greatest day of all: nothing shown from morning till night but
horses--horses in harness, horses under the saddle. Ah! but _that_ will
be worth seeing! Late in the afternoon the little boys will ride for
premiums on their ponies, and, what is not so pretty, but far more
exciting, young men will contest the prize of horsemanship. And then
such racking and pacing and loping and walking!--such racing round and
round and round to see who can go fastest, and be gracefulest, and turn
quickest! Such pirouetting and curveting and prancing and cavorting and
riding with arms folded across the breast while the reins lie on the
horse's neck, and suddenly bowing over to the horse's mane, as some
queen of beauty high up in the amphitheatre, transported by the
excitement of the thousands of spectators and the closeness of the
contest, throws her flowers and handkerchief down into the arena! Ah,
yes! this will be the great day at the fair--at the modern tourney!
[Illustration: HARNESS HORSES.]
So the tide of the people is at the flood. For days they have been
pouring into the town. The hotels are overflowing with strangers; the
open houses of the citizens are full of guests. Strolling companies of
players will crack the dusty boards tonight with the tread of buskin and
cothurnus. The easy-going tradespeople have trimmed their shops, and
imported from the North their richest merchandise.
From an early hour of the morning, along every road that leads from
country or town to the amphitheatre, pour the hurrying throng of people,
eager to get good seats for the day; for there will be thousands not
seated at all. Streaming out, on the side of the town, are pedestrians,
hacks, omnibuses, the negro drivers shouting, racing, cracking their
whips, and sometimes running into the way-side stands where old negro
women are selling apples and gingerbread. Streaming in, on the side of
the country, are pedestrians, heated, their coats thrown over the
shoulder or the arm; buggies containing often a pair of lovers who do
not keep their secret discreetly; family carriages with children made
conspicuously tidy and mothers aglow with the recent labors of the
kitchen: comfortable evidences of which are the huge baskets or hampers
that are piled up in front or strapped on behind. Nay, sometimes may be
seen whole wagon-loads of provisions moving slowly in, guarded by portly
negresses, whose eyes shine like black diamonds through the setting of
their white-dusted eyelashes.
Within the grounds, how rapidly the crowd swells and surges hither and
thither, tasting the pleasures of the place before going to the
amphitheatre: to the stalls, to the booths, to the swings, to the
cottage, to the floral hall, to the living curiosities, to the swinish
pundits, who have learned their lessons in numbers and cards. Is not
that the same pig that was shown at Bartholomew's four centuries ago?
Mixed in with the Kentuckians are people of a different build and
complexion. For Kentucky now is one of the great summering States for
the extreme Southerners, who come up with their families to its
watering-places. Others who are scattered over the North return in the
autumn by way of Kentucky, remaining till the fair and the fall of the
first frost. Nay, is not the State the place for the reunion of families
that have Southern members? Back to the old home from the rice and sugar
and cotton plantations of the swamps and the bayous come young Kentucky
wives with Southern husbands, young Kentucky husbands with Southern
wives. All these are at the fair--the Lexington fair. Here, too, are
strangers from wellnigh every Northern State. And, I beg you, do not
overlook the negroes--a solid acre of them. They play unconsciously a
great part in the essential history of this scene and festival. Briskly
grooming the stock in the stalls; strolling around with carriage whips
in their hands; running on distant errands; showering a tumult of
blows upon the newly-arrived "boss" with their nimble, ubiquitous
brush-brooms; everywhere, everywhere, happy, well-dressed, sleek--the
fateful background of all this stage of social history.
[Illustration: THE MODERN TOURNEY.]
But the amphitheatre! Through the mild, chastened, soft-toned atmosphere
of the early September day the sunlight falls from the unclouded sky
upon the seated thousands. Ah, the women in all their silken and satin
bravery! delicate blue and pink and canary-colored petticoats, with
muslin over-dresses, black lace and white lace mantles, white kid
gloves, and boots to match the color of their petticoats. One stands up
to allow a lemonade-seller to pass; she wears a hoop-skirt twelve feet
in circumference. Here and there costumes suitable for a ball; arms and
shoulders glistening like marble in the sunlight; gold chains around the
delicate arching necks. Oh, the jewels, the flowers, the fans, the
parasols, the ribbons, the soft eyes and smiles, the love and happiness!
