CHAPTER VIII.NEW ENGLAND LIFE.
Earnestness of the New England people.
It is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for a thoughtless, shallow-minded person. If we represent things as they are, their intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and earnestness must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as the reverse pole of the magnet drives off sticks and straws. In no other country were the soul and the spiritual life ever such intense realities, and everything contemplated so much (to use a current New England phrase) “in reference to eternity.”
New England theology.
The rigid theological discipline of New England is fitted to produce rather strength and purity than enjoyment. It was not fitted to make a sensitive and thoughtful nature happy, however it might ennoble and exalt.
The kitchen.
The kitchen of a New England matron was her throne-room, her pride; it wasthe habit of her life to produce the greatest possible results there with the slightest possible discomposure; and what any woman could do, Mrs. Katy Scudder could dopar excellence. Everything there seemed to be always done and never doing. Washing and baking, those formidable disturbers of the composure of families, were all over within those two or three morning hours when we are composing ourselves for a last nap,—and only the fluttering of linen over the green yard on Monday mornings proclaimed that the dreaded solemnity of a wash had transpired. A breakfast arose there as by magic; and in an incredibly short space after, every knife, fork, spoon, and trencher, clean and shining, was looking as innocent and unconscious in its place as if it never had been used and never expected to be.
The floor,—perhaps, sir, you remember your grandmother’s floor of snowy boards sanded with whitest sand; you remember the ancient fireplace stretching quite across one end,—a vast cavern, in each corner of which a cozy seat might be found, distant enough to enjoy the crackle of the great jolly wood fire; across the room ran a dresser, on which was displayed great store of shining pewter dishes and platters, which always shone with the same mysterious brightness; by the side of the fire, a commodious wooden settee, or “settle,” offered repose to people too little accustomed to luxury to ask for a cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden time,—theold, clean, roomy, New England kitchen! Who that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in one, has not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, its coolness? The noonmark on its floor was a dial that told off some of the happiest days; thereby did we right up some of the shortcomings of the solemn old clock that tick-tacked in the corner, and whose ticks seemed mysterious prophecies of unknown good yet to arise out of the hours of life. How dreamy the winter twilight came in there,—when as yet the candles were not lighted,—when the crickets chirped around the dark stone hearth, and shifting tongues of flame flickered and cast dancing shadows and elfish lights on the walls, while grandmother nodded over her knitting-work, and puss purred, and old Rover lay dreamily opening now one eye and then the other on the family group! With all our ceiled houses, let us not forget our grandmother’s kitchen.
Faculty.
She was one of the much admired class, who, in the speech of New England, are said to have faculty, a gift which, among that shrewd people, commands more esteem than beauty, riches, learning, or any other worldly endowment.Facultyis Yankee forsavoir faire, and the opposite virtue to shiftlessness. Faculty is the greatest virtue, and shiftlessness the greatest vice, of Yankee men and women. To her who has faculty nothing shall be impossible. She shall scrub floors, wash, wring, bake, brew, andyet her hands shall be small and white; she shall have no perceptible income, yet always be handsomely dressed; she shall have not a servant in her house,—with a dairy to manage, hired men to feed, a boarder or two to care for, unheard-of pickling and preserving to do,—and yet you commonly see her every afternoon sitting at her shady parlor-window behind the lilacs, cool and easy, hemming muslin cap-strings, or reading the last new book. She who hath faculty is never in a hurry, never behindhand. She can always step over to distressed Mrs. Smith, whose jelly won’t come,—and stop to show Mrs. Jones how she makes her pickles so green,—and be ready to watch with poor old Mrs. Simpkins, who is down with the rheumatism.
Garrets.
Garrets are delicious places in any case, for people of thoughtful, imaginative temperament. Who has not loved a garret in the twilight days of childhood, with its endless stores of quaint, cast-off, suggestive antiquity,—old, worm-eaten chests,—rickety chairs,—boxes and casks full of odd comminglings, out of which, with tiny, childish hands, we picked wonderful hoards of fairy treasure? What peep-holes, and hiding-places, and undiscoverable retreats we made to ourselves,—where we sat rejoicing in our security, and bidding defiance to the vague, distant cry which summoned us to school, or to some unsavory every-day task! How deliciously the rain came pattering on theroof over our head, or the red twilight streamed in at the window, while we sat snugly ensconced over the delicious pages of some romance which careful aunts had packed away at the bottom of all things, to be sure we should never read it! If you have anything, beloved friends, which you wish your Charley or your Susy to be sure and read, pack it mysteriously away at the bottom of a trunk of stimulating rubbish in the darkest corner of your garret; in that case, if the book be at all readable,—one that by any possible chance can make its way into a young mind, you may be sure that it will not only be read, but remembered to the longest day they have to live.
