Part 4

Nor would they content themselves, I fancy, with the negative ground of mere humility. They would have something very decided to say to the wiseacres, who taunt our wives in the agony of tic-doloureux with the statement that their grandmothers knew nothing of neuralgia. "No!" these generous ancients would retort, "that is the residuary legacy of a generation to whom we left a nervous system of worn-out fiddle strings." To such as talk of that woful novelty diphtheria as a crime of the present age, they would point out the impossibility of a race's throat descending to it without tenderness, a race's blood flowing to it without taint, from ancestors who swaddled their necks in fathoms of cravat, and despised the question of sewage. When I had the gout, and could not stand up for myself, those brave _vieilles moustaches_ would stand up for me. "Many a fine old bin of our port," would they exclaim, "has been emptied down through the æons into those innocent toes of thine. I mind me how I smacked my lips over that very bottle whose broken glass now grinds around, red-hot, in the articulation of thy metatarsal phalanges. Dancing at thy fair great-grandmother's wedding, I slaked the thirst of many vigorous sarabands in that identical ruby nectar, which, turned by the alchemy of generations into acid blood, now through thy great toe distils in gouts of fiery torture. I danced;--thou, poor Serò-natus, dancest not, but dost pay the piper."

Suppose that our returning ancestors regarded us in the intellectual and spiritual, as well as the physical aspect, they must find still less reason to put on airs of superiority. If, in the sphere where they have been lately moving, improvement goes on as fast as we believe, they may be expected to wonder that the theological and scholastic training of their own earthly day has not resulted in a present race of imbeciles and fetish-worshippers, or Torquemadas and madmen. With thankful astonishment will they revere that nature whose boundless elasticity and self-repair has brought bright and self-reliant, even though sometimes a trifle too pert and iconoclastic, Young America from loins burdened, through all their period of cartilage, with five days and a half per week of grammar-grinding, a Saturday afternoon of "keeping in for marks," and a seventh day which should have been the Lord's, but was conspicuously liker the devil's.

Woman, religion, and the forefathers are all the victims of a false quality of reverence. The world has immemorially paid them in the coin of lip-service for the privilege of using their sacredness as a yoke. They are defrauded of their true power by the hands that waft them hypocritical incense; bought off the ground where their influence might be precious and permanent, by the compliment of a moment, or the ceremony of a day. We pick up the fan of the first, and shoulder her out of her partnership in our serious business of living. We build temples for the second, that she may not gad about among our shops, or trouble the doors of our houses. In the third, we do superstitious homage to a mere accident of time, and feel free to neglect the genial lesson of humanity which is eternal.

It is impossible not to reverence our forefathers--those grand old fellows who, long before we rose, got up to build the fires, and shovel the sidewalks of this world. The amount of work which they did was immense; great was their poking and their pushing; their thrashing of arms, and their blowing of fingers. If they sometimes made a compromise with their job; if here and there they left the gutters uncleared, or a heavy drift to thaw over under the sun of modern conscience, and flood our streets with revolution; if they built some of their fires with wet wood, which unto this day smokes the parlors, or even the inmost bed-chambers of mankind,--let us remember how frosty the dawn was, how poorly made were the tools and mittens of the period. All honor to their work, and the will with which they went at it! But when we are asked to regret the rising of the sun; to despise a time of day when there are no more fires to build, no more walks to shovel; or, if such anywhere remain, when there are snow-ploughs and patent-kindling to use in their behoof--distinctly No!--a No as everlasting as Mr. Carlyle's, and spelt with as big a capital.

The mistake of that great writer and minor disciple of the Belated-Owl school to which he belongs, naturally arises, not from the over-development of reverence, to which it is generally ascribed, but from a constitutional divorce between the poetic imagination and the power of analysis. The former faculty, by itself, results in impatience with the meaner actualities of life,--a divine impatience in great poets, a petulant in small ones. Lacking the latter faculty, such persons are in the condition of a near-sighted man placed without chart or compass at the helm of a free-going clipper. Making no allowance for the fact that the blemished and the trivial disappear with distance, and, ignorant of the direction in which humanity must steer, they put out with disgust from a shore where every old clam-shell and rotten wreck is as conspicuous to those, at least, who look for it as the orange-groved cliffs, and the fair retiring stretches of greensward, to voyage for some scarce descried Atlantis gemming the horizon ring with an empurpled roundness born of vapor, time, and space. To such, the future might be a noble course to lay; but that lies beyond the horizon, and impatience is not consistent with faith. On, then, on to the farthest visible,--but westward, while the grand fleet of humanity sails last. Into shadow which drowns the petty details of existence,--not toward a shore which shall be reached only by long buffeting and weary watching, whose noble scenery, glorious with all the temples and trophies of the latest age, shall bear unshamed the scrutiny of the full-risen sun.

