BY ALVAN F. SANBORN
If the generation now coming to the front in France is healthy and
vigorous physically, mentally, and morally, and proud of its health
and vigor, if it is confident, expectant, full of energy and will,
impatient for action and fit to act, if it dares to be happy, if it
will have none of the pessimism of Schopenhauer or of the nihilism
of Renan; if it is, in a word, a generation of young young men,
whereas the generation that preceded it was a generation of old young
men, melancholy, morbid, dilettante, neurasthenic, and proud of its
melancholia, morbidness, dilettantism, and neurasthenia,--and such is
generally admitted to be the case,--certainly not the least of the
numerous and varied influences that have combined to bring about this
radical transformation is the inspiriting message of Henri Bergson.
In the early years of the twelfth century, at the base of the Tower
of Clovis, on the summit of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève in Paris, a
scholar in the habit of a monk, Pierre Abélard, proclaimed under the
open sky “the rights of the earth, the right of the reason to reason”
in discourses which Michelet characterizes as “the veritable point of
departure of the first Renaissance for France and for Europe.” The
élite of the then civilized world--two popes, twenty cardinals, fifty
bishops, “all the orders,” Romans, Germans, Englishmen, Italians,
Spaniards, Flemings--flocked thither to listen to the great innovator.
He was silenced by the dogmatists of the period, but he left behind him
an idea which “became more and more the fixed idea of the Renaissance,
namely, ‘wisdom is not wisdom if it confines itself to logic, if it
does not add thereto erudition, all human knowledge.’”
Five hundred years later, on this same Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, René
Descartes demolished scholasticism and founded modern psychology.
Persecuted by the Sorbonne, as was nearly every other expounder of new
doctrines at that time, he nevertheless created a veritable furor among
the bluestockings of the magnificent court of Louis XIV. His “vortexes”
and “fluted matter,” his “three elements” and his “innate metaphysical
ideas,” were the small talk of the _précieuses_; snobbishness for
the most part, of course, but it is one of the redeeming features of
snobbishness that it sometimes bestows its plaudits and its patronage
upon genuine merit.
At the present time the philosopher Henri Bergson is assailing, in
his turn, another scholasticism--the scholasticism of science. At the
Collège de France, the consummation and the coronation of the various
schools of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, he is creating a flutter in
the dove-cotes of bluestockingdom such as no pure philosopher has
created there since the time of Descartes. Indeed, Bergson has become
so fashionable that soon, as some one facetiously observed regarding
Francis of Assisi after the appearance of Sabatier’s fascinating
biography of that saint, “they will be wearing him upon bonnets,”
another instance of snobbishness adoring actual achievement.
The biggest amphitheater the Collège de France can provide is quite too
small for M. Bergson’s would-be auditors. Long before the lecture-hour,
the seats and the steps of the aisles, which can be made to serve as
seats, are preëmpted by patient waiters of both sexes, of varying ages,
sorts, conditions, and all nationalities. The standing-room fills
up rapidly also, while about the doors are enacted scenes vaguely
reminiscent of those that occur daily at the City Hall terminal of
the Brooklyn Bridge during the rush hours, in which the gentle, but
not always mannerly, sex does rather more than its share of pushing,
tugging, elbowing, and treading upon toes, in virtue, no doubt, of its
superior zeal for knowledge.
When the lecture begins, the sitters, and such of the standers as are
lucky enough to have their arms free, scribble furiously in their
note-books, the hapless strugglers at the doors and in the vestibule
crane their necks in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the
platform through the rifts in the monstrous feminine headgear now in
fashion, and all alike, those who neither see, hear, nor comprehend, as
well as those who do, promptly take on the rapt, superior expression of
initiates--the expression that used to characterize the audiences at
“Pelléas and Mélisande” when Debussyism was in its infancy.
The lecturer is short of stature, spare, an almost perfect ascetic
type, somewhat, gray and slightly bald. He has slender hands, tapering
fingers, a weasel-shaped head, heavy eyebrows, a close-cropped
mustache grayer than the hair, and “liquid and profound eyes that
suggest mysterious molten metals in the stars.” He is correctly,
even fastidiously, but not foppishly, dressed. He speaks slowly and
distinctly, but easily, with engaging indifference to his notes and
without any effort at oratory, his nearest approaches to gestures being
abruptly arrested semispasmodic workings of the hands, periodical
inclinations of the head, and an occasional deepening and darkening of
the eyes. It is as though sheer intellect, abstract intellect, were
endowed with the power of speech. There is not the slightest trace
in M. Bergson’s manner of the overweening vanity that too often mars
the public appearances of world celebrities, nor is there a scrap of
the unlovely pedantry and arid officialism against the prevalence of
which at the Sorbonne a considerable portion of cultivated France
recently rose in revolt. On the contrary, he is constantly referred
to in university circles as “the lark,” partly perhaps because he
offers a certain physical resemblance to that ungarish creature; but
mainly because there is a touch of lyricism in all his utterances, even
his most trenchant analyses. He presents his views progressively and
with a modest tentativeness which makes his auditors feel that they
are assisting at the birth of a system rather than listening to the
exposition of a perfected one. They seem to see the lecturer suffer and
create, as the symbolical pelican of ecclesiastical tradition pierces
her flank for the wherewithal to feed her young. Indeed, the regular
attendants follow the stages of the creative process as eagerly and
impatiently as though they were the instalments of an absorbing novel.
How far Henri Bergson’s extraordinary vogue is due to the substance
and how far to the form of his thought is not easy to determine,
since either alone amply suffices to account for it. His philosophy
is a rehabilitation, to employ untechnical language, of God and the
soul. It is a reconciliation “in a harmony felt by the heart of terms
irreconcilable, perhaps, by the intellect,” of science and metaphysics
with religion, of knowledge with life, of law with conduct, of liberty
with authority, of the ideals of the Occident with the ideals of the
Orient, of the present with the past and with the future. According
to M. Bergson, the universe, which is incessant mobility, perpetual,
continuous flux, is acquiring a constantly swelling volume of free
creative activity, and the inner life of each and every person in the
universe is absolutely original. “Life is really creation. It is not
a fabrication determined by the idea of an end to be realized; it is
an impetus, an initiative, an effort to make matter produce something
which it would not produce of itself.” We know reality by living it. We
may act freely, and in so acting we experience creation.
M. Bergson’s philosophy is a vindication of intuition, the faculty
upon which the poets, the Shelleys and the Keatses, the Villons and
the Verlaines, have always depended for their knowledge of themselves,
of the universe, and of their relations to the universe. We who are
not poets are the deluded victims, says M. Bergson in effect, of
our reasoning faculty, which is constantly playing hob with us. We
should submit to the authority of intuition, for to do a thing without
reason, even against reason, may in certain cases be to act from the
best of reasons. This does not mean that reason should be despised or
discarded, as some of the philosopher’s overzealous followers are prone
to proclaim,--even the great poet must resort to it in expressing the
conceptions his intuition gives him,--but rather that reason is a
highly useful subordinate of intuition, bearing much the same relation
thereto that the housemaid bears to the housewife, the mason or
carpenter to the architect, the private soldier to the strategist. In
short, M. Bergson’s attitude toward reason is essentially that of the
immortal seers. It recalls Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which
reason knoweth not,” Joubert’s “It is easy to know God if you do not
attempt to define Him,” Emerson’s “With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do,” and Browning’s “Others may reason and welcome,
’t is we musicians know.”
Our William James pronounced every page of Henri Bergson to be “like
the breath of morning and the song of birds.” M. Bergson’s style,
though delightfully free from affectation, is not so simple and direct
as these comparisons imply. They suggest admirably its freshness,
melodiousness, graciousness, and grace, but they fail to suggest the
exquisite subtlety which is its most distinctive trait. They may be
given a fair approach to adequacy, however, by substituting for “the
morning,” a morning of luminous haze such as Corot loved to paint,
and for “the song of birds,” the cuckoo’s “wandering voice.” As soft,
tenuous, filmy, fluid as mist or wreathing smoke, it is as precise,
not to say geometrical, in design as the spider’s gossamer web, and
is equally iridescent. The critic who characterized it as Arachnean,
therefore, was most happily inspired, though his purpose in doing so
was, if I remember right, to hold it up to derision. No living writer,
not even Maurice Maeterlinck, surpasses Henri Bergson in evoking, in
projecting, in visualizing, so to speak, those subconscious activities
of the soul which are commonly esteemed unanalyzable and, great poetry,
possibly, apart, unutterable. He “forces language to express things for
which language was not intended.” With impalpable pigments and ghostly
brushes he paints upon imaginary canvases veritable landscapes of the
soul. We do not go to pure philosophers for esthetic sensations,--no
one ever frequented Kant, for instance, for his style,--and in general
we enjoy or do not enjoy them according as they do or do not succeed
in convincing us. Henri Bergson is a striking exception to this rule.
We read Bergson, as we read Plato, out of sheer infatuation with his
verbal artistry, and we should continue to read him ecstatically if he
should undertake to prove that the moon was made of green cheese.
Such as he is in the lecture-room, such as he is in his books,
unassuming, unpedantic, gracious, well-poised, subtle, tactful, alert,
resourceful, stimulating, such Henri Bergson is in his every-day
existence. In his case, and to an unusual degree, the style is the man.
An easy talker, ever ready to speak freely upon all subjects,--his
personal affairs, work, and politics excepted,--he nevertheless
goes little into society, not because he dislikes social functions,
but because he cannot contrive to make the necessary leisure. He
resides about midway between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne, in
an umbrageous and incredibly tranquil corner of the Auteuil quarter,
where he is well nigh as secure from the hustle and bustle of Paris
as he would be in a provincial village; and he spends his summers
in Switzerland at St.-Cergue, almost ten miles from the nearest
railway station, in a modest two-story villa, surrounded by meadows
and evergreen woods, the front windows and veranda of which afford
ravishing views of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc. Winter and summer
alike, six in the morning finds him installed at his desk, and from
that moment until he retires for the night he allows himself virtually
no respite save that which is afforded by an occasional varying of
occupations.
[Illustration: Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
HENRI BERGSON
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY JACQUES BLANCHE]
Though so little of a Parisian in the sense in which the word is
currently employed, M. Bergson is one of the relatively few famous
Frenchmen who possess a clear title to that distinction. He was born
in Paris on the eighteenth of October, 1859. From nine to eighteen he
attended as a day student the Lycée Condorcet (then Lycée Bonaparte),
in the Opéra quarter, an institution founded in 1803 under the
consulship of the First Napoleon, which numbers among its illustrious
alumni Dumas _fils_, De Banville, the Goncourts, Eugène Sue, and
Hippolyte Taine. Less precocious than Pascal, who at sixteen wrote a
treatise on conic sections that excited the admiration of Descartes,
and who is said to have rediscovered at twelve the first propositions
of Euclid, young Bergson was nevertheless sufficiently advanced at
eighteen to produce in the _concours général_ of the Paris _lycées_ a
mathematical solution which was accorded the unusual honor of being
published in full in the “Annales Mathématiques,” and which, if I
mistake not, exempted him from the obligation of military service.
From the Lycée Condorcet he went to the Ecole Normale Supérieure,
matriculating in the section of letters, which he had chosen over
the section of sciences after not a little hesitation and misgiving,
for he was at that time an ardent disciple of Herbert Spencer and
dreamed of perfecting Spencerianism. While at the Ecole Normale he came
under the joint influence of Félix Ravaisson, harmonizer of the Greek
spirituality of the intelligence and the Christian spirituality of
the will and of the heart, and Emile Boutroux, author of a memorable
assault upon the then dominant determinism entitled “De la contingence
des lois de la nature,” and now President of the Institut de France,
who speedily freed him from his Spencerian obsession and turned him in
the direction he has since followed. Obliged, after his graduation from
the Ecole Normale to submit, like the majority of its graduates, to a
period of banishment from Paris, he taught philosophy for two years at
the Lycée of Angers, in the province of Anjou, and for five years at
the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand, in the province of Auvergne. During his
stay at Clermont, he delivered a number of lectures in the university
of that city, and wrote the work “L’essai sur les données immédiates
de la conscience,” which revealed him as an original thinker and as a
redoubtable antagonist of determinism. At Clermont he also mapped out
his life-work (studies, researches, and publications), calculating
carefully the time to be allotted to each subject, and thus far he has
not only succeeded in executing his program to the letter, but he has
been able to permit himself such interludes as a course of lectures on
Plotinus, his essay on laughter, a lecturing sojourn at Oxford, and the
projected visit to the United States.
His “stage” in the provinces over, he taught first in the Collège
Rollin and then in the Lycée Henri IV, located upon the very spot where
Abélard held his open-air classes. While connected with the latter
institution, he published “Matière et mémoire,” and it is thanks, no
doubt, to the sensation this work created in the university world
that he was called in 1897 to an assistant professorship in the Ecole
Normale, and, in 1900, to his present professorship at the Collège de
France.
Teaching, for Henri Bergson, is not a makeshift, but a veritable
sacrament. His former pupils are virtually unanimous in testifying to
his conscientiousness and zeal, as well as to his magnetic qualities
as a teacher. Not a few of them, become teachers in their turn, call
upon him often for counsel and guidance, which he invariably bestows
gladly, however preoccupied and harassed by his formidable undertakings
he may be at the time. And this is not the least of the reasons why a
goodly proportion of the younger professors of philosophy in the French
_lycées_ and _collèges_ of France proclaim themselves Bergsonians.
Furthermore, the young men who have attended his classes or his
lectures or who have come under the less direct, but only a shade less
potent, spell of his writings, seem to be possessed with a passion
for “living things”--for “doing things,” we would say in America--as
distinguished from analyzing things.
Bergson has been hailed as “the inaugurator of a new era in
philosophy,” “the foremost thinker of France,” “the most original and
significant figure in the philosophical field of Europe,” “the sole
philosopher of the first rank France has had since Descartes and Europe
since Kant,” “the restorer of psychology,” “the modern Heraclitus,”
“the Darwin or the Newton of philosophy,” “the Wells of philosophy,
adventurous inventor of a new machine for exploring the world.” And
his system has been characterized as “a new principle for the integral
renovation of philosophy,” “the matrix of all future systems,” “the
ruin of Marxism,” “the annihilation of materialism.”
Whether all of these appraisals be just or none of them be just,
whether Bergsonism be sound or unsound, enduring or ephemeral, time,
the supreme winnower, will of course determine. In the meanwhile it
is perfectly safe to affirm that Bergson is a peculiarly fine and
rich personality, an admirable example of the consecrated scholar, a
consummate literary artist, a genuine prose poet, a keen psychologist,
an observer of life, and one of the most suggestive and stimulating
of contemporaneous thinkers; and this, even though his philosophy may
ultimately share the fate of the greatest of its predecessors, is
enough to make the glory of one man.
[1] Professor Bergson is about to visit the United States, and will
deliver a series of lectures at Columbia University in January.
[Illustration: Christmas Echoes from PROVENCE
by Edith M. Thomas]
[Illustration: The Almond Branch
(Cache-Fiò)
I
“Come answer me this, petite, petite--
A riddle for you to guess, my sweet:
What is the tree that in winter’s gloom
Breaks in an hour into bloom, into bloom?
Here’s silver for her who tells”
(Hark to the nougat bells!)[2]
II
“Mon vieux, mon vieux, that’s no riddle for me
’Tis a branch of the little almond tree
The poor man brings from the orchard-plot;
A branch for a yule-log--is all he has got,
While his children sing +noëls+”
(Hark to the nougat bells!)
III
“But it snaps in the fire and the whole branch glows--
Breaks into blossoms of white and rose!
His wife and his children laugh to see
Those blossoms of fire from the almond tree--
And the smoke how sweet it smells!”
(Hark to the nougat bells!)
Edith M. Thomas
]
[2] The Christmas chimes, so called from the confection of that
season.
[Illustration: Saboly
Seventeenth Century--
Saboly is dead,
Is dead in Avignon!
He made the organ sing
As it had been a choir
Of angels of the Lord
Cleaving and brightening
The roof of dark St. Pierre!
The sound was of great glory,
It trembled all around
And quivered through our hearts.
Saboly is dead,
The maker of +noëls+
That all the people loved,
Saboly is dead--
And Yule is here again;
The great log on the hearth,
The crèche with all its lights,
The children gathering there;
The Kings are on the road--
The twilight road that leads
From out the purple East
The road from St. Remys!...
How shall we sing his songs
Who sang so well of these!
Folk say, when death was near
He set his hand to write
For us a new +noël+.
(So many a one before
He wrote with pen of gold!)
When he to Heaven came
I wis was silence then.
While Mary Mother bent
And raised him to his place,
The sweetness on his lips
Of that last, best +noël+!
But we--how can we sing
The songs he made for us,
Though Yule is here again!
For Saboly is dead,
Is dead in Avignon.
Edith M. Thomas.]
[Illustration: “Little Christmas Ghost.”
I
I am an old, old woman
And I do not see so well;
The things that are from the things that seem,
I may not at all times tell.
II
But this for a truth I know--
I know I had locked my door;
And had buried the fire on the hearth
As I’d always done before.
III
I am an old, old woman--
Not a chick nor child have I;
But that Christmas night, as I climbed the stair,
A Little One flitted by!
IV
It was nothing of flesh or blood,
But it passed with a lilting joy;
Its hair so bright flew out in Its haste,
And in either hand was a toy!
V
It heeded me not at all--
It was passing me by, when I said,
“Who art thou, thou little Christmas Ghost?”
And quickly it turned Its head!
VI
I am an old, old woman
You will not believe, but I know
That Christmas Elf was my own child-self
Of fourscore years ago!
Edith M. Thomas.]
[Illustration:
THE MIRACLE
OF
LITTLE NOËL
BY VIRGINIA YEAMAN REMNITZ]
Drawn by Joseph Clement Coll
Lizette Amboise sat beside the window making lace. The lovely line
of her profile caught the light; the clear white of cap and kerchief
enriched the olive of her skin. Seen thus from within the room, she was
so beautiful that the old eyes of Pierre’s mother brightened as they
looked at her.
Pierre himself was working in the woolen mills at Lisieux. Soon after
he went his house had caught fire, and Lizette, rushing through the
flames, had led his mother out to safety. Since then the old woman had
remembered only in flashes.
So there she sat in Lizette’s cottage, her eyes brightening as they
rested on the girl. But all at once they clouded; she had remembered.
“If it was as it used to be,” she broke out in a quavering voice, “you
might be restored for Pierre’s coming home.”
At the words Lizette turned, and the old woman began to cry.
“For him to come back at Christmas,” she wailed, “to see that!”
The girl looked quickly away. The rich olive of her cheek had faded to
a dead pallor; her hands lay idle in her lap. “For him to come back
to see that!” She used to rejoice in Pierre’s love of beauty. He was
different from the other young men of the village, who cared more for a
woman’s strength than for her face, and who looked always at the earth
they tilled and never at the sky. Pierre could be keen and shrewd as
any other Norman peasant; but Lizette knew his dreams, his delight in
beauty, the thoughts he hid from his neighbors.
Once Lizette had said to him:
“Perhaps I can serve you as well making my lace as though I were strong
to work in the fields.”
And Pierre, his dark eyes glowing, had answered:
“It is not your service I want, my Lizette. I want only to have you
near me, to be able to look into your face.”
The words had pleased her when he spoke them; now they stabbed her to
the heart. And so did these lines of the letter Pierre had written
after he heard from the curé about the burning of his house, and how
Lizette had saved his mother: “My beautiful, brave Lizette! How shall I
wait to see you! Your face is always before me.”
“Mère Bernay,”--Lizette had turned again to the old woman,--“listen to
me, Mère Bernay. What did you mean when you said I could be restored
for Pierre’s return if it was as it used to be?”
“By a miracle of Little Noël. You would make the nine-days’ prayer
before Christmas mass. Many are the cures were made so at our church in
the old days. But that was long ago; they are made no more.”
The miracles of Little Noël! Lizette had heard of them ever since she
was a child, but they had seemed merely a tradition. Suppose--her eyes
widened and she drew her breath in quickly.
If the miracles had ceased, it must be because the faith of the people
had died. Had not the curé often bewailed the worldliness of the times,
the love of pleasure that had replaced piety? If she had faith, if she
prayed with her whole heart, it might be that a miracle of Little
Noël would be wrought even now for her!
[Illustration: Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by C. W.
Chadwick
“THE STARRY EYES, UPRAISED, OVERFLOWED WITH TEARS; THE LIPS QUIVERED IN
THEIR SUPPLICATIONS: ‘GRANT TO ME FAITH, THAT A MIRACLE OF LITTLE NOËL
MAY BE WROUGHT UPON ME’”]
It was only two weeks before Christmas. Soon she could begin the nine
days of special fasting and prayer; and there was time before that for
preparation. Lizette rose, took down her long cloak, bent over Pierre’s
mother, kissed her withered cheeks, and then went out into the golden
light of the sunset.
She pulled the hood of her cloak far over her face, and walked rapidly.
She saw no one until Mère Fouchard came to her door, calling shrilly to
the little Henri. Mère Fouchard stopped shrilling when she saw Lizette.
“How the girl keeps the hood over her face!” she said to herself. And
then, “Does she think she can hide it thus from Pierre Bernay when he
comes back!”
She called a greeting, hoping Lizette would turn; but she was
disappointed. The girl answered without looking around.
The church was in the middle of the wood in which the village was
built. In Normandy these little villages try to hide themselves among
the trees; but the gleam of their white-walled cottages betrays them.
When Lizette reached the church, twilight was gathering, and the
branches of the trees wove delicate traceries against a sky of pale
amethyst and rose. The old stone church, with its square tower, made a
picture amid that setting which Lizette was quick to note. Pierre had
taught her to see such things.
