last of the seven services that the Trappist holds between 2 o'clock in
the morning and this hour of early nightfall. Standing alone in the
silent darkness you allow imagination to carry you once more into the
church. You sit in one of the galleries and look down upon the stalls of
the monks ranged along the walls of the nave. There is no light except
the feeble gleam of a single low red cresset that swings ever-burning
before the altar. You can just discern a long line of nameless dusky
figures creep forth from the deeper gloom and glide noiselessly into
their seats. You listen to the _cantus plenus gravitate_--those long,
level notes with sorrowful cadences and measured pauses, sung by a full,
unfaltering chorus of voices, old and young. It is the song that smote
the heart of Bossuet with such sadness in the desert of Normandy two and
a half centuries ago.
Anon by some unseen hand two tall candles are lighted on the altar. The
singing is hushed. From the ghostly line of white-robed Fathers a
shadowy figure suddenly moves towards the spot in the middle of the
church where the bell-rope hangs, and with slow, weird movements rings
the solemn bell until it fills the cold, gray arches with quivering
sound. One will not in a lifetime forget the impressiveness of the
scene--the long tapering shadows that stretch out over the dimly
lighted, polished floor from this figure silhouetted against the
brighter light from the altar beyond; the bowed, moveless forms of the
monks in brown almost indiscernible in the gloom; the spectral glamour
reflected from the robes of the bowed Fathers in white; the ghastly,
suffering scene of the Saviour, strangely luminous in the glare of the
tall candles. It is the daily climax in the devotions of the Old World
monks at Gethsemane.
HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
I
Kentucky is a land of rural homes. The people are out in the country
with a perennial appetite and passion for the soil. Like Englishmen,
they are by nature no dwellers in cities; like older Saxon forefathers,
they have a strong feeling for a habitation even no better than a
one-story log-house, with furniture of the rudest kind, and cooking in
the open air, if, only, it be surrounded by a plot of ground and
individualized by all-encompassing fences. They are gregarious at
respectful distances, dear to them being that sense of personal worth
and importance which comes from territorial aloofness, from domestic
privacy, from a certain lordship over all they survey.
The land they hold has a singular charm and power of infusing fierce,
tender desire of ownership. Centuries before it was possessed by them,
all ruthless aboriginal wars for its sole occupancy had resolved
themselves into the final understanding that it be wholly claimed by
none. Bounty in land was the coveted reward of Virginia troops in the
old French and Indian war. Hereditary love of land drew the earliest
settlers across the perilous mountains. Rapacity for land caused them
to rush down into the green plains, fall upon the natives, slay,
torture, hack to pieces, and sacrifice wife and child, with the swift,
barbaric hardihood and unappeasable fury of Northmen of old descending
upon the softer shores of France. Acquisition of land was the
determinative principle of the new civilization. Litigation concerning
land has made famous the decisions of their courts of law. The
surveyor's chain should be wrapped about the rifle as a symbolic epitome
of pioneer history. It was for land that they turned from the Indians
upon one another, and wrangled, cheated, and lied. They robbed Boone
until he had none left in which to lay his bones. One of the first acts
of one of the first colonists was to glut his appetite by the purchase
of all of the State that lies south of the Kentucky River. The middle
class land-owner has always been the controlling element of population.
To-day more of the people are engaged in agriculture than in all other
pursuits combined; taste for it has steadily drawn a rich stream of
younger generations hither and thither into the younger West; and
to-day, as always, the broad, average ideal of a happy life is expressed
in the quiet holding of perpetual pastures.
Steam, said Emerson, is almost an Englishman; grass is almost a
Kentuckian. Wealth, labor, productions, revenues, public markets, public
improvements, manners, characters, social modes--all speak in common of
the country, and fix attention upon the soil. The staples attest the
predominance of agriculture; unsurpassed breeds of stock imply the
verdure of the woodlands; turnpikes, the finest on the continent,
furnish viaducts for the garnered riches of the earth, and prove the
high development of rural life, the every-day luxury of delightful
riding and driving. Even the crow, the most boldly characteristic
freebooter of the air, whose cawing is often the only sound heard in
dead February days, or whose flight amid his multitudinous fellows forms
long black lines across the morning and the evening sky, tells of fat
pickings and profitable thefts in innumerable fields. In Kentucky a
rustic young woman of Homeric sensibility might be allowed to discover
in the slow-moving panorama of white clouds her father's herd of
short-horned cattle grazing through heavenly pastures, and her lover to
see in the halo around the moon a perfect celestial racetrack.
