“Still before living he’d learn how to live—No end to learning.Earn the means first—God surely will contriveUse for our earning.Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes,—Live now or never!’He said, ’What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes,Man has Forever.’”
“Still before living he’d learn how to live—No end to learning.Earn the means first—God surely will contriveUse for our earning.Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes,—Live now or never!’He said, ’What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes,Man has Forever.’”
“Still before living he’d learn how to live—No end to learning.Earn the means first—God surely will contriveUse for our earning.
Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes,—Live now or never!’He said, ’What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes,Man has Forever.’”
The ratio of Hesperus students who chose the old form of scholastic training, called through long centuries the Humanities, was some little time ago not more than one-fifth of those in the department of literature and arts. Since the number was so small—all departmentswould then hardly count five hundred students—the growth was favored of that most delightful feature of small-college life, friendship between instructor and undergraduate. Such offices often grew to significant proportions during a student’s four collegiate years. All genialities aided them; and nothing sinister hindered.
The young folks’ hearts were as warm as may be found upon any generous soil, and they held a sentiment of personal loyalty which one needed never to question. They went to their University, after such longing and eagerness, so thoroughly convinced that there was to be found the open sesame to whatever in their lives had been most unattainable, that their first attitude was not the critical, negative, which one notices in some universities deemed more fortunate, but the positive and receptive. If they did not find that which to their minds seemed best, had they not the inheritanceof hope?—a devise which Hesperus earth and air entail upon all their children, and upon which all are most liberally nurtured.
Then the Hesperus youth had a defect, if one may so put it, that aided him materially to a friendly attitude with his instructors. He was, with rare exceptions, as devoid of reverence for conventional distinctions as a meadow-lark nesting in last year’s tumble-weed and thinking only of soaring and singing. In this, perhaps, is the main-spring of the reason why nearly every student, either through some inborn affinity or by election of studies, drifted into genial relations with some member of the faculty.
The pleasantest part of my day’s work used to be in the retirement of the Greek study and from eight to nine in the morning. Never a student of mine who did not come at that hour for some occasion or need. One man snatchedthe opportunity to read at sight a good part of the Odyssey. Another took up and discussed certain dialogues of Plato. Another who aimed at theological learning studied the Greek Testament and the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” Others came in to block out courses of work. Still others were preparing papers and gathering arguments, authorities, and data for debating societies and clubs.
In that hour, too, a sympathetic ear would hear many a personal history told with entire frankness and naïveté. One poor fellow had that defect of will which is mated at times with the humorous warmth which the Germans call gemüth, and the added pain of consciousness of his own weakness. Another clear-headed, muscular-handed, and ready youth measured his chances of getting wood to saw,—“just the exercise he needed, out of doors,”—horses to groom, and the city lamps to light, to earn thesimple fare which he himself cooked. Many a pathetic story found tongue in that morning air, and times were when fate dropped no cap of recognition and granted no final victory. In hearing the details of hope deferred, of narrow estate and expansive ambition, you longed for the fabled Crœsus touch which turned want to plenty, or, more rationally, you projected a social order where the young and inapt should not suffer for the sins of others, but be within the sheltering arms of some sympathetic power.
There was the mildness of the chinook to this social blizzard, however, for groups moved even in the dewy hour of half-past eight toward the open door of the Greek lecture-room, laughing at the last college joke or secret society escapade, and forecasting who would be the next penitent before the council. Also certain youths and maids, between whom lay the engagement announced by a ringon the heart-finger—these one might see hanging over and fingering—
“Vor Liebe und Liebesweh”—
“Vor Liebe und Liebesweh”—
“Vor Liebe und Liebesweh”—
volumes lying upon my table, and in their eagerness and absorption of the world in two, dog-earing the golden edges of ever-living Theocritus. And why not? Such entanglements in the web of love oftenest differed in no way from the innocence and simplicity of the pristine Daphnes and Coras. They were living again, the Sicilian shepherd and shepherdess, and wandering in the eternally virid fields of youth. The skies and trees and waters were merely not of Trinacria. But Hesperus heavens omitted no degree of ardor.
And had you seen her, you would never have blamed the youth for loving the college maid. She has the charm abloom in the girlhood of every land, and most of all in this of ours. Physically she differs little from her sisterin Eastern States. Her form is as willowy. She has, except in the case of foreign-born parents, the same elongated head and bright-glancing eye. Her skin sometimes lacks in fairness owing to the desiccating winds of the interior; but there is the same fineness of texture.