But she noted also, and with a sorrow she had never felt before, the
dilapidated condition of the church. In the days when the miracles of
Little Noël made the village famous, it had been different. Then, as
Lizette knew, not a crumbling bit of mortar had gone untended or a
candlestick unpolished. And the women of the village had woven finest
cloth for the altars, and bordered them with lace of their own making.
Lizette resolved that she would begin such an altar-cloth on the morrow.
Now she pushed the door open and looked shrinkingly about. There was
only stillness and peace within, and the Virgin with the Child in her
arms. It seemed she was waiting for Lizette. With a little sob, swept
by a wave of emotion that laid bare all her heart, the girl went
forward and fell on her knees, throwing back the hood from her head.
Her face was now revealed, as though for the pitiful eyes of the Virgin
to see. On one side it was the beautiful face Pierre Bernay hungered
for day and night: on the other it was furrowed across by the crimson
scars the fire had made.
The starry eyes, upraised, overflowed with tears; the lips quivered in
their supplications: “Grant to me faith, that a miracle of Little Noël
may be wrought upon me! Have pity upon me and restore me for Pierre’s
return!”
How often she had pictured that return--the leap of her lover’s eyes to
her face, their horrified turning away; for she had begged the curé to
write no hint of her disfigurement. She would have no pretense, she who
had throbbed and glowed under the long caress of Pierre’s gaze. If he
could not bear to look upon her, she must know it. It would be better
than finding out little by little. If it should be as she feared,
she would go away. She had a cousin who worked on a farm in the rich
country to the east. Perhaps she could find the place; it did not much
matter.
Suddenly Lizette realized that these thoughts were intruding themselves
upon her devotions; that fear and foreboding were driving out the faith
she longed for. She began to pray again, and little by little her heart
grew still within her. It was as though a light broke softly and grew;
there was no room left for fear.
In the church, meantime, the dusk had been gathering. Lizette, when she
rose to her feet, could just see the face of the Child. It was in honor
of his birthday the cures had been made; for the sake of the little
Jesus, who had come to heal the sicknesses and sorrows of all the world.
For some minutes Lizette stood there. Then she remembered the Mère
Bernay, sitting all alone, with the fire dying on the hearth; and
she hurried away. But the crushing weight was gone from her heart.
She walked with light steps, and looked up at the stars, which were
beginning to come out in the sky.
Every day now Lizette prayed in the church, but no one who saw her pass
guessed at what was in her heart. It may be, however, that Pierre’s
mother knew; she knew many things that no one ever told her. Sometimes
when Lizette came in with that light on her face the old woman would
look at her with eyes which seemed to understand.
When the time came for her to make the nine-days’ prayer, Lizette went
to her devotions both morning and evening, and so absorbed was she that
the fire often died on the hearth, and Pierre’s mother shivered as she
sat beside it. But it was on the last day of her waiting that the girl
knelt longest in the little church. When she came again it would be
for the midnight mass; she hardly dared to think further than that.
The old fear seemed to be hovering near, threatening to seize her.
She sought shelter from it in her prayers: she even tried to forget a
certain resolve she had made, lest it argue lack of faith. This resolve
was that Pierre’s eyes should be the first to rest upon her after the
midnight mass. She would neither look in her glass nor touch her face
with her fingers. His eyes, and his alone, should tell her whether the
miracle had been performed.
Pierre had written again, saying that he would come early on Christmas
morning. In a few hours he would be on his way, walking from Lisieux to
a little inn where he slept. But long before dawn he would start again,
and be with her soon after the sun was up. She was glad that Mère
Bernay lay in bed until late. She wished to watch for Pierre alone.
That evening she told the old woman that they would eat the réveillon
before mass. “You would be too weary if you waited for my return,” she
said; but the true reason lay in her resolve that Pierre should be the
first to see her face after the midnight mass.
The réveillon may be spread either before or after that mass. Lizette
brought out the roasted chestnuts soaked in wine and the little cakes.
Her heart was suddenly light and gay. She made Mère Bernay put her
shoes on the hearth, ready for gifts; then Lizette put one of her own
beside them, and next to that she put the other of the pair for her
lover.
The gifts were in readiness; the cottage wore a festive air. Branches
of laurel and pine were fastened over the fireplace, and the vessels of
copper and brass twinkled in the light of the yule log. Père Fouchard
had brought the log in that morning. He was as kind as his wife was
shrewish.
When the feast was eaten and Pierre’s mother was in bed, Lizette made
herself ready to go to the church. With greater care than ever she hid
her face in the hood of her cloak; then she lighted her lantern and
stepped out into a white mist, which seemed to open to receive her. The
frosty road crackled beneath her feet, and the branches of the trees
waved ghostly arms on each side.
The mist was like a delicate veil, entwining everything. Lizette knew
that the little procession of village folk had already passed on its
way to the church. She had heard them singing a few minutes before as
they went; but she had not wished to join them.
Now that she was on her way, she realized that her gaiety had deserted
her, that she felt frightened. But she must not be frightened; she must
have faith. It was faith that would make the miracle possible.
So Lizette came to the church after the others, and slipped into a dim
corner. Nevertheless, several saw her and peered curiously. Among these
was Mère Fouchard. Like all the rest, she had heard that Pierre Bernay
returned on the morrow.
Lizette scarcely heard the hymns or the sermon. She sat like one
tranced, waiting. Her rosary slipped through her fingers, and her pale
lips moved. She tried to think of the words of the prayers, and she
tried not to see Pierre’s eyes as they leaped to her face. Beyond her
meeting with Pierre everything was a blank.
The mass was over, and Lizette was on her way home. The others had
lingered to sing the Christmas carols and to exchange greetings; but
Lizette had slipped out quickly, and went alone through the fog. She
held her cloak tight about her with both hands. At first it had been
all she could do not to touch her face, but that temptation had passed.
She did not even think of it; she knew she would wait for Pierre’s
coming.
But the reaction after the long strain had set in. She felt a great
weariness; she would have liked to creep away into the wood and cry
like a little child. But she stumbled on through the fog, came to the
cottage, and lay down on her bed.
Then it was morning, and the mist was lifting and drifting away. It
drifted away in trailing veils, clinging to everything it passed. But
Lizette looked at the mist only a few moments; she had to make herself
ready for Pierre’s coming.
She watched for him from the window where she sat when she made her
lace, and the mist rose as though to let her see as far down the road
as possible. She could not have said whether she believed herself
healed. There was a sort of blankness in her head. Yet she knew she was
suffering supreme suspense. Now and again the anguish of it pierced
through the blankness; but it was only for a moment, or she could not
have borne it.
Then a figure came into sight at the farthest point of the road she
could see. She rose instantly; she knew it was Pierre. His tall figure,
his eager gait--how often she had seen him coming thus to the cottage!
But now her heart seemed to stop, and she felt she would never get to
the door; never put on her cloak, and pull her hood over her head. She
held the hood tight about her face as she went.
When Pierre saw her coming he stood perfectly still, his head lifted
up. It was as though his very longing, the piercing delight of her
nearness, had fixed him there. And Lizette, her knees trembling beneath
her, went on toward him. Then stopping suddenly, she lifted her hands
and threw back the hood from her face.
Ah, the leap of Pierre’s eyes! But before Lizette’s there came a
swimming blackness; the earth seemed to rise up and the trees to
rush past her. She tried to speak, she tried to see; then the deadly
struggling ceased.
She found herself in Pierre’s arms. His eyes were on her face. Their
love enveloped her and drew her close--closer than ever before. It was
like something in which she lost herself. She lay still, looking up at
him.
“Lizette,” he whispered brokenly. He put his face down against hers.
“My brave, beautiful Lizette!”
Tears sprang to her eyes; an incredible happiness flooded her being.
“It is the miracle of Little Noël,” she whispered.
Pierre paid no heed. He seemed not to care about her meaning; he cared
only for her. Raising her to her feet, he supported her with his
arm. He gazed in her face as though his hunger for it could never be
appeased; and at last he put one hand beneath her chin and turned her
head gently to one side.
“This is the Lizette I left,” he said--“the Lizette whose beautiful
face made me forget her soul. I loved her as a man loves a woman when
both are young.”
He stopped, and then he turned Lizette’s face so that his eyes rested
upon the side which had been burned.
“And this--” He broke off; when he could speak again, his voice had a
hushed, exquisite note--“and this,” he said, “is the Lizette I never
knew. It is the wonderful, beautiful soul of Lizette. When we are old
and our bodies have changed, still I shall always see your brave,
tender, beautiful soul.”
But Lizette, with a low cry, had pushed him from her. She put a hand to
her face.
“The burns!” she gasped. “I feel the burns!”
Pierre seized her hands in his. He drew her to him, kissing the scars
again and again.
“My Lizette,” he whispered, “I did not know before what love was--this
love of soul and body!”
And Lizette, raising her head, clasped her hands together.
“It is the miracle of Little Noël,” she said.
[Illustration]
THE CENTURY’S AFTER-THE-WAR SERIES
[Illustration]
THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON
INTRODUCTION
No period of our history better repays perusal by thoughtful readers
and good citizens than the political happenings of the three years
following the Civil War, culminating in the attempt to “recall”
President Johnson. But the subject is so vast that no magazine article
can more than suggest its outlines, or sketch the personalities
involved in the first efforts to reëstablish civil order in the South.
Probably no actor in that series of passionate events could write of
them without some bias; nor would any picture be quite true without the
perspective due to individual experience.
Considered in the large, the long fight between Congress and President
Johnson must be regarded as a wrestling of political forces, a struggle
for major influence in reconstruction, between the executive and
legislative branches of the Government.
In the Civil War the Democratic party, which for many years had been
dominated by the slave-holding interests of the South, had been
dethroned by the new Republican party, which, however, could not have
achieved its purpose to save the Union and abolish slavery without the
aid of the large body of War Democrats who had been rallied to the
support of Lincoln by his defeated rival, Senator Douglas.
At the end of the war, the Republican party was dominated by its
Radical wing, whose extreme aims were almost as offensive to the War
Democrats as to their old allies of the South; and the latter were not
slow to grasp at the political advantage of a reunion which promised
Democratic control of the National Government.
A fourth great factor in the war had been the Union men of the South,
formerly Democrats, of whom Andrew Johnson had been the forceful
leader. It was this prominence which dictated his nomination for
Vice-President in 1864. When, at the close of the war, by the
assassination of Lincoln he became President, his utterances gave the
Republicans hope that as a convert his zeal would equal if not exceed
that of the Radicals in their purpose to subject the South to a period
of political probation. But it was soon manifest that he would steer
the course of conciliation which Lincoln, before the end of battle, had
already charted and begun. The tendency of Johnson’s policy was to draw
to him men imbued with the old Democratic sentiment. In a little while,
the Republican leaders perceived that as soon as the Democrats of the
South should be allowed to vote they would unite with the Democrats of
the North, and thus Republican ascendancy might come to a sudden end,
and some of the results achieved by battle might be reversed at the
ballot-box.
The black man had been freed, and, to protect him against the political
power of his former masters, the Republicans decided to give him the
ballot. This, it was expected, would also offset Democratic votes
in the South, and help to perpetuate Republican rule. President
Johnson had championed emancipation, but was opposed to immediate
Negro suffrage. In the minds of the Radicals that attitude not only
stamped him as a traitor to the party which elected him, but also
incited an obstinate South. When the efforts to thwart the President
by obstructive laws had failed, the Radicals sought to remove him by
impeachment.
Each side had abundant legal and moral grounds for its actions, and
each believed that the other was reaching for selfish political
advantage. Outbreaks of lawlessness in the South, peculiar to the
extraordinary conditions, and chargeable to both sides, convinced each
that its worst fears were justified.
In the pages which follow, the main motives for impeachment are
sketched by General Otis, who fought through the Civil War as a
Union soldier, then entered the long political contest as a militant
journalist, and finally resumed his place by the flag in the war
with Spain. A more conservative view is taken by General Henderson,
a War Democrat high in Lincoln’s confidence, and a slaveholder who
yet proposed the final edict of freedom in the Senate. He is the only
survivor of the seven Republican senators who thwarted impeachment,
ex-Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, being the only other
surviving member of the court. Out of his personal recollection
General Henderson describes his intercourse with Lincoln in securing
emancipation, and his part in the impeachment fiasco.
Papers to follow, in the January ~Century~, will include an account
of the impeachment trial, largely based on the President’s notes and
letters, and an anecdotal sketch of Andrew Johnson, one of the most
peculiar characters in American history.
In subsequent papers, after an interval, the later aspects of
“Reconstruction” will be treated from the Southern point of view.--~The
Editor.~
[Illustration]
THE CAUSES OF IMPEACHMENT
BY HARRISON GRAY OTIS
Editor of the “Los Angeles Times”; veteran of the war for the Union;
Brevet Major-General in the war with Spain
THE SAVING OF THE UNION
The War of the Rebellion was the offspring of a desire on the part of
the South to secure exemption from laws that its people believed would
be enacted by a great Northern party, following the election of Abraham
Lincoln, and which would put an end to the extension of slavery, and
menace its safety in the States where it existed. In vain Republican
statesmen protested that slavery would not be interfered with south of
the Potomac. Behind Lincoln and Seward the South beheld Garrison and
Lovejoy and Phillips. It was the belief of Davis and Breckinridge and
Benjamin and Toombs that to exclude slavery from Kansas and Nebraska
would be to sound the prelude of its abolition in Virginia and the
Carolinas, and that those who commended the raid of John Brown and
indorsed Helper’s “Impending Crisis” would sooner or later dominate the
Republican party and commit it to universal abolition of the system of
servile labor, upon the perpetuation of which depended the industrial
life of the South.
It was believed by Southern publicists that the Dred Scott decision
would be reversed by a reorganized Supreme Court, and that a
Republican Congress would enact laws denying the slaveholders the right
to carry their slaves into the territories, and to be protected there
by Federal power. As a matter of fact, slave labor could not have been
employed profitably in the corn-fields of Kansas and Nebraska, and the
cotton States had no slaves to spare. As was wittily said by Charles
Francis Adams, “The South seceded because she couldn’t get protection
for a thing she hadn’t got, in a place where she didn’t want it.”
In the months between the election and inauguration of Lincoln,
during which the Southern Confederacy was organized, members of the
Thirty-sixth Congress made futile efforts to avert the coming struggle.
Senator Mason of Virginia sneeringly characterized the Crittenden
compromise resolutions as “a bread pill.” Senator Douglas rejoined
that “hypochondriacs were sometimes best cured of imaginary disorders
by the use of bread pills.” Compromise was impossible. The South was
determined on separation. Her press and her orators cherished the
delusion that Northern men would not fight to preserve the Union. They
fired the Southern heart and precipitated the cotton States into a
revolution.
The uprising in the North that followed the assault on Sumter amazed
the South and astonished the world; but it was not until nearly two
years after Sumter that the nation became fully aroused to a sense of
its power, its duty, and its destiny. The Emancipation Proclamation of
President Lincoln struck swift and sure at the cause of the war, which
was the Southern determination to perpetuate slavery. It enlisted the
sympathies of Christian civilization. By the late summer of 1864 it
became apparent that the sacrifices, the generalship, and the desperate
valor of the Confederates could not much longer hold out against the
superiority of the Union forces in numbers and arms, and the financial
resources of the Federal government. The one hope of the Confederacy
was that, at the ensuing election, the people of the loyal States might
decree to end the contest. But the soul went out of the Confederacy
on the sixth of November, 1864, when the ballots cast for Abraham
Lincoln settled the issue of continuing the war for the Union. Victory
succeeded victory, until the old banner, hallowed by the new motive,
floated over every Southern stronghold.
AN ELECTION ON THE MARCH
Many of the volunteer troops had been authorized by the laws of
their respective States to vote in the field for President of the
United States. In the case of my command, this voting was done in the
Shenandoah Valley on November 6, about a fortnight after the famous
battle of Cedar Creek, the scene of “Sheridan’s Ride.” My brigade was
then on the march from Cedar Creek to Martinsburg as guard to a long
supply-train. The usual practice on infantry marches was to march
fifty minutes and rest ten minutes. Our troops availed themselves of
the opportunity offered by these ten-minute rests to go to the polls
and cast their ballots. Polling-places had been provided in every
regimental line, proper election blanks supplied by the State, and the
voting was done not “early and often,” but with honesty and a fair
degree of regularity. In my own regiment the care of the rolls fell
to me and my associate election judges, who had charge of the polling
throughout the day. A bullet through the leg, received in the battle
of Kernstown three months before, had deprived me of my full “hiking”
powers, compelling me to resort to the “hurricane-deck” of a mule for
transportation throughout the march; but I “arrived” all right, and on
the following day, in the midst of a snow-storm, I was able to collect
the rolls, certify to the results, and officially transmit the papers
to the Ohio Secretary of State. The votes cast were almost entirely
for Abraham Lincoln’s reëlection, General George B. McClellan, his
Democratic, anti-war opponent, securing scarcely more than a “look in”
at the hands of this steadfast Ohio brigade. McClellan fared little
better at the hands of those Ohio volunteers than had Clement L.
Vallandigham when he was a candidate for governor of the Buckeye State.
CIVIC AND MATERIAL DESOLATION
The surrender of Lee and Johnston left the South in a deplorable
condition. Its people were without money or credit, and their labor
system was destroyed. Its legislators and judges were fleeing or hiding
from Federal soldiers. The organic and statutory laws of the South that
were in existence before the war had been changed by State conventions
and legislatures during the war. Twelve millions of people, white and
black, were not only without representation at Washington, but they
were without local law, without civil government of any kind, without
other protection than the bayonets of Federal troops. Somewhere there
must exist the power to create, to adjust, to set the machinery of
government again in motion. Clearly the creative power was in the
people of each State capable of giving their consent to be governed,
and not in a few, or in a class who should assume to govern the others.
The adjusting power was in Congress under Section 8 of Article I of
the Federal Constitution, which provides that Congress “shall have the
power to provide for the general welfare of the United States.”
The national statesmen of those days were confronted with a perplexing
problem. They desired to remove the blight from the fair face of the
South, to open her seaports to the ships of the world, to restore her
marts to commerce, her fields to plenty, her people to prosperity,
to citizenship, to equality, and to a place in the councils of the
Government. Nothing less than this was intended by those who undertook
the task of reconstruction. There was no vengeful outbreak of passion,
no proscription of the Southern people, no spirit of retaliation in the
hearts of Union men.
The new nation which was to issue from the war began to take form
before the surrender of Lee or the assassination of President Lincoln.
The Thirteenth Amendment, validating the Emancipation Proclamation and
abolishing slavery, had been ratified by eleven of the States which had
joined the Confederacy, also by Maryland and Missouri of the border
States, and by all the Northern States. Delaware and Kentucky alone had
refused to ratify. But it was unfortunate for the Southern people that
their leaders in the fighting did not participate in the public affairs
of the South and advise the politicians that they could not expect
to win from Union statesmen what their armies had failed to gain on
the battle-field. Southern soldiers, as a whole, showed the spirit of
men who had fought bravely and lost fairly, and recognized the duty,
not less than the patriotism, of submitting to the inevitable. Almost
without exception, Union soldiers of the line and their officers stood
ready to reflect in their acts, attitude, and feelings the sentiments
of their great commander General Grant, who had said to the vanquished
at Appomattox: “Take your horses home with you; you will need them to
put in your crops.” Had the Southern people, the non-combatants among
them, taken the attitude of the mass of the Confederate soldiers,
the difficulties of reconstruction would have been lessened. But in
the first year after the close of the war the country, as already
described, was convulsed by disturbing political events, in which the
rebellious spirit shown by the Southern people caused deep anxiety and
created marked revulsion in the North. There were strong exhibitions
of aroused and indignant sentiment in Union conventions and other
public assemblies, and there was a tremendous outpouring of protest and
warning. At the same time the South was aflame with claims of Southern
rights denied and of wrongs suffered.
INCIDENTS OF PROVOST-MARSHAL RULE
Two incidents within my personal knowledge illustrate the inconvenience
caused by the total absence of civil law in the South at that
juncture. In June, 1865, I was serving as provost-marshal at the town
of Harrisonburg, in the Valley of the Shenandoah, with instructions
to preserve order, gather up various sorts of United States military
property scattered through the country, arrest outlaws and marauders,
and receive the surrender of, and give paroles to, bands of scattered
Confederate soldiers who had not been “in” at the all-compelling
surrender at Appomattox Court House two months before. The country was
honeycombed with stragglers, and I was burdened with my unique tasks.
Civil government being non-existent, there was not even authority for
the issuance of marriage-licenses and for the performance of like civic
duties. One day, in this emergency, I received a personal application
from an ardent Virginia swain, who announced that he wished to get
married, and appealed to me for instructions as to how to go about the
tender though untimely task. Rising to the occasion, I told him that
I would issue him a license, and accordingly did so in my capacity
as a captain of United States Volunteers, and for the time being
provost-marshal of that district. I wrote out the necessary authority,
observing no forms, empowering any minister of the gospel, or any
former justice of the peace under the Confederacy, to perform the
ceremony. Then I sent the happy lover on his way rejoicing, and assumed
that the knot was tied with due solemnity, that the couple would live
happily ever after, and rear a family of Virginia children.