The application of scientific processes to the study of history has revealed the steady amelioration of the race. The mail of chivalric giants is brought out of romance's armory to the profane test of a vulgar trying on, and, behold, it is too small for the foot-soldier of to-day. Population everywhere increases, while the rates of mortality diminish. The average longevity of the people of London is greater, by something like twenty-five per cent., than it was a century ago. The improvement of machinery is more and more lifting the yoke of physical labor from the neck of man, leaving his mind freer to cope with the higher problems of his own nature and the universe without. Not as a matter of platform enthusiasm and optimist poetry, but of office statistics, do we know that the world is an easier and better place to live in, and that a man is luckier to be born into it, than in the day of the fathers. So much has changed, and changed for the better. That analysis, which the Carlylists lack, reveals still other changes worked by the course of time in the phenomena of the race,--such changes as concern the habits of society, the styles of literature, the systems of political economy and commercial order, the tenets of philosophy, the schools of art, the forms of government and religion. This analysis further reveals that, while all these functions of life are in their nature endlessly mutable, the organic man, from whom, under all variations, they get their _vis viva_, remains from age to age eternally the same. While each successive generation has its fresh, particular business on the earth,--something to do for the race, which succeeding generations will not have the time, even as prior generations had not the light, to do,--something which is wanted right away,--something for which it was sent and for which the whole machine-shop of time had been shaping the material to be worked by its special hand,--analysis discloses that the capital upon which every business is to be carried on undergoes neither increase nor diminution. There is just as much faith, just as much courage, just as much power in the world as there ever was. They do not show themselves in Runnymedes, because Runnymede has been attended to; nor in wondrous Abbot Sampsons, because monkery is mainly cured. They are not manifest in martyred Edwardses, because at this day Edwards could call a policeman; nor in burning Cranmers, because society has made a phenomenal change in her method with martyrs and shuts them in a refrigerator, where once she chained them to a stake. They do not appear in French Revolutions, because the world has grown through a second American Revolution, grander than the first, and a great representative native has plucked Liberty out of the fire without one scorch of license on her garments. They seek no outlet in crusade, for Jerusalem has been made of as little consequence as Barnegat, by the fulfilment of the promise,--

"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet in Jerusalem, worship the Father, ... when the true worshippers shall worship him in spirit and in truth."

I have a little butcher, who is Coeur de Lion in the small. He does not split heads nor get imprisoned in castles, but has the same capricious force, the same capacity for affront-taking, the same terribleness of retribution, and the same power of large, frank forgiveness which belonged to the man who broke the skulls of the Saracens and pardoned his own assassin. I went to school to Frederick the Great. He did not take snuff nor swear in high Dutch, and it was his destiny to be at the head, not of an army of men, but of one hundred as unmanageable boys as ever played hawkey or "fought pillows" in the dormitory. His solution of difficulties was as prompt, his decisions were as inexorable, he had as irascible a temper and as admirable a faculty of organization as his Prussian prototype's. Calvin and Servetus discuss their differences at my dinner-table; the former possesses all his old faith in the inscrutable; the latter all his ancient tendency to bring everything alleged to the tribunal of science, and I may add that Calvin has as little doubt as ever of the propriety of having Servetus cooked,--only he postpones the operation, and expects to see it done without his help. I am acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney, the courtly knight and the melodious poet. The chivalry with which he jousted at Kenilworth and fought at Zutphen are hourly needed in the temptations and harassments of a broker's office, and many's the hard day through which it has borne him with honor. The pen which he devotes to the Muses is as facile as in the Arcadian time,--though the sturdy lance he used to set in rest is substituted by another pen, of the fat office type, consecrated to the back of gold certificates and the support of an unmediævally expensive family.

Looking in all directions round the world, I find the old nobleness,--the primeval sublimities of love and courage, faith and justice, which have always kept humanity moving, and will keep it to the end. In no age has the quantity of this nobleness been excessive, but so much of it as exists is an imperishable quantity. It is a good interred with no man's bones; it is the indispensable preventive of the world's annihilation. Carlyle has been praised for the epigrammatic assertion that nothing can be kept without either life or salt. This is true, but not the whole truth; salt will keep beeves, but as for nations and races which have lost their savor, wherewithal shall they be salted? The fact that mankind survive at all is the proof that ages have not tainted them with putrescence. Things live only by the good that there is in them, and the interests to which they appeal; the fields which open to man, in our own day, are so much vaster and massier than they were in the day of our fathers, that the tax on the activities of the race could not be met by our capital of life if we had lost one particle of the good which supported them.