Comparatively weak and unpronounced are the features of urban life. The
many little towns and villages scattered at easy distances over the
State for the most part draw out a thin existence by reason of
surrounding rural populations. They bear the pastoral stamp. Up to their
very environs approach the cultivated fields, the meadows of brilliant
green, the delicate woodlands; in and out along the white highways move
the tranquil currents of rural trade; through their streets groan and
creak the loaded wagons; on the sidewalks the most conspicuous human
type is the owner of the soil. Once a month county-seats overflow with
the incoming tide of country folk, livery-stables are crowded with
horses and vehicles, court-house squares become marketplaces for
traffic in stock. But when emptied of country folk, they sink again into
repose, all but falling asleep of summer noonings, and in winter seeming
frost-locked with the outlying woods and streams.
Remarkable is the absence of considerable cities, there being but one
that may be said truly to reflect Kentucky life, and that situated on
the river frontier, a hundred miles from the centre of the State. Think
of it! A population of some two millions with only one interior town
that contains over five thousand white inhabitants. Hence Kentucky makes
no impression abroad by reason of its urban population. Lexington,
Bowling Green, Harrodsburg, Winchester, Richmond, Frankfort, Mount
Sterling, and all the others, where do they stand in the scale of
American cities? Hence, too, the disparaging contrast liable to be drawn
between Kentucky and the gigantic young States of the West. Where is the
magnitude of the commonwealth, where the ground of the sense of
importance in the people? No huge mills and gleaming forges, no din of
factories and throb of mines, nowhere any colossal centres for rushing,
multiform American energy. The answer must be: Judge the State thus far
as an agricultural State; the people as an agricultural people. In time
no doubt the rest will come. All other things are here, awaiting
occasion and development. The eastern portions of the State now verge
upon an era of long-delayed activity. There lie the mines, the
building-stone, the illimitable wealth of timbers; there soon will be
opened new fields for commercial and industrial centralization. But
hitherto in Kentucky it has seemed enough that the pulse of life should
beat with the heart of nature, and be in unison with the slow unfolding
and decadence of the seasons. The farmer can go no faster than the sun,
and is rich or poor by the law of planetary orbits. In all central
Kentucky not a single village of note has been founded within
three-quarters of a century, and some villages a hundred years old have
not succeeded in gaining even from this fecund race more than a thousand
or two thousand inhabitants. But these little towns are inaccessible to
the criticism that would assault their commercial greatness. Business is
not their boast. Sounded to its depths, the serene sea in which their
existence floats will reveal a bottom, not of mercantile, but of social
ideas; studied as to cost or comfort, the architecture in which the
people have expressed themselves will appear noticeable, not in their
business houses and public buildings, but in their homes. If these
towns pique themselves pointedly on anything, it is that they are the
centres of genial intercourse and polite entertainment. Even commercial
Louisville must find its peculiar distinction in the number of its
sumptuous private residences. It is wellnigh a rule that in Kentucky the
value of the house is out of proportion to the value of the estate.
But if the towns regard themselves as the provincial fortresses of good
society, they do not look down upon the home life of the country.
Between country and town in Kentucky exists a relation unique and well
to be studied: such a part of the population of the town owning or
managing estates in the country; such a part of the population of the
country being business or professional men in town. For it is strikingly
true that here all vocations and avocations of life may and do go with
tillage, and there are none it is not considered to adorn. The first
Governor of the State was awarded his domain for raising a crop of corn,
and laid down public life at last to renew his companionship with the
plough. "I retire," said Clay, many years afterwards, "to the shades of
Ashland." The present Governor (1888), a man of large wealth, lives,
when at home, in a rural log-house built near the beginning of the
century. His predecessor in office was a farmer. Hardly a man of note in
all the past or present history of the State but has had his near or
immediate origin in the woods and fields. Formerly it was the
custom--less general now--that young men should take their academic
degrees in the colleges of the United States, sometimes in those of
Europe, and, returning home, hang up their diplomas as votive offerings
to the god of boundaries. To-day you will find the ex-minister to a
foreign court spending his final years in the solitude of his
farm-house, and the representative at Washington making his retreat to
the restful homestead. The banker in town bethinks him of stocks at home
that know no panic; the clergyman studies St. Paul amid the native corn,
and muses on the surpassing beauty of David as he rides his favorite
horse through green pastures and beside still waters.