As provost-marshal I imposed a fine on a portly Negro saloon-keeper for
violating a military order commanding the closing of all liquor shops
in the town. The amount of the fine was fifty dollars in greenbacks,
which was promptly, albeit ungraciously, paid by the aggrieved
dispenser of firewater. Then, not knowing what to do legally with the
money, I transmitted it to the regimental and post commander. He,
also, not knowing how to dispose of this exceptional collection under
any section of the army regulations, sent it to the Treasury of the
United States at Washington, accompanied by an explanatory letter. The
treasury officials, likewise “stumped” by the unusual problem, sent
the fifty dollars back to the colonel commanding. He in turn threw the
money back upon me, with a hint that in the unique dilemma the colored
man’s unwilling contribution might not inappropriately be covered into
the treasury of a certain regimental fund which was then being raised
to promote a permanent, patriotic, and reverent object. Without delay I
proceeded to act upon the hint, and to this day I hold among my private
military archives the receipt of the regimental quartermaster for the
money thus forcibly extorted from that Negro at Harrisonburg who had
undertaken to sell Virginia apple-jack without a military license.
OPPOSITION TO THE EDICT OF FREEDOM
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, which
was pending when Lee surrendered, was not acceptable to the South.
Almost the first acts of the Southern legislatures which assembled
under President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty, and the provisional
organizations provided for by these agencies, breathed antagonism to
the abolition of slavery. In November, 1865, Mississippi provided
by legislative enactment that any Negro over eighteen years of age
found in that State with no lawful employment or business should be
deemed a vagrant. Conviction of vagrancy was punished by fine, and for
non-payment of fine for five days it was made the duty of the sheriff
to hire out the “vagrant” to any person who for the shortest period
of service would pay the fine. In March, 1865, three months after the
Thirteenth Amendment was declared in force, Georgia enacted a vagrant
law authorizing the sale of the black man’s time for a year. The same
law provided for the return and punishment by fine and imprisonment
of runaway black employees, and authorized the employer to pay the
fine and deduct it from the servant’s wages. Alabama, South Carolina,
and Virginia had vagrant laws similar to those of Mississippi, and
Louisiana had an additional provision requiring employers to pay only
half-wages, and giving them the right to keep the remainder if the
laborer quit before his time was out; and also the right to complain of
a laborer who might quit work, and cause him to be put on the public
works, without pay, until he returned to his employer.
Union men who had left their Southern homes during the war came back to
find their property, real and personal, in the hands of Confederates,
who refused to surrender it. Returning Unionists encountered such
persecution as compelled them to leave again. There was, under “the
black law,” a virtual reënslavement of Negroes. Confederate sentiment
was nearly as dominant from the Potomac to the Gulf as when the Stars
and Bars floated from every flagstaff. Georgia elected, or tried to
elect, Alexander H. Stephens a United States Senator. Mobile made
Raphael Semmes, the captain of the _Alabama_, a probate judge. Monroe
was elected mayor of New Orleans, and Robert E. Lee was offered the
nomination for Governor of Virginia. National airs were hissed in
the theaters, and the national flag was insulted in the streets.
The local press extolled the “Lost Cause” and flouted those who had
overthrown it. Former Confederate officers were the chosen leaders of
public sentiment. Taxation was levied to pay municipal indebtedness
contracted to fit out Confederate regiments. The generally expressed
Southern opinion was that, if reconstruction was necessary, it was the
Confederates who should do the reconstructing.
Northern representatives in Congress, under the leadership of Thaddeus
Stevens and Henry Winter Davis, were not hospitable to the Southern
claims for immediate and unconditional representation in Congress. In
substance they said: The alleged “right” of secession has been trampled
under the feet of the Union armies; the Confederate claims of exemption
from the consequences of their action is not allowed. The North does
not demand punishment of Confederates, nor indemnity for the past, but
it will have security for the future. Taxation is a consequence of war
which the South must bear with the North. Representation--participation
in public rule--is a privilege which, except under satisfactory
conditions and guarantees, will not be extended to the people of the
cotton States.
THE MILITARY STATE GOVERNMENTS
A law of Congress was enacted authorizing an officer not below the
rank of brigadier-general of the United States army to make a list
of all the voters in a State which might be under his command as
a military district. In making this list, residence and manhood
were the only qualifications.[3] The general was authorized and
directed to issue a proclamation inviting the listed voters to
assemble at the polls and elect delegates to a convention to draft a
State constitution to be submitted to a vote of the people, and if
ratified and approved by Congress, the State to be placed at once in
practical political relations with the other States, and accorded her
proper representation in Congress. The only persons excluded from
participation in reconstruction were those who before the war had
taken an official oath to support the Government and Constitution
of the United States, and who had afterward violated that oath by
voluntarily bearing arms against the Government of the United States.
The class thus excluded from suffrage was perhaps 30,000 in number. The
conventions were required to perpetuate the basis of suffrage set forth
in the Reconstruction Act and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. That
amendment provided that Federal indebtedness should be paid, and that
Confederate indebtedness should not be paid; that those who were under
disabilities should not be eligible to office until Congress should
remove their disabilities; that representation in Congress and in the
Electoral College should not be accorded to those to whom the right of
suffrage had been or might be denied, and that all persons should be
protected in their rights of liberty and property.
The Fourteenth Amendment was opposed both South and North by those who
asserted that the Union armies had fought to establish the doctrine
that no State could secede from the Union; that the Union victories had
established such doctrine; that as no State could secede, therefore no
State did secede, and, so being in the Union, every Southern State was
entitled to representation without conditions.
To such reasoning it was answered that no statesman and no party had
ever claimed that a State might not destroy herself, even as a city
might disincorporate, or a county merge itself with another. No State
could absolve its citizens from their allegiance to the United States
or release them from their obligation to obey Federal laws and their
liability for Federal taxes, or deprive them of their right to Federal
protection. No State could withdraw her territory or her people from
the dominant jurisdiction of the United States. But, nevertheless, a
State might destroy her internal government, repeal her local laws, and
discontinue her political relations with the other States. She might
commit state suicide. If she sent no senators or representatives to the
Federal Congress; if through her officers she emptied her treasury,
abrogated her courts, disrobed herself of sovereignty, dissolved her
legislature, smote her constitution to pieces with anarchic blows,
and submitted to military rule or to the sway of a revolutionary
central power, she did not take her territory or her people out of
the Union, but she took herself out of existence as a State, leaving
only her territorial boundaries to mark her place on the map. In such
circumstances it became the duty of the Government of the United
States to treat such disorganized Federal territory as it would treat
unorganized Federal territory acquired by purchase or by conquest.
LINCOLN’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY IN WAR AND JOHNSON’S IN PEACE
Between the assassination of President Lincoln and the meeting of
Congress in December, 1865, an interval of over seven months, there
was no authoritative Republican declaration of the party policy as to
reconstruction. The murder of Lincoln, hastily and unjustly charged by
some Union men against the entire South, was received with an outburst
of rage that encouraged Thaddeus Stevens and other leading Radicals to
propose that the South should be reconstructed by treating the eleven
late Confederate States as conquered territory, wiping out State lines,
and organizing the Territory of Grant, the Territory of Lincoln, the
Territory of Sherman, the Territory of Sheridan, and other territories
to be named after Union officers, which should be governed like the
Territories of Idaho, Montana, and Colorado, and in due time admitted
to the Union on a satisfactory showing in each case.
President Johnson opposed the program of Thad. Stevens. He called
attention to the fact that before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox
the white men of Tennessee elected two United States senators and a
full complement of congressmen, made Brownlow governor, and gave a
majority for Lincoln and Johnson. He reasoned that if Tennessee was
in the Union sufficiently to provide a Vice-President who had become
President, she was in the Union absolutely, and entitled to have her
senators and representatives admitted to seats in Congress. Johnson’s
policy was to ignore everything in the past; to readmit senators and
representatives from the late Confederate States without guarantees
and without delay; to withdraw our armies, and permit the Confederates
to reëstablish their local governments to suit themselves. He proposed,
in effect, that the Confederates, after four years of fighting, having
surrendered to the Union, Union men in turn should, after four weeks of
rejoicing, surrender to the Confederacy.
In assuming this position, Johnson claimed that he was carrying out
Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction, for Lincoln had said long before
the surrender of Lee that his purpose was to save the Union, whether
such saving was accomplished by abolishing slavery or by preserving
it. But Lincoln was a progressive and constructive statesman, and a
policy which he might have favored to obtain peace conditioned on the
disbandment of the Confederate armies, while they were still in the
field as a mighty force, might not have been his policy after the
enforced surrender of Lee and Johnston.
There was no time between the collapse of the Confederacy and the
assassination of Lincoln for him to formulate any policy. It may be
said, however, that he was not in favor of the plan of Thad. Stevens
and Ben. Wade to blot out lines and names in eleven States, and deal
with them as conquered territory. Lincoln’s plan was not to destroy
the Southern States as existing entities, but to recognize the fact
that, as far as government in those entities was concerned, “chaos
had come again,” and it was the duty of Congress to provide for a
reëstablishment of government there, and to prescribe the conditions
on which the people of those States should be accorded national
representation.
NEGRO SUFFRAGE
Congress was determined that one of the conditions of reconstruction
should be the admission of colored men to the right of suffrage. Most
of those who advised this were influenced by politico-economic rather
than moral or sentimental considerations. They said to the South, the
action of your legislatures and the utterances of your public men and
newspapers all evince your determination virtually to restore slavery
by establishing peonage. We must either garrison every school district
in the South with soldiers at enormous cost in order to protect the
Negro, or else we must give him the ballot and enable him to protect
himself. If he is made a voter, the struggle of candidates to obtain
his vote may protect him.
Congress, as subsequently appeared, was determined to make Negro
suffrage an essential part of any plan of reconstruction. Johnson was
equally determined to refuse the franchise to the black man, and he had
the power to do it.
KU-KLUX OUTRAGES
One of the most potent instrumentalities in discrediting Andrew
Johnson was the Ku-Klux Klan. It would be impossible within the
limits of this article to give even a brief synopsis of the outrages
of this remarkable band of outlaws. The report of the “Congressional
Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States,” made to the
Forty-second Congress, fills thirteen large volumes. The Ku-Klux
organization extended over eleven States. It was estimated that
its membership exceeded one hundred thousand, and included men who
otherwise were reputable and respected citizens. Its avowed purpose
was to exclude from participation in public affairs, either as voters
or office-holders, all Negroes, all “carpet-baggers,” as incomers from
the North were called, and all “scallywags,” as Southern Union men were
designated.
The purpose of the Ku-Klux Klan was not primarily to depredate private
property, but for a long period they were merciless in dealing
with those who came under their ban. A white man obnoxious to them
was ordered to leave the vicinage. If he failed to obey, the torch
was applied to his home, and he was openly assaulted or secretly
assassinated. If he offered armed resistance, he was murdered. The
colored man who attempted to exercise the right of suffrage was called
from his cabin at midnight, tied to a tree, and whipped, and his house
was burned to the ground. Prosecutions of the members of the Ku-Klux
instituted in the Federal courts in North Carolina, in South Carolina,
and in other States almost invariably resulted in failure for want of
proof, hard to get; and not until the second administration of General
Grant were these outlaws finally disbanded and dispersed.
PUBLIC SENTIMENT AGAINST JOHNSON’S POLICIES
Two great national conventions were held in the year 1866, one at
Pittsburg and the other at Philadelphia. The latter, beginning on
September 3, was made up in large measure of Southern loyalists and
other civilians, among whom the tide of patriotism ran high. It made
a tremendous impression upon the country and upon the recalcitrant
and dissatisfied South. Among the delegates were Ralph Waldo Emerson,
James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, eleven
governors, and eight United States senators. Among the thousands of
Unionists whom I met there was James A. Garfield, who had won his spurs
as a major-general in the field, who subsequently served in the House
of Representatives, became President, and died that tragic death which
history has sadly recorded. In his joyousness and geniality he seemed
to me like a great overgrown boy. While masses of shouting, cheering,
and singing men were parading through Independence Square, within the
sound of the Liberty Bell, that big man passed his arms affectionately
about the shoulders of a young soldier, whom he did not know, and
strode proudly along as though the latter had been his lifelong friend.
It was enough for Garfield to know that the other was a comrade. I was
the obscure young soldier.
The object of the convention was to devise means for the protection of
the imperiled lives and property of loyal Southerners. The chairman,
the Hon. Charles Gibbons, voiced the purpose of the convention when he
said: “It is the honest sentiment of the North, held and uttered in the
interests of union, of peace, and of Christianity, that when the South
returns to her duty she must come in new robes, with new covenants for
liberty, equality, and justice, led by her own loyal Unionists, who are
free from the guilt of treason.”
The Union Soldiers’ and Sailors’ convention, at Pittsburg, followed
the other in the same month. It was equally large, equally serious and
determined in its character and utterances. It was attended by hosts
of soldiers of all grades, from private to major-general. The speeches
and resolutions breathed a sentiment of deep devotion to the restored
Union, expressed a fearless determination to prevent the fruits of the
nation’s sacrifices from being snatched away or diluted. Revolt against
the tendencies in the White House and the South was general among the
friends of the Union.
THE FAILURE TO DISLODGE THE PRESIDENT
In 1867 an act of Congress was passed depriving the President of
the power to issue an amnesty proclamation, which he overrode. His
disposition and his plans to defy Congress and pursue his own method of
reconstructing the South caused Congress to deprive him of the command
of the army, a bold act, the constitutionality of which might well
be disputed at any stage, but which illustrates the almost desperate
frame of mind in which Congress then was. Johnson’s continued defiance
was met by the enactment into law of the Tenure-of-Office bill, which
prevented him from making a change in his cabinet, his own official
household.
These strained relations between the President and Congress, which had
existed for more than two years, reached an open rupture on February
21, 1868, when the President informed the Senate that he had removed
Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, contrary to the Tenure-of-Office
act. The House at once adopted a resolution, by a vote of 122 to 47
(not voting 17) to “impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United
States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.” James G. Blaine, in his
“Twenty Years of Congress,” says that, in adopting this resolution of
impeachment, Congress acted hastily; but it is the opinion of many
still living that he did not consider the precedent circumstances,
which, as much as the removal of Stanton, led 122 congressmen to cast
their votes for impeachment. Still, it was probably fortunate for the
nation that Johnson was saved from impeachment by one senatorial vote.
If Johnson had been impeached, Ben. Wade of Ohio, a fearless Republican
statesman, would have become President. Wade was a Radical of the
Radicals, who always had the courage of his convictions. He probably
would have given the whole force of his administration to the plan of
Thad. Stevens to organize the South into territories and govern it
as such, yet granting the States readmission to the Union gradually
and on stipulated terms. The people of the North were so enraged over
the assassination of Lincoln and the continued efforts of the Southern
States to nullify the Thirteenth Amendment that they might then have
approved the Stevens plan of reconstruction. At this day, nearly half a
century after Appomattox, it seems best that neither the Johnson plan
nor the Stevens plan did prevail.
TWO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS
The failure to impeach Johnson accentuated the need of further
constitutional amendment. As early as June 13, 1866, the Fourteenth
Amendment, declaring that no State may abridge the rights of citizens
of the United States, was proposed in Congress, but it was not finally
ratified and declared to be in force until July 28, 1868. California
never took final action on this amendment. It was rejected by
Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. New Jersey and Ohio rescinded their
ratification of it. Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia at first rejected the
amendment, but afterward ratified it.
Notwithstanding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, feud,
anarchy, and devastation continued in the Southern country, and the
failure to impeach Johnson was an incentive to continued disorder. How
to secure peace, justice, and prosperity was the pressing question of
the hour. Congress had tried constitutional amendments, and the South
ignored them. It had tried civil-rights bills, which were useless
without military power to enforce them. Then Congress said in effect
to the Southern people: “If you have not a loyal white majority
which can be trusted with the administration of civil government, we
will enfranchise the black man. We must either garrison every school
district with Union troops in order to protect the Negro from a peonage
that is practical reënslavement, or we must give him the ballot and let
him protect himself.” It was believed that the contending ambitions of
office-seekers to obtain the colored man’s vote would cause them to
treat him justly.
It was such conditions that produced the Fifteenth Amendment, providing
that no State might deprive a citizen of his vote “on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The first draft
contained the word “nativity,” which was obnoxious to the Pacific
coast because of the apprehension of Chinese suffrage, so the word
was eliminated. Nevada was the first State to ratify the Fifteenth
Amendment. California, Oregon, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and New
Jersey rejected it. Georgia and Ohio at first rejected it, but finally
ratified it. New York rescinded her ratification. The amendment was
proposed February 26, 1869, and declared in force March 30, 1870.
Half a century ago human slavery had been banished from every civilized
nation in the world except the United States. Here it was intrenched
behind apparently impregnable fortifications composed of cotton-bales,
pulpits, and counting-rooms, of bank vaults and political conventions.
The reverberations of Sumter’s guns changed a majority of the people
of the Northern States from conservative indifference to toleration
of antislavery sentiments, and, as the war progressed, into active
abolitionists; and thus the Emancipation Proclamation was acclaimed
by millions who three years before would have scouted such a measure.
It is more than forty-seven years since the last gun was fired in
the Civil War; it is more than forty years since the last measure of
reconstruction was enacted. The generals and statesmen of that historic
era have journeyed on. The veterans in the soldiers’ homes grow rapidly
fewer in number, and it will not be many years until the last of them
will have joined the great majority. The acerbities and rancors of the
war have been submerged in Lethean waters, and the Southern States,
once desolated, have become prosperous and powerful supporters of the
Old Flag.
[Illustration: Drawn by Joseph Pennell
THE CAPITOL, FROM PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]
[3] See page 195 for a reference to the Fifteenth Amendment, which
introduced into the fundamental law the phrase, “without
distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
EMANCIPATION AND IMPEACHMENT
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SENATOR WHO PROPOSED THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT, AND
WAS ONE OF THE SEVEN REPUBLICANS WHO THWARTED THE ATTEMPT TO IMPEACH
PRESIDENT JOHNSON
BY GENERAL JOHN B. HENDERSON
THE “RECALL” FOR PRESIDENTS
Article II, Sec. 4, of the Constitution provides that “The President,
Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be
removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason,
bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Thus the principle
of the “recall,” in very broad terms, has been written into our
fundamental law. Human nature is such that the idea of resorting to
this remedy originates first in the minds of political opponents. As
applicable to Presidents, the recall was probably much desired by the
enemies of John Adams, the second President, and of Andrew Jackson,
the seventh. Fortunately it has actually been invoked only against
the seventeenth President, Andrew Johnson, who owed his position to
the recall by assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His impeachment, I
believe, was due mainly to a counter-tide of passion, prejudice, and
political revenge. His trial formed a crisis in the life of the nation,
the dangerous import of which may not yet be fully understood. His
rescue from conviction by the narrow margin of one vote was followed
by demands for the recall of the seven Republican senators who voted
with the Democrats. I happened to be the youngest of the seven, though
not the least berated. By the refusal of a reëlection, all of the seven
were retired to private life. Then out of several years of bitterness
came the wisdom of reflection. Those who had reviled began to praise
and finally to utter words of thankfulness. Even some of the leaders
of impeachment, in the calm of reason, have put on record frank
confessions of error. Thus it has been my happiness to live to see the
keenest disappointment of my public life transformed into its chief
honor.
BORDER-STATE INFLUENCE AND WARFARE
In his great wisdom Lincoln early perceived that unless antislavery
sentiment could be sustained in the border States, the Federal cause
was likely to fail. With that belief he sought information and
counsel from those men in Congress who, like myself, had been bred
in the shadow of slavery and who yet desired the extinction of the
institution. Though born in Danville, Virginia, most of my early life
was spent at Louisiana, a town north of St. Louis, on the Missouri side
of the Mississippi. There I began to practise law in 1848 and to hear
of a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, located at Springfield, seventy-five
miles to the northeast. In that year he was serving his only term in
Congress, while I was beginning public life as a member of the Missouri
legislature, to which I returned in 1856. Though a member of the
Electoral College in 1856 which made Buchanan President, I was strongly
opposed to his Kansas policy. In 1860 I was an elector on the Stephen
A. Douglas ticket. I had inherited slave property, but was convinced
that slavery was an economic drawback in Missouri. On her borders, east
and north, white settlers were founding prosperous communities, and
avoiding us because white labor would not compete with slave labor.
My only purchase of slaves was made on the appeal of a black man who
had built the fires in my office. He and his wife and son were sold at
auction to pay the debts of their master. I bought them in for about
$1400. Thereafter they never served me; but as the law required that
they should be in regular employ, I hired them out, they taking the
wages.
Civil war was an actual fact in Missouri before the sword and the torch
were at work in the other border States. Early in 1861 our legislature,
which was secessionist in sentiment, provided for a state convention
to join, as they hoped, the other seceding States; but, to their great
surprise, a majority of Union delegates were chosen at the special
election, I being among that majority. Ex-Governor Sterling Price,
then classed with the opponents of secession, became president of the
convention which assembled soon after Lincoln’s first inaugural made
it plain that a conflict was inevitable. As Jackson, our governor at
that time, was disloyal, the life of the convention was prolonged by
adjournment, during which the secession element ranged itself under
Jackson and Price, and the Union element, with the continuing authority
of the convention, grew strong enough to organize and to elect Governor
Gamble. Under the arrangements for home defense, I organized a brigade,
and in General Schofield’s command operated against the raiders who
burned bridges and disturbed northeastern Missouri during the first
year of the war. The conditions were such that no man could safely
remain neutral. Unless he was openly for one side or the other, he was
suspected by both, and doubly liable to pillage and arrest.
THE TREND TOWARD EMANCIPATION
From the field I was sent to the United States Senate in January, 1862,
to fill the unexpired term of Trusten Polk, who had joined the South.