When I look at the fathers, I recollect that courage and love, faith and justice, have no swallowing horizon, while all that is petty and base succumbs in one generation to the laws of perspective. It is pleasanter thus. At the grave of the old schoolmaster who flogged us, we remember the silver hair and the apple he gave us once,--never the rattan. "We had fathers after the flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence," nothing but reverence, when we leaned with tearful eyes over their vacant chairs. If I have ever quarrelled with my friend, when he can return to me no more, I make up with his memory by canonizing him. The tendency to do thus is among the loveliest and divinest things in our nature. But it is a still lovelier and diviner thing to anticipate the parallax of time and look upon the present with the same loving, teachable, and reverent eyes, which shall be bent upon it from the standpoint of coming generations. He to whom the beauty and nobleness of his own time are, throughout all that he deplores in it and in himself, the conspicuous objects of love and veneration,--who extends the allowance of the dead to the faults of the living,--from whom no personal disappointments can ever take away his faith in the abiding divinity of his kind,--need never fear that his judgment of the fathers will be a churlish and disrespectful one. The only object which such a man can have in recalling the vices and defects of older generations is to establish their kinship with his own, to prove his era's legitimacy against philosophers who find only pettiness in the present and grandeur in the past. If he cannot make them see the good side by which the modern family receives blood from the ancient, there shall not be any bend sinister on his escutcheon because he neglects to show them the bad one, though he would rather vindicate his lineage the other way. To him the organic unity of mankind, throughout all generations, is dearer than the individual reputation of any one of them.

Having the faith of this organic unity he can look at the errors of the forefathers without pain. They lessen neither his love nor his respect for them. Who is there that would care to know king David only as a very respectable Jew, in a Sunday-school book, who was always successful, invariably pious, and passed his time wholly in playing hymns on a harp with a golden crown upon his head? To almost all young readers, and many an old one, the vindictive psalms seem a shocking inexplicability in the sacred canon. The philosopher, however, feels with the illiterate preacher, "It is a comfort to us poor erring mortals, my brethren, to remember that on one occasion even, David, beloved of the Lord, said not only, 'I am mad,' but 'I am fearfully and wonderfully mad?'" Not that it would be any comfort to us if that were all we possess of him; but we also have the record of his getting over it. I once knew a little boy who learned to swear out of the psalms, and it must be acknowledged that of good round curses there is in no tongue a much fuller armory. Conscientious persons, who want to damn their enemies without committing sin, no doubt often sit down and read an execratory psalm with considerable relief to their minds. Not in this spirit do men skilled in human nature peruse the grand rages of the many-sided fighting bard; not because they would cloak their errors with the kingly shadow of his own, do they rejoice that he exists for us to-day just where the rude, large simplicity of his original Hebrew left him, and that tame-handed biography has never been able to pumice him down into a demi-god. They are glad because these things prove him human and imitable. If his stormy soul triumphed over itself; if he could be beloved of the Infinite at a moment when the surges of both outer and inner vicissitude seemed conspiring to sweep him away, then we cease to hear his swearing or the clamor of his despair; and to us, whose modern spirits are not exempt from flood and hurricane, his grand voice chants only cheer down the centuries, and we know that there is love caring and victory waiting for us also in our struggle, since we are not the lonely anomalies of time.

As with David so with all the men of the past,--it gives us no pain to find that they were not a whit nearer perfection than ourselves. We do not regret their superseded customs, nor wish them restored in the living age. He who takes them from the time of which they are a congruous part and seeks to import them into a day which has no explanatory relevance to them, so far from showing them reverence, is like a man who, to compel the recognition of his grandfather's tombstone, strips it of its moss, scrubs it with soap and sand, and sets it up on Broadway among signs and show-cases. Their opinions are not final with us, because every age brings new proofs, and every generation is a new court of appeal. Their business methods are framed upon a hypothesis which does not include the telegraph or the steam-engine. Where a man can persuade his correspondents to send their letters by the coach and their goods by the freight-wagon, he may adjust himself very comfortably to the good old way by which his grandfather made a fortune and preserved his health to a great age. Until he gets his mail weekly and answers it all in a batch, recuperating from that labor by the sale of merchandise, one box to an invoice, he is simply absurd to lament over the rapidity with which fortunes are made at this day, and eulogize the "sure and slow" process by which a lifetime whose sole principle was the avoiding of risks attained the same object. As if the whole problem of life were not how to secure, as quick as possible, all the material good necessary for living, in order to leave the kind free for all its higher functions of self-development and discipline. As if money were not a mere expression of the extent to which a man has subordinated the forces of the world to his own use,--a thing, therefore, which naturally comes quicker to a generation which has taken all the great atmospheric and imponderable couriers into its service!