Power of minute observation and a vivacious self-reliance are characteristics of the girl of the University of Hesperus—and, indeed, of the girl throughout the West. She sees everything within her horizon. Nothing escapes her eye or disturbs her animated self-poise. She has not the Buddhistic self-contemplation the New England girl is apt to cultivate; nor is she given to talking about her sensations of body and moods of mind. I never heard her say she wanted to fall in love in order to study her sensations—as a Smith College alumna studying at Barnard once declared. She rarely pursues fads.Neither is she a fatalist. And she never thinks of doubting her capacity of correct conclusions upon data which she gathers with her own experience of eye and ear. From early years she has been a reasoner by the inductive method, and a believer in the equality and unsimilarity of men and women. Undeniably her mental tone is a result of the greater friction with the world which the girl of the West experiences in her fuller freedom. Conventionalism does not commonly overpower the individual—social lines are not so closely defined—in those States where people count by decades instead of by centuries.
And what is said of this University girl’s observing faculties is in nowise untrue of her brother’s. Nature, the most Socratic of all instructors and the pedagogue of least apparent method, seems actually to have taught him more than his sister, as, in fact, the physical universe is apt to teach its laws moreclearly to the man than to the woman, even if she hath a clearer vision of the moral order. Perhaps the man’s duties knit him more closely to physical things.
With clear, far-seeing eyes—for plenty of oxygen has saved them from near-sightedness—a Hesperus boy will distinguish the species of hawk flying yonder in the sky, forming his judgment by the length of wing and color-bars across the tail. I have heard him comment on the tarsi of falcons which whirled over the roadway as he was driving, and from their appearance determine genus and species. He knows the note and flight of every bird. He will tell you what months the scarlet tanager whistles in the woods, why leaves curl into cups during droughts, and a thousand delicate facts which one who has never had the liberty of the bird and squirrel in nowise dreams of.
And why should he not? All beasts of the prairie and insects of the air areknown to him as intimately as were the rising and setting stars to the old seafaring, star-led Greeks. During his summer the whip-poor-will has whistled in the shadow of the distant timber, and the hoot-owl has ghosted his sleep. He has wakened to the carol of the brown thrush and the yearning call of the mourning dove, as the dawn reached rosy fingers up the eastern sky.
He has risen to look upon endless rows of corn earing its milky kernels, and upon fields golden with nodding wheat-heads. And from the impenetrable centre of the tillage, when the brown stubble has stood like needles to his bare feet, he has heard the whiz of the cicada quivering in the heated air. The steam-thresher has then come panting and rumbling over the highway, and in the affairs of men the boy has made his first essay. He cuts the wires that bind the sheaves, or feeds the hopper, or catches the wheat, or forks away theyellow straw, or ties the golden kernels in sacks, or brings water to the choked and dusty men. He runs here and there for all industries.
Perhaps it is because of his association with such fundamentals of life that this boy has great grasp upon the physical world. In his very appearance one sees a life untaught in the schools of men. In looking at him there is nothing of which you are so often reminded as of a young cottonwood-tree. The tree and the boy somehow seem to have a kinship in structure, and to have been built by the same feeling upward of matter. And this perhaps he is—a broad-limbed, white-skinned, animalized, great-souled poplar, which in ages long past dreamed of red blood and a beating heart and power of moving over that fair earth—after the way that Heine’s fir-tree dreamed of the palm—and finally through this yearning became the honest boysoul and body which leaps from pureluxuriance of vigor, and runs and rides and breathes the vital air of Hesperus to-day.
But even with the strong-limbed physique which open-air life upbuilds, the Hesperus students have their full quota of nervousness. Elements in their lives induce it. First there is the almost infinite possibility of accomplishment for the ambitious and energetic—so little is done, so much needs to be. Again, temperature changes of their climate are most sudden and extreme. A third incentive to nervous excitation is the stimulant of their wonderful atmosphere, which is so exhilarating that dwellers upon the Hesperus plateau suffer somnolence under the air-pressure and equilibrium of the seaboard.
Unfortunately the students have until lately had nothing that could be called a gymnasium, in which they might counterpoise nerve-work with muscular action. At one time they endeavored toequip a modest building. In the Legislature, however, the average representative, the man who voted supplies, looked back upon his own boyhood, and, recalling that he never suffered indigestion while following the plough down the brown furrow, set his head against granting one dollar of the State’s supplies for the deed fool athletics; in fact, he lapsed for the moment into the mental condition of, say, a Tory of Tom Jones’s time or a hater of the oppressed races of to-day.