And some of the complexions!--paint on the cheeks, powder on the neck,
stick-pomatum plastering the beautiful hair down over the temples. No
matter; it is the fashion. Rub it in! Rub it in well--up to the very
roots of the hair and eyebrows! Now, how perfect you are, madam! You are
the great Kentucky show of life-size wax-works.
In another part of the amphitheatre nothing but men, red-faced, excited,
standing up on the seats, shouting, applauding, as the rival horses rush
round the ring before them. It is not difficult to know who these are.
The money streams through their fingers. Did you hear the crack of that
pistol? How the crowd swarms angrily. Stand back! A man has been shot.
He insulted a gentleman. He called him a liar. Be careful. There are a
great many pistols on the fair grounds.
In all the United States where else is there to be seen any such holiday
assemblage of people--any such expression of the national life impressed
with local peculiarities? Where else is there to be seen anything that,
while it falls far behind, approaches so near the spirit of uproarious
merriment, of reckless fun, which used to intoxicate and madden the
English populace when given over to the sports of a ruder age?
[Illustration: THE JUDGE'S STAND--THE FINISH.]
These are the descendants of the sad pioneers--of those early cavalcades
which we glanced at in the primeval forests a few minutes ago. These
have subdued the land, and are reclining on its tranquil autumn fulness.
Time enough to play now--more time than there ever was before; more than
there will ever be again. They have established their great fair here on
the very spot where their forefathers were massacred or put to torture.
So, at old Smithfield, the tumblers, the jesters, the buffoons, and the
dancers shouldered each other in joyful riot over the ashes of the
earlier heroes and martyrs.
It is past high noon, and the thousands break away from the amphitheatre
and move towards a soft green woodland in another part of the grounds,
shaded by forest trees. Here are the private dinner-tables--hundreds of
them, covered with snowy linen, glittering with glass and silver. You
have heard of Kentucky hospitality; here you will see one of the
peaceful battle-fields where reputation for that virtue is fought for
and won. Is there a stranger among these thousands that has not been
hunted up and provided for? And such dinners! Old Pepys should be
here--immortal eater--so that he could go home and set down in his
diary, along with other gastronomic adventures, garrulous notes of what
he saw eaten and ate himself at the Kentucky fair. You will never see
the Kentuckians making a better show than at this moment. What courtesy,
what good-will, what warm and gracious manners! Tie a blue ribbon on
them. In a competitive exhibition of this kind the premium will stay at
home.
But make the most of it--make the most of this harmony. For did you see
that? A father and a son met each other, turned their heads quickly and
angrily away, and passed without speaking.
[Illustration: A DINNER-PARTY.]
Look how these two men shake hands with too much cordiality, and search
each other's eyes. There is a man from the North standing apart
and watching with astonishment these alert, happy, efficient
negroes--perhaps following with his thoughtful gaze one of Mrs. Stowe's
Uncle Toms. A Southerner has drawn that Kentucky farmer beside a tree,
and is trying to buy one of these servants for his plantation. Yes, yes,
make the most of it! The war is coming. It is in men's hearts, and in
their eyes and consciences. By-and-by this bright, gay pageant will pass
so entirely away that even the thought of it will come back to one like
the unsubstantial revelry of a dream. By-and-by there will be another
throng filling these grounds: not in pink and white and canary, but in
blue, solid blue--blue overcoats, showing sad and cold above the snow.
All round the amphitheatre tents will be spread--not covering, as now,
the hideous and the monstrous, but the sleeping forms of young men,
athletic, sinewy, beautiful. This, too, shall vanish. And some day, when
the fierce summer sun is killing the little gray leaves and blades of
grass, in through these deserted gates will pass a long, weary,
foot-sore line of brown. Nothing in the floral hall now but cots, around
which are nurses and weeping women. Lying there, some poor young fellow,
with the death dew on his forehead, will open his shadowy eyes and
remember this day of the fair, where he walked among the flowers and
made love.