Clearcut thought.
His was one of those clearly cut minds which New England forms among her farmers, as she forms quartz crystals in her mountains, by a sort of gradual influence flowing through every pore of the soil and system.
New England the parent of the West.
New England has been to the United States what the Dorian hive was to Greece. It has always been a capital country to emigrate from, and North, South, East, and West have been populated largely from New England, so that the seed-bed of New England was the seed-bed of the great American republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.
Rough exterior.
Any one that has ever pricked his fingers in trying to force open a chestnut-burr may perhaps have moralized at the satin lining, so smooth and soft, that lies inside of that sharpness. It is an emblem of a kind of nature very frequent in New England, where the best and kindest and most desirable of traits are enveloped in an outside wrapping of sharp austerity.
The do-nothing.
Every New England village, if you only think of it, must have its do-nothing, as regularly as it has its schoolhouse or its meeting-house. Nature is always wide awake in the matter of compensation. Work, thrift, and industry are such an incessant steam-power in Yankee life that society would burn itself out with the intense friction, were there not interposed here and there the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing,—a man who won’t be hurried, and won’t work, and will take his ease in his own way, in spite of the whole protest of his neighborhood to the contrary. And there is on the face of the whole earth no do-nothing whose softness, idleness, general inaptitude to labor, and everlasting, universal shiftlessness, can compare with that of the worthy, as found in a brisk Yankee village.
Life an engrossing interest.
People have often supposed, because the Puritans founded a society where there were no professed public amusements,that therefore there was no fun going on in the ancient land of Israel, and that there were no cakes and ale, because they were virtuous. They were never more mistaken in their lives. There was an abundance of sober, well-considered merriment, and the hinges of life were well-oiled with that sort of secret humor which to this day gives the raciness to real Yankee wit. Besides this, we must remember that life itself is the greatest possible amusement to people who really believe they can do much with it,—who have that intense sense of what can be brought to pass by human effort that was characteristic of the New England colonies. To such, it is not exactly proper to say that life is an amusement, but it certainly is an engrossing interest, that takes the place of all amusements.
New England nobility.
In the little theocracy which the Pilgrims established in the wilderness, the ministry was the only order of nobility. They were the only privileged class, and their voice it was that decidedex cathedraon all questions both of church and state, from the choice of governor to that of district school teacher.
Our minister, as I remember him, was one of the cleanest, most gentlemanly, most well-bred of men,—never appearing without all the decorums of silk stockings, shining knee and shoe buckles, well-brushed shoes, immaculately powdered wig, out of which shone his clear, calm, serious face, like the moon out of a fleecy cloud.
A ship-building community.
In the plain, simple regions we are describing,—where the sea is the great avenue of active life, and the pine forests are the great source of wealth,—ship-building is an engrossing interest, and there is no fête that calls forth the community like the launching of a vessel.
And no wonder; for what is there belonging to this workaday world of ours that has such a never-failing fund of poetry and grace as a ship? A ship is a beauty and mystery wherever we see it: its white wings touch the region of the unknown and the imaginative; they seem to us full of the odors of quaint, strange, foreign shores, where life, we fondly dream, moves in brighter currents than the muddy, tranquil tides of every day.
Who that sees one bound outward, with her white breasts swelling and heaving, as if with a reaching expectancy, does not feel his heart swell with a longing impulse to go with her to the far-off shores? Even at dingy, crowded wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, the coming in of a ship is an event that can never lose its interest. But on these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the blue sea lies embraced in the arms of a dark, solitary forest, the sudden incoming of a ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance....The very life and spirit of strange, romantic lands come with her; suggestions of sandalwood and spice breathe through the pine woods; she is an Oriental queen, with hands full of mystical gifts; “all her garments smell of myrrh and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made her glad.” No wonder men have loved ships like birds, and that there have been found brave, rough hearts that in fatal wrecks chose rather to go down with their ocean love than to leave her in the last throes of her death-agony.