Hence, to be a farmer here implies no social inferiority, no rusticity,
no boorishness. Hence, so clearly interlaced are urban and rural society
that there results a homogeneousness of manners, customs, dress,
entertainments, ideals, and tastes. Hence, the infiltration of the
country with the best the towns contain. More, indeed, than this: rather
to the country than to the towns in Kentucky must one look for the local
history of the home life. There first was implanted under English and
Virginian influences the antique style of country-seat; there flourished
for a time gracious manners that were the high-born endowment of the
olden school; there in piquant contrast were developed side by side the
democratic and aristocratic spirits, working severally towards equality
and caste; there was established the State reputation for effusive
private hospitalities; and there still are peculiarly cherished the
fading traditions of more festive boards and kindlier hearthstones. If
the feeling of the whole people could be interpreted by a single saying,
it would perhaps be this: that whether in town or country--and if in the
country, not remotely here or there, but in wellnigh unbroken succession
from estate to estate--they have attained a notable stage in the
civilization of the home. This is the common conviction, this the idol
of the tribe. The idol itself may rest on the fact of provincial
isolation, which is the fortress of self-love and neighborly devotion;
but it suffices for the present purpose to say that it is an idol still,
worshipped for the divinity it is thought to enshrine. Hence you may
assail the Kentuckian on many grounds, and he will hold his peace. You
may tell him that he has no great cities, that he does not run with the
currents of national progress; but never tell him that the home life of
his fellows and himself is not as good as the best in the land.
Domesticity is the State porcupine, presenting an angry quill to every
point of attack. To write of homes in Kentucky, therefore, and
particularly of rural homes, is to enter the very citadel of the popular
affections.
II
At first they built for the tribe, working together like beavers in
common cause against nature and their enemies. Home life and domestic
architecture began among them with the wooden-fort community, the idea
of which was no doubt derived from the frontier defences of Virginia,
and modified by the Kentuckians with a view to domestic use. This
building habit culminated in the erection of some two hundred rustic
castles, the sites of which in some instances have been identified. It
was a singularly fit sort of structure, adjusting itself desperately and
economically to the necessities of environment. For the time society
lapsed into a state which, but for the want of lords and retainers, was
feudalism of the rudest kind. There were gates for sally and swift
retreat, bastions for defence, and loop-holes in cabin walls for deadly
volleys. There were hunting-parties winding forth stealthily without
horn or hound, and returning with game that would have graced the great
feudal halls. There was siege, too, and suffering, and death enough, God
knows, mingled with the lowing of cattle and the clatter of looms. Some
morning, even, you might have seen a slight girl trip covertly out to
the little cottonpatch in one corner of the enclosure, and, blushing
crimson over the snowy cotton-bolls, pick the wherewithal to spin her
bridal dress; for in these forts they married also and bore children.
Many a Kentucky family must trace its origin through the tribal
communities pent up within a stockade, and discover that the family
plate consisted then of a tin cup, and, haply, an iron fork.
But, as soon as might be, this compulsory village life broke eagerly
asunder into private homes. The common building form was that of the
log-house. It is needful to distinguish this from the log-house of the
mountaineer, which is found throughout eastern Kentucky to-day.
Encompassed by all difficulties, the pioneer yet reared himself a
better, more enduring habitation. One of these, still intact after the
lapse of more than a century, stands as a singularly interesting type of
its kind, and brings us face to face with primitive architecture.
"Mulberry Hill," a double house, two and a half stories high, with a
central hall, was built in Jefferson County, near Louisville, in 1785,
for John Clark, the father of General George Rogers Clark.
The settlers made the mistake of supposing that the country lacked
building-stone, so deep under the loam and verdure lay the whole
foundation rock; but soon they discovered that their better houses had
only to be taken from beneath their feet. The first stone house in the
State, and withal the most notable, is "Traveller's Rest," in Lincoln
County, built in 1783 by Governor Metcalf, who was then a stone-mason,
for Isaac Shelby, the first Governor of Kentucky. To those who know the
blue-grass landscape, this type of homestead is familiar enough, with
its solidity of foundation, great thickness of walls, enormous, low
chimneys, and little windows. The owners were the architects and
builders, and with stern, necessitous industry translated their
condition into their work, giving it an intensely human element. It
harmonized with need, not with feeling; was built by the virtues, and
not by the vanities. With no fine balance of proportion, with details
few, scant, and crude, the entire effect of the architecture was not
unpleasing, so honest was its poverty, so rugged and robust its purpose.
It was the gravest of all historic commentaries written in stone. Varied
fate has overtaken these old-time structures. Many have been torn down,
yielding their well-chosen sites to newer, showier houses. Others became
in time the quarters of the slaves. Others still have been hidden away
beneath weather-boarding--a veneer of commonplace modernism--as though
whitewashed or painted plank were finer than roughhewn gray-stone. But
one is glad to discover that in numerous instances they are the
preferred homes of those who have taste for the old in native history,
and pride in family associations and traditions. On the thinned, open
landscape nothing stands out with a more pathetic air of nakedness than
one of these stone houses, long since abandoned and fallen into ruin.