But it is late in the afternoon, and the people are beginning to
disperse by turnpike and lane to their homes in the country, or to
hasten back into town for the festivities of the night; for to-night the
spirit of the fair will be continued in other amphitheatres. To-night
comedy and tragedy will tread the village boards; but hand in hand also
they will flaunt their colors through the streets, and haunt the
midnight alleys. In all the year no time like fair-time: parties at
private houses; hops, balls at the hotels. You shall sip the foam from
the very crest of the wave of revelry and carousal. Darkness be over it
till the east reddens! Let Bacchus be unconfined!
[Illustration: THE RACE-COURSE--THE FINISH.]
V
The fair languished during the war, but the people were not slow to
revive it upon the return of peace. Peace, however, could never bring
back the fair of the past: it was gone forever--gone with the stage and
phase of the social evolution of which it was the unique and memorable
expression. For there was no phase of social evolution in Kentucky but
felt profoundly that era of upheaval, drift, and readjustment. Start
where we will, or end where we may, we shall always come sooner or later
to the war as a great rent and chasm, with its hither side and its
farther side and its deep abyss between, down into which old things were
dashed to death, and out of which new things were born into the better
life.
Therefore, as we study the Kentucky fair of today, more than a quarter
of a century later, we must expect to find it much changed. Withal it
has many local variations. As it is held here and there in retired
counties or by little neighborhoods it has characteristics of rural
picturesqueness that suggest the manners of the era passed away. But the
typical Kentucky fair, the fair that represents the leading interests
and advanced ideas of the day, bears testimony enough to the altered
life of the people.
The old circular amphitheatre has been torn down, and replaced with a
straight or a slightly curved bank of seats. Thus we see the arena
turned into the race-course, the idea of the Colosseum giving way to the
idea of the Circus Maximus. In front of the bank of seats stretch a
small track for the exhibition of different kinds of stock, and a large
track for the races. This abandonment of the old form of amphitheatre is
thus a significant concession to the trotting-horse, and a sign that its
speed has become the great pleasure of the fair.
As a picture, also, the fair of to-day lacks the Tyrolean brightness of
its predecessor; and as a social event it seems like a pensive tale of
by-gone merriment. Society no longer looks upon it as the occasion of
displaying its wealth, its toilets, its courtesies, its hospitalities.
No such gay and splendid dresses now; no such hundreds of dinner-tables
on the shaded greensward. It would be too much to say that the
disappearance of the latter betokens the loss of that virtue which the
gracious usages of a former time made a byword. The explanation lies
elsewhere. Under the old social regime a common appurtenance to every
well-established household was a trained force of negro servants. It was
the services of these that made the exercise of generous public
entertainment possible to the Kentucky housewife. Moreover, the lavish
ideals of the time threw upon economy the reproach of meanness;
and, as has been noted, the fair was then the universally recognized
time for the display of munificent competitive hospitalities. In truth,
it was the sharpness of the competition that brought in at last the
general disuse of the custom; for the dinners grew more and more
sumptuous, the labor of preparing them more and more severe, and the
expense of paying for them more and more burdensome. So to-day the
Kentuckians remain a hospitable people, but you must not look to find
the noblest exercise of their hospitality at the fair. A few dinners you
will see, but modest luncheons are not despicable and the whole tendency
of things is towards the understanding that an appetite is an affair of
the private conscience. And this brings to light some striking
differences between the old and the new Kentuckians. Along with the
circular amphitheatre, the dresses, and the dinners, have gone the
miscellaneous amusements of which the fair was ere-while the mongrel
scene and centre. The ideal fair of to-day frowns upon the side-show,
and discards every floating accessory. It would be self-sufficient. It
would say to the thousands of people who still attend it as the greatest
of all their organized pleasures, "Find your excitement, your
relaxation, your happiness, in a shed for machinery, a floral hall, and
the fine stock." But of these the greatest attraction is the last, and
of all kinds of stock the one most honored is the horse. Here, then, we
come upon a noteworthy fact: the Kentucky fair, which began as a
cattle-show, seems likely to end with being a horse-show.