In March, President Lincoln sent to Congress his message asking for
a joint resolution favoring the gradual abolishment of slavery with
compensation. A few days later he asked the border States delegations
to a conference at the White House in which he urged that policy
without gaining much encouragement. On July 12 he made a second direct
appeal to the same delegations, in conference, and urged that if the
border States would adopt measures of compensated emancipation, the
war must shortly end, since then, and not till then, would the South
realize that slavery was doomed. Twenty of them signed a written
qualified refusal to urge his recommendation; seven assented in a
prepared address; and Horace Maynard and I wrote individual replies.
I had been absent from the conference on business relating to my
duties as senator, but I gave the President my view that, while I
had supported the measure when first introduced, I did not share his
belief that it alone would bring the war to an early termination. But
I added that in such a period of national distress I knew of “no human
institution too sacred for discussion, no material interest belonging
to the citizen that he should not willingly place upon the altar of
his country, if demanded by the public good. The man who cannot now
sacrifice party and put aside selfish considerations is more than half
disloyal. Pride of opinion, based upon sectional jealousies, should not
be permitted to control the decision of any political question. These
remarks are general, but apply with peculiar force to the people of the
border States at present.”
THE FAILURE OF PLANS TO PURCHASE EMANCIPATION
These sentiments indicated that I was drifting toward Lincoln’s
position that emancipation was indispensable to the saving of the
Union. After the July conference at the White House, a general bill
offering aid to the border States if they would adopt compensated
emancipation was introduced in Congress, but not brought to final
action. In the autumn, at Mr. Lincoln’s request, I went to Missouri
to take part in the agitation of the question, and the reversal of
sentiment shown at the November election seemed altogether favorable.
So, on December 10, I introduced a bill in the Senate appropriating
twenty millions of dollars to aid Missouri if her people would adopt
compensated emancipation. At the same time Congressman Noell, in the
House, gave notice of a similar bill, but reducing the aid to ten
millions. His bill passed the House on January 6, 1863, and was sent
to the Senate, where, on February 7, a compromise of fifteen millions
was adopted; but the pro-slavery members from Missouri gathered
enough strength to prevent action by the House. Meantime Lincoln’s
proclamation of freedom to all slaves in rebellious territory had gone
into effect on the first of January.
The idea of compensated emancipation for the border States made no
further progress in Congress, and probably lost ground in the North,
for a reason humorously stated by Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont.
During the recess he addressed a meeting of several hundred neighbors
and stated that the measure would call for the payment of about $300
each for four million slaves. He asked them to go home and consider
what they would advise their representatives to do. An old leader
in the town waxed eloquent over the fact that the North shared the
responsibility for slavery and ought to help settle the bill, and,
though poor, he declared himself willing to pay his share. But in a day
or two he was back again with a different opinion.
“Senator,” he exclaimed, “me and wife and the boys figure that our
share would be just about all we’ve got; so I guess you might as well
let that damned Negro question alone.”
THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT
A year later the distress of the nation had enforced a more united
sentiment, and on January 11, 1864, I offered in the Senate a joint
resolution to abolish slavery in the United States. After a good deal
of discussion over the wording of the resolution, Senator Sumner
offering one form, and Senator Trumbull suggesting the terms of the
ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in all the Northwest, the
latter was favored. Though the requisite two-thirds vote was obtained
in the Senate, the House did not acquiesce until after a whole year of
discussion. The bill became a law on January 31, 1865. A hundred guns
announced the event, and the rejoicing was great and spontaneous.
LINCOLN AND THE LIQUOR HABIT
At the second inauguration of Lincoln I was chairman of the committee
which escorted the President to the Capitol, and sat by his side while
Andrew Johnson, after taking the oath as Vice-President, harangued
the crowded senate chamber. During the painful ordeal, Mr. Lincoln’s
head drooped in the deepest humiliation. As I offered him my arm for
the procession to the steps of the Capitol, where he delivered the
Inaugural, he turned to the marshal and said, “Don’t let Johnson speak
outside.”
Senator Doolittle, who had escorted the Vice-President elect to the
Capitol, told me that when they went into Mr. Hamlin’s room Johnson
said to the retiring Vice-President:
“Mr. Hamlin, I have been feeling very ill. Can you give me some good
brandy?”
A bottle of French brandy was found, and to brace his nerves for
the task before him, he poured out the full glass that wrought the
mischief. His reputation was that of a temperate man; and this was his
only show of inebriety; but the scene was so deeply humiliating that
a caucus of senators a few days afterward seriously considered the
propriety of asking him to resign as their presiding officer.
Mr. Lincoln’s aversion to liquor and tobacco was well known. He
once told me with relish of a rebuke for his abstinence given by a
friendly stage-driver. During the time that he was a circuit lawyer,
he sometimes walked from one county court to another. While on such a
tramp a stage overtook him and the driver invited him to take a seat
on the box. After they had chatted for a while the driver produced a
whisky-flask, saying:
“Stranger, won’t you take a drink?”
“No, thank you,” Lincoln replied; “I never drink.”
A little later the driver drew some tobacco from his pocket and said:
“Stranger, won’t you have a chew?”
Lincoln answered:
“No, thank you, I never chew.”
After a period of reflection the driver said:
“Stranger, do you smoke?”
Lincoln replied:
“No, I never smoke.”
Looking at him quizzically, the driver exclaimed:
“So you’re one of those men I’ve heard of who have no small vices.”
To which Lincoln answered:
“It is true that I don’t use liquor or tobacco.”
Then the driver turned on him with the conclusive remark:
“Stranger, I’ll tell you what I think: those men who have no small
vices seldom have any large virtues.”
I once heard Mr. Lincoln tell of another liquor experience, this time
at the expense of Senator David Davis, who was present and enjoyed
it as much as the rest of the company. While attending a session of
court presided over by Judge Davis, the latter overtook him one morning
on the road, and asked him to get into the Davis carriage, which was
drawn by a pair of spirited horses, driven by a trusted coachman. They
traveled at a rate which made Lincoln uneasy, and soon entered on a
piece of new road abounding in ruts and stumps. As the carriage bumped
and swayed, Lincoln, in much alarm, turned to the judge and asked:
“Mr. Davis, isn’t your driver drunk?”
[Illustration: From a photograph by Prince, taken in 1908. Half-tone
plate engraved by H. Davidson
GENERAL JOHN B. HENDERSON]
“No,” replied the judge, “Michael is a sober man and never takes
anything.”
After a jar which nearly upset them, Lincoln asked that the carriage
should be stopped, so that he could get out. The judge expostulated,
but when they struck another stump, Lincoln exclaimed:
“Mr. Davis, your driver _is_ drunk!”
Thereupon Davis loudly demanded of the coachman that he should stop,
and, observing him closely, saw the whole truth in the wild gleam of
his eyes. The judge indignantly exclaimed:
“Michael, you are drunk!”
And Michael, with an approving leer, answered:
“Judge Davis, that’s the correctest decision you’ve rendered in the
last twelve months.”
LINCOLN’S CLEMENCY
My last interview with Mr. Lincoln occurred after the adjournment of
the extra session of the Senate about the middle of March, 1865. I went
to the White House to ask the President to pardon a number of the men
who had been languishing in Missouri prisons for various offenses, all
political. Some of them had been my schoolmates, and their mothers,
sisters, and sweethearts had persisted in appeals that I should use
my influence for their release. Since it was evident to me that the
Confederacy was in its last throes, I felt that the pardon of most of
these prisoners would do more good than harm. I had separated them
according to the gravity of the offense into three classes, and handing
the first list to him, I said:
“Mr. President, the session is closed, and I am about to start for
home. The war is virtually over. Grant is pretty certain to get Lee
and his army, and Sherman is plainly able to take care of Johnston.
In my opinion, the best way to prevent guerrilla warfare at the end
of organized resistance will be to show clemency to these rebel
sympathizers.”
Lincoln shook his head and said:
“Henderson, I am deeply indebted to you and I want to show it, but
don’t ask me at this time to pardon rebels.”
Then I offered new arguments, but he replied in a grieved tone:
“I can’t do it! People are continually blaming me for being too
lenient. Don’t encourage such fellows by inducing me to turn loose a
lot of men who, perhaps, ought to be hanged.”
I answered:
“Mr. President, these prisoners and their friends tell me that for them
the Rebellion is over, and it will surely have a good influence now to
let them go.”
He answered:
“Henderson, my conscience tells me that I must not do it.”
But I persisted:
“Mr. President, you _should_ do it. It is necessary for good feeling in
Missouri that these people should be released.”
“If I sign this list as a whole, will you be responsible for the future
good behavior of the men?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then I will take the risk and sign it.” He wrote the word “pardoned,”
signed the general order of release, and returned the paper to me.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, “but that is not all; I have
another list here.”
“You are not going to make me let loose another lot!” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” I answered, “but I am not quite so sure of the merits of this
list. However, I believe the men are not dangerous, and it will be good
policy to let them go. My argument for this list is the same as for the
other. The war is virtually over; the guilt of these men is at least
doubtful; mercy must be the policy of peace.”
With the only word approaching profanity I ever heard him utter, he
exclaimed:
“I’ll be durned if I don’t sign it!” and he signed the second list like
the first. “Now, Henderson,” he said, as he handed the list back to me,
“remember that you are responsible to me for these men; and if they
don’t behave, I shall have to put you in prison for their sins.”
THE DISCONTENT WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON
On December 18, 1865, eight months after the death of Lincoln, the
Thirteenth Amendment was proclaimed by Secretary Seward, it having
received the indorsement of two thirds of all the States in the
Union. Partly through my solicitation, President Johnson had used
his great influence with the border States to gain their approval of
emancipation. During the fight for the Thirteenth Amendment it was no
secret that some of the leading Radicals in Congress were indifferent
toward the abolishment of slavery at that time, as well as toward
Mr. Lincoln’s scheme of reconstruction, out of the belief that those
measures would make inevitable his renomination and election, which
they did not favor. The Radicals had been sympathetic toward Andrew
Johnson as senator and as military governor of Tennessee, on account
of his vigorous antislavery views, but when he became President,
and, as he believed, took up the work of reconstruction on the lines
that Lincoln had begun, they at once realized that his success would
frustrate their plans for the political domination of the South.
[Illustration: Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
ANDREW JOHNSON
This portrait is from a photograph taken not long before his death.]
Senator Sumner’s theory of “State suicide” and Thad. Stevens’s idea
of “conquered provinces,” became the basis of the Radical scheme of
territorializing the South by keeping the States that had seceded
under semi-military rule, and condemning them to a period of probation
before they should be allowed to come back into the Union on terms of
self-government.
Those of us in Congress who believed that Johnson’s policy was in
the main in line with the right principles were nevertheless not in
entire agreement with him. He felt that he was following precedent as
far as Lincoln had established it, and that he was entitled to the
confidence of the conservative Union element of the country; but he was
hot-headed, and as the controversy with the Radicals in Congress grew,
his attitude became more and more aggressive and irritating to the
majority.
Early in 1866, Congress passed a bill enlarging the powers of the
Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson vetoed it, as well as a revised bill that
followed, and the latter was enacted over his head. Congress soon after
enacted a measure to fortify the rights of the Negroes, known as the
Civil-Rights Bill, which he promptly vetoed, and which was as promptly
passed over his head. Then, to prevent the President, who was now in
open conflict with the Radical Republicans, from dispossessing the
office-holders who were their friends, Congress passed the Tenure of
Office Act in a form which most of the Radicals interpreted to mean
that the President might not supplant even a member of his own Cabinet.
As another weapon against the administration, Congress passed the
Reconstruction Act, which designated as illegal the State governments
which had been set up by Johnson in the South, and provided that
those States should be ruled by military governors appointed by the
President, but really under control of the head of the army. Both these
bills were vetoed by the President and Congress promptly enacted them
over his head.
The President’s official advisers, who, it should not be forgotten,
were those who had formed Lincoln’s Cabinet, themselves strongly
objected to the Tenure of Office Act, the President’s veto being drawn
up by Seward and Stanton. The latter was most emphatic in declaring
that the act was unconstitutional; but it was part of the irony of
the situation that Stanton was the first to feel its effects, and
thereafter to become active in maintaining its validity. With Stanton’s
suspension and the appointment, first of General Grant, and then of
General Lorenzo Thomas, as Secretary of War _ad interim_, the first
practical move for impeachment may be said to have begun.
PREPARING FOR IMPEACHMENT
Thus the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the culmination of political
differences which had become increasingly strained in the disturbed
conditions which followed the death of Lincoln. The trial has been
wrongly described as a great judicial event, but in the strict sense
it was not a judicial event, since it was without sound basis in law.
It was the culmination of a struggle for political advantage. Still
the Radicals who brought it about were intensely in earnest. They felt
that the tendency of Johnson’s reconstruction policy was toward the
return of the Democratic party to power, which would have the effect of
neutralizing the political results of the Civil War.
The very nature of the so-called Court of Impeachment was a
monstrosity, as several of the lawyers in that body perceived, for the
Senate was to act both as judge and as jury. I made several motions
or orders to separate the jurisdiction of the jury from that of the
judge, but in vain. I wanted a judge, preferably Chief-Justice Chase,
to decide the judicial points, as the Senate was like a mob, deciding
everything for themselves.
[Illustration:
SENATOR PETER G. VAN WINKLE
OF WEST VIRGINIA
SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL
OF ILLINOIS
SENATOR JAMES W. GRIMES
OF IOWA
SENATOR EDMUND G.
ROSS OF KANSAS
SENATOR JOSEPH F. FOWLER
OF TENNESSEE
]
[Illustration: From a photograph by Brady
SENATOR WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN OF MAINE]
Impeachment was of course a matter in which personalities and personal
ambitions played a large part. Without Benjamin F. Butler and Thad.
Stevens, there never would have been an impeachment trial, for
impeachment was chiefly a scheme to get place and power for themselves
and their friends. Like many other politicians of selfish aims, they
flourished under the peculiar conditions following the war--conditions
in which the sole inquiry was, “Is he loyal?” and not, “Is he honest?”
Butler was able to push the impeachment scheme on the claim that
Johnson was not loyal. It was even charged that Johnson was conspiring
to form a new secession, despite the fact that he had been instrumental
in securing the adhesion of a number of the Southern States to the
Thirteenth Amendment. And this charge was fomented by Butler, the man
whom I had heard vote fifty-seven times in the Charleston convention
for Jeff Davis as President, and whom I heard address a group of
Southern delegates in support of a declaration for the protection of
slavery in all territories. On that occasion he declared that if the
North undertook to raise troops to “coerce the South,” the bones of the
Northern soldiers would rot upon the mountains before they reached the
South. Yet this same man was the leader of one of the first regiments
to march through Baltimore to “coerce the South.”
Feeling ran high in all parts of the country, and whenever a Republican
senator showed a disinclination to join in impeachment he was bombarded
by excited constituents. I was not slow to make my attitude known,
for I would as soon have voted to condemn an innocent man to death
as to vote to impeach Johnson on the articles that were presented.
The Republicans in Missouri were, if possible, more aroused than in
other parts of the country. Even the legislature passed a resolution
requesting me to resign. I replied finally that I would hold my seat
until impeachment was defeated. That position carried a great deal of
significance, since the alinement of forces indicated clearly that the
change of a single vote would result in the President’s condemnation.
[Illustration: From a photograph by Brady, taken in 1867
SENATOR JOHN B. HENDERSON OF MISSOURI]
All of the articles of impeachment were based on some phase of the
quarrel with Stanton. The eleventh article, which accused him of
violating an act of Congress in suspending the Secretary of War was the
strongest, though in my view of the law, as I declared in the Senate,
he had legally suspended Stanton and had undoubted authority to fill
the vacancy by an _ad interim_ appointment. When the Tenure of Office
Act was before the Committee of Conference, Senator John Sherman,
chairman of the committee, was asked if the bill was intended to take
away the power of the President to remove his own Cabinet, and he
answered, “No, it is not to interfere with his power to remove or to
retain his Cabinet.” During the impeachment trial, when it was reported
that Senator Sherman was in favor of convicting Johnson on the eleventh
article, I had a talk with him, and asked:
“Do you remember your attitude in the Committee of Conference on the
question of the power of the President to remove his Cabinet?”
He said:
“I remember it very well.”
Then I asked bluntly:
“You are not going to stultify yourself by voting for the eleventh
article?”
He replied:
“No.”
That conversation convinced me that the advocates of impeachment could
not depend, as they hoped, on Sherman to vote guilty on the eleventh
article, and in fact, when the crucial moment came, he voted against it.
GENERAL GRANT’S CHANGE OF VIEWS
During most of the period of agitation for impeachment General Grant
had ranged himself with those who stood by the President. Everybody
believed in the honesty of his purpose, and owing to his great fame,
his influence was paramount. The Radical leaders understood the
difficult task of carrying out their plans without Grant’s coöperation,
and they shaped their course so that he would profit by the overturn
of the administration. Grant’s quarrel with the President, over the
question of his relations as head of the army to the Secretary of
War, afforded them a line of approach, and the talk of making Grant a
Presidential candidate in the coming election suggested the reward.
About the last of April, 1868, I received an invitation to a ten
o’clock breakfast at General Grant’s house, which had recently been
presented to him. Commodore Porter and other guests were present. Our
host asked me to remain, and after the other guests had departed, he
lighted a cigar--I did not smoke--and proposed a walk.
He shortly broached the question of impeachment, and asked for my
opinion as to the result, saying that there were personal reasons why
he should like to know definitely what might be expected.
I said:
“General Grant, you may rest assured that impeachment will fail.”
He answered:
“Senator, I have reason to believe, from good authority, that the
managers of impeachment are confident of success.”
“They have no substantial grounds for such confidence,” I replied.
“I may tell you in confidence,” he then said, “that not only is it
expected that Ben. Wade will become President, but the members of his
Cabinet have already been selected.”
“Can you tell me, General, who they are to be?” I asked.
“Perhaps I ought not to say,” he replied, “but I will tell you, at
least, that General Butler has been designated as Secretary of State.”
I reiterated my belief that the program never would be carried out,
whereupon General Grant said:
“You know that people are talking of me for the Presidency at the
coming election. I have not had political ambition, but I begin to
think that possibly I might be of great service to the country in
bringing peace to the disturbed sections of the Union. These men who
are counting on the success of impeachment offer me their influence as
the nominee to succeed Wade in case he becomes President by the removal
of Johnson.”
“What are the conditions?” I asked.
“That I shall agree to take over Wade’s Cabinet.”
“Good God, General!” I exclaimed, in astonishment, “you didn’t consent
to that, did you?”
“No,” he replied; “I did not give them any answer.”
He expressed distrust of Butler; yet I thought he seemed to lean toward
the bargain. Then I said:
“General Grant, you may feel confident of the nomination whether these
men support you or not; and you may rest assured that the succession
will not occur as they promise.”
[Illustration: Drawn by Jay Hambidge, on the basis of a woodcut in
“Leslie’s Weekly,” April 11, 1868
THE HIGH COURT OF IMPEACHMENT IN SESSION IN THE SENATE CHAMBER, MONDAY,
MARCH 23, 1868
Benjamin R. Curtis of the counsel for the President is reading the
answer to the articles of impeachment. At the table in the middleground
are seated the Committee of Managers of the House of Representatives.]
About a week later, as I was coming from the Capitol in a street-car,
General Grant got in. The car was well filled, and the General came
over and sat beside me. He asked whether I had changed my opinion about
the impeachment.
“No, General,” I answered, “I am of the same mind about it.”
“Do you think you can defeat it?” he asked.
“Well, I can’t warrant that,” I replied. “We have friends enough
against it to defeat it, but I cannot give a pledge that we shall
actually defeat it.”
“Well,” he said, “I hope you won’t.”
“Why, General,” I exclaimed, “you wouldn’t impeach Johnson?”
“Yes I would,” he answered bruskly.
“Then you have changed your mind,” I said, “and I am sorry to hear it.”
“Yes,” he repeated, “I would impeach him if for nothing else than
because he is such an infernal liar.”
“I very much regret to hear you say it,” I answered, looking at him
earnestly, for his language and manner aroused my indignation. “I
regret it because on such terms it would be nearly impossible to find
the right sort of man to serve as President.”
He seemed annoyed, but made no further remark, and in a few minutes
left the car. We never had any further conversation on the subject. I
inferred that the Radicals hoped to influence me through Grant, since
they knew I was ready to support him for President. When I saw how and
why he had changed about, I lost respect for his opinion.
From that time a coolness entered into our relations; but during his
Presidency I was paid the compliment of being asked to take charge of
the Whisky Ring prosecution in St. Louis.
THE SEVEN REPUBLICAN SENATORS
All of the Democratic senators were ranged on the side of President
Johnson, and the division of the voting power was such that seven
Republican senators voting with the Democrats could defeat impeachment.
We senators who were opposed to the scheme held several informal
conferences. At first we numbered at least eight, since Senator William
Sprague of Rhode Island joined in the talks and was frankly on our
side. He was the son-in-law of the Chief-Justice who would preside at
the trial, and it was no secret that Chase looked upon the articles
of impeachment as flimsy. But after the opposing senators began to
be deluged with appeals and threats from their constituents, Sprague
evidently decided that the good of the country required that he should
return to the Senate, and he absented himself from further conference.
It was rumored that Senator Edwin D. Morgan, formerly Governor of New
York, would have voted with us in case of the defection of one of
the seven. For political reasons he finally alined himself with the
Radicals.
The tension in the senate chamber during the first vote, which was on
the last, or eleventh, article, was tremendous, for at least two of the
seven Republicans were claimed by both sides. William P. Fessenden of
Maine was the first of the seven to rise on roll-call and be questioned
by the Chief-Justice, saying:
“Mr. Senator Fessenden, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson,
President of the United States, guilty or not guilty of a high
misdemeanor as charged in this article?”
