Author of "The Gates Ajar," "The Madonna of the Tubs," etc.
Has it not been said that once in a lifetime most of us succumb to the
particular situation against which we have cultivated the strongest
principles? If there be one such, among the possibilities to which a
truly civilized career is liable, more than another objectionable to
the writer of these words, the creation of autobiography has long been
that one.
Yet, for that offence, once criminal to my taste, I find myself hereby
about to become indictable; and do set my hand and seal, on this day
of the recall of my dearest literary oath, in this year of eminent
autobiographical examples, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five.
"There is ----, who has written a charming series of personal
reminiscences, and ---- ----, and ----.
"You might meet your natural shrinking by allowing yourself to treat
especially of your literary life; including, of course, whatever went
to form and sustain it."
"I suppose I _might_," I sigh. The answer is faint; but the deed is
decreed. Shall I be sorry for it?
It is a gray day, on gray Cape Ann, as I write these words. The fog is
breathing over the downs. The outside steamers shriek from off the
Point, as they feel their way at live of noon, groping as though it
were dead of night, and stars and coast-lights all were smitten dark,
and every pilot were a stranger to his chart.
A stranger to my chart, I, doubtful, put about, and make the untried
coast.
At such a moment, one thinks wistfully of that fair, misty world which
is all one's own, yet on the outside of which one stands so humbly,
and so gently. One thinks of the unseen faces, of the unknown friends
who have read one's tales of other people's lives, and cared to read,
and told one so, and made one believe in their kindness, and affection
and fidelity for thirty years. And the hesitating heart calls out to
them: Will _you_ let me be sorry? Thirty years! It is a good while
that you and I have kept step together. Shall we miss it now? If _you_
will care to hear such chapters as may select themselves from the
story of the story-teller,--you have the oldest right to choose, and
I, the happy will to please you if I can.
* * * * *
The lives of the makers of books are very much like other people's in
most respects, but especially in this: that they are either rebels to,
or subjects of, their ancestry. The lives of some literary persons
begin a good while after they are born. Others begin a good while
before.
Of this latter kind is mine.
It has sometimes occurred to me to find myself the possessor of a sort
of unholy envy of writers concerning whom our stout American phrase
says that they have "made themselves." What delight to be aware that
one has not only created one's work, but the worker! What elation in
the remembrance of the battle against a commercial, or a scientific,
or a worldly and superficial heredity; in the recollection of the tug
with habit and education, and the overthrow of impulses setting in
other directions than the chosen movement of one's own soul!
What pleasure in the proud knowledge that all one's success is one's
own doing, and the sum of it cast up to one's credit upon the long
ledger of life! To this exhilarating self-content I can lay no claim.
For whatever measure of what is called success has fallen to my lot, I
can ask no credit. I find myself in the chastened position of one
whose literary abilities all belong to one's ancestors.
It is humbling--I do not deny that it may be morally invigorating--to
feel that whatever is "worth mentioning" in my life is no affair of
mine, but falls under the beautiful and terrible law by which the dead
men and women whose blood bounds in our being control our destinies.
Yet, with the notable exception of my father, I have less than the
usual store of personal acquaintance with the "people who most
influenced me." Of my grandfather, Moses Stuart, I have but two
recollections; and these, taken together, may not be quite devoid of
interest, as showing how the law of selection works in the mind of an
imaginative child.
I remember seeing the Professor of Sacred Literature come into his
dining-room one morning in his old house on Andover Hill which was
built for him, and marked the creation of his department in the early
days of the seminary history. He looked very tall and imposing. He had
a mug in his hand, and his face smiled like the silver of which it was
made.
The mug was full of milk, and he handed it ceremoniously to the
year-old baby, his namesake and grandson, my first brother, whose
high-chair stood at the table.
Then, I remember--it must have been a little more than a year after
that--seeing the professor in his coffin in the front hall; that he
looked taller than he did before, but still imposing; that he had his
best coat on--the one, I think, in which he preached; and that he was
the first dead person I had ever seen.
