Part 29

Next, Hiram's prying eyes saw Mr. Turfmould, the sexton and undertaker, who seemed to be in a pensive meditation upon all the dead that he had ever buried. He looked upon men in a mild and pitying manner, as if he forgave them for being in good health. You could not help feeling that he gazed upon you with a professional eye, and saw just how you would look in the condition which was to him the most interesting period of a man's earthly state. He walked with a soft tread, as if he was always at a funeral; and when he shook your hand, his left hand half followed his right, as if he were about beginning to lay you out. He was one of the few men absorbed by his business, and who unconsciously measured all things from its standpoint.

"Good-morning, Mr. Turfmould! How's your health? How is business with you?"

"Good--the Lord be praised! I've no reason to complain."

And he glided silently and smoothly into the church.

"There comes Judge Bacon, white and ugly," said the critical Hiram. "I wonder what he comes to meetin' for. Lord knows he needs it, sly, slippery old sinner! Face's as white as a lily; his heart's as black as a chimney flue afore it's cleaned. He'll get his flue burned out if he don't repent, that's certain. He don't believe the Bible. They say he don't believe in God. Wal, I guess it's pretty even between 'em. Shouldn't wonder if God didn't believe in him neither."

As soon as the afternoon service was over, every horse on the green knew that it was time for him to go home. Some grew restless and whinnied for their masters. Nimble hands soon put them into the shafts or repaired any irregularity of harness. Then came such a scramble of vehicles to the church door for the older persons; while young women and children, venturing further out upon the green, were taken up hastily, that the impatient horses might as soon as possible turn their heads homeward. Clouds of dust began to arise along every outward-going road. In less than ten minutes not a wagon or chaise was seen upon the village green. They were whirling homeward at the very best pace that the horses could raise. Stiff old steeds vainly essayed a nimbler gait, but gave it up in a few rods, and fell back to the steady jog. Young horses, tired of long standing, and with a strong yearning for evening oats, shot along the level ground, rushed up the little hills, or down upon the other side, in the most un-Sunday-like haste. The scene was not altogether unlike the return from a military funeral, _to_ which men march with sad music and slow, but _from_ which they return nimbly marching to the most brilliant quick-step.

In half an hour Norwood was quiet again. The dinner, on Sunday, when for the sake of the outlying population the two services are brought near together in the middle of the day, was usually deferred till the ordinary supper hour. It was evident that the tone of the day was changed. Children were not so strictly held in. There was no loud talking, nor was laughing allowed, but a general feeling sprung up around the table that the severer tasks of the day were ended.

Devout and age-sobered people sat in a kind of golden twilight of meditation. The minister, in his well-ordered house, tired with a double service, mingled thoughts both glad and sad. His tasks were ended. He was conscious that he had manfully done his best. But that best doing, as he reflected upon it, seemed so poor, so unworthy of the nobleness of the theme, and so relatively powerless upon the stubborn stuff of which his people's dispositions were made, that there remained a vague, unquiet sense of blame upon his conscience.

It was Dr. Wentworth's habit to walk with his family in the garden, early in the morning and late in the afternoon. If early, Rose was usually his company; in the afternoon the whole family, Agate Bissell always excepted. She had in full measure that peculiar New England feeling that Sunday is to be kept by staying in the house, except such time as is spent at church. And though she never, impliedly even, rebuked the doctor's resort to his garden, it was plain that deep down in her heart she thought it an improper way of spending Sunday; and in that view she had the secret sympathy of almost all the noteworthy villagers. Had any one, upon that day, made Agate a visit, unless for some plain end of necessity or mercy, she would have deemed it a personal affront.

Sunday was the Lord's day. Agate acted as if any use of it for her own pleasure would be literal and downright stealing.

"We have six days for our own work. We ought not to begrudge the Lord one whole day."

Two circumstances distressed honest Agate's conscience. The one was that the incursion of summer visitors from the city was tending manifestly to relax the Sabbath, especially after the church services. The other was that Dr. Wentworth would occasionally allow Judge Bacon to call in and discuss with him topics suggested by the sermons. She once expressed herself in this wise:--

"Either Sunday is worth keeping, or it is not. If you do keep it, it ought to be strictly done. But lately Sunday is raveling out at the end. We take it on like a summer dress, which in the morning is clean and sweet, but at night it is soiled at the bottom and much rumpled all over."

Dr. Wentworth sat with Rose on one side and her mother on the other, in the honeysuckle corner, where the west could be seen, great trees lying athwart the horizon and checkering the golden light with their dark masses. Judge Bacon had turned the conversation upon this very topic.