Fessenden responded in a clear voice, “Not guilty.” In a written
opinion filed later he disposed of the suggestion that “popular
opinion” demanded the conviction of the President, by saying that the
people had not heard the evidence as the Senate had heard it, and that
the responsibility was not on the people, but on the senators who had
taken an oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution
and the laws.”
When the name of Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa was called, Fessenden
asked for a moment’s delay, in order that the senator, who was ill,
might be brought into the chamber. He was carried in and placed in his
seat. Before the Chief-Justice summoned him to answer he suggested that
Grimes might answer from his seat; but the ill senator rose with the
aid of friends and, after the summons, in a feeble voice answered, “Not
guilty.” Perhaps no one of the seven was afterward so roundly abused by
newspapers and politicians who had formerly been his friends.
Senator Joseph F. Fowler of Tennessee had been claimed by both sides,
since he had voted on some questions favorable to the Radicals and
on others favorable to the President. Though not a man of conspicuous
ability, he was regarded as level-headed. After his vote of “Not
guilty” he received a despatch congratulating him on the position he
had taken, to which he answered, “I acted for my country and posterity,
in obedience to the voice of God.”
After my vote of “Not guilty,” which created no surprise, Senator
Edmund G. Ross of Kansas was the next Republican to disappoint his
party friends. He had begun political life as an Abolitionist and
had been appointed to fill the unexpired term of the noted senator,
“Jim” Lane. He had voted with the Radicals on some questions, and the
reticence he had maintained with regard to his position on impeachment
subjected him to enormous pressure. Still he maintained silence, and
the audience held its breath until, in a clear voice he unhesitatingly
answered, “Not guilty.” As Ross had been the main hope of the Radicals,
his vote made a sensation. It was claimed that a sum of money had
been subscribed to reward him for taking the stand he did contrary to
the sentiment of the people of Kansas, who had threatened him with
expulsion from the State if he voted for the President. He was made
to suffer heavily for his adherence to principle, and his immediate
hardships and poverty indicated that he was not bribed. After the trial
was over, he stated in the Senate that he had entertained doubts on
some of the articles until a few days before the vote, but had settled
the matter in his own mind, as he said, “by giving his country the
benefit of his doubts.”
Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, though he had voted for the
resolution censuring Stanton, had been outspoken against impeachment;
consequently his vote of “Not guilty” awakened no surprise. His
position was based on the harm which would be done to the country by
setting the example of impeaching a President, and he expressed the
opinion that if Johnson were removed on such partizan grounds, “no
future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of
the House and two thirds of the Senate on any measure desired by them,
particularly if of a political character.” In other words, his action
was based on antagonism to the principle of the “recall” as it is
being urged to-day.
Senator Peter G. Van Winkle of West Virginia was a substantial,
fair-minded man, who on some questions had favored the President and
on others had voted with the Radicals. Still, his vote of “Not guilty”
occasioned no surprise.
During the clamor from Missouri to induce me to change my attitude, I
was appealed to by the Missouri delegation in Congress, who, as a body,
besought me to vote for impeachment. Under the stress of their urging
I entertained momentarily the question of resigning, but as that would
have brought victory to the side of the impeachers, I resolved to stay.
On May 13 I received from St. Louis a despatch making a final appeal,
which read:
There is intense excitement here. Meeting called for to-morrow night.
Can your friends hope that you will vote for the eleventh article? If
so, all will be well.
To this I immediately replied:
Say to my friends that I am sworn to do impartial justice according
to law and conscience and I will try to do it like an honest man.
Every one of the seven Republican senators who voted against
impeachment was relegated to private life at the expiration of his
term. In addition to all kinds of printed and written abuse, I was
burned in effigy at Macon, Missouri.
HOW TIME VINDICATED THE RIGHT
My part in this crisis strained some of my friendships, particularly
that with Sumner. At first he had been rather opposed to impeachment,
especially to the eleventh article, remarking that no one but a
Pennsylvania justice of the peace (alluding to Thad. Stevens) could
have drawn that article; but he and Stevens were “thick as thieves”
before the trial terminated. Meantime, as Sumner’s enthusiasm for
impeachment grew, his regard for those of us who opposed it lessened.
After the trial he directed a personal remark at me in the senate
chamber that rankled. I was denouncing the course of the managers of
impeachment for converting themselves into a committee to investigate
and punish the seven senators. They sent telegrams and spies over the
country. Butler was the most active in using the spy system, and it
became an acute annoyance. Mr. Fessenden complained of it to me. He
said, “I cannot go out at night without being pursued by spies who
come behind me at every cross street.” Others told me the same. I
had nothing to fear, for there was nothing they might not know about
me. While I was denouncing the conduct of this committee as that of
traitors, Sumner in a taunting voice exclaimed, “It is only the wounded
bird that flutters.”
The coldness between us lasted for several years. In fact, it was not
until the controversy over the treaty for annexing Santo Domingo arose
that I had any further relations with him. At that time I had gone to
Washington to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and Mr. Sumner
asked me to dinner. I was a little surprised, but I went to his dinner,
where I found a very good company. When I was ready to bid him good
night, he insisted on my staying, as he wished to talk with me; but
I was reluctant, as I wanted to do some work before I went to sleep.
Still he insisted, and after Senator Thurman, who lingered enjoying his
cigar, had gone, Sumner said that he had desired for several years to
have a private talk with me over the impeachment of Johnson. He then
said impressively:
“I want to say that in that matter you were right and I was wrong.”
“Mr. Senator,” I answered, “I am very glad to hear you say so for my
own satisfaction, and also on your own account, because your course
was a disappointment. I believed that you would take ground against
impeachment.”
“That was my original impression,” he replied, “but Johnson talked so
foolishly, and was so abusive, I came to believe it would be just as
well to turn him out.” After a pause he repeated earnestly: “I didn’t
want to die without making this confession, that in the matter of
impeachment you were right and I was wrong. But,” he added, “if it is
just as convenient to you, I would rather you would say nothing about
it until I am dead--and I won’t live many years.”
In his “Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet”
John Sherman says:
I felt bound, with much regret, to vote “guilty” in response to my
name, but I was entirely satisfied with the result of the vote,
brought about by the action of several Republican senators.
James G. Blaine in “Twenty Years of Congress” is less apologetic and
more candid. He says:
The sober reflection of later years has persuaded many who favored
impeachment that it was not justifiable on the charges made, and
that its success would have resulted in greater injury to free
institutions than Andrew Johnson in his utmost endeavor was able to
inflict.
It would be well if those who are urging the “recall” as a general
panacea for mistakes and dissatisfaction in the working of elections,
would study the personal motives and partizan manœuverings which were
the soul and body of this enormity of injustice in American history.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: A CHRISTMAS FÊTE IN CALIFORNIA]
INCLUDING A MASQUE IN THE MUIR WOODS
BY LOUISE HERRICK WALL
WITH PICTURES BY W. T. BENDA
Early in December the Angel of Peace on earth came to us, saying:
“How would you like a Christmas day deep in the woods, with no
tissue-paper parcels or tinsel ribbon, with the people that you know
best and like best and their children, with old English carols and
games and wassail-songs and morris-dances, and stockings, and a huge
bowl of innocent punch, and presents that cost fifteen cents, and no
more, on pain of death? Now, how would you?”
Then we cried with one accord:
“Hath eye seen or ear heard? Can the cords of custom be loosened?”
“They can,” said the Angel, snapping her glove-clasp into its socket.
She rose.
We turned questioningly to our Valiant One.
“I should like that,” she said. “I remember seventy Christmases, but
none like that.”
“If I go,” said the Objector, “my Christmas-tree shall be a living
tree. No cut-down, mutilated trees in a forest for me.”
The Angel frowned. Commentators spring up to amend the text almost
before a miraculous visitant can catch a ferry-boat back to town. “We
will see,” she said with the asperity common to women and angels.
* * * * *
Many were called before our party of foresters was chosen. We were
told that a little inn on a mountain-side, in a redwood grove, even in
California, is a drafty place for aged parents and young children to be
laid. And who would be separated from his own on Christmas day?
We found, too, that when Heaven had made the marriages between
our friends, that no trouble had been taken to pair them for like
qualities. Initiative and energy lay in streaks in families: the woman
would, and the man would not, or the other way around, which, alas!
was no way around at all, but just an _impasse_. Then there were aged
parents-in-law who purposed to eat their turkey in the immemorial,
family way or to perish forthwith of reproachful old age; others
frankly confessed themselves caught in the Christmas mill: it was
not that they enjoyed shopping for Christmas, or even the effects of
Christmas-shopping, but to stop seemed perilous. Had it been tried?
At length forty freed spirits agreed. Muir Inn, part way up the shaggy
flank of Mount Tamalpais, was to be the place; December 24 was to be
the time; and sixteen young people were to do what they could toward
supplying the action.
[Illustration: “THE GREAT FIRE WAS FED AGAIN, AND BY ITS LIGHT
CHRISTMAS STORIES, IN SOBER PANTOMIME, WERE ENACTED”]
On the day before Christmas seven of us, tucked in a touring-car, were
climbing the foot-hills opposite the purple bulk of the mountain. A
soft drizzle hung its drops on the fronds of the redwoods and made the
leaves of the dwarf manzanita look ashen on their twisted, wine-red
stems. As we beat up the grade, the world behind and below began to
unroll, the inlets of the bay and the light-lying islands flattened to
a map, while across and beyond we lifted San Francisco on her hills.
The broken gray of the city houses laid washes of color, one above
another, dove against rose-gray, against fawn, against pearl, and all
cut by the sharper tones of the dark buildings.
At the crest of the foot-hills the car plunged down into the
green-black shade of Muir Woods. Autumn and winter had touched the
interior of the forest, and left sparse, lantern-like leaves of
pale yellow on the bushes along the stream that gave to the wide,
dim evergreen space an air of delicate and transient mortality.
We ran beside the stream, the huge, shifting columns and the red,
needle-silenced ground flowing past us, and on our eyelashes clung the
caressing mist. Then our good cylinders labored hard to lift us by a
winding, slippery grade up the abrupt side of the mountain to the inn.
At a turn, without warning, we came out on a little plateau and up to
the weather-stained building itself.
[Illustration: “AT THAT MOMENT FROM THE HOLLOW TRUNK OF A REDWOOD
ANOTHER FIGURE STEPPED OUT”]
As we stopped, the inn doors flew open, and out on the porches came
friends, and friends, children, young girls, and men called our names,
tossing us greetings and laughing. Something tightened in the throat,
and we knew, before we tore the rugs off our knees, that the Muir Woods
Christmas was going to be--different.
The inn was chiefly one big room of seventy feet or so smelling of
evergreens. The fireplace, built for a sleigh-and-six, held a red
mound of fire that just now gnawed, half-sated, at the carcass of
a tree. Evergreens hung from the rafters, and all the tangle of
California winter woods--wild huckleberry, manzanita, sallol, Oregon
grape, rose-haws, Woodwardia fern, as tall as the tallest child, and
swordfern--branched forth from jars in the corners.
We were busy at once. There were costumes to arrange for the charades,
and costumes to trim in secrecy for the Christmas masque in the woods;
there were stockings--each family had brought characteristic ones for
its group--to make ready to be strung on the wire in front of the fire;
there were derisive jingles to be written and affixed to fifteen-cent
presents for one’s dearest friend; ferns, evergreens, and candies had
to be tied to things; there were packages with disguised contours to be
hidden. Concealment, like a worm, preyed everywhere, and people talked
muffledly because of twine and tacks between the teeth. Busy, efficient
men nailed things, to the envy of wives who had brought ruminative,
pocket-handed men of the smoking variety. The children romped and
peeped at forbidden things, and the people who were not their mothers
said they were wonderfully good, and what the mothers said was not
recorded. About the whole place there was such a smell of evergreens
and such a mood of noisy fellowship, climbing, nailing, upsetting,
and standing about, that one suddenly realized that Dickens was not a
caricaturist, just a merrymaker.
When the lights were lighted and things at their busiest, so that they
could not possibly be moved from the tables, the waiters came to lay
the cloth for Christmas-eve dinner. This sent us all to the fire. Laps
were made, two-child deep; the very little people were fed hygienic
pulp and simmered into drowsiness, so that they could be put to bed;
and the women, and especially the girls, went and dressed in chilly
little bedrooms smelling of matting.
We got back to the warm room again, to find that the tables had been
laid in the form of a great cross, red berries at every place. All
seemed sweet and familiar as we seated ourselves, for every face was
the face of a friend. Food came and went, songs, stories, laughter;
toasts were drunk and answered, and we wagged our heads and said the
inevitable thing, “There used to be a time when people had families the
size of this!” and were half sad and half glad for the decline of the
good old times of abundance.
After dinner, chairs and tables were pushed aside, the great fire was
fed again, and by its light Christmas stories, in sober pantomime,
were enacted: Joseph and Mary, foot-sore and weary, knocked at the
door of the inn at Bethlehem, and found not where to lay their heads;
the shepherds fed their flocks by night, and a voice sang of peace on
earth, good-will to men; then came the Magi, following the star, to
the manger where the Child was laid and offered gifts of frankincense
and myrrh, and all the simple, reverent scenes spelled adoration for
those who watched. The absence of footlights and formal costumes made
the little plays seem a part of some humble worship in memory of
the hallowed and gracious time. The familiar faces, with a thousand
every-day associations, perhaps, under veil or turban took on a new
suggestion, a shade of mystery from a time and thought not wholly ours,
yet wrought with ours by centuries of faith.
“Mirth is also of Heaven’s making,” and this soberness melted into
laughter with the tramping of feet as the big circle formed to play the
old English ring-games that have been sung and played where children
have gathered, in merrymaking times, since our speech broke into
rugged, rhythmic verse. As the older children and most of the grown
people played,--for only trundle-bed trash had been put to bed,--the
rope in front of the fire was putting forth a grotesque fruitage of
harlequin stockings, stuffed with ten-cent surprises. One giant, pink
sock, decorated with carnations, was for some one’s big, red-haired
nephew, and the St. Patrick green one, bound with serpents, was
marked “For Rattlesnake Pete, the Sierra Snake-Destroyer.” And so
all down the line the stockings mocked their owners with intimate
audacities. There were genuine baby stockings, too, to melt one’s
heart, so little, woolly, and shrunken from the wash.
[Illustration: “GIVING AN ALMOST INTOLERABLE BEAUTY TO THE AGE-OLD
TRUNKS”]
It grew late; the piano, which had been beating its life out all the
evening over, “Oats, Pease, Beans, and Barley Grows” and “London Bridge
is Falling Down, O My Lady!” began whispering a strange, old air, a
marching tune with a pulse of marching feet, more and more loudly,
until suddenly we all sang in lusty unison:
“Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wandering
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you--”
when in came the large and paunchy punch-bowl, borne by the stoutest
of the waiters. All in line, singing and marching, old and young, we
circled in a wide detour about the room, coming to a stand, our glasses
high, about the wassail-bowl.
“Christmas! God bless us!” We drank the toast, and even the lip of the
abstainer was touched with the foam of egg-nog.
When at last all was quiet for the night, the big room dark and empty,
and the heavy line of forty stockings sagged and bulged in front of the
fire, several sober rioters stole back for a few last words.
“The only thing that could spoil Christmas now,” said an anxious
Martha, stooping to pick up a string from the floor, “would be that
some of the younger children who have been sending letters to Santa
Claus for automobiles and hill-coasters may be disappointed by ten-cent
toys.”
“I know children,” said the Chief Emancipator. “They are not half as
mercenary as we think. Play is what they love. They will never think
of hill-coasters on the happy day when the grown people come to their
senses and give themselves up to fun.”
Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,
Born was the King of Israel!
Did you ever wake on a Christmas morning to the sound of fresh voices
singing at your door and the soft swish of a redwood bough across your
window-pane--eyes opening upon walls as bare as the walls of a stable,
and the smell and feel of Christmas in the air of your naked little
room?
The first Noël, the angels did say,
Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,
In fields as they lay, keeping their sheep,
On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.
Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,
Born was the King of Israel!
The carolers were down from the little cabins on the hillside where
they had slept with a figment of roof between them and the stars, and
the cries of Merry Christmas beat upon our doors until we all came
together, in noisy collision; on the porches, and swept in to strip the
line of stockings. The babies dropped on the floor with their pouches,
dumping their toys frankly between their outspread legs, laughing,
crooning, and picking, with tiny, pointed fingers, at the mystery of
things. It was with them, as the wise woman had said, all bubbling
contentment and delight. Little tin wagons bounded over the floor, any
side up, two babies abreast, and every mouth blew upon squeakers and
trumpets the blasts of which were mercifully tempered to the short wind
of the little lambs. Our own gifts unmasked, with even-handed justice,
our inner foibles, but the children’s came to the breakfast table
with them in a spirit of peace. Live stock surrounded every plate,
and cattle fed from porcelain mangers, and became entangled in patent
breakfast foods.
As breakfast ended, a call came from the doorway, “Who wants to come
with me to the woods and pick out a Christmas tree?” It was she of the
Yerba Buena wreath and shoe-top skirt. We all wanted to come. This
finding of the tree was to be a ceremony. Though a faint mist was still
a-drift, no one cared, and a few wraps made the children snug.
A dozen tangled little paths lead down among the chaparral to the
redwoods, and here the children gathered from everywhere, laughing and
calling among the undergrowth, scattering, breaking, and running down
the steep paths exactly as a brood of quail run and call and scatter
through the mesquite under the convoy of their crested leader.
“The Woodsman! The Woodsman! First we must find a woodsman with an ax
to cut the Christmas-tree,” called the leader. “He used to live over
here. Who can find him?”
Her brood scurried here and there, unconsciously led where she would,
beating up the brush, when suddenly, shouting with delight, they came
full upon a man with an ax--a flannel-shirted man with a kind face and
a great, broad, shining ax.
“Yes, I am the Woodsman,” he called. “May I cut a Christmas-tree for
you this morning?” He came forward, and jumped straight into the story,
without preliminaries. The whole flock surged down upon him and off to
find the tree, accepting his being there with his ax as children do
accept pleasant things. We all went down into the winding wood road,
almost roofed over by redwood plumes, the little children stopping
to consult gravely with the Woodsman about the suitability of trees
two hundred feet high or saplings of a century’s growth, squinting
up trunks, considering, rejecting, earnestly intent, each one, upon
finding the perfect tree. The older conspirators, half lost in brake
and fern, kept close behind.
“This one I think will do,” cried the Woodsman at last, and he lifted
his ax.
At that moment from the hollow trunk of a redwood another figure
stepped out, and all the children started, he was so strange.
“I am the Spirit of the Woods,” he said in a deep voice; “I come to
plead with you for the life of this tree.”
He wore a mantle bordered with fern and moss. Instead of hair, his head
was closely covered with the greenish lichen that grows on the north
side of trees in winter, and his beard was of long, gray moss. He spoke
very earnestly, and told the children how sweet it is to live, as a
tree, in the forest. They were not exactly frightened; they even drew
a step nearer: in that beautiful, solemn place strange things might
happen. Then the Woodsman once more lifted his ax, when a very little
boy, quite unprompted, and to every one’s surprise, suddenly broke from
his father, and ran to the Woodsman, clasping his arms about him,
crying out for the life of the tree.
“Don’t cut it down!” he sobbed. “It wants to be a tree; it doesn’t want
to be logs.”
We were quite still for a moment, then the Spirit of the Woods said:
“The tree has another friend. I thought I was the only one who really
loved it.” Then turning to us all, he said with authority: “Do as
the child bids. Come with me, for I have something to show you.” He
moved with a long stride in his long mantle, the moss wagged from his
sleeves like the beard of a goat, and the children crowded nearer to
the Woodsman; but at a turn of the road they all cried out and ran
forward. Growing beside the road, with its branches full of gold and
silver ornaments, snow and cranberries and gifts, was a lovely living
Christmas-tree, bearing its shining fruitage in the thick forest.
Then all took hands and danced about the tree, and sang to it, and
praised it, and called it beautiful. From the thick branches, which
were not so very high in that high place, grown people took packages
marked with names. There were little Robin Hood costumes for several
of the children, with feathered caps and feathered bows, and a Cupid’s
dress of white gauze and filmy wings for the four-year-old cherub, and
green mantles for every one, that slipped over the head, and wreaths of
fresh green vines for the hair. The living tree gave up toys and tinsel
and everything, as other trees, that have given up their lives, have
never been known to do. The children starred themselves over with its
ornaments, and everybody dressed at the same moment. The pretty girls
wrapped tinsel and cranberry ropes in their hair, and looked prettier
than ever. It was so deep in the forest that for mirrors each must
inquire of the eyes that loved her for news of how she looked.
By the time that the tree was stripped quite bare, with only a spangle
here or a fleece of snow there, the whole party was peacocking in its
finery down the wood road, two by two, and two by two: the Woodsman
with his boy on his shoulder; the green-mantled, vine-wreathed folk;
the lonely Spirit of the Woods, a hesitating child peeping up at
him; the little Robin Hoods, a-chase for sparrows; and, straggling
behind the rest, the Cupid-baby, like a new-born butterfly, not
quite able either to run or to fly. And so, winding with the winding
red road, all our brightness subdued to the dim atmosphere in which
we moved,--that impalpable violet that floats about the stems of the
trees in these vast groves, giving an almost intolerable beauty to
the age-old trunks,--we came to recognize that about us were the real
Christmas-trees; for they were fast-rooted here when homeless Mary was
with child in Bethlehem.