[Illustration: STALLIONS.]
If anything is lacking to complete the contrast between the fair in the
fulness of its development before the war and the fair of to-day, what
better could be found to reflect this than the different _morale_ of the
crowd?
You are a stranger, and you have the impression that an assemblage of
ten, fifteen, twenty thousand Kentuckians out on a holiday is pervaded
by the spirit of a mob. You think that a few broken heads is one of its
cherished traditions; that intoxication and disorderliness are its
dearest prerogatives. But nowadays you look in vain for those heated,
excited men with money lying between their fingers, who were once the
rebuke and the terror of the amphitheatre. You look in vain for heated,
excited men of any kind: there are none. There is no drinking, no
bullying, no elbowing, or shouldering, or swearing.
[Illustration: MULES.]
While still in their nurses' arms you may sometimes see the young
Kentuckians shown in the ring at the horse-fair for premiums. From their
early years they are taken to the amphitheatre to enjoy its color, its
fleetness, and its form. As little boys they ride for prizes. The horse
is the subject of talk in the hotels, on the street corners, in the
saloons, at the stables, on county court day, at the cross-roads and
blacksmiths' shops, in country church-yards before the sermon. The
barber, as he shaves his morning customer, gives him points on the
races. There will be found many a group of gentlemen in whose presence
to reveal an ignorance of famous horses and common pedigrees will bring
a blush to the cheek. Not to feel interested in such themes is to lay
one's self open to a charge of disagreeable eccentricity. The horse has
gradually emerged into prominence until to-day it occupies the
foreground.
A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
I
More than two hundred and fifty years have passed since the Cardinal de
Richelieu stood at the baptismal font as sponsor to a name that within
the pale of the Church was destined to become more famous than his own.
But the world has wellnigh forgotten Richelieu's godson. Only the
tireless student of biography now turns the pages that record his
extraordinary career, ponders the strange unfolding of his moral nature,
is moved by the deep pathos of his dying hours. Dominique Armand-Jean le
Bouthillier de Rancé! How cleverly, while scarcely out of short-clothes,
did he puzzle the king's confessor with questions on Homer, and at the
age of thirteen publish an edition of Anacreon! Of ancient, illustrious
birth, and heir to an almost ducal house, how tenderly favored was he by
Marie de Médicis; happy-hearted, kindly, suasive, how idolized by a
gorgeous court! In what affluence of rich laces did he dress; in what
irresistible violet-colored close coats, with emeralds at his
wristbands, a diamond on his finger, red heels on his shoes! How nimbly
he capered through the dance with a sword on his hip! How bravely he
planned quests after the manner of knights of the Round Table, meaning
to take for himself the part of Lancelot! How exquisitely, ardently, and
ah! how fatally he flirted with the incomparable ladies in the circle of
Madame de Rambouillet! And with a zest for sport as great as his unction
for the priestly office, how wittily--laying one hand on his heart and
waving the other through the air--could he bow and say, "This morning I
preached like an angel; I'll hunt like the devil this afternoon!"
All at once his life broke in two when half spent. He ceased to hunt
like the devil, to adore the flesh, to scandalize the world; and
retiring to the ancient Abbey of La Trappe in Normandy--the sponsorial
gift of his Eminence and favored by many popes--there undertook the
difficult task of reforming the relaxed Benedictines. The old
abbey--situated in a great fog-covered basin encompassed by dense woods
of beech, oak, and linden, and therefore gloomy, unhealthy, and
forbidding--was in ruins. One ascended by means of a ladder from floor
to rotting floor. The refectory had become a place where the monks
assembled to play at bowls with worldlings. The dormitory, exposed to
wind, rain, and snow, had been given up to owls. In the church the
stones were scattered, the walls unsteady, the pavement was broken, the
bell ready to fall. As a single solemn reminder of the vanished spirit
of the place, which had been founded by St. Stephen and St. Bernard in
the twelfth century, with the intention of reviving in the Western
Church the bright examples of primitive sanctity furnished by Eastern
solitaries of the third and fourth, one read over the door of the
cloister the words of Jeremiah: "_Sedebit solitarius et tacebit_" The
few monks who remained in the convent slept where they could, and were,
as Chateaubriand says, in a state of ruins. They preferred sipping
ratafia to reading their breviaries; and when De Rancé undertook to
enforce reform, they threatened to whip him for his pains. He, in turn,
threatened them with the royal interference, and they submitted. There,
accordingly, he introduced a system of rules that a sybarite might have
wept over even to hear recited; carried into practice cenobitical
austerities that recalled the models of pious anchorites in Syria and
Thebais; and gave its peculiar meaning to the word "Trappist," a name
which has since been taken by all Cistercian communities embracing the
reform of the first monastery.