A ship-building, a ship-sailing community has an unconscious poetry ever underlying its existence. Exotic ideas from foreign lands relieve the trite monotony of life; the ship-owner lives in communion with the whole world, and is less likely to fall into the petty commonplaces that infest the routine of inland life.
Repression.
There is a class of people in New England who betray the uprising of the softer feelings of our nature only by an increase of outward asperity—a sort of bashfulness and shyness leaves them no power of expression for these unwonted guests of the heart—they hurry them into inner chambers and slam the doors upon them, as if they were vexed at their appearance.
The Sabbath.
A vague, dream-like sense of rest and Sabbath stillness seemed to brood in the air. The very spruce-trees seemed to know thatit was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward with their dusky fingers, and the small tide-waves that chased each other up on the shelly beach, or broke against projecting rocks, seemed to do it with a chastened decorum, as each blue-haired wave whispered to his brother, “Be still—be still.”...
Not merely as a burdensome restraint, or a weary endurance came the shadow of that Puritan Sabbath. It brought with it all the sweetness that belongs to rest, all the sacredness that hallows home, all the memories of patient thrift, of sober order, of chastened yet intense family feeling, of calmness, of purity, and self-respecting dignity, which distinguished the Puritan household. It seemed a solemn pause in all the sights and sounds of earth.
Early New England society.
The state of society in some of the districts of Maine, in these days, much resembled, in its spirit, that which Moses labored to produce in ruder ages. It was entirely democratic, simple, grave, hearty, and sincere,—solemn and religious in its daily tone, and yet, as to all material good, full of wholesome thrift and prosperity. Perhaps taking the average mass of the people, a more healthful and desirable state of society never existed. Its better specimens had a simple, Doric grandeur, unsurpassed in any age.
A typical New England village.
Did you ever see the little village of Newbury, in New England? I dare say you never did; for it was just one of those out-of-the-way places where nobody ever came unless they came on purpose: a green little hollow, wedged like a bird’s nest between half a dozen high hills, that kept off the wind and kept out foreigners; so that the little place was as straitlysui generisas if there were not another in the world. The inhabitants were all of that respectable old steadfast family who made it a point to be born, bred, married, die, and be buried, all in the self-same spot. There were just so many houses, and just so many people lived in them; nobody ever seemed to be sick, or to die either, at least while I was there. The natives grew old till they could not grow any older, and then they stood still, andlasted, from generation to generation. There was, too, an unchangeability about all the externals of Newbury. Here was a red house, and there a brown house, and across the way was a yellow house; and there was a straggling rail fence or a tribe of mullein stalks between. The minister lived here, and Squire Moses lived there, and Deacon Hart lived under the hill, and Messrs. Nadab and Abihu Peters lived by the cross-road, and the old “Widder Smith” lived by the meeting-house, and Ebenezer Camp kept a shoemaker’s shop on oneside, and Patience Mosely kept a milliner’s shop in front; and there was old Comfort Scran, who kept store for the whole town, and sold axe-heads, brass thimbles, licorice ball, fancy handkerchiefs, and everything else you can think of. Here, too, was the general post-office, where you might see letters marvelously folded, directed wrong side upwards, stamped with a thimble, and superscribed to some of the Dollys, or Pollys, or Peters, or Moseses aforenamed or not named.
For the rest, as to manners, morals, arts, and sciences, the people in Newbury always went to their parties at three o’clock in the afternoon, and came home before dark; always stopped all work the minute the sun was down on Saturday night; always went to meeting on Sunday; had a schoolhouse with all the ordinary inconveniences; were in neighborly charity with one another, read their Bibles, feared their God, and were content with such things as they had,—the best philosophy after all.
The farmhouse.
Everything in Uncle Abel’s house was in the same time, place, manner, and form, from year’s end to year’s end. There was old Master Bose, a dog after my uncle’s own heart, who always walked as if he were studying the multiplication table. There was the old clock, forever ticking in the kitchen corner, with a picture on its face of the sun forever setting behind a perpendicular row of poplar-trees. There was the never-failing supply of red peppersand onions hanging over the chimney. There, too, were the yearly hollyhocks and morning-glories blooming about the windows. There was the “best room,” with its sanded floor, the cupboard in one corner with its glass doors, the evergreen asparagus bushes in the chimney, and there was the stand with the Bible and almanac on it in another corner. There, too, was Aunt Betsey, who never looked any older, because she always looked as old as she could; who always dried her catnip and wormwood the last of September, and began to clean house the first of May. In short, this was the land of continuance. Old Time never took it into his head to practice either addition, or subtraction, or multiplication on its sum total.