This one instance will possibly give a shadow of impression of the power base politics—reversions to conditions our race is evolving from—have had in Hesperus University life. The power was obtained in the beginning chiefly because of the University’s sources of financial support—appropriations by biennial Legislatures in which every item, the salary of each individual professor, was scanned, and talked over, andcut down to the lowest bread-and-water figure, first by the committee in charge of the budget and afterwards by the Legislature in full session. One instance alone illustrates. In the early spring of 1897, when the University estimate was before the Legislature for discussion and the dominating Populists were endeavoring to reduce its figure, a legislator sturdily insisted: “They’re too stingy down there at the University. They’re getting good salaries, and could spare a sum to some one who would undertake to put the appropriations through.” One thousand dollars was said to be “about the size of the job.” A cut of twenty per cent., generally speaking, upon already meagre salaries resulted to a faculty too blear-eyed politically and unbusiness-like to see its financial advantage. After two or three years the stipends were restored to their former humility, the Legislature possibly having become ashamed.
And in the make-up of the senatus academicus, or board of regents, thereby hangs, or there used to hang, much of doubt and many a political trick and quibble. It was a variation of the dream of the Texas delegate to the nominating convention—“The offices! That’s what we’re here for.” For if a Democratic governor were elected, he appointed from his party men to whom he was beholden in small favors. The members of the board were Democrats, that is, and were expected to guard the interests of their party. Or if the voters of Hesperus chose a Republican executive, he in turn had his abettors whom he wanted to dignify with an academic course for which there were no entrance examinations beyond faithfulness to party lines and party whips. It thus happened that the fitness of the man has not always been a prime consideration in his appointment. More often because he was somebody’s henchman, or somebody’sfriend, the executive delighted to honor him.
These political features in the board of regents materially affected the faculty. For instance, if there were among the professors one who illustrated his lectures or class-room work by examples of the justice and reasonableness of free trade, he acted advisedly for his tenure if he lapsed into silence when the Republicans were in power. But if, on the other hand, he advocated protection instead of free trade, while the Democrats held State offices—which happened only by unusual fate—it was prudent for the professor to hold his tongue.
Upon every question of the day, and even in presenting conditions of life in ancient days, as, for instance, in Greece, the faculty were restrained, or at least threats were rendered. The petty politics of an agricultural democracy acted upon academic life in precisely the same way that autocracy and clericalism inGermany have affected its university faculties. In Hesperus professors have been dismissed without any excuse, apparent reason, or apology, because of a change of administration at the State capital and a hungry party’s coming into power. In various callings, or lines of life, the individual may be, nay, often is, wantonly sacrificed, but surely one of the saddest results of political shystering is the cheapening of the professor’s chair, and rendering that insecure for the permanence of which active life and its plums have been yielded.
Hinging immediately upon the political machine are the rights of and recognition of women in university government and pedagogic work. The fact that two or three women were the strenuous initiators of the institution has been forgotten, and no longer is there faith that
“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”
“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”
“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”
With all its coeducation, Hesperus has not yet evolved—as have New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin—to women regents or trustees. The people have not yet awakened to the justice of demanding that, in a State institution open to young women as well as to young men, women as well as men shall be in its government and direction.
And within the brown walls of the institution a woman may not carry her learning to the supreme pedagogic end. “People ridicule learned women,” said clear-eyed Goethe, speaking for his world, the confines of which at times extend to and overlap our own, “and dislike even women who are well informed, probably because it is considered impolite to put so many ignorant men to shame.” Such a man—an ignorant man, one of the party appointees just now spoken of—when a woman was dismissed from the Greek chairsome years ago, declared, “The place of women is naturally subordinate; we shall have no more women professors.” It was a pitiful aping of dead and gone academic prejudices. To this day, however, but one act—that rather an enforced one—has gainsaid his dictum. A woman has been appointed to the chair of French. It remains to be seen whether her salary is the same as that of the men doing work of equal grade and weight with her own.
“We cross the prairie as of oldThe pilgrims crossed the sea,To make the West, as they the East,The homestead of the free”—
“We cross the prairie as of oldThe pilgrims crossed the sea,To make the West, as they the East,The homestead of the free”—
“We cross the prairie as of oldThe pilgrims crossed the sea,To make the West, as they the East,The homestead of the free”—
sang the men and women of the fifties as their train pulled out of Eastern stations and their steamboats paddled up the waters of the Big Muddy. But how often it happens that what one generation will die for, the next will hold of little value, or even in derision!