Under the Kentucky sky houses crumble and die without seeming to grow
old, without an aged toning down of colors, without the tender memorials
of mosses and lichens, and of the whole race of clinging things. So not
until they are quite overthrown does Nature reclaim them, or draw once
more to her bosom the walls and chimneys within whose faithful bulwarks,
and by whose cavernous, glowing recesses, our great-grandmothers and
great-grandfathers danced and made love, married, suffered, and fell
asleep.
Neither to the house of logs, therefore, nor to that of stone must we
look for the earliest embodiment of positive taste in domestic
architecture. This found its first, and, considering the exigencies of
the period, its most noteworthy expression in the homestead of brick. No
finer specimen survives than that built in 1796, on a plan furnished by
Thomas Jefferson to John Brown, who had been his law student, remained
always his honored friend, and became one of the founders of the
commonwealth. It is a rich landmark, this old manor-place on the bank of
the Kentucky River, in Frankfort. The great hall with its pillared
archway is wide enough for dancing the Virginia reel. The suites
of high, spacious rooms; the carefully carved wood-work of the
window-casings and the doors; the tall, quaint mantel-frames; the deep
fireplaces with their shining fire-dogs and fenders of brass, brought
laboriously enough on pack-mules from Philadelphia; the brass
locks and keys; the portraits on the walls--all these bespeak the
early implantation in Kentucky of a taste for sumptuous life and
entertainment. The house is like a far-descending echo of colonial Old
Virginia.
Famous in its day--for it is already beneath the sod--and built not
of wood, nor of stone, nor of brick, but in part of all, was
"Chaumière," the home of David Meade during the closing years of the
last, and the early years of the present, century. The owner, a
Virginian who had been much in England, brought back with him
notions of the baronial style of country-seat, and in Jessamine
County, some ten miles from Lexington, built a home that lingers in
the mind like some picture of the imagination. It was a villa-like
place, a cluster of rustic cottages, with a great park laid out in
the style of Old World landscape-gardening. There were artificial
rivers spanned by bridges, and lakes with islands crowned by
temples. There were terraces and retired alcoves, and winding ways
cut through flowering thickets. A fortune was spent on the grounds;
a retinue of servants was employed in nurturing their beauty.
The dining-room, wainscoted with walnut and relieved by deep
window-seats, was rich with the family service of silver and glass;
on the walls of other rooms hung family portraits by Thomas Hudson
and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two days in the week were appointed
for formal receptions. There Jackson and Monroe and Taylor were
entertained; there Aaron Burr was held for a time under arrest;
there the old school showed itself in buckles and knee-breeches, and
rode abroad in a yellow chariot with outriders in blue cloth and
silver buttons.
Near Lexington may be found a further notable example of early
architecture in the Todd homestead, the oldest house in the region,
built by the brother of John Todd, who was Governor of Kentucky
Territory, including Illinois. It is a strong, spacious brick
structure reared on a high foundation of stone, with a large, square
hall and square rooms in suites, connected by double doors. To the
last century also belongs the low, irregular pile that became the
Wickliffe, and later the Preston, house in Lexington--a striking
example of the taste then prevalent for plain, or even commonplace,
exteriors, if combined with interiors that touched the imagination
with the suggestion of something stately and noble and courtly.
These are a few types of homes erected in the last century. The wonder
is not that such places exist, but that they should have been found in
Kentucky at such a time. For society had begun as the purest of
democracies. Only a little while ago the people had been shut up within
a stockade. Stress of peril and hardship had levelled the elements of
population to more than a democracy: it had knit them together as one
endangered human brotherhood. Hence the sudden, fierce flaring up of
sympathy with the French Revolution; hence the deep re-echoing war-cry
of Jacobin emissaries. But scarcely had the wave of primitive conquest
flowed over the land, and wealth followed in its peaceful wake, before
life fell apart into the extremes of social caste. The memories of
former position, the influences of old domestic habits were powerful
still; so that, before a generation passed, Kentucky society gave proof
of the continuity of its development from Virginia. The region of the
James River, so rich in antique homesteads, began to renew itself in the
region of the blue-grass. On a new and larger canvas began to be painted
the picture of shaded lawns, wide portals, broad staircases, great
halls, drawing-rooms, and dining-rooms, wainscoting, carved wood-work,
and waxed hard-wood floors. In came a few yellow chariots, morocco-lined
and drawn by four horses. In came the powder, the wigs, and the queues,
the ruffled shirts, the knee-breeches, the glittering buckles, the
high-heeled slippers, and the frosty brocades. Over the Alleghanies, in
slow-moving wagons, came the massive mahogany furniture, the sunny
brasswork, the tall silver candlesticks, the nervous-looking, thin
legged little pianos. In came old manners and old speech and old
prides: the very Past gathered together its household gods and made an
exodus into the Future.