What broke the spell was the old Edenic curse. Some one spoke of
food. I think it was a man. He said, in effect, that he wished to be
comforted with apples; that he was sick of love; he described a cold
Christmas dinner; then a dinner burned to a crisp and served to forty
empty chairs. It was a moving tale, and had that effect upon our
procession.
The dinner-hour had been set early that every child might come; and
one or two little heads, with their first thistle-down thatch, beside
the old white ones, made the Christmas dinner seem more than ever a
gracious family feast. We did not come dressed as people dining on
Christmas day, but all still in our mantles of forest green and wreaths
of vine. Down the tables, formed like a cross, shone the red of toyon
berries, in the folds of the girls’ coiled hair and in the chains about
children’s necks.
If there, was a moment of disillusionment, it was the one in which
it was discovered that the Spirit of the Woods did not subsist on
wood-alcohol, as had been rumored, but contrived large pieces of turkey
between the fringes of moss about his lips. But this, too, had a happy
influence, because it loosened some rather silent tongues, and the
children’s talk burst out fluent and simultaneous.
Housed intimately in by the evergreen-hung walls, the fire-light and
soft lamps bringing us into one warm group, the sense of comradeship,
up there on the big, misty mountain, and the gracious presence of
little children and our own, dear people, brought us to our feet to
sing again the wassail-song.
“Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wandering
So fair to be seen.”
And as we stood, glasses lifted, we looked from the faces that had made
our own first Christmases bright to the little ones, just above the
cloth, and pledged the birth of this good, new way of being glad on
Christmas day.
[Illustration]
THE DREAMS DENIED
BY MARION COUTHOUY SMITH
Our lives are molded by the things we miss.
Not by Love’s answering eyes, not by his kiss,
But by Love’s hunger do we learn Love’s bliss.
Our growth must answer to the swell and strain
Of thew and sinew toward the ultimate gain;
The warrior’s worth is measured by his pain.
Upward our hopes are flung, like tongues of fire.
The dreams denied unendingly aspire;
The soul must take the shape of its desire.
THE WOOING OF “HOLY CALM”
BY MARION HAMILTON CARTER
Miss Ashbell’s first name was Matilda, but everybody at her
boarding-house called her “Miss Mittie” by way of friendliness to a
stranger; nor did they express much wonder as to what had brought
her from Philadelphia to Laramie, because to a Wyomingite it is the
most natural thing in the world that anybody should forsake every
other place in the world for Wyoming, the only wonder being that
millions more did not do it all the time. Possibly these dwellers
on the altitudes would have thought her being in Laramie still more
natural had they seen the house of her birth and rearing, one of those
three-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand-all-just-alike homes for which
Philadelphia is famous, each with its bath-room, each bath-room with
its cake of Cashmere bouquet soap, each parlor with its onyx-topped
table between the two lace-curtained windows; and outside, white marble
steps, and white, solid wood shutters to keep the Indians out at
night. That is, they were to keep the Indians out, but as the Indians
went faster than Philadelphia, the shutters are there yet. And Miss
Mittie missed them dreadfully in Laramie; it didn’t seem like home if
you couldn’t barricade at night, and scrub white marble steps in the
morning.
But at Mrs. Ingersoll’s store, where Miss Mittie “had the ribbons,”
they called her “Holy Calm,” pronouncing it “ca’m.” Coming from
peaceful nights behind white, solid shutters, calm was to be expected,
though perhaps not so much of it as Miss Mittie had. Her calm was of
the peculiarly Quaker variety that exasperated you to the depths:
instantly your desire was to ruffle it, to tear it open, and find out
what was underneath, and if it were calm all through, and holy, or
just put on for effect. And you felt somehow that the Lord made her on
Sunday, after He had rested from His labors in the meetings attended by
her father and mother; and by the same token, you felt that the Lord
made Roddy McQueed on Monday, as a preliminary to getting the creative
hand in on original chaos. It is beyond me to determine why these two
should have been each other’s particular fate, yet such was the case.
My one experience with Miss Mittie showed me what she was. It was in
the days when they were wearing yard-long hat-pins as articles of
warfare. I went into the store to buy two short ones, and Holy Calm
showed me a cushionful of rapiers, and told me “those were all they had
now.”
There was just something in the way she said it that “got” me. I
retorted that she didn’t know her stock--that I had bought proper
hat-pins there three months before on my way up to the ranch, and there
were a million of ’em still in a box.
“Oh, only two sold,” said she, taking it for truth, though never till
that instant had she set eyes on me. “Then they must all be here except
those two,” and with that, she drew out a box marked “ruching” in black
letters six inches long. It contained ruching.
Miss Mittie only murmured apologetically to the box, “Not here, I
see,” and drew forth another marked “stocks” containing stocks, and
then one marked “gloves” containing gloves, and a fourth marked “ties”
containing ties.
At this point my wickedness took me, and I showed her a box marked
“corsets” containing corsets, a box marked “baby ribbon” containing
baby ribbon, a box marked “embroidery cotton” containing embroidery
cotton; after which I swept a commanding gesture over a table where
silk hose were displayed and said artfully, “You’d better look under
those stockings.”
She thanked me for the kind suggestion and conscientiously turned over
every pair, soberly telling me, when she was through, she “didn’t see
any hat-pins.” Neither did she see the glitter in my eye nor hear the
derision in my voice; she positively never suspected that I was “doing
her” in a way that would have reduced a New York “saleslady” either
to rage or a red-faced pulp. I’d have kept it up for an hour until I
forced her to show some sign of human feeling, but time was pressing,
and I couldn’t sacrifice my sleeping-car berth east for the fine sport
of baiting her Holy Calm. I stepped behind the counter and took a box,
in full sight all the time, marked “hat-pins--short,” opened it, and
put it in her hand.
No written words can convey the manner in which she said, “Oh, yes--two
of those. Ten cents,” and wrote her slip.
I went off feeling defeated--the calm had never quivered; I had
mentally made no more impression on her than if she’d been a waxwork.
But it had been borne in upon me that Miss Mittie’s soul needed
saving to a world of human endeavor--that she was in bondage to
some intangible inner force; and I was still thinking of her as
a psychological phenomenon, wondering how a person so devoid of
perception and imagination could contrive to earn her daily bread even
in Wyoming, where the stress of commercial conditions is much easier
than in the East, when the porter took my suitcase from Roddy’s hand
and he cheered me off.
Roddy had driven me down from the ranch,--an all-day trip across the
plains, with a sandwich lunch in the middle,--and he had made use of
the opportunity to tell me the whole, _true_ story of his life. He was
emphatic on the truth of it, and said that I ought to write it up for
the New York papers; and with this in view he went into details that
would have made me faint away if they had been true. But knowing Roddy
after three summers of him, I took his recitation quietly. My vague
“Did you’s?” annoyed him but stimulated him to larger invention; and
when at last we reached Laramie, he was in fine fettle for an adventure
that would eclipse all the rest.
In this mood he strolled up the street after leaving me, and almost
trampled Mrs. Ingersoll under foot as she dashed out of her store. She,
too, had just received defeat at the hands of Holy Calm, and felt she
had to save a soul alive.
Mrs. Ingersoll and Roddy were friends, after a sort. Everybody in the
country was friends with him in the same fashion, as you’ve got to be
with a next-to-nature man who has a reputation for originality in sin
and has been in the papers no less than five times for it. So when
Roddy and she collided and he said: “Why, hello, Mis’ Ingersoll! I
didn’t _go_ fer to smash ye,” and held out his big paw, she, with fine
courtesy, gave him her hand and told him, smiling as though she liked
to be smashed by careless cow-boys, “You’re just the one I want to see.”
Roddy was flattered. He knew, of course, that he was “just the one”
any lady would want to see,--why not?--but somehow Mrs. Ingersoll was
a little bit different from the rest. She did things, too, and her
name was in the papers almost any time, attached to real news. Didn’t
she organize the Laramie brass band that beat the Cheyenne band all to
pieces?
So it really meant something to be wanted to be seen by _her_, and
Roddy, hastily reviewing the situation, returned a handsome, “Well,
you’re jest the one _I_ wanta see. Now, ain’t that two of a kind?” and
felt he had scored himself.
This paved the way for confidences. They were both smarting from too
much Holy Calm. Mrs. Ingersoll blurted out her own experience, and
asked Roddy how did he account for a girl like that?
Roddy pushed his hat back on his head to let out the thought that Miss
Mittie seemed to lack a sense of humor and ought to be shown a thing or
two; Mrs. Ingersoll, however, inclined to the belief that the trouble
was “Holy Calm was too good for use,” or at least too good for any use
in a millinery establishment. Roddy suggested that “something might be
done fer her if ye went about it right,” but Mrs. Ingersoll averred
despairingly that you’d never get an idea into Miss Mittie’s head short
of cutting it open with an ax. However, after sifting the situation
back and forth between them, the upshot was a soul-saving plot: Mrs.
Ingersoll was to slip out just before closing time, leaving Miss
Mittie to shut up shop alone; then Roddy, with a gang of cow-boys, was
to “jump the store” and hold her up for a couple of hundred yards of
ribbon, which they were to carry up to Mrs. Ingersoll’s house afterward.
All started off according to program. Holy Calm, softly humming to
herself, was putting the store to bed as snug as anything, and thinking
of her well-earned rest, when five young, seemingly desperate rascals,
Roddy leading, fired their guns in the air and landed with a bounce
inside, two of the boys blocking the door so she couldn’t get away.
Miss Mittie never quivered an eyelash.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” she asked, fixing her gaze and a
smile on Roddy, whom she had met, and admired tremendously for the
tales told of him.
Roddy was just a trifle dashed by her politeness, for he’d “allowed
she’d screech, er something, like a woman always does,” and when
anybody screeched his rule was, “Give ’em some more o’ the same
medicine.” But under her serene, uncomprehending stare Roddy forgot
what he’d come for.
Beany Johnson nudged him in the ribs as a reminder, and then, seeing
a hesitancy, kicked him with his spur. Thus pushed to his duty, Roddy
blurted out:
“I want some ribbon--pink ribbon--fer a church-fest’val decorations.”
He slipped his gun into its holster, gave a hitch to his chaps and a
jerk to the red handkerchief about his neck, picked up a roll from the
counter, and told her in an offhand way: “This here will do. Gimme
forty yards offen it,” and began carelessly unwinding it on the counter.
“There aren’t forty yards in that piece,” said she, taking the roll
from his hand with her holiest calm and a smile at him, and at the same
time noting the number on the roll. “There’s only eight and a quarter.”
“Well, gimme what they is--an’ then some more,” he commanded.
She measured off the eight and a quarter, then ten from another roll,
said she was sorry she couldn’t match that pink exactly, but it was
“special-sale goods,” and wouldn’t something else do, since it was for
a church and not for a dress? The quality would be absolutely the same;
the store didn’t carry any but the best.
Roddy, who had somewhat found himself by this time, amiably explained
that “It didn’t matter about the match; it was only fer a church,
anyways,” and handed her a roll of bright green.
She measured it demurely without looking at him. Still, it wouldn’t
have helped her if she had; she wouldn’t have perceived the glitter of
his eye.
With the green on the counter his self-confidence entirely returned.
At the same time Beany Johnson and Hank Homans began to clamor, their
arms overflowing with ribbons, that she measure some for them; and
presently upon that counter lay a haystack of silk of all colors of
the rainbow, and every roll that the boys could lay hands on had been
unwound.
“Thirty-seven dollars and five cents,” said Miss Mittie. “But I’ll
throw in the remnant and call it an even thirty-seven, since you took
so much.” She had done the sum all in her head while she was measuring
off!
“Charge it,” said Roddy, loftily. “This here gent--” He presented
Hank, who bowed acknowledgment--“is Mr. Andy Carnegie. I guess you
heard of him often enough, and know you can trust him all right; an’
this here one with the _mus_tache is Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I am John D.
Rockyfelly.” That being the preconcerted cue for them to go on with
their parts, they began gathering the ribbons into their arms as fast
as they could, meaning to cut and run with them.
“Excuse me, but this is a cash-down store,” informed Miss Mittie,
laying her hand on the ribbons nearest her. “I can’t charge anything.
I’m sorry not to oblige,--” She turned a little pale at the thought of
it,--“but you see how it is; I’m not allowed, so I can’t. Thirty-seven
dollars, please.”
“Well, I guess you won’t refuse _us_,” said Roddy, ingratiatingly,
pulling surreptitiously at the ribbons while Hank added this sweet
touch, “it’s fer a strawb’ry fest’val--real strawb’ries, real cream,
you know.” (The season was late October.)
The words gave Roddy an idea. “Perhaps you’d like to go--with _me_.”
The wretch beamed at her, thinking here was the best chance yet to “do
her one” and send the shivers over her in a way she’d never forget.
A faint tinge of color suffused her cheeks. How kind of him, the great
Roddy, to want her! She spoke, however, with her calm:
“I’d like to go with you ever so much. Yes, I’m sure I can go to-night;
I haven’t anything else. I’ll go,” she accepted, making what she felt
a momentous decision. Never yet had she been anywhere with a real
live cow-boy, and it had been the dream of her life--the dream now
at last come true! What a story to write home to Philadelphia! She
smiled happily at Roddy, then, suddenly remembering her duty, said,
“Thirty-seven dollars, please,” but very sweetly, and as though she
hated to ask him for it after that invitation, and felt it not quite
ladylike.
“Charge it, please,” he gave back, with a sweetness imitating her own,
while a flush was beginning to be felt on his cheeks also. He hadn’t
expected her to take him up so quickly. He was prepared to wheedle
and urge, and it made him feel just a bit mean to see her so eager
to go with him to a fictitious festival; and after his first stab of
self-pride came the thought, was he “the first fella ever ast her to go
somewheres in the evening? Didn’t she git no amusement at all? Why, the
poor kid!”
He questioned, hesitating:
“You--ain’t been out much--in Laramie--sence you come?”
She shook her head.
“I haven’t been to one thing,” she replied, giving him a wistful look,
and adding with a brighter one and a sigh, “until to-night.”
Meanwhile the two guards at the door had become so entranced with the
scene at the ribbon counter that they’d cast aside their duty: they
acknowledged the duty, however, by tiptoeing to the region of the
ribbons, flattering themselves that, if they were not heard, they would
not be seen.
Miss Mittie swept a glance at the five young men ranged before her and
then at the clock. It was ten minutes past closing-time, and the street
door stood wide open! Dreadful! In her shy delight at the prospect of
a strawberry festival, she’d forgotten her sacred trust in putting the
store to bed. What would Mrs. Ingersoll say when she found it out?
With a quick, “Excuse me,” she slipped along behind the counter, those
five cow-boys standing like gawks and watching her do it, and locked
the door and put the key in her pocket. She took the key, naturally,
so she could get in the next morning, and she was intending to let the
young men out by a certain back way in order that nobody should know
how remiss she’d been. Returning hurriedly, she said, “Thirty-seven
dollars, please,” and stuck her pencil in her hair.
The young men had been exchanging disconcerted glances. Roddy dropped
his ribbon on the counter. Figuratively speaking, he threw up the
sponge then; but it was Hank Homans who first found a usable tongue.
“I guess we don’t want it, after all,” said he, depositing his armful
beside Roddy’s.
She smiled at him a smile that nothing but calm that is calm all
through can produce on earth, and said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please.”
“No--I guess we don’t want it,” corroborated Roddy, trying to appear
self-confident while he bunched his ribbons together with decisive
gestures that eschewed ribbons from his life forever.
For the fraction of a second she appeared to believe it; then she
repeated, “Thirty-seven dollars,” and thrust the slip across the pile
at him.
He turned red.
“I say--we don’t want it,” he stammered.
She took this for a pleasantry, and held out her hand for the money.
At the same moment he felt a spur dig into his boot; the situation was
become exceedingly unpleasant to his fellow-missioners. What was the
girl up to, anyway? And what in thunder did she mean by locking them
in? Beany Johnson came to the rescue.
“I say, why, this here was--a--er--kinder _joke_,” he explained
sheepishly, and feeling dreadfully uncomfortable.
She looked at him, puzzled.
“I don’t see it,” she remarked. Literally she didn’t. “What is the
joke?”
“Why--er--all this here--” He waved his hand over the pile of
ribbons--“this here pink ribbon hold-up--why, it was all a--er--kinder
joke, without meanin’ any offense,” he trailed off, blushing.
“But I don’t see it,” she repeated, still with her puzzled look.
“Well, it is, anyway,” he assured her, desperately. “It’s what it is
all right--a joke.”
For a moment after this brutal confession they thought comprehension
dawned in her eyes; then she murmured, looking critically at the
ribbon: “But I’m sure I measured it all right; I never make mistakes on
ribbons. Mrs. Ingersoll will tell you that. I was very particular as I
went along. And I know I counted it right--thirty-seven dollars, and
the remnant, five cents; but I threw that off; I didn’t charge it on
the slip.” She glanced at the slip to make sure on that point.
“Oh, you’re all right,” Hank chipped in courageously. “We ain’t
kickin’ on yer measurin’. An’ the thirty-seven--it’s all right, too;
but--why--er--”
“I gave you all-silk ribbon, no cotton-back,” she interrupted. “I
looked at every piece before I undid it. There’s some cotton-back
in the store for cheap trimmings and flower ties, but I was very
particular to give you the same as you started out with--that pink Mr.
McQueed took first.” She began rummaging the pile for the original
sample.
“Oh, that’s all right; we ain’t kickin’ on the quality,” Hank rumbled
on, despite the pucker on her brow feeling he was making progress--that
by a process of elimination of false scents he was gradually getting
her on the track of a true apprehension. He motioned with his hand to
include the others. “We ain’t kickin’ on that part of it, fer it’s all
right; but--”
“Then I don’t see what _isn’t_ all right,” she sighed helplessly,
glancing at the sale-slip to make sure the joke wasn’t there. “Yes,
thirty-seven.” With that a light dawned on her face, and she handed
the slip to him. “Oh, I see,” she cried, “I’ve been asking the wrong
gentleman to pay!”
Beany only shook his head and pushed the bill aside. He was beginning
to perspire, and the others, coming to his rescue in a chorus,
protested:
“But it was all a joke--this here. Don’t you see?” hoping she’d see and
make the best of it by opening the door and telling them to get out for
a mean lot of--, well, anything you like and can imagine as coming from
her chaste lips. Getting out was now all they were capable of thinking
of in the present predicament; they wouldn’t have cared what she called
them. Hank added firmly, and as a sort of inspiration, “You see, we
don’t want it now.”
She looked from one to the other of them, repeating, “Don’t want it
now, did you say?” Then with another of her comprehending smiles, “But
you ain’t the kind of gentlemen that orders things you don’t want,
and then don’t pay up for ’em, and you wouldn’t disappoint a church.
Besides--” Here she presented them with a smile apiece--“I know you
wouldn’t leave a lady to roll up ’most two hundred yards of ribbon
just for a matter of thirty-seven dollars.”
“It wouldn’t be kinder jes right,” Hank admitted, seeing a chance here
to slide out on excuses. “Sure it wouldn’t; but we didn’t none of us
fellas think o’ that--”
She broke in on him with a quick, “I see it now!” and they waited
breathless while she looked at the price-tags on several rolls. “You
think I made a mistake in the different prices, carrying the different
widths in my head, and you’re all too nice to tell me for fear you’ll
get me in trouble with Mrs. Ingersoll. Well, maybe I did. Nobody’s
perfect; no matter how careful you are, you’re liable to a slip-up once
in a while. But I’ll measure it again and count it over just to satisfy
you.”
She took a long ribbon in her hand. Inwardly they groaned, and Roddy
felt spurs digging at his legs and elbows at his ribs that said, “You
got us into this fix; now get us out, and be quick about it, too.”
But Roddy seemed to have been struck with paralysis. The truth is, Miss
Mittie had those young missioners cowed. They didn’t dare tell her to
her face how they’d planned and played a mean joke on her confiding
innocence when she’d never done anything to harm or annoy them in the
whole of her blameless life. To leave her to roll up that pile of
ribbon was, as Roddy afterward confessed when he told me the story,
“sich a dirty, ornery trick to play on a lady as only a coyote would
think of.” And, then, they didn’t dare to give Mrs. Ingersoll away.
Yet if they didn’t make a clean breast of it and show Miss Mittie just
how low-down cussed they’d been, how were they to get the key? They
couldn’t take it from her by force; at least things hadn’t reached
the point where they felt they could “do anything that was _reely_
ungentlemanly,” as Roddy said. And then this thought came to all of
them: suppose they did make her understand, and “she struck it hoppin’
mad an’ kep’ ’em there all night to pay ’em fer it an’ git even!” By
this time they felt her capable of anything through sheer lack of
imagination.
[Illustration:
Drawn by Fletcher C. Ransom Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merritt
“‘THIRTY-SEVEN DOLLARS, PLEASE’”]
“One--two--three--four--five--” She measured swiftly, counting aloud as
she went that they might be sure she was making no mistake. Under cover
of her voice Hank hissed in Roddy’s ear:
“It’s yer turn to play. Say something, can’t yer? An’ git us outa this
here hold-up.”
“Hold-up! I should say _yes_!” snorted Beany in Roddy’s other ear,
suddenly appreciating the real essence of the joke; and then snorted
again as he heard “Seventeen--eighteen--nineteen,” accompanied by the
rapid swish of silk along the counter.
But all Roddy, now very red of face, could contribute toward a graceful
retreat for himself and friends from the scene of disaster was, “We
don’t want it,” while pushing the ribbons weakly in her direction.
Before he could think of anything else, she raised her unsuspicious
eyes questioningly to his, acknowledging him the leader and his word
her law. That was the glance that shot him through the heart--that,
and the way she’d beaten them at their own game and never turned a
hair. Roddy was enough the man and the sport to appreciate the laugh on
himself.