Not wholly independent of politics, not without the uses and abuses of politics, is a great corporation which one of necessity mentions because it has played no small part in Hesperus University life. In those portions of our country where the units of the Methodist church are segregate few know the gigantic secular power it possesses in the South and in the West. The perfection of its organization is like that of the Roman Catholic Church where it is longest at home, or like the unity of the Latter Day Saints in their centre, Utah. The Methodists in Hesperus far outnumber in membership and money any other denomination. They are tenacious of their power, as religious denominations have ever been, and aggressive in upbuilding schools of their own voice and foundation. The question, “What shall we do to keep on the good side of the Methodists?” was, therefore, not infrequently asked in Hesperus Universitypolitics. The answer was practical: “Make us Methodists. Bring Methodism to us to stop the antagonism of a powerful body.” Such a solving of the problem—for these reasons—was not high-minded; it was not moral courage. But it was thought politic—and it was done.
Some of the best elements of our day have been profoundly at work among the Methodists. Many of the denomination have been in the vanguard of the march to better things. But it is fair to the course of Hesperus University, which has sometimes halted, to say that sagacious vigor and a knowledge of the best—τὰ Βέλτιστα—were not in every case the claim to distinction of its Methodist head. “Aus Nichts,” says Fichte, “wird nimmer Etwas.” But mediocrity—or worse—did not always prevail. Under absolutely pure and true conditions a man would be chosen for his fitness to fill the office of Chancellor,no matter what his religious bias, unless, indeed, that bias marred his scholarship and access to men, and thus really became an element in his unfitness.
In a perspective of the University of Hesperus it is necessary to consider these various controlling forces as well as the spiritual light of its students. And yet to those who have faith in its growth in righteousness there is an ever-present fear. The greatness of the institution will be in inverse proportion to the reign of politics, materialism, and denominationalism in its councils, and the fear is that the people may not think straight and see clear in regard to this great fact. Upon spiritual lines alone can its spirit grow, and if an institution of the spirit is not great in the spirit, it is great in nothing.
Its vigor and vitality are of truth in its young men and women. One boy or one girl may differ from another inglory, but each comes trailing clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stout-heartedness and courage for taking life in hand too many pæans cannot be chanted, or too many triumphant ἰώ raised. They have been the reason for the existence of the institution now more than a generation. Their spiritual content is its strength, and is to be more clearly its strength when guidance of its affairs shall have come to their hands.
Their spiritual content, we say—it should reflect that life of theirs when heaven seems dropping from above to their earth underfoot—in addition to the labors and loves of men and women, a procession of joys from the February morning the cardinal first whistles “what cheer.”
While dog-tooth violets swing their bells in winds of early March bluebirds are singing. The red-bud blossoms, and robins carol from its branches. Then the mandrake, long honored in enchantment,opens its sour-sweet petals of wax. Crimson-capped woodpeckers test tree-trunks and chisel their round house with skilful carpentry. The meadow-lark whistles in mating joy. Purple violets carpet the open woods. Trees chlorophyl their leaves in the warm sun. The wild crab bursts in sea-shell pink, and sober orchards shake out ambrosial perfume. Soft, slumberous airs puff clouds across the sky, and daylight lingers long upon the western horizon. Summer is come in.
The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert. Doves, whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under leaves of grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover bloom in red and white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with honey swarm and flit in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in soft whirls and stand to sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves of growing corn.
Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less satyr and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where some fallen cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts his buried shagbarks.
There “life is sweet, brother. There’s day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things. There’s likewise a wind on the heath.”
They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent ether. They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts in summer so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the recess of branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky trees, while slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the earth, murmur in antiphonal chorus.
And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces oflight upon our earth awhirl in the dear God’s Arms.
The West is large. That which would be true of a university in one part of its broad expanse might not be true of another institution of like foundation some distance away. And what might be said of a college or university independent of politics, would in nowise be averable of one pretty well controlled by that perplexing monitor.
Again, a fact which might be asserted of a college built up by some religious denomination might be radically false if claimed for one supported by the taxpayers of a great commonwealth, and hedged by sentiment and statute from the predominance of any ecclesiasticism.
You speak of the general characteristics of the University of Michigan, but these characteristics are not true of the little college down in Missouri, or Kentucky, or Ohio. Neither would the factsof life in some institutions in Chicago be at one with those of a thriving school where conditions are markedly kleinstädtisch.
In speaking of the West we must realize its vast territory and the varying characteristics of its people. Of what is here set down I am positive of its entire truth only so far as one institution is concerned, namely, the titulary—that is, the University of Hesperus—which recalleth the city bespoken in the Gospel according to Matthew—that it is set upon a hill and cannot be hid.