"I think our Sundays in New England are Puritan and Jewish more than Christian. They are days of restriction rather than of joyousness. They are fast days, not feast days."

"Do you say that as a mere matter of historical criticism, or do you think that they could be improved practically?"

"Both. It is susceptible of proof that the early Christian Sunday was a day of triumph and of much social joy. It would be well if we could follow primitive example."

"Judge, I am hardly of your opinion. I should be unwilling to see our New England Sunday changed, except perhaps by a larger social liberty _in_ each family. Much might be done to make it attractive to children, and relieve older persons from _ennui_. But after all, we must judge things by their fruits. If you bring me good apples, it is in vain to abuse the tree as craggy, rude, or homely. The fruit redeems the tree."

"A very comely figure, Doctor, but not very good reasoning. New England has had something at work upon her beside her Sundays. What you call the 'fruit' grew, a good deal of it at any rate, on other trees than Sunday trees."

"You are only partly right. New England character and history are the result of a wide-spread system of influences of which the Sabbath day was the type--and not only so, but the grand motive power. Almost every cause which has worked benignly among us has received its inspiration and impulse largely from this One Solitary Day of the week.

"It is true that all the vegetable growths that we see about us here depend upon a great variety of causes; but there is one cause that is the condition of power in every other, and that is the Sun! And so, many as have been the influences working at New England character, Sunday has been a generic and multiplex force, inspiring and directing all others. It is indeed the _Sun's_ day.

"It is a little singular that, borrowing the name from the heathen calendar, it should have tallied so well with the Scripture name, the Lord's day--that Lord who was the Morning Star in early day, and at length the Sun of Righteousness!

"The Jews called it the Sabbath--a day of rest. Modern Christians call it the _Sun's_ day, or the day of light, warmth, and growth. If this seems fanciful so far as the names of the day are concerned, it is strikingly characteristic of the real spirit of the two days, in the ancient and modern dispensation. I doubt if the old Jews ever kept a Sabbath religiously, as we understand that term. Indeed, I suspect there was not yet a religious strength in that national character that could hold up religious feeling without the help of social and even physical adjuvants. Their religious days were either fasts or like our Thanksgiving days. But the higher and richer moral nature which has been developed by Christianity enables communities to sustain one day in seven upon a high spiritual plane, with the need of but very little social help, and without the feasting element at all."

"That may be very well for a few saints like you and me, Doctor, but it is too high for the majority of men. Common people find the strict Sundays a great annoyance, and clandestinely set them aside."

"I doubt it. There are a few in every society that live by their sensuous nature. Sunday must be a dead day to them--a dark room. No wonder they break through. But it is not so with the sturdy, unsophisticated laboring class in New England. If it came to a vote, you would find that the farmers of New England would be the defenders of the day, even if screwed up to the old strictness. Their instinct is right. It is an observance that has always worked its best effects upon the common people, and if I were to change the name, I should call Sunday THE POOR MAN'S DAY.

"Men do not yet perceive that the base of the brain is full of despotism, and the coronal brain is radiant with liberty. I mean that the laws and relations which grow out of men's relations in physical things are the sternest and hardest, and at every step in the assent toward reason and spirituality, the relations grow more kindly and free.

"Now, it is natural for men to prefer an animal life. By-and-by they will learn that such a life necessitates force, absolutism. It is natural for unreflecting men to complain when custom or institutions hold them up to some higher degree. But that higher degree has in it an element of emancipation from the necessary despotisms of physical life. If it were possible to bring the whole community up to a plane of spirituality, it would be found that there and there only could be the highest measure of liberty. And this is my answer to those who grumble at the restriction of Sunday liberty. It is only the liberty of the senses that suffers. A higher and nobler civil liberty, moral liberty, social liberty, will work out of it. Sunday is the common people's Magna Charta."

"Well done, Doctor! I give up. Hereafter you shall see me radiant on Sunday. I must not get my hay in if storms do threaten to spoil it; but I shall give my conscience a hitch up, and take it out in that. I must not ride out; but then I shall regard every virtuous self-denial as a moral investment with good dividends coming in by-and-by. I can't let the children frolic in the front dooryard; but then, while they sit waiting for the sun to go down, and your _Sun_-day to be over, I shall console myself that they are one notch nearer an angelic condition every week. But good-night, good-night, Mrs. Wentworth. I hope you may not become so spiritual as quite to disdain the body. I really think, for this world, the body has some respectable uses yet. Good-night, Rose. The angels take care of you, if there is one of them good enough."

And so the judge left.