The true use of ancestors is not slavish; we do not want them for authority, but for solace. If my grandfather could come back, he certainly would be too much of a gentleman to sit down on my hat or put his feet on my piano; and how much less would he crush my convictions or trample on my opinions! He would be equally too much of a business-man to interfere in the responsibilities of any practical course I might take, when he had not looked into the books of the concern, taken account of its stock, or consulted the world's market-list for an entire generation. He would do what any man would be proud to have his grandfather do,--take the easiest and most distinguished chair at the fireside, and tell us night by night, the story of his life. What roars of laughter would applaud his recollection of jokes uttered by some playmate of his boyhood. They would seem so droll to us at the distance of a hundred years, though a contemporary might have uttered them without raising a smile on our faces. What mingling of tears and laughter would there be when he related some simple little family drama,--its pathos depending on incidents as slender as the death of Auld Robin Gray's cows, but like the wonderful song, in which those animals have part interest, going unerringly to the fountains of the human heart! How would we double up our fists, how red would we grow in the face when he told us, in the most unadorned, dispassionate way, about the cruel creditor who foreclosed a mortgage on him and turned him and our grandmother into the street, just after the birth of their first child, our father; and when he came to the passage where the kind friend steps in and says, "here are five hundred dollars,--pay me when you are able," how many girls there would be sobbing, and men violently blowing their noses! If we had belonged to the period of the foreclosure and been next-door neighbors to the mortgagor, the thing might have impressed us simply as the spectacle of a young couple with a baby who couldn't meet their quarterly payments, and were obliged to curtail their style of living. The thing still happens, and that is the way we look at it. But when grandpapa relates it, nothing in the domestic line we ever saw upon the stage seems half so touching. The littlest school-boy feels a roseate fascination hovering around the dogs that went after squirrels with that venerable man when he wore the roundabout of his far-off period; there is glamour about the mere fact that then, as now, there were dogs, and there were squirrels; and as the grandchild hears of the boughs which hung so full, the crisp leaves which crackled so frostily those many, many falls ago--a strange delight comes over him, and he seems to be going out chestnutting in the morning of the world.

What we want of one, we want of all the grandfathers of the race,--their story. Their value is that they take the experience of human life, and hold it a sufficient distance from us to be judged in its true proportions. That experience in all ages is a solemn and a beautiful, a perilous, yet a glorious thing. We are too near the picture to appreciate it, as it appears in our own day, though all its grand motives are the same. We rub our noses against the nobilities and cannot see them. The foreground weed is more conspicuous than the background mountain. When the grandfathers carry it from us, and hang it on the wall of that calm gallery where no confusing cross-lights of selfish interest any longer interfere, the shadows fall into their proper places, the symbolisms of the piece are manifest, and above all minor hillocks, above all clouds of storm, unconscious of its earthquake struggles and its glacier scars, Human Nature stands an eternal unity, its peak in a clear heaven full of stars. We recognize that unity and all things become possible to us, for thereby even the commonest living is glorified.

AT EVE.

AT EVE.

"It is almost time for John to come home, I guess," and the young wife rose from her sewing and put the tea-kettle over the bright fire on the clean-swept hearth. Then she pulled the table out into the middle of the floor, right to the spot where she knew the setting sun would soon shine through the latticed window; for John loved to see the light play upon the homely cups and saucers, and pewter spoons; he said it reminded him of the fairy stories, where they ate off gold dishes. She went about her work swiftly, but very quietly. Once there had been a time when the little cottage rang early and late with the sound of her glad voice. But then a pair of little feet crept over the floor, and a tiny figure had raised itself up by the very table whose cloth was now so smooth and unruffled by the small awkward hands.

When Margery had put the golden butter, the jug of cream, and the slice of sweet honey on the table, she went to the door to look for John. A narrow path, skirted on one side by waving corn-fields, on the other by pastures and orchards, stretched from the cottage down to the broader road that led to the village. The sun was already low in the