There was never in any age more money stirring, nor never more stir to get money.The Great Frost of January, 1608”
Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings: a round of little cares, or vain pursuits, frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense.Mary Wollstonecraft
You have too much respect upon the world:They lose it that do buy it with much care.Shakespeare
You have too much respect upon the world:They lose it that do buy it with much care.Shakespeare
You have too much respect upon the world:They lose it that do buy it with much care.Shakespeare
The Big Muddy built the fertile regions near its course. Dropping in warm low tides mellow soil gathered from upper lands, it pushed the flood of the sea farther and farther to the south. Non palma sine pulvere has been the song of its waters—no green will grow here without my mould.
It was at its wonder-work those millions of suns ago when the tiny three-toed horse browsed among the grasses of what is now Kansas. Its great years can be measured only by the dial of God. All the monstrosities of the eld of its birth it has survived, and like a knowing, sentient thing—a thinking, feeling thing—it has been expanding and contracting, doubling up and straighteningout its tawny body, each one of its numberless centuries pushing its uncounted mouths farther toward the submerged mountains of the Antilles.
In its thaumaturgy it formed vast prairies and rolling lands. Upon its gently-packed earth forests shot up. Subterranean streams jetted limpid springs, which joined and grew to rivers open to the light of day. Above the heavens were broad and the horizon far away—as far as you outlook at sea when sky and earth melt to a gray, and you stand wondering where the bar of heaven begins and where the restless waters below.
Indians, autochthons, or, perchance, wanderers from Iberia, or Babylon, were here. Then white men came to the flat brown lands, and that they brought wives showed they meant to stay and build a commonwealth. The two raised hearthstones for their family, and barns for herds and flocks. They marked off fieldsand knotted them with fruit trees, and blanketed them with growing wheat, and embossed them in days of ripeness with haystacks such as the race of giants long since foregone might have built. In their rich cornfields they set up shocks which leaned wearily with their weight of golden kernels, or stood torn and troubled by cattle nosing for the sugary pulp. Such works their heaven saw and to-day sees, their air above entirely bright, beading and sparkling in its inverted cup through every moment of sunshine.
Over this land and its constant people icy northers, victorious in elemental conflicts far above the Rockies, rush swirling and sweeping. They snap tense, sapless branches and roll dried leaves and other ghosts of dead summer before their force. They pile their snows in the angles of the rail fence and upon the southern banks of ravines, and whistle for warmth through the key-holes andunder the shrunken doors of farm-houses.
But winds and snows disappear, and again life leaps into pasture-land. A yellow light glowing between branches foreruns the green on brown stalk and tree. The meadow-lark lifts his buoyant note in the air, and the farmer clears his field and manures his furrow with sleepy bonfires and the ashes of dead stalks. Earth springs to vital show in slender grasses and rose-red verbena, and the pale canary of the bastard indigo.
In this great folkland of the Big Muddy, which is beyond praise in the ordinary phrase of men, there live alongside many other types, a peculiar man and woman. They are—to repeat, for clearness’ sake—only two of many types there indwelling, for it is true of these parts as was said of England in 1755: “You see more people in the roads than in all Europe, and more uneasy countenancesthan are to be found in the world besides.”
The man is seen in all our longitudes; the woman is rarely in any other milieu. She is a product of her city and town. The women of the country have ever before them queryings of the facts of life, the great lessons and slow processes of nature, the depth and feeling of country dwelling. But this city-woman suffers from shallowness and warp through her unknowledge of nature and the unsympathy with fellow humans that protection in bourgeois comfort engenders. She is inexperienced in the instructive adventure of the rich and the instructive suffering of the poor. The basis of her life is conventional.
The dollar to her eyes is apt to measure every value. Let us not forget that in the history of the world this is no new estimate. It was the ancient Sabine poet who advised “make money—honestly if we can, if not, dishonestly—only,make money.” “This is the money-got mechanic age,” cried Ben Jonson in Elizabeth’s day. And the poet of the “Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard” more than one hundred and fifty years ago wrote to his friend Wharton: “It is a foolish Thing that one can’t only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without Money.... Money is Liberty, and I fear money is Friendship too and Society, and almost every external Blessing.”
Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and false conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and curled in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs above a countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her well-formed hands, even in daily comings and goings, are flashing with rings. She loves to turn the precious stones and watch them divide the light. These jewels are herfirst expression of accumulating wealth—these and the pelts of animals difficult to capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining these insignia of opulence she begins to long for a third—the gentle, inept riot and solitary Phorcides’s eye for seeing life which she calls “society.”
The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of inheritance of every American—she is at times of the old American stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,—she is apt to wrap in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life, formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has not the instinct of attentionto her mother tongue which marks women of fine breeding.