They sat silently looking at the sun, now but just above the horizon. A few scarfs of cloud, brilliant with flame-color, and every moment changing forms, seemed like winged spirits, half revealed, that hovered round the retiring orb.

Mrs. Wentworth at length broke the silence.

"I always thought, Doctor, that you believed Sunday over-strictly kept, and that you were in favor of relaxation."

"I am. Just as fast as you can make it a day of real religious enjoyment, it will relax itself. True and deep spiritual feeling is the freest of all experiences. And it reconciles in itself the most perfect consciousness of liberty with the most thorough observance of outward rules and proprieties. Liberty is not an outward condition. It is an inward attribute, or rather a name for the quality of life produced by the highest moral attributes. When communities come to that condition, we shall see fewer laws and higher morality.

"The one great poem of New England is her Sunday! Through that she has escaped materialism. That has been a crystal dome overhead, through which Imagination has been kept alive. New England's imagination is to be found, not in art and literature, but in her inventions, her social organism, and above all in her religious life. The Sabbath has been the nurse of that. When she ceases to have a Sunday, she will be as this landscape is:--now growing dark, all its lines blurred, its distances and gradations fast merging into sheeted darkness and night. Come, let us go in!"

Copyrighted by Fords, Howard and Hulbert.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

(1770-1827)

BY E. IRENÆUS STEVENSON

We are warned on high authority that no man can serve two masters. The caution should obtain in æsthetics as well as in ethics. As a general rule, the painter must stick to his easel, the sculptor must carve, the musician must score or play or sing, the actor must act,--each with no more than the merest coquettings with sister arts. Otherwise his genius is apt to suffer from what are side-issues for temperament. To many minds a taste, and even a singular capacity, for an avocation has injured the work done in the real vocation.

Of course there are exceptions. The versatility has not always been fatal. We recall Leonardo, Angelo, Rossetti, and Blake among painters; in the ranks of musicians we note Hoffmann, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, Boito. In other art-paths, such personal pages as those of Cellini, and the critical writings of Story, of to-day, may add their evidence. The essentially autobiographic in such a connection must be accepted with reserve. So must be taken much admirable writing as to the art in which the critic or teacher has labored. Didactics are not necessarily literature. Perhaps the best basis of determining the right to literary recognition of men and women who have written and printed more or less without actually professing letters, will be the interest of the matter they have left to the kind of reader who does not care a pin about their real life-work, or about their self-expression as it really comes down to us.

In painting, the dual capacity--for the brush and for letters--has more shining examples than in music. But with Beethoven, Schumann, Boito, and Wagner, comes a striking succession of men who, as to autobiography or criticism or verse, present a high quality of interest to the general reader. In the instance of Beethoven the critical or essayistic side is limited. It is by his letters and diary that we study (only less vividly than in his music) a character of profound depth and imposing nobility; a nature of exquisite sensitiveness. In them we follow, if fragmentarily, the battle of personality against environment, the secrets of strong but high passion, the artist temperament,--endowed with a dignity and a moral majesty seldom equaled in an art indeed called divine, but with children who frequently remind us that Pan absorbed in playing his syrinx has a goat's hoof.

Beethoven in all his correspondence wrote himself down as what he was,--a superior man, a mighty soul in many traits, as well as a supreme creative musician. His letters are absorbing, whether they breathe love or anger, discouragement or joy, rebellion against untoward conditions of daily life or solemn resignation. The religious quality, too, is strong in them; that element more in touch with Deism than with one or another orthodoxy. Withal, he is as sincere in every line of such matter as he was in the spoken word. His correspondence holds up the mirror to his own nature, with its extremes of impulse and reserve, of affection and austerity, of confidence and suspicion. It abounds, too, in that brusque yet seldom coarse humor which leaps up in the Finale of the Seventh Symphony, in the Eighth Symphony's waggery, the last movement of the Concerto in E flat. They offer likewise verbal admissions of such depression of heart as we recognize in the sternest episodes of the later Sonatas and of the Galitzin Quartets, and in the awful Allegretto of the Symphony in A. They hint at the amorous passion of the slow movements of the Fourth and Ninth Symphonies, at the moral heroism of the Fifth, at the more human courage of the 'Heroic,' at the mysticism of the Ninth's tremendous opening. In interesting relation to the group, and merely of superficial interest, are his hasty notes, his occasional efforts to write in English or in French, his touches of musical allusiveness.