Conscience in New England women.
Nowhere is conscience so dominant and all-absorbing as with New England women. It is the granite formation which lies deepest, and rises out even to the tops of the highest mountains.
Selling their disadvantages.
“But these Yankees turn everything to account. If a man’s field is covered with rock, he’ll find some way to sell it,and make money out of it; and if they freeze up all winter, they sell the ice, and make money out of that. They just live by selling their disadvantages!”
Yankee grit.
Zeph was a creature born to oppose, as much as white bears are made to walk on ice.
And how, we ask, would New England’s rocky soil and icy hills have been made mines of wealth unless there had been human beings born to oppose, delighting to combat and wrestle, and with an unconquerable power of will?
Zeph had taken a thirteen acre lot, so rocky that a sheep could scarce find a nibble there, had dug out and blasted and carted the rocks, wrought them into a circumambient fence,—ploughed and planted and raised crop after crop of good rye thereon. He did it with heat, with zeal, with dogged determination; he did it all the more because neighbors said he was a fool for trying, and that he could never raise anything on that lot. There was a stern joy in this hand-to-hand fight with Nature. He got his bread as Samson did his honeycomb out of the carcass of the slain lion. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” Even the sharp March wind did not annoy him. It was a controversial wind, and that suited him; it was fighting him all theway, and he enjoyed beating it. Such a human being has his place in the Creator’s scheme.
Religious development.
They greatly mistake the New England religious development who suppose that it was a mere culture of the head in dry, metaphysical doctrines. As in the rifts of the granite rocks grow flowers of wonderful beauty and delicacy, so in the secret recesses of Puritan life, by the fireside of the farmhouse, in the contemplative silence of austere care and labor, grew up religious experiences that brought a heavenly brightness down into the poverty of commonplace existence.
Family worship.
The custom of family worship was one of the most rigid inculcations of the Puritan order of society, and came down from parent to child with the big family Bible, where the births, deaths, and marriages of the household stood recorded.
In Zeph’s case, the custom seemed to be merely an inherited tradition, which had dwindled into a habit purely mechanical. Yet, who shall say?
Of a rugged race, educated in hardness, wringing his substance out of the very teeth and claws of reluctant nature, on a rocky and barren soil, and under a harsh, forbidding sky, who but the All-seeing could judge him? In that hard soul, there may have been, thus uncouthly expressed, a loyalty to Something Higher, however dimlyperceived. It was acknowledging that even he had his master. One thing is certain, the custom of family prayers, such as it was, was a great comfort to the meek saint by his side, to whom any form of prayer, any pause from earthly care, and looking up to a Heavenly Power, was a blessed rest. In that daily toil, often beyond her strength, when she never received a word of sympathy or praise, it was a comfort all day to her to have had a chapter in the Bible and a prayer in the morning. Even though the chapter were one that she could not by any possibility understand a word of, yet it put her in mind of things in that same dear book that she did understand,—things that gave her strength to live and hope to die by,—and it was enough! Her faith in the Invisible Friend was so strong that she needed but to touch the hem of His garment. Even a table of genealogies out ofHisbook was a sacred charm, an amulet of peace.
The kitchen fireplace.
The fire that illuminated the great kitchen of the farmhouse was a splendid sight to behold. It is, alas, with us, only a vision and memory of the past; for who, in our days, can afford to keep up the great fireplace, where the backlogs were cut from the giants of the forest, and the forestick was as much as a modern man could lift? And then the glowing fire-palace built thereon! That architectural pile of split and seasoned wood, over which the flames leaped and danced andcrackled like rejoicing genii—what a glory it was! The hearty, bright, warm hearth, in those days, stood instead of fine furniture and handsome pictures. The plainest room becomes beautiful and attractive by firelight, and when men think of a country and home to be fought for and defended, they think of the fireside.
The curfew.
Though not exactly backed by the arbitrary power which enforced the celebrated curfew, yet the nine o’clock bell was one of the authoritative institutions of New England; and, at its sound, all obediently set their faces homeward, to rake up housefires, put out candles, and say their prayers before going to rest.
Faculty.
What Yankee matrons are pleased to denominate faculty, which is, being interpreted,a genius for home life.