The best thing made by man—good books—she has little love for. The newspaper and to-day’s flimsy novel of adventure stand in their stead. There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm of Milton’s “Penseroso” and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare’s comedies. But that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on the mountain-top of school-girl idealism and looked not at things near by, but afar—a period not long when compared to the jaded vacuity of later years.
To this shapely woman a writer is presented as “the highest paid lady-writer in the world.” The highest paid! Where, then, is literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for “Paradise Lost,” and eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal writer of the simplicities ofWakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns! “Learning,” says Thomas Fuller, in his “Holy States,” “learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”
This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the mother of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she moves—a result of her freedom and a sign of her strength—and she is mistress of the occasion always. In this domination (the right of the domina) she has, even when unmarried and as early as in her teens, the poise and solidity of the matron. She scorns your supposition that she is not informed in every worldly line, and that the wavering hesitancy of the one who does not know could be hers. She rarely blushes, and is therefore a negative witness to Swift’s hard-cut apophthegm—
“A virtue but at second-hand;They blush because they understand.”
“A virtue but at second-hand;They blush because they understand.”
“A virtue but at second-hand;They blush because they understand.”
Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty distinctions and laws which of late more and more growingly have manacled the hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our democracy; and which threaten that plasticity which, it is claimed, is the great characteristic of life. “It is quite possible,” says Clifford in his “Conditions of Mental Development,” “for conventional rules of action and conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress is impossible.... In the face of such dangerit is not right to be proper.”
Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to
“the chill dread sneerConventional, the abject fearOf form-transgressing freedom.”
“the chill dread sneerConventional, the abject fearOf form-transgressing freedom.”
“the chill dread sneerConventional, the abject fearOf form-transgressing freedom.”
Openly she often passes it by and remarks, rocking her chair a trifle uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some unspoken reason you never ask her if every one else is as good as she. You recall what de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: “If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women.”
Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex. Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her husband she analyzes to their friends—herein is a fertile source of divorce. Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic, rattling, and uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving thepeccant humors of her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems a man’s estimate of women—to please the sex she is not of. To men she is pert, flippant, witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At times she amuses them and herself by slurring upon other women. She seems to leave it to the man to establish the spirit upon which the two shall meet; and by deft hand and turn and movement she is constantly suggesting her eternal variation from him. The woman is always chaste. It follows that marriages are many.
A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for divorce, which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that you would hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence.
“Has she applied, do you know?”
“Oh! they’ve separated.”
“On what grounds is she going to get it?”
“If she isn’t careful she’ll lose her case by seeing him too often.”
These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in public places.
Nothing higher than what an ordinary civil contract seeks seems to be sought in her marital affairs. She undoes the decree of old Pope Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a function of his church and the claim of its sanctified indissolubility. In the light of her action marriage is truly and purely a civil contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation, forbearance, patience, tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make it truly religious.
She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and her power—that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The divine beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. In her midst Fra Angelico wouldfind few sitters. Her religion, commonly that which in other ages passed from a propulsive, burning spirit to frozen formalism, is the crystallized precept of theologue and priest, the fundamental ecstasy and informing soul having long since departed. If she had a real religion she could not be what she is.
Those questions of our day that shove their gaunt visages into sympathetic minds she has little knowledge of, and little of that curiosity which leads to knowledge. The fashion of her gown and the weekly relays at the theatre are nearer to her heart, and to her thinking touch her more personally, than the moral miasmata and physical typhoids of her neighboring Poverty Flat. Both pests the adjustment of her household relations brings within her door. For her dwelling is commonly domesticked by dusky shapes upon whom also the real things of life sit lightly, to whom permanenceand serious thought and work are rare. Their engagement is by the week, like that of pitiful vaudeville associates, and their performance as surpassingly shallow. They come upon their stage of work, veneer their little task with clever sleight of hand, and roll off to the supine inertness and inanity of their cabin.
This woman has therefore in her hands no feeling of the real relation and friendship that grow between mistress and maid who live the joys and sorrows of years together. By the less fortunate themselves, as well as by her own shallow skimming, her sympathies with the less fortunate are dwarfed. She looks upon her domestic as a serving sub-human animal, infinitely below herself, tolerated because of its menial performance, and barely possessed of the soul which her ecclesiastical tradition says is in every human form. In this deflection of her moral sense, can thehand of secular justice be punishing the wrong-doing of past centuries—the bringing in putrid slave-ships the captured, dazed, Eden-minded, animal-man—“the blameless Ethiopian”—to our shores?