It is not in the purpose of these prefatory paragraphs to a too-brief group of Beethoven's letters to enter upon his biography. That is essentially a musician's life; albeit the life of a musician who, as Mr. Edward Dannreuther suggests, leaves behind him the domain of mere art and enters upon that of the seer and the prophet. He was born in Bonn in 1770, on a day the date of which is not certain (though we know that his baptism was December 17th). His youth was not a sunshiny period. Poverty, neglect, a drunken father, violin lessons under compulsion, were the circumstances ushering him into his career. He was for a brief time a pupil of Mozart; just enough so to preserve that succession of royal geniuses expressed in linking Mozart to Haydn, and in remembering that Liszt played for Beethoven and that Schubert stood beside Beethoven's last sick-bed. High patronage and interest gradually took the composer under its care. Austria and Germany recognized him, England accepted him early, universal intelligence became enthusiastic over utterances in art that seemed as much innovations as Wagneristic writing seemed to the next generation. In Vienna, Beethoven may be said to have passed his life. There were the friends to whom he wrote--who understood and loved him. Afflicted early with a deafness that became total,--the irony of fate,--the majority of his master-works were evolved from a mind shut away from the pleasures and disturbances of earthly sounds, and beset by invalidism and suffering. Naturally genial, he grew morbidly sensitive. Infirmities of temper as well as of body marked him for their own. But underneath all superficial shortcomings of his intensely human nature was a Shakespearean dignity of moral and intellectual individuality.

It is not necessary here even to touch on the works that follow him. They stand now as firmly as ever--perhaps more firmly--in the honor and the affection of all the world of auditors in touch with the highest expressions in the tone-world. The mere mention of such monuments as the sonatas, the nine symphonies, the Mass in D minor, the magnificent chain of overtures, the dramatic concert-arias, does not exhaust the list. They are the vivid self-expressions of one who learned in suffering what he taught in song: a man whose personality impressed itself into almost everything that he wrote, upon almost every one whom he met, and who towers up as impressively as the author of 'Hamlet,' the sculptor of 'Moses,' the painter of 'The Last Supper.'

It is perhaps interesting to mention that the very chirography of Beethoven's letters is eloquent of the man. Handwriting is apt to be. Mendelssohn, the well-balanced, the precise, wrote like copper-plate. Wagner wrote a fine strong hand, seldom with erasures. Spontini, the soldier-like, wrote with the decision of a soldier. Beethoven's letters and notes are in a large, open, dashing hand, often scrawls, always with the blackest of ink, full of changes, and not a flourish to spare--the handwriting of impulse and carelessness as to form, compared with a writer's desire of making his meaning clear.

FROM LETTER TO DR. WEGELER, VIENNA

In what an odious light have you exhibited me to myself! Oh! I acknowledge it, I do not deserve your friendship. It was no intentional or deliberate malice that induced me to act towards you as I did--but inexcusable thoughtlessness alone.

I say no more. I am coming to throw myself into your arms, and to entreat you to restore me my lost friend; and you will give him back to me, to your penitent, loving, and ever grateful

BEETHOVEN.

TO THE SAME

VIENNA, June 29th, 1800.

_My dear and valued Wegeler:_

How much I thank you for your remembrance of me, little as I deserve it or have sought to deserve it; and yet you are so kind that you allow nothing, not even my unpardonable neglect, to discourage you, always remaining the same true, good, and faithful friend. That I can ever forget you or yours, once so dear and precious to me, do not for a moment believe. There are times when I find myself longing to see you again, and wishing that I could go to stay with you. My fatherland, that lovely region where I first saw the light, is still as distinct and beauteous in my eyes as when I quitted you; in short, I shall esteem the time when I once more see you, and again greet Father Rhine, as one of the happiest periods of my life. When this may be I cannot yet tell, but at all events I may say that you shall not see me again till I have become not only eminent as an artist, but better and more perfect as a man; and if the condition of our fatherland be then more prosperous, my art shall be entirely devoted to the benefit of the poor. Oh, blissful moment!--how happy do I esteem myself that I can expedite it and bring it to pass!

You desire to know something of my position: well! it is by no means bad. However incredible it may appear, I must tell you that Lichnowsky has been, and still is, my warmest friend (slight dissensions occurred occasionally between us, and yet they only served to strengthen our friendship). He settled on me last year the sum of six hundred florins, for which I am to draw on him till I can procure some suitable situation. My compositions are very profitable, and I may really say that I have almost more commissions than it is possible for me to execute. I can have six or seven publishers or more for every piece if I choose: they no longer bargain with me--I demand, and they pay--so you see this is a very good thing. For instance, I have a friend in distress, and my purse does not admit of my assisting him at once, but I have only to sit down and write, and in a short time he is relieved. I am also become more economical than formerly....