“Fellas, the drinks are on us,” he informed them, grimly. “The little
girl gits the jackpot. It’s up to us to shell out an’ be P. D. Q. about
it, too.”
Miss Mittie stopped her measuring, since he was satisfied to take the
ribbon as it was, and put the slip into his hand with a smile that
said, “Now I’ll be ready to go with you to our entertainment.”
They made up the amount with difficulty,--it took every cent Roddy had
and most of the spare cash in the party,--and when he had given it to
her, he leaned over the counter, almost to kissing distance, and said:
“Little girl, y’ can buy _me_ fer a nickel.”
She drew a shabby purse and took out of it a shabby nickel.
“It’s all I have,” she told him, soberly, offering it.
All she had, and she was giving it to him _in earnest_! In one swift
flash it came to him why she hadn’t seen through the mean joke they
were playing on her: she had trusted him too much; or, as he more
picturesquely put it, “She knowed I was too much of a gentleman to do
a girl dirt.” Her lack of comprehension of the true inwardness of the
whole affair was precisely her measure of the high estimate she placed
on his chivalry; she saw him as his own deepest ideals painted him, and
he knew she saw him thus; and in the shine of the heavenly revelation
he saw her as lovely calm womanhood confiding in his nobility.
Something broke loose in him; his better nature, his affection, his
generosity, his instinct for fair play, rose to its occasion, and in
one instant he ceased to be a lawless young rapscallion--his heart
truly and in the scriptural sense turned from its wickedness and the
error of its ways.
“Little girl, if I take this here nickel offen ye, it’s a bargain
between us,” he told her, dizzily. “You an’ me’ll belong to each other
fer keeps. I mean it, honest.”
She hesitated, blushing from throat to forehead under the gaping stare
of the other young fellows; then she said bravely, “I mean it honest,
too,” and laid the nickel in his hand.
I fear I’ve told this so jocosely I’ve belittled their miracle, which
was very real. I met her on the street in Laramie last summer, five
years after the episode, and speaking of her marriage she confided to
me that she and Roddy had been “made for each other.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
TIMOTHY COLE’S
WOOD ENGRAVINGS
OF
MASTERPIECES
IN
AMERICAN GALLERIES
LADY MILDMAY
BY
HOPPNER
]
[Illustration: Owned by Mr. P. A. Valentine
LADY MILDMAY. BY HOPPNER
(TIMOTHY COLE’S WOOD ENGRAVINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN AMERICAN GALLERIES)]
EXCLUSIVENESS AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
BY EDITH RICKERT
Miss Rickert’s article, “The Fraternity Idea among College Women,” in
the November number, developed the argument that women’s fraternities
like men’s are aristocratic, in that they are self-perpetuating
and destructive to freedom of intercourse; that they stand for the
privilege of one as against the common rights of all; that the
benefits that they claim to bestow upon members are exaggerated,
even in the case of individuals, and do not counterbalance the two
evils which are inherent in the system and cannot be done away with
by regulation from without or reform from within; and that these
evils are, as regards members, that the fraternities educate to type,
and, as regards outsiders, that they harden social differences into
caste.--~The Editor.~
Can we do anything? Should we try? Some of the women’s colleges are
taking action. Fraternities have recently been abolished at Rockford
as contrary to the democratic spirit of that institution; also at
Pembroke, on the ground that they had come to absorb too much of the
interest that should go into general college activities. At Elmira,
where they have been since 1856, they have recently disbanded of their
own accord, and they are to be discontinued at Mount Holyoke after 1913.
Among coëducational institutions, however, the fraternal spirit is
certainly growing. Although the entire number of fraternity women is
less than one fifth that of fraternity men, the active members--that
is, the undergraduates--are almost half as numerous as the men, and
the rate of initiation is nearly the same. Unless some check is put
upon them, the women will soon outnumber the men, as they are said to
surpass them in efficiency of organization.
FACULTIES AND THE FRATERNITIES
Presidents and deans of colleges in which the Greek-letter societies
exist show little inclination to abolish them, but rather a distinct
recognition of the value of their coöperation in manipulating the
student body. On the other hand, officers of institutions where
only the local organizations are admitted, with no uncertain voice,
declare that they mean to keep the control in their own hands, while
the authorities of colleges where no fraternities have ever been
admitted[4] are equally emphatic in stating that, as a force hostile to
democracy, they shall never be allowed to enter.
There are the three faces of the problem. Which attitude is right?
The women’s fraternities, which first arose in small colleges that
were scarcely more than boarding-schools, were purely in imitation
of men’s organizations. But when women students were admitted to
the state universities and other big endowed institutions, which
were without provision for their students beyond lecture halls,
laboratories, and libraries, the situation changed. In so far as the
universities were concerned merely with intellectual training and
made no attempt to reach the social side, the women’s fraternities
took on a certain defensive quality--the banding together of the
minority, whose presence was more or less resented by the men. Their
practical value in providing safe and comfortable homes for students
was quickly recognized both by parents and by deans, upon whom came
the responsibility for student welfare. But now this question of
housing is a very minor aspect of the case, as even in institutions
where chapter houses exist, these provide for less than one third of
the women, usually much less; and in the majority of institutions the
fraternities have no chapter houses at all.
On the other hand, the immediate practical use of the fraternities
to-day is that by their organization and their training in organizing
power they can be trusted to put things through. One dean writes,
“Unconsciously one often chooses a fraternity girl to do a necessary
thing, knowing that she will see it through.” Several others, deans
and presidents, say that the fraternities do valuable service in two
ways: first, by making themselves responsible for the conduct of
individual members of their societies who give trouble to the faculty;
and, second, by taking the initiative, and standing solid in passing
measures for the welfare of the whole student body.
[Illustration: “THE FRAT OF THE ULTRA-PLATONISTS”]
These two virtues seem to me to be on very different levels. In regard
to the first, I doubt whether any other agency could easily be found to
deal as successfully with a recalcitrant student as a self-appointed
committee of her intimate associates. It does not follow, however,
that this committee need have the social characteristics of the
fraternity. As for the second, it would seem that larger and more
weighty organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association
and the Women’s League, not subject to the jealousies and rivalries of
the fraternities, could be of much greater service.
SOME GOOD AGAINST MUCH EVIL
It is difficult to balance the good and the bad points of the local and
national organizations. The former are more democratic in that they
are usually larger, being less strictly limited. They are without the
element of permanent regulation that comes from the national union.
They lack the exchange of ideas which comes from the association of a
group of organizations, and their activities are entirely confined to
the undergraduate years. In that they are always subject to faculty
regulation, it is probable that loyalty to the society or club does
not, as is too often the case among the fraternities, usurp the place
of loyalty to alma mater.
As for the alleged democracy of the women’s colleges, it is, in many
cases, largely theoretical. These colleges provide for their students
both housing and social life. The latter is somewhat cloistral, to be
sure, but it is open to all. By the very conditions of their life,
they do not need the help of the fraternities for disciplinary or
legislative measures. Does this mean that the colleges are without
cliques, that every student is a sister to every other? Who that
has lived in a woman’s college does not know that every class is
run usually by one group of friends, with occasional more or less
successful attempts by other rival groups to grasp the power? The
“fraternity spirit” comes into play all over the world as soon as
three people meet, because one combination of two will always be more
congenial than the other, and one is always left out. The fraternity
spirit is simply the aristocratic impulse, the social instinct that
is ever working toward the formation of class. Then, as it cannot
be torn out of human nature, is it to be recognized and allowed to
develop freely as in the case of the national organizations, or is
it to be checked and controlled from without as in the case of the
local organizations, or is it to be ignored, hidden under a cloak of
theoretical democracy, as in the women’s colleges?
REFORMING THE SYSTEM
The furthest limit to which the national organizations will go
in the way of outside regulation is to allow a representation of
non-fraternity members of the faculty on their boards--a minority, I
judge. On the other hand, they freely admit the more obvious faults of
their system, and declare their earnest purpose of self-regulation.
They even admit that these measures are defensive; they feel that their
system is threatened. Let us look at the reforms they propose, and see
how far they will go to change its fundamental nature.
They propose to do away, first, with the practice of “rushing” and
the hysteria, expense, bitterness, and heartburn that accompany it,
and to insure a thorough acquaintance on both sides by postponing
pledge-day to the sophomore year. At the same time they mean to raise
the scholarship standard for admission, and to regulate the social life
of the chapter houses by insisting upon the observance of uniform and
reasonable house rules.
The first trouble is that their chance of success in these reforms is
very small. They may keep rushing, to all appearances, within bounds,
but the feelings that it engenders must arise wherever a few persons
are singled out by the arbitrary choice of several rival organizations.
[Illustration: A GIRL WHO IS PLEASANTLY WELCOMED INTO A FRATERNITY]
When they postpone pledge-day, they cease to house the very
students--the beginners--who in our big, promiscuous universities
chiefly need care. Even if they provide for the freshmen by themselves
building dormitories, they have to face the problems how the wide
acquaintance of the first year is to pass into the segregation of
the later years without breaking up friendships formed at that time,
and whether, to avoid this thing, there will not be formed among the
freshmen defensive cliques which will be taken in as wholes when the
time comes. Under these conditions, which actually prevail in at least
one university where sophomore pledging has been adopted, the system
will remain unchanged.
The scholarship standard for admission, while it will improve the
tone and efficiency of the fraternities by keeping out the thoroughly
frivolous and incapable element, might conceivably, must inevitably
render them still more exclusive by adding pride of intellect to pride
of social standing. Even where a most beneficent result is confidently
urged, that is, when the fraternity acts as a stimulus to drag the poor
student up to the required grade, I am still in doubt. Is it worth
while to force scholarship by means of social reward? Would it not be
better to let these girls drop and find their place in another level
in which they are moved by real interest in the thing they are doing,
instead of by the goad of social ambition? This is at least a question
to be considered.
[Illustration: “WHEN ALICE GOES TO COLLEGE AND IS RUSHED BY BETA AND
GAMMA AND KAPPA”]
As for the uniform house rules, where is the machinery that can enforce
them in an aggregation of societies widely scattered and independent?
But suppose these reforms are carried out to the last degree, how will
they affect the system? Will they break down the barriers between Greek
and barbarian? Will they make the selection of the college aristocracy
any less artificial? Will they not, by still further elimination of
“mistakes,”--the incongruous element,--tend to make the fraternity
woman still more conventional? Will they not _ingrow_ more and more
in their limitation of types? Will they not be still more the circle
of girls looking inward and blowing up the little flame of their own
ideals and aspirations, instead of individual women mingling with the
great crowd of human beings, and turning their faces this way and that
according to the needs of the time?
But if outside regulation is impracticable where the national
organizations are already in control, and the proposed regulation from
within only intensifies the abnormal conditions of the system, what can
be done?
The fundamental problem for both the fraternities and the officers of
colleges where they exist, is, whether or not the number of societies
is to be restricted.
One dean says: “If I could, I would keep them out. As I cannot, I say
let us have as many as possible.”
Another dean stands for, “The rendering of fraternities inconspicuous
and unimportant as an element in college life.” She adds: “Often this
end may be in a measure accomplished by strengthening the organizations
to which all women students are eligible.”
A FOMENTER OF CASTE FEELING
There is the difference of theory. One view looks toward enough
fraternities to take in all the students who have any inclination to
be “clubable”; the other, toward preserving what is sometimes called
“the balance” between fraternity and non-fraternity women. The first
tendency is democratic by bringing the majority into the position held
by the minority to-day; the second is democratic by limiting the powers
of the present minority. The regulation from within, being urged by the
National Pan-Hellenic, is aristocratic in that it aims to increase the
efficiency and power of this minority.
Where the fraternities contain nearly the whole body of women students,
as happens in some small institutions, the few who are left out suffer
proportionately. Again, as the “barbs” need not be reckoned with,
jealousies between chapters are almost sure to arise.
On the other hand, in regard to the balance, one of the fraternity
journals says in effect: Why should there be this balance between the
fraternity and the non-fraternity element? If the system is ideal for
one girl, is it not for all? What ground can a college stand on in
putting a premium on the fraternity girls? Why increase the difference
which we would all gladly lose sight of? Our ideals are the same as
those of every true college woman, and the banding together into a
fraternity is a help toward these ideals. Why refuse any college woman
this help?
It is not merely a question of ideals and of the help of friends,
but of definite social values, such as, for example, more intimate
association with members of the faculty, more opportunities for meeting
distinguished guests, and so on. Why should the fraternities have the
monopoly of these social pleasures and assets?
The usual answer of the fraternity woman would be, I think: “Shall we
do away with colleges because fewer than two persons out of a thousand
go to college? Opportunities must necessarily be limited to the few.”
“Limited to the few?” Yes, necessarily to a few at a time; but not
always to the same few.
No, the fraternity woman does not wish to open up her fraternity to the
general public. She may go outside her walls and speak with the barbs
on terms of what she calls perfect equality and friendliness; but she
wishes to keep to herself the fastness of her fraternity, with its
idealistic ritual, its trivial secret, as a sanctuary secure from the
miscellaneous hordes of the world.
There is no getting over or around or away from this attitude of mind.
The insidiousness of it is that no amount of theory will save from it
the average human being who gets the chance. One may have heard of
the college professor who objected strongly when his sister was “bid”
because he did not wish her to become a snob. Later, as fate would have
it, he himself was called upon to organize a fraternity. Where was the
snob then? On the other side of the wall, to be sure! And that is just
where the difference comes in.
DO COLLEGE AUTHORITIES FACE THEIR DUTY?
One conclusion which would be generally admitted is, that the colleges
and universities where the fraternities thrive have not done their
whole duty by their students. Suppose, then, that they realize this,
and wish to use the fraternal spirit to forward the welfare of the
general body of students, what can they do? As a result of many
suggestions, I seem to see that a somewhat definite line of action is
possible.
In the first place, they are even now facing the problem of housing
their students, and there arises the question of choice between the
dormitory and the cottage. The large dormitory is more economical, and
it was more manageable than a group of cottages in the old days before
student government; but from every other point of view it fails. The
small dormitory and the large cottage are rapidly approaching each
other in size, and the approximation is due to a compromise between the
desire of each college to put first the welfare of its students and the
money available to carry out its plans.
But suppose--a somewhat visionary hypothesis, I am afraid--that an
institution is free to build as many cottages as it needs, of the size
that should bring the best possible results of group development, so
that every girl student may be assured of a comfortable home with,
for example, nineteen or twenty-nine others. She would then be on
the proper basis for extending and receiving hospitality, and social
training would follow as a matter of course.
THE GROUPING OF STUDENTS FOR DEVELOPMENT
The fraternity girls put great stress on their power of developing one
another, the “house mother,” or chaperon, even when she is not the
cook, seeming to be usually more or less a figurehead. In this cottage
system, what would happen if the group were left to itself in the same
way? Naturally this would depend entirely upon the constitution of the
group. If all birds of a feather flocked together, no sparrows would
learn the song of the canary. If they were housed haphazard, in the
order, for example, of registration, there would be at first anarchy,
with the speedy assertion of the clique and government by the strongest
spirits who were attracted to one another by congeniality, much as
happens in the chapter houses now, while the weak and isolated spirits
would have much the position of extension members of fraternities,
taken in to help pay the coal bills. Clearly some sort of regulation
from without would be not only desirable, but essential, unless the
development of the individual girl is to be as much a matter of
chance as with the fraternities. The line of remedy would seem to be
by a proper distribution of upper-class girls and new students--poor
dean!--and by the appointment of some responsible older woman as “house
mother.”
[Illustration: “THE SOLITARY, SELF-SUFFICIENT GIRL SHOULD HAVE HER
FRIENDS ABOUT HER”]
A great deal would depend upon the type of woman in charge. As one of
the fraternity members said, she ought to be an alumna. But however
important it is that a woman of fine ability, tact, social distinction,
and loving-kindness should be paid an excellent salary for developing
this side of life in every cottage or dormitory on the campus, there is
probably not an institution in the country that can afford to pay for
such service exclusively. A middle way, perhaps not so impracticable,
would be to choose from the graduating class of each year girls for
whom college has been rather a general training for life than a
specialized preparation for some one profession--girls who could afford
to give a year’s time and who would gladly do so in return for board
and lodging, special college privileges, such as graduate courses, and
so on, and the not invaluable experience that they would gain by acting
as these house mothers. They would be near enough in age to sympathize
with the undergraduate point of view, far enough away to counsel,
direct, and influence; and they, acting with house committees chosen
by the household of each cottage, could guide each little group in
such a way as to insure a flexible system which would permit both the
individual and the social virtues to flourish. One might even foresee
that a conference of these house mothers with the officers of the large
students’ organizations and a committee of the faculty might form a
board comparable to the local Pan-Hellenics of the fraternities for the
general guidance of student affairs.[5]
This might allow for social training and group development; but, the
objection may be urged, how would it react upon student friendships?
What assurance is there that in any cottage home there might not be as
many “mistakes” as occur in fraternity choosing? Deans are proverbially
not infallible, and the burden put upon them by such a plan would be
heavy.
The answer is that congenial friendships are no more a matter of
accidental living together than of arbitrary imposition by upper
classmen, but of a free choice that in undergraduate years should range
over the campus and as far as possible out into the world. With these
the cottage system has little to do, except that by its flexibility it
saves a girl from being unhappy more than one year or perhaps even a
semester. Whether her most intimate friends are all in her own house or
scattered over the campus and through the town is a matter of special
temperament. No two--poor dean again!--should be treated alike. The
intense girl who tends to abnormality of the affections should have
scattered friends. The solitary, self-sufficient girl should have her
friends about her. With the eminently conventional, clubable girl it
will make little difference with whom she lives; those about her will
always be her friends, and by continued intimate association with them,
she will develop a certain attitude of permanence in her ties which
probably makes for character development.
A NARROWING INFLUENCE
IN this connection I cannot forbear pointing out another fallacy in
the fraternity theory. As most fraternity girls are naturally of the
clubable type, it is undoubtedly true that the four years of close
association lead them to permanent ties of friendship as no other
system could do; but, on the other hand, as these girls in their teens
must grow at different rates of development, the fraternity becomes an
actual clog on those who might otherwise develop more rapidly and more
freely; it tends to keep them all back to the pace of those who remain
most nearly what they were in college years.
It must be admitted, however, that the cottage system does not do
much to foster the kind of growth that comes, not from the clash of
different types of personality, but from congenial associations. But
is there not in every college adequate machinery for such expression
of tastes? With the students’ associations, the women’s leagues, the
Young Women’s Christian Association, literary associations, tennis
clubs, golf clubs, garden clubs, walking clubs, journal clubs,--the
multifarious club activities of almost any college, to which ability,
or at least interest, is the test for admission, there should be no
lack of opportunity for any student to encourage to the utmost any
taste whatsoever. Nor should there be any limitation as to the number
of clubs to which any student belongs, apart from the question of her
interests and the amount of energy that she diverts from her main
business as a student.
Because of the diversity of their activities and the overlapping of
their memberships, with such clubs as these there could be no question
of rivalry. Rivalries and jealousies between the different cottages
might spring up, but with a strong students’ association and with
partizanship weakened by the inevitable scattering of friends, this
could not grow into anything like the hostility between fraternities
and non-fraternities, between Greeks and Greeks, that exists in many
institutions to-day.
INTERCOURSE BETWEEN ALUMNA AND STUDENT
One thing not provided for in the scheme outlined is put forward by
the fraternities as one of the great advantages of their organization,
and that is the continued relationship between the alumna and her
alma mater. Without admitting the wisdom of allowing too much alumnæ
interference and control, one may see that some continuance of the tie
is a good thing. The fraternities foster this connection, where they
have chapter houses for the small proportion of students whom they
reach, by means of a permanent college home and an abiding interest in
the younger sisterhood. A similar result could be secured for the whole
student body by means of a club-house built by the alumnæ to put up
those who return for visits and to accommodate offices for the various
organizations of students.[6]
All this is visionary and impracticable, at present; and yet it is only
following out the various lines of suggestion, which are based upon
institutions already in existence.
SOCIAL EXCLUSIVENESS
IF the colleges and universities should develop in this direction, what
would become of the fraternities? The double system of cottages and
clubs would remove the practical reasons for their existence. There
is no work that they claim to do for the few that could not be done
for the whole either in a cottage organization of students or by a
club. They would be driven back upon the real ground of their growing
prosperity in our land of the Newly Made--social exclusiveness. On
that basis doubtless they will continue to exist. There will always
be some people who will wish to wear a badge possessed by the few,
who will wish to retire into an inner circle of common knowledge and
common acquaintance where they are safe in feeling superior to those
whom they keep outside as far as the choice lies with themselves. But
these cliques, whatever each thinks of itself, will be forced to yield
to the larger organizations of students both the control of affairs
and the right to set the fashion in character and in social customs.
They may become specialists in “cliquocracy”--the frat of the Vans and
the frat of the Vons and the frat of the Log-Cabin Ancestors, the frat
of the Ultra-Platonists, the frat of the Super-Bogies, and the frat
of the Number-Two Shoes. That is, if the element of good which the
fraternities give to their members is supplied to all college students
in other ways, the fraternities themselves are bound to dwindle and
shrivel until they become mere social excrescences, curiosities of
aristocratic affinities.
[Illustration: THE FRATERNITY BADGE]
Probably it is too late to make a stand. The fraternities are strong
among the privileged classes, and tenacious of their privilege. They
see, as who does not, that in an age and a country where opportunities
are increasingly restricted to the few, this caste system of education
is the best possible preparation to enable the few to use the
opportunities that are theirs, in that it gives them all the social
powers and affiliations by which chiefly the few rule the many; and the
development of the individual is not the concern of a system that works
to make corporate bodies closed against individual striving.