She is born of fine material. When her nature is awry it is because of lack of right incentive. Old measures and life estimates are absurd to her quick senses, and none of the best of our modern values are put in their place. Her creed is wholly at variance with the facts of life to-day. If substantial instruction had entered the formative period of her life, there would have been no substance to project the darker parts of her shadow. Her nature is now ill-formed because of the misdirection of its elemental forces. She knows the tenor of her empire, and in truth and secretly she wonders how long her reign will endure.
“And therefore,” says Aristotle, inhis Politics, “women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtue of the state. And they must make a difference, for children grow up to be citizens, and half the persons in a state are women.”
Abiding beside this overdressed woman is an underdressed man. His first striking quality is a certain sweet-natured patience—a result of his optimistic dwelling in the future. Not content with the present, and having forgotten the values of present-day simple life, he lives in a future of fictitious money values. “All human power,” he thinks, with Balzac, “is a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and wait.” He knows his power and he waits.
“It’s going to be worth a good deal.”
“In a few years, that’ll be a good thing.”
“Fifteen years from now it’ll sell for ten times its present value.”
People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old Greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget of our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old Hellenes has there been such an idealistic people as that of which he is a part. In Elizabeth’s time, indeed, there was imaginative vigor similar to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in their hands and standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.
Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or railway ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues; schemes for building and controlling transcontinental railwaysand interoceanic fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million bushels and fattening cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for compressing air, gas, cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign mining; for irrigation; for oil borings—he brings his dynamic energy and resourcefulness to the evolution of all things but the human who is to be yoked to work out his plan.
In theory he is democratic and humane—for the future, after his interests in dividends shall have ceased. But his reckless exploiting of human life for the present, now growing more and more common by means of impersonal agents, is distinctly at war with our foundation, democratic ideas which hold one man’s life as good as another’s and which made his existence possible.
An essentially material basis of life turns his natural idealism into practical values and activities. He is an ideal practician, or rather a practical idealist.
His unnatural attitude toward to-day—that is, his futurity—and his inconsiderateness for to-day’s sunshine, put him in a false position, which bears the fruit of self-consciousness. Nature is not self-conscious. The primal man was not self-conscious. Self-consciousness implies pain; it means that a fellow-being is not at one with his surroundings; that extraneous, false, or hostile things are pushing him from his native status. If his pain, whether physical or spiritual, is eased, morbidness disappears.
In this man’s self-conscious habit he jumps at once to the conclusion that if you do not like his town you do not like him. Your taste is a personal affront. There is no logical connection, but he has a certain “defect of heat” which Dean Swift avers lies in men of the Anglo-Saxon type. The cordiality and open-handedness with which he first met you wanes. That he has one of thebest of hearts, and one of the strongest of heads, you are sure. He inwardly has the same faith. He knows it as Achilles knew his own strength, and the knowledge gives him sometimes the leonine front which the son of silver-footed Thetis boasted. But your not recognizing the superiority of his physical and spiritual environment over all the world causes an irritation deeper than the epidermis—to the nerve-centres, in fact.
“What do you think!” he laughed, shaking burlily and plunging hands in pockets. “What do you think! The other day in Washington I met an Englishman, and when I told him the United States was the best country in the world, and the State I lived in the best State in the best country, and the town I lived in the best town in the best State, and the block my office was in the best block in the best town, and my office the best office in the best block——”
“And you the best man in the best office,” I interjected, to which he laughed a hearty affirmative.
“What do you think he said? Why, ‘Comfohtaable, awh! comfohtaable!’ I told him itwascomfortable,—damned comfortable.”
This very Englishman, with that condescension of manner which at times we see foreigners assume, declared such mental individualization to be purely American. Vanity, audacity, and self-appreciation exist among all peoples, and even from the banks of the Isis we hear how the late Dr. Jowett averred, “I am the Master of Baliol College; Baliol is the first college in Oxford; Oxford is the first city in England; England is the first country in the world.”
United with the feeling of personal worth and independence in this citizen by the Big Muddy is, paradoxically, another characteristic—namely, a greattolerance. He could hardly expect tolerance himself if he did not extend it to another who may have opinions diametrically opposed to his own, is probably his attitude of mind. He is in his way a sort of embodiment of the spirit of our national constitution.
But this largess of broad tolerance leaves him lacking a gift of the discriminating or critical judgment. The sense or feeling of quality—that which measures accurately spiritual and artistic values—his very breadth and practical largeness, his democracy, allow no growth to. A sensitive discrimination, the power of differentiation, is no natural endowment, but a result of training, mental elimination, comparison, association, and a dwelling in inherent spiritual values.