In the retirement of this mass of woods and sky De Rancé passed the rest
of his long life, doing nothing more worldly, so far as is now known,
than quoting Aristophanes and Horace to Bossuet, and allowing himself to
be entertained by Pellisson, exhibiting the accomplishments of his
educated spider. There, in acute agony of body and perfect meekness of
spirit, a worn and weary old man, with time enough to remember his
youthful ardors and emeralds and illusions, he watched his mortal end
draw slowly near. And there, asking to be buried in some desolate
spot--some old battle-field--he died at last, extending his poor
macerated body on the cross of blessed cinders and straw, and commending
his poor penitent soul to the mercy of Heaven.
A wonderful spectacle to the less fervid Benedictines of the closing
seventeenth century must have seemed the work of De Rancé in that old
Norman abbey! A strange company of human souls, attracted by the former
distinction of the great abbot as well as by the peculiar vows of the
institute, must have come together in its silent halls! One hears many
stories, in the lighter vein, regarding some of its inmates. Thus, there
was a certain furious ex-trooper, lately reeking with blood, who got
himself much commended by living on baked apples; and a young nobleman
who devoted himself to the work of washing daily the monastery
spittoons. One Brother, the story runs, having one day said there was
too much salt in his scalding-hot broth, immediately burst into tears of
contrition for his wickedness in complaining; and another went for so
many years without raising his eyes that he knew not a new chapel had
been built, and so quite cracked his skull one day against the wall of
it.
The abbey was an asylum for the poor and helpless, the shipwrecked, the
conscience-stricken, and the broken-hearted--for that meditative type of
fervid piety which for ages has looked upon the cloister as the true
earthly paradise wherein to rear the difficult edifice of the soul's
salvation. Much noble blood sought De Rancé's retreat to wash out its
terrifying stains, and more than one reckless spirit went thither to
take upon itself the yoke of purer, sweeter usages.
De Rancé's work remains an influence in the world. His monastery and his
reform constitute the true background of material and spiritual fact
against which to outline the present Abbey of La Trappe in Kentucky.
Even when thus viewed, it seems placed where it is only by some freak of
history. An abbey of La Trappe in Kentucky! How inharmonious with every
element of its environment appears this fragment of old French monastic
life! It is the twelfth century touching the last of the nineteenth--the
Old World reappearing in the New. Here are French faces--here is the
French tongue. Here is the identical white cowl presented to blessed St.
Alberick in the forests of Burgundy nine hundred years ago. Here is the
rule of St. Benedict, patriarch of the Western monks in the sixth
century. When one is put out at the way-side station, amid woodlands and
fields of Indian-corn, and, leaving the world behind him, turns his
footsteps across the country towards the abbey, more than a mile away,
the seclusion of the region, its ineffable quietude, the infinite
isolation of the life passed by the silent brotherhood--all bring
vividly before the mind the image of that ancient distant abbey with
which this one holds connection so sacred and so close. Is it not the
veritable spot in Normandy? Here, too, is the broad basin of retired
country; here the densely wooded hills, shutting it in from the world;
here the orchards and vineyards and gardens of the ascetic devotees;
and, as the night falls from the low, blurred sky of gray, and cuts
short a silent contemplation of the scene, here, too, one finds one's
self, like some belated traveller in the dangerous forests of old,
hurrying on to reach the porter's lodge, and ask within the sacred walls
the hospitality of the venerable abbot.
II
[Illustration: OFFICE OF THE FATHER PRIOR.]