When one remembers the movement against the high-school fraternities,
one is tempted for a moment to hope for a revision of popular opinion.
How should what is generally condemned for the years between twelve
and twenty be approved for the years between sixteen and twenty-four?
Is there so wide a difference between the fraternity idea as it finds
expression in the high-school girl of eighteen and the college girl
of eighteen? The very women who most earnestly advocate the system in
the colleges are bent upon driving it out of the high schools. Yet
the fact that neither the joint effort of parents and teachers and
state legislation has succeeded in this, argues ill for any successful
movement against it in the colleges.
A NEW ALTRUISM NEEDED
What can we do? We need a new religion to teach the subordination of
personal good to communal welfare. We believe in it theoretically, we
are anxious that our neighbors should practise it; but when it cuts
home, we falter and fail. We see the evils of the fraternity system,
and the fraternity people are among our most desirable acquaintances.
We like them for friends and especially for our children’s friends. We
argue against the system and preach its abolition; but when Alice goes
to college and is rushed by Beta and Gamma and Kappa in eager rivalry,
we step down from the pulpit and rejoice with her and suffer with her
anxious little heart until she is safely housed within the chapter that
has the best standing.
And yet we do not call ourselves snobs. There must be a top layer. Why
should not we be in it? Democracy? Yes; but that we and our children
are to be on the same level with venders and hagglers and foreigners
and other impossible people--absurd! Let us hasten to put on the Alpha
Omega pin, which assures public recognition of our social superiority.
In other words, we still care more for individual distinction than
for the welfare of society. I have heard more than a few thoughtful
fraternity women sum up their position thus: “I hate the system; I
deplore it! But _as_ it’s here, I’ve got to be in it because I can’t
bear to be left outside!” Can we fight this spirit? Can we win? If we
do, the victory will mean that we have grown wise and sane and strong
enough for such a democracy as the world has never yet known.
[4] As Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe; and, properly speaking,
Smith.
[5] It has also been pointed out to me that the system could be used
even in a large dormitory by dividing up the building into floors
or sections, and that this is now being done in the newest
dormitories. The idea is not, of course, to secure boarding-school
_supervision_.
[6] Such club-houses are already in existence for men, and seem to
fulfil their purpose admirably.
THE PITILESSNESS OF DESIRE
BY SHAEMAS O’SHEEL
Cease, cease, implacable desire,
Cease, cease!
The endless ways no longer, for I tire!
I who went forth mantled with morning fire
Pray now surcease
And peace--peace!
O Protean, pitiless, perilous, dread desire,
Cease, cease!
Blow not again
Your trumpet tyrannous, nor sound your lyre:
Once in their notes I heard a spirit choir;
Now only pain.
Whispers at my young soul, blood in the heart,
Limbs of the leaping goat--aye, these I had,
And spurned a myriad summits gained, to start
Down through new vales to newer hills apart;
And I was glad
To be insatiably mad
For more--more knowledge, wisdom, passion, art!
But now release
Your broken bondsman from his broken bond!
What is beyond
This, and the next horizon, and beyond
The last horizon, could not give me peace.
That I have learned at last, and therefore cease
The bloody goad and the illusory wand--
Cease, cease!
Cease, cease!
My life’s a burning arrow shot in the dark,
Fearfully arching heaven to find no mark.
Must it be always warfare, never peace?
Nay, then I ground my arms! I will not hark
The old command; so maybe you will cease.
This is the end of all; I quench the fire.
Calm of the hills, the rooted flowers and trees,
Have some right to my love, and now to these
I turn, because their service will not tire.
My staff, my scrip, my cloak into the pyre!
Yet--what high vision through the hot flame flees?
THE SET-BACK TO ENGLISH SOCIALISM
BY G. K. CHESTERTON
The present condition of England is a very curious one, and the only
obvious thing to say about it is that there is virtually nothing about
it in the English papers. When I heard long ago that Mr. Balfour never
read the papers, I thought it was because he was languid and frivolous;
by which you will see that I did read the papers. Now I am older,
I think it was more likely because he was practical and busy, and
preferred to deal direct with the real facts. If, like the English, you
run what is still at best an aristocracy with most of the forms of a
democracy, it is found virtually necessary that the journalists should
talk in public about anything or everything except what the politicians
are really doing in private.
[Illustration]
You may therefore utterly disregard all the things printed in very
large letters in the “Daily Mail” or the “Daily Chronicle.” I have
heard that American journalism is in a manner more truthful, if it is
only by being more transparently untrue; but I will not presume to
guess about that, or to imagine what the headlines in American papers
mean. The headlines in English papers mean nothing. Mr. Bonar Law means
nothing. Sir Edward Carson means nothing. Belfast means nothing. There
is not one man of education and influence in England who cares a button
about Belfast; at least in the governing classes, who have long seen
that Home Rule is horse sense and nothing else; and least of all in the
Conservative party, where a general High-Church flavor can be varied
by Romanism, Atheism, Theosophy, Christian Science, or Devil-worship,
but where such a thing as a No Popery puritan simply could not live
for twenty minutes. Nor is there anything in Mr. Churchill’s supposed
frenzy for war, or the other Radicals’ frenzy for peace. There is no
more division among Englishmen about the need for national defense
than there would be among you Americans or among Frenchmen or any
other white men. And the mysterious ambitions and alterations of Mr.
Churchill (of which you will see a great deal in the papers) mean
nothing whatever but this: that the man is a cynic and an oligarch, but
not a traitor; and that he is behaving exactly as any Englishman in his
place would behave.
There was more in the comparatively slight stir about the tragedy of
the _Titanic_. For that was connected, though largely unconsciously,
with what is the deepest thing in modern England, a general suspicion
that the men and methods now on top everywhere are not the best even
from their own paternalist point of view; or, to use the foolish modern
phraseology, that the survival of the unfittest rather than the fittest
is the real result of our competitions or conspiracies. But here again
the very phrase reminds us that in the modern world the real issue is
carefully cloaked with a false issue.
There is much in the English papers just now, and I do not doubt in the
American papers also, about degeneration and eugenics and the appalling
sexual conduct and physical condition of the submerged. This also is
a mere plutocratic fad, and corresponds to no general public feeling.
Every sensible man in England knows that the poor must somehow or other
be given more money for food and rest; but every sensible man also
knows that in other respects they are as mixed and average as any other
class, and marry and are given in marriage, as people always have done
and always will do.
The suspicion really abroad in England is not a doubt about the people
below, but about the people above. Looking at those who emerge into the
first social rank, we are more inclined to be ashamed of our successes
than of our failures. It is the breed of the top dog rather than the
breed of the bottom dog that is becoming a mongrel breed. And there is
certainly something amusing in the picture of the rich and powerful
peering down into the abyss and dropping tears over the poor specimens
that make up the populace, while by far the greater part of the
populace is remarking more and more what uncommonly poor specimens are
looking down at them.
This doubt of the powers that be is vague but universal, and had a sort
of stifled explosion at the time of the _Titanic_ affair; a general
suspicion that governors cannot be trusted to govern or inspectors to
inspect or arbiters to arbitrate, that captains are not to be trusted
with ships, that lawyers are not to be trusted with laws. The kind of
man who comes to the top everywhere conquers nothing but his superiors,
gains nothing but his own gain. In modern England the successful man is
not a success.
Now this state of public feeling has produced one rather odd, but very
important, effect. While our attitude is growing more revolutionary,
it is growing less Socialistic. For Socialism proposes to give to
the state, and therefore to statesmen, fresh powers against social
abuses. And England in its modern mood is rather more suspicious of
the statesmen than of the bosses or middlemen whom they are supposed
to control. The simple Socialistic formula that government should own
the mines, for example--that simple formula begins to look a little
too simple when people are suspecting that the mine-owners own the
government. The mere proposal to set the politician to watch the
capitalist has been disturbed by the rather disconcerting discovery
that they are both the same man. We are past the point where being
a capitalist is the only way of becoming a politician, and we are
dangerously near the point where being a politician is much the
quickest way of becoming a capitalist. But while the European _haute
politique_ is hypocritical and diseased (much more so, I should
say, than the American), there is certainly less “graft” and corrupt
give-and-take in the mass of minor functionaries or moderate fortunes;
and this very comparative honesty in the less successful mass of Europe
increases their uneasiness touching the national leadership. The
English people, so far from being supine or decadent, are much more
vigorous and wide-awake than they have been for a long time. But they
have awakened in a cage. This cage produces a curious situation in
which we silently but suddenly find ourselves.
When your nation separated from our nation, to my present delight and
yours, it separated before most men had become commercial wage-earners.
Our ruler was called Farmer George; but yours might have been called
Farmer George also. Last week I went up the great Sussex road where
stands the village of Washington; and I remembered that your sword was
also beaten out of a plowshare. If we had separated later, he might
have been called General Brighton, or Heaven knows what.
Now the big difference made by that fact is this: that in America
industrialism may be quite as strong; but agriculture is not so weak.
A hazy horizon of free farms surrounds your most insane cities: but
with us all the eager and intelligent have become servants of the
capitalists; it is only the idle or idiotic that remain servants of the
landlords. It is undoubtedly tenable that the idle and idiotic were the
wiser of the two.
On us, thus situated, has come an insurrection against industrialism
itself. Our recent strikes have really been a revolt against the whole
system of wage-earning. But while your workers would have some cloudy
notion of an alternative in farming the larger country by freer men,
with us the agricultural alternative has slipped out of sight. The
workers know what they don’t want more than what they do; like _Miss
Arabella Allen_ in “Pickwick.” This state of mind is called by the
learned syndicalism. It is really something much more serious; it is
anger.
In the stress of these strikes two extraordinary things happened. The
capitalist became a Socialist. The proletarian became an individualist.
The employer wanted the community to intervene; and the employee didn’t
want it to intervene. It was the rich man who used the Socialist
argument; the comfort and convenience of the whole nation. It was the
poor man who used the individualist argument; the freedom of contract
and the private rights of man. It was the coal-owner who said, “_Salus
populi suprema lex_.” It was the coal-miner who said, “_Fiat justitia
ruat cœlum_.” He may not have expressed it precisely in those terms;
though he is often no more illiterate than the coal-owner. This, then,
is the extraordinary inversion that is the deepest dilemma of England
to-day. _Hamlet_ and _Laertes_ have really changed swords in the
scuffle: which is the poisoned sword I will not at this moment inquire.
The results of this extend and solidify every hour. For nearly a
century now Socialists and social reformers in England, as in the rest
of Europe and in America, have preached either greater philanthropy
among the rich or greater rebellion among the poor. In both cases
they have been suddenly taken at their word; but in such a manner as
to sweep away the very foundations of their social science and their
social scheme. The rich have become philanthropists; the rich have, in
a sense, become Socialists; but only on condition that they may also be
slave-owners. The poor have become rebels--but rebels against Socialism.
So far is this from being an exaggeration that every daily detail in
the present development illustrates this and nothing else. The railway
men, who led the revolt, were not, literally and legally, striking
against an employer at all. They were striking against the decisions
of State Arbitration Courts and Conciliation Boards such as State
Socialists would set up; and semi-socialistic publicists had set up.
The capitalists, wishing to strike back at the trade-unions, have not
struck back by cutthroat competition or irresponsible locking out. They
have struck back by a big act of Parliament, aimed at limiting the
trade-unions by the law of the land; and tying men to their masters by
a new and constructive social scheme. Here they have much the advantage
of their proletarian opponents; who have to fight mainly with the
remains of rather rhetorical Socialism and dreams, as yet somewhat dim,
of the old liberty of the medieval guilds and charters. Thus it may too
often seem that capitalists can combine and Socialists can only quarrel.
I do not myself think things can be cured except by a wider
equalization of strictly private property, especially in land. This is
not done or even demanded, not because it is impossible, but because
its tradition has been lost. Meanwhile the Insurance Act, by which the
rich contribute to the medical support of their servants, on condition
of obtaining a tighter hold on their service, is the first of many
legislative acts which will have for their object the ordering and
cleansing, but also the strengthening, of the wage-system. They will
attempt to forbid strikes. Thus we shall have the poor, with better
conditions perhaps and under some general social stipulations; but
bound irrevocably to particular and private masters.
The only thing I have to say about such a scheme concerns your country
more than mine. This system of fixed service for certain masters has
much to be said for it; and much was said by men dead and alive. In
the wilderness by Chancellorsville or down all the roads to Richmond,
there must be the dust of great gentlemen who came up out of the South
to fight for such a system; and I think our Liberal social reformers
owe them an apology. I think they ought to stand a moment and salute
the dead, who had the courage to die for this thing, and the courage to
call it by its name.
[Illustration:
© V. O.
“LIGHT IS THERE ABOVE
WHICH MAKES THE
CREATOR VISIBLE
TO THAT CREATURE
WHICH HAS ITS
PEACE ONLY IN
SEEING HIM”
PARADISO
CANTO
XXIX-XXX
THE
RIVER OF
LIGHT
The Divine Comedy
of Dante Alighieri
Studies in Red Chalk
by Violet Oakley, for
the medallions of a painted glass
window made for the house of
Mr. Robert J. Collier
]
[Illustration:
“O GLORY AND LIGHT
OF OTHER POETS:
MAY THE LONG
ZEAL
AVAIL ME AND THE
GREAT LOVE THAT
MADE ME SEARCH
THY VOLUME”
INFERNO
CANTO I
DANTE,
DRIVEN BACK BY
THE THREE BEASTS
IN THE MID-JOURNEY OF OUR LIFE BELOW,
I FOUND MYSELF WITHIN A GLOOMY WOOD, ...
HOW FIRST I ENTERED, IT IS HARD TO SAY;
IN SUCH DEEP SLUMBER WERE MY SENSES BOUND, ...
BUT SOON AS I HAD REACHED A MOUNTAIN’S BASE, ...
TO CLIMB THE ASCENT I SCARCELY HAD ESSAYED,
WHEN LO! AN AGILE PANTHER BARRED MY WAY ...
... I SAW APPEAR
A LION’S FORM THAT BURST UPON MY SIGHT, ...
A SHE-WOLF TOO, ... RAVENOUS AND LEAN.
“THEE IT BEHOVES ANOTHER PATH TO TAKE, ...
FOR YONDER BEAST THAT FILLS THEE WITH DISMAY
DOTH NONE PERMIT TO JOURNEY O’ER HER ROAD ...
UNTIL THE GREYHOUND COME, TO MAKE HER DIE ...
HIM NEITHER LAND NOR LUCRE SHALL SUSTAIN
BY LOVE, BY WISDOM, AND BY VIRTUE FED; ...
BACK TO THE LIMITS OF HER NATIVE HELL,
WHENCE ENVY DREW HER FIRST--WITH POTENT SWAY
FROM TOWN TO TOWN SHALL HE THE BEAST REPEL.”
]
[Illustration:
“THEN GRIEVED I, AND
I NOW DO GRIEVE
AGAIN WHEN I
DIRECT MY
MIND TO WHAT I SAW, AND
MORE REIN IN MY
THOUGHT THAN
I AM WONT”
INFERNO
CANTO XIV
VERGIL LEADS
DANTE THROUGH
THE RAIN OF FIRE
THEN CAME WE TO A BOUNDARY, WHICH PARTS
THE THIRD AND SECOND CIRCLES, WHERE ARE SHOWN
THE RACKS OF JUSTICE, ...
... WE REACHED A WIDE AND DESERT GROUND,
THAT SPURNS EACH PLANT FROM ITS UNGENIAL BREAST;
THIS PLAIN IS COMPASSED BY THE MOURNFUL WOOD,
AND THAT ENCIRCLED BY THE FOSS PROFOUND:
HERE ON THE VERY EDGE OF BOTH WE STOOD.
BEFORE US LAY A THICK AND ARID SAND
* * * * *
O HEAVENLY VENGEANCE! HOW SHOULDEST THOU BE FEARED
* * * * *
O’ER ALL THE SANDY DESERT FELL BELOW
LARGE FLAKES OF FIRE, AS WHEN ON ALPINE HILL,
WHILE SLEEP THE WINDS, ARE FALLING FLAKES OF SLOW.
* * * * *
“LETHE, BEYOND THIS FOSS, THOU SHALT SURVEY,
THERE, WHERE THE SHADES RESORT, THEIR FORMS TO LAVE,
WHEN PENITENCE HATH WASHED THEIR SINS AWAY.”
]
[Illustration:
“THY WILL HENCEFORTH
IS UPRIGHT, PURE,
AND SOUND.
LORD OF THYSELF
BE MITERED AND
BE CROWNED.”
PURGATORIO
CANTO
XXVIII-XXIX
DANTE
UPON THE MOUNTAIN
OF PURIFICATION
EAGER THAT HEAVENLY FOREST TO SURVEY, ...
... I LEFT THE ROCKY BOUND,
AND THERE APPEARED TO ME ...
A LADY ALL ALONE: WHO ROVED ABOUT
SINGING, AS SHE SELECTED FLOWER FROM FLOWER,
WITH WHICH HER PATHWAY PAINTED WAS THROUGHOUT ...
LIKE TO A LADY TURNING IN THE DANCE,
FOOT BEFORE FOOT FROM EARTH SO SLIGHTLY MOVED,
THAT SCARCE PERCEPTIBLE IS HER ADVANCE;--
... TO ME SHE TURNED AROUND, ...
“THE STREAMS THOU SEE’ST SPRING NOT FROM EARTHLY VEIN, ...
BUT ISSUE FROM A NEVER-FAILING SOURCE,
REPLENISHED BY THE WILL OF GOD ...
ON THIS HAND, ABLE--SUCH THE POWER ASSIGNED--
TO TAKE AWAY THE MEMORY OF SIN;
ON THAT--TO CALL EACH VIRTUOUS DEED TO MIND:
THIS, LETHE NAMED--THAT EUNÖE.” ...
AS THOUGH BY LOVE INSPIRED--HER HEAVENLY LAY
TO ITS LAST CADENCE SANG THAT LADY FAIR:
“BLESSED ARE THOSE WHOSE SINS ARE WASHED AWAY.”
]
[Illustration:
“A LITTLE WHILE AND ME
YE SHALL NOT SEE--
AND THEN AGAIN
O SISTERS, MY DELIGHT, A
LITTLE WHILE AND ME
YE SHALL BEHOLD!”
PURGATORIO
CANTO
XXX
BEATRICE,
DIVINE WISDOM,
DESCENDS FROM
HEAVEN UPON THE
CHARIOT OF THE CHURCH
AND LO! A VOICE--“COME, SPOUSE FROM LEBANON,”
AS THOUGH FROM HEAVENLY MESSENGER ...
* * * * *
“O BLESSED THOU WHO COMEST,” THEY ALL CRIED;
“SCATTER WE LILIES WITH UNSPARING HAND”;
* * * * *
E’EN SO, ENCOMPASSED IN A CLOUD OF FLOWERS,
WHICH UPWARD BY ANGELIC HANDS WERE FLUNG,
AND ALL ABOUT THE CHARIOT FELL IN SHOWERS--
IN VEIL OF WHITE, WITH OLIVE CHAPLET BOUND,
A MAID APPEARED BENEATH A MANTLE GREEN,
WITH HUE OF LIVING FLAME ENROBED AROUND.
AND NOW MY SPIRIT (WHICH FOR MANY A DAY,
UNUSED TO FEEL HER PRESENCE) ...
FELT, THOUGH SHE WAS NOT FULLY MANIFEST, ...
HOW STRONG THE LOVE THAT ERST MY SOUL POSSESSED.
* * * * *
“YES, I AM BEATRICE; REGARD ME WELL:--
AND HAS THOUGH DEIGNED AT LAST TO ASCEND THE MOUNT,
WHERE JOYS UNSPEAKABLE FOREVER DWELL?”
]
[Illustration:
“HIS WILL IS OUR PEACE.
IT IS THAT OCEAN
VAST WHEREUNTO
ARE
MOVING ALL THINGS
WHICH HE CREATES
AND WHICH NATURE
MAKES”
PARADISO
CANTO II, FIRST
HEAVEN OF THE MOON
BEATRICE
LIFTS DANTE
FROM THE EARTH
THE CEASELESS INNATE THIRSTING OF THE SOUL
BORE US TO GOD’S OWN DWELLING ...
* * * * *
I LOOKED ON BEATRICE--AND SHE ON HEAVEN;
* * * * *
“AS TO THE HAMMER FROM THE ARTIST’S BLOW,
SO, THAT SAME HEAVEN WITH STARS RESPLENDENT DIGHT
RECEIVES ITS IMPRESS FROM THE MIND PROFOUND
THAT ROLLS IT EVER THROUGH THE FIELDS OF LIGHT.
* * * * *
THUS DOTH INTELLIGENCE WITH GOODNESS FILL
THE ORBS OF HEAVEN; THOUGH MULTIPLIED, THE SAME;
ON ITS OWN UNITY REVOLVING STILL.
* * * * *
SHINES THROUGH EACH ORB THE INFLUENCE DIVERSELY,
SWAYED BY THE JOYOUS NATURE WHENCE IT STREAMS,
LIKE GLADNESS THROUGH THE PUPIL OF THE EYE.
HENCE IS DERIVED THE DIFFERENCE THAT WE MARK
’TWIXT STAR AND STAR ...”
]
[Illustration:
“HER BEAUTY RAINETH
LITTLE FLAMES OF
FIRE FULL OF
A SPIRIT
THAT INSPIRES LOVE AND IN
OUR NATURE QUICKENS
ALL GOOD
THOUGHTS”
PARADISO