Whenever the gray-headed men who knew him used to sit about, relating
anecdotes of him--as, how many commentaries he published, or how he
introduced the first German lexicon into this country (as if a girl in
short dresses would be absorbingly interested in her grandfather's
dictionaries!)--I saw the silver mug and the coffin.
Gradually the German lexicon in a hazy condition got melted in between
them. Sometimes the baby's mug sat upon the dictionary. Sometimes the
dictionary lay upon the coffin. Sometimes the baby spilled the milk
out of the mug upon the dictionary. But for my personal uses, the
Andover grandfather's memoirs began and ended with the mug and the
coffin.
The other grandfather was not distinguished as a scholar; he was but
an orthodox minister of ability and originality, and with a vivacious
personal history. Of him I knew something. From his own lips came
thrilling stories of his connection with the underground railway of
slavery days; how he sent the sharpest carving-knife in the house,
concealed in a basket of food, to a hidden fugitive slave who had
vowed never to be taken alive, and whose master had come North in
search of him. It was a fine thing, that throbbing humanity, which
could in those days burst the reformer out of the evangelical husk,
and I learned my lesson from it. ("Where _did_ she get it?"
conservative friends used to wail, whenever I was seen to have tumbled
into the last new and unfashionable reform.)
From his own lips, too, I heard the accounts of that extraordinary
case of house-possession of which (like Wesley) this innocent and
unimaginative country minister, who had no more faith in "spooks" than
he had in Universalists, was made the astonished victim.
Night upon night I have crept gasping to bed, and shivered for hours
with my head under the clothes, after an evening spent in listening to
this authentic and fantastic family tale. How the candlesticks walked
out into the air from the mantelpiece, and back again; how the chairs
of skeptical visitors collected from all parts of the country to study
what one had hardly then begun to call the "phenomena" at the
parsonage at Stratford, Connecticut, hopped after the guests when they
crossed the room; how the dishes at the table leaped, and the silver
forks were bent by unseen hands, and cold turnips dropped from the
solid ceiling; and ghastly images were found, composed of
underclothing proved to have been locked at the time in drawers of
which the only key lay all the while in Dr. Phelps's pocket; and how
the mysterious agencies, purporting by alphabetical raps upon bed-head
or on table to be in torments of the nether world, being asked what
their host could do to relieve them, demanded a piece of squash pie.
From the old man's own calm hands, within a year or two of his death,
I received the legacy of the written journal of these phenomena, as
recorded by the victim from day to day, during the seven months that
this mysterious misfortune dwelt within his house.
It may be prudent to say, just here, that it will be quite useless to
make any further inquiries of me upon the subject, or to ask of me--a
request which has been repeated till I am fain to put an end to
it--for either loan or copy of these records for the benefit of either
personal or scientific curiosity. Both loaning and copying are now
impossible, and have been made so by family wishes which will be
sacredly respected. The phenomena themselves have long been too widely
known to be ignored, and I have no hesitation in making reference to
them.
[Illustration: ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS, HER MOTHER, AND HER INFANT
BROTHER. AFTERWARDS PROFESSOR M. STUART PHELPS.]
Perhaps it is partly on account of the traditions respecting this bit
of family history that I am so often asked if I am a spiritualist. I
am sometimes tempted to reply in grammar comprehensible to the writers
of certain letters which I receive upon the subject:
"No; nor none of our folks!"
How the Connecticut parson on whom this mysterious infliction fell
ever came out of it _not_ a spiritualist, who can tell? That the
phenomena were facts, and facts explicable by no known natural law, he
was forced, like others in similar positions, to believe and admit.
That he should study the subject of spiritualism carefully from then
until the end of his life, was inevitable.
But, as nearly as I can make it out, on the whole, he liked his Bible
better.
Things like these did not happen on Andover Hill; and my talks with
this very interesting grandfather gave me my first vivid sensation of
the possibilities of life.
With what thrills of hope and fear I listened for thumps on the head
of my bed, or watched anxiously to see my candlestick walk out into
the air!
But not a thump! Not a rap! Never a snap of the weakest proportions
(not explicable by natural laws) has, from that day to this, visited
my personal career. Not a candlestick ever walked an inch for me. I
have never been able to induce a chair to hop after me. No turnip has
consented to drop from the ceiling for me. Planchette, in her day,
wrote hundreds of lines for me, but never one that was of the
slightest possible significance to me, or to the universe at large.
Never did a medium tell me anything that ever came to pass; though one
of them once made a whole winter miserable by prophesying a death
which did not occur.
Being destitute of objections to belief in the usefulness of
spiritualistic mystery,--in fact, by temperament, perhaps inclining to
hope that such phenomena may be tamed and yoked, and made to work for
human happiness,--yet there seems to be something about me which these
agencies do not find congenial. Though I have gone longing for a sign,
no sign has been given me. Though I have been always ready to believe
all other people's mysteries, no inexplicable facts have honored my
experience.
The only personal prophecy ever strictly fulfilled in my life was--I
am not certain whether I ought to feel embarrassed in alluding to
it--made by a gipsy fortune-teller. She was young and pretty, the
seventh child of a seventh child, and she lived in a Massachusetts
shoe-town by the name of Lynn. And what was it? Oh, but you must
excuse me.
The grandfather to whom these marvels happened was not, as I say, a
literary man; yet even he did write a little book--a religious tale,
or tract, after the manner of his day and profession; and it took to
itself a circulation of two hundred thousand copies. I remember how
Mr. James T. Fields laughed when he heard of it--that merry laugh
peculiar to himself.
"You can't help it," the publisher said; "you come of a family of
large circulations."
One day I was at school with my brother,--a little, private school,
down by what were called the English dormitories in Andover.
I was eight years old. Some one came in and whispered to the teacher.
Her face turned very grave, and she came up to us quietly, and called
us out into the entry, and gently put on our things.
"You are to go home," she said; "your mother is dead." I took my
little brother's hand without a word, and we trudged off. I do not
think we spoke--I am sure we did not cry--on the way home. I remember
perfectly that we were very gayly dressed. Our mother liked bright,
almost barbaric colors on children. The little boy's coat was of red
broadcloth, and my cape of a canary yellow, dyed at home in white-oak
dye. The two colors flared before my eyes as we shuffled along and
crushed the crisp, dead leaves that were tossing in the autumn wind
all over Andover Hill.
When we got home they told us it was a mistake; she was not dead; and
we were sent back to school. But, in a few weeks after that, one day
we were told we need not go to school at all; the red and yellow coats
came off, and little black ones took their places. The new baby, in
his haggard father's arms, was baptized at his mother's funeral; and
we looked on, and wondered what it all meant, and what became of
children whose mother was obliged to go to heaven when she seemed so
necessary in Andover.
At eight years of age a child cannot be expected to know her mother
intimately, and it is hard for me always to distinguish between the
effect produced upon me by her literary success as I have since
understood it, and that left by her own truly extraordinary
personality upon the annals of the nursery.
[Illustration: PROFESSOR PHELPS'S HOUSE AT ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS, THE
HOUSE IN WHICH ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WAS REARED.]
My mother, whose name I am proud to wear, was the eldest daughter of
Professor Stuart, and inherited his intellectuality. At the time of
her death she was at the first blossom of her very positive and
widely-promising success as a writer of the simple home stories which
took such a hold upon the popular heart. Her "Sunnyside" had already
reached a circulation of one hundred thousand copies, and she was
following it fast--too fast--by other books for which the critics and
the publishers clamored. Her last book and her last baby came
together, and killed her. She lived one of those rich and piteous
lives such as only gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the
dual nature which can be given to women only. It was as natural for
her daughter to write as to breathe; but it was impossible for her
daughter to forget that a woman of intellectual power could be the
most successful of mothers.
[Illustration: PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS, FATHER OF ELIZABETH STUART
PHELPS.