"Everybody's mother is a remarkable woman," my father used to say when
he read overdrawn memoirs indited by devout children; and yet I have
sometimes felt as if even the generation that knows her not would feel
a certain degree of interest in the tact and power by which this
unusual woman achieved the difficult reconciliation between genius and
domestic life.
In our times and to our women such a problem is practical, indeed. One
need not possess genius to understand it now. A career is enough.
The author of "Sunnyside," "The Angel on the Right Shoulder," and
"Peep at Number Five," lived before women had careers and public
sympathy in them. Her nature was drawn against the grain of her times
and of her circumstances; and where our feet find easy walking, hers
were hedged. A child's memories go for something by way of tribute to
the achievement of one of those rare women of the elder time whose
gifts forced her out, but whose heart held her in.
I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must
write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot
remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find
her.
My first distinct vision of this kind of a mother gives her by the
nursery lamp, reading to us her own stories, written for ourselves,
never meant to go beyond that little public of two, and illustrated in
colored crayons by her own pencil. For her gift in this direction was
of an original quality, and had she not been a writer she must have
achieved something as an artist.
Perhaps it was to keep the standards up, and a little girl's filial
adoration down, that these readings ended with some classic--Wordsworth,
I remember most often--"We are Seven," or "Lucy Gray."
[Illustration: ELM ARCH, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]
It is certain that I very early had the conviction that a mother was a
being of power and importance to the world; but that the world had no
business with her when we wanted her. In a word, she was a strong and
lovely symmetry--a woman whose heart had not enfeebled her head, but
whose head could never freeze her heart.
I hardly know which of those charming ways in which I learned to spell
the word motherhood impressed me most. All seemed to go on together
side by side and step by step. Now she sits correcting proof-sheets,
and now she is painting apostles for the baby's first Bible lesson.
Now she is writing her new book, and now she is dyeing things
canary-yellow in the white-oak dye--for the professor's salary is
small, and a crushing economy was in those days one of the conditions
of faculty life on Andover Hill. Now--for her practical ingenuity was
unlimited--she is whittling little wooden feet to stretch the
children's stockings on, to save them from shrinking; and now she is
reading to us from the old, red copy of Hazlitt's "British Poets," by
the register, upon a winter night. Now she is a popular writer,
incredulous of her first success, with her future flashing before her;
and now she is a tired, tender mother, crooning to a sick child, while
the MS. lies unprinted on the table, and the publishers are wishing
their professor's wife were a free woman, childless and solitary, able
to send copy as fast as it is wanted. The struggle killed her, but she
fought till she fell.
In these different days, when,
"Pealing, the clock of time
Has struck the Woman's Hour,"
[Illustration: THE REV. DR. E. PHELPS, GRANDFATHER OF ELIZABETH
STUART PHELPS.]
I have sometimes been glad, as my time came to face the long question
which life puts to-day to all women who think and feel, and who care
for other women and are loyal to them, that I had those early visions
of my own to look upon.
When I was learning why the sun rose and the moon set, how the flowers
grew and the rain fell, that God and heaven and art and letters
existed, that it was intelligent to say one's prayers, and that
well-bred children never told a lie, I learned that a mother can be
strong and still be sweet, and sweet although she is strong; and that
she whom the world and her children both have need of, is of more
value to each, for this very reason.
I said it was impossible to be her daughter and not to write. Rather,
I should say, impossible to be _their_ daughter and not to have
something to say, and a pen to say it.
The comparatively recent close of my father's life has not left him
yet forgotten, and it can hardly be necessary for me to do more than
to refer to the name of Austin Phelps to recall to that part of our
public which knew and loved him the quality of his work.
"The Still Hour" is yet read, and there are enough who remember how
widely this book has been known and loved, and how marked was the
literary gift in all the professor's work.
It has fallen to me otherwise to say so much of my peculiar
indebtedness to my father, that I shall forbid myself, and spare my
reader, too much repetition of a loving credit which it would not be
possible altogether to omit from this chapter.
He who becomes father and mother in one to motherless children, bears
a burden which men shirk or stagger under; and there was not a
shirking cell in his brain or heart.
As I have elsewhere said: "There was hardly a chapter in my life of
which he was not in some sense, whether revealed or concealed, the
hero."
"If I am asked to sum in a few words the vivid points of his
influence, I find it as hard to give definite form to my indebtedness
to the Christian scholar whose daughter it is my honor to be, as to
specify the particulars in which one responds to sunshine or oxygen.
He was my climate. As soon as I began to think, I began to reverence
thought and study and the hard work of a man devoted to the high ends
of a scholar's life. His department was that of rhetoric, and his
appreciation of the uses and graces of language very early descended
like a mantle upon me. I learned to read and to love reading, not
because I was made to, but because I could not help it. It was the
atmosphere I breathed."
"Day after day the watchful girl observed the life of a student--its
scholarly tastes, its high ideals, its scorn of worldliness and paltry
aims or petty indulgences, and forever its magnificent habits of
_work_."