Through his worth and capacity in other directions he would have this quality if he “had time” and seclusion for thought. But his life makes it possiblefor an explosive and heated talker, a mouther of platitudinous phrase, to stand cheek by jowl in his esteem with a seer of elevation and limpid thoughtfulness. His estimate of even lighter publicities is tinctured by this defect—the theatrical, for instance, where a verdant girl, lavishing upon her ambition for the stage the money she inherited from a father’s patent syrup or pills, and an actress of genius and experience fall in his mind in the same category because a theatrical syndicate has equally advertised each.
What the result to politics of this indiscriminating and non-sagacious judgment, this lack of feeling for finer lines in character—mark, peculiar nature, as Plato means when he uses the word in the Phædrus—would be hard to estimate.
Although for the most part a private citizen absorbed in his own affairs, the holder of an office has to him a peculiar glamour. He is apt to fall into thethinking lines of writers of nameless editorials, who, forgetful of their own hidden effulgence, fillip at quiet folk as “parochial celebrities” and “small deer.” And yet he knows that he lives in an age of réclame, and that by the expenditure of a few dollars in direct or indirect advertisement a name may be set before more people than our forefathers numbered on the first Independence Day.
In his midst is a certain publicity of spirit, and in his estimation work undertaken in the sight of men is of a higher order than that done in the privacy of one’s closet. The active life is everything; the contemplative, nothing. Talking is better than writing—it so easily gives opportunity for the aggressive personality. For a young woman looking to support herself he advocated type-writing in a public office in preference to the retirement of nursery governess. When the girl drewback with the dread of publicity which results from the retired life of women, he exclaimed, “It’s all a question of whether you’ve got the courage to take the higher thing.”
If he is a fruit of self-cultivation, he enjoys talking of the viridity of his growth as well as these now purpler days. During early struggles he may have undergone suffering and privation. In that event, if his nature is narrow and hard, he has become narrower and harder, and his presence, like Quilp’s, shrivels and deadens every accretion save his interest. But when he is of the better sort of soil, adversity discovers the true metal, and misfortune gives him a sympathy, depth, and tenderness that charm you to all defects. You would migrate to his neighborhood to live in the light of his genial warmth. You think of the beautiful encomium Menelaus pronounced upon Patroclus—“He knew how to be kind to all men.”
Beyond all, he is open-eyed and open-eared. And above all he is affirmative; never negative. His intuition tells him it is affirmation that builds, and that Bacon says right—“it is the peculiar trait of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.”
“Why do people buy and read such fool stuff as ‘Treasure Island’? I can’t see.”
“They read it for its story of adventure, and for its rare way of telling the story,” I ventured, in answer. “They read it for its style.”
“Style! Gemini! Style! I should smile! I can write a better book than that myself!”
“Then it might pay you as a business venture to set yourself about it.”
“It’s by a man named Stevenson, and he’s written other stories. Are they all as bad?”
Strange he should make such a criticismof Louis Stevenson, in literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete—the word success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development—he worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,—to have returns greater than one’s effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with the author of Lorna Doone, “the excess of price over value is the true test of success in life.” None of us would think of saying Shakespeare was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin Luther. But Pope, with his clever money-making, we might call a success, as did Swift in 1728: “God bless you, whose great genius has not so transported you as to leave you to the constancy of mankind, for wealth is liberty, and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher.”
The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile not to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been. Look at all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and many of our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his acts often contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman, “gets there,” it does not matter much how. “Work through a corporation or trust,” he tells you, and smiling at you with honest eyes, adds, “A corporation can do things the individual man would not.” The one who succeeds is the model; he is to be envied; he is the ideal the ancients sought—the happy man. Pass by noblesse oblige, human heartedness, elevation that would not stoop to exploit human labor, human need, and human sacrifice—that is, as corporations pass these qualities by.
In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the character formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee.
Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading people that you have it. There is not so great difference in people after all, this democrat believes. When one has every material privilege that will allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence his assumption about, he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and be cried up as a man of extraordinary virtue, of taste, of attainment. In any success, commonly so-called, he asks little of the great marks by which a man should be judged. “He has done this.” “He has got that.” “He is clever,” he says. He rarely cries, “He is honest.” “He is true.”
Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to consider impermanent. This is wholly a result ofconvention, for women, by their very nature and the conditions of married life, cling more closely to the permanence of the union.
In marital relations he has more liberty. When she asks him if she may, or in her phrase “can,” do so and so, and in rehearsing the matter says he “let her,” he accepts her homage and the servile status she voluntarily assumes. You exclaim that men for many centuries have been apt to do this. Entirely, if offered him by such an enchantress.