"At sixteen, I remember, there came to me a distinct arousing or
awakening to the intellectual life. As I look back, I see it in a
flash-light. Most of the important phases or crises of our lives can
be traced to some one influence or event, and this one I connect
directly with the reading to me by my father of the writings of De
Quincey and the poems of Wordsworth. Every one who has ever heard him
preach or lecture remembers the rare quality of Professor Phelps's
voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few, and to hear him read
in his own study was an absorbing experience. To this day I cannot put
myself outside of certain pages of the laureate or the essayist. I do
not read; I listen. The great lines beginning:
"'Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;'
the great passage which opens: 'Then like a chorus the passion
deepened,' and which rises to the aching cry: 'Everlasting
farewells!... Everlasting farewells!' ring in my ears as they left his
lips."
For my first effort to sail the sea of letters, it occurs to me that I
ought to say that my father's literary reputation cannot be held
responsible.
I had reached (to take a step backwards in the story) the mature age
of thirteen. I was a little girl in low-necked gingham dresses, I
know, because I remember I had on one (of a purple shade, and
incredibly unbecoming to a half-grown, brunette girl) one evening when
my first gentleman caller came to see me.
I felt that the fact that he was my Sunday-school teacher detracted
from the importance of the occasion, but did not extinguish it.
It was perhaps half-past eight, and, obediently to law and gospel, I
had gone upstairs.
The actual troubles of life have never dulled my sense of
mortification at overhearing from my little room at the head of the
stairs, where I was struggling to get into that gingham gown and
present a tardy appearance, a voice distinctly excusing me on the
ground that it was past her usual bedtime, and she had gone to bed.
Whether the anguish of that occasion so far aged me that it had
anything to do with my first literary undertaking, I cannot say; but I
am sure about the low-necked gingham dress, and that it was during
this particular year that I determined to become an individual and
contribute to the "Youth's Companion."
I did so. My contribution was accepted and paid for by the appearance
in my father's post-office box of the paper for a year; and my
impression is that I wore high-necked dresses pretty soon thereafter,
and was allowed to sit up till nine o'clock. At any rate, these
memorable events are distinctly intertwined in my mind.
This was in the days when even the "Companion," that oldest and most
delightful of children's journals, printed things like these:
"_Why Julia B. loved the Country_.
"Julia B. loved the country because whenever she walked out she
could see God in the face of Nature."
I really think that the semi-column which I sent to that distinguished
paper was a tone or two above this. But I can remember nothing about
it, except that there was a sister who neglected her little brothers,
and hence defeated the first object of existence in a woman-child. It
was very proper, and very pious, and very much like what
well-brought-up little girls were taught to do, to be, to suffer, or
to write in those days. I have often intended to ask Mr. Ford if the
staff discovered any signs of literary promise in that funny little
performance.
At all events, my literary ambitions, with this solitary exercise,
came to a sudden suspension. I have no recollection of having written
or of having wanted to write anything more for a long time.
I was not in the least a precocious young person, and very much of a
tomboy into the bargain. I think I was far more likely to have been
found on the top of an apple-tree or walking the length of the
seminary fence than writing rhymes or reading "solid reading." I know
that I was once told by a queer old man in the street that little
girls should not walk fences, and that I stood still and looked at
him, transfixed with contempt. I do not think I vouchsafed him any
answer at all. But this must have been while I was still in the little
gingham gowns.
Perhaps this is the place, if anywhere, to mention the next experiment
at helping along the literature of my native land of which I have any
recollection. There was another little contribution--a pious little
contribution, like the first. Where it was written, or what it was
about, or where it was printed, it is impossible to remember; but I
know that it appeared in some extremely orthodox young people's
periodical--I think, one with a missionary predilection. The point of
interest I find to have been that I was paid for it.
With the exception of some private capital amassed by abstaining from
butter (a method of creating a fortune of whose wisdom, I must say, I
had the same doubts then that I have now), this was the first money I
had ever earned. The sum was two dollars and a half. It became my
immediate purpose not to squander this wealth. I had no spending money
in particular that I recall. Three cents a week was, I believe, for
years the limit of my personal income, and I am compelled to own that
this sum was not expended at book-stalls, or for the benefit of the
heathen who appealed to the generosity of professors' daughters
through the treasurer of the chapel Sunday-school; but went solidly
for cream cakes and apple turnovers alternately, one each week.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE WESTERN WINDOW OF THE STUDY IN PROFESSOR
AUSTIN PHELPS'S HOUSE, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]
Two dollars and a half represented to me a standard of munificent
possession which it would be difficult to make most girls in their
first teens, and socially situated today as I was then, understand. To
waste this fortune in riotous living was impossible. From the hour
that I received that check for "two-fifty," cream cakes began to wear
a juvenile air, and turnovers seemed unworthy of my position in life.
I remember begging to be allowed to invest the sum "in pictures," and
that my father, gently diverting my selection from a frowsy and
popular "Hope" at whose memory I shudder even yet, induced me to find
that I preferred some excellent photographs of Thorwaldsen's "Night"
and "Morning," which he framed for me, and which hang in our rooms
to-day.
It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour
when one becomes a wage-earner. The humorous side of it is the least
of it--or was in my case. I felt that I had suddenly acquired
value--to myself, to my family, and to the world.
Probably all people who write "for a living" would agree with me in
recalling the first check as the largest and most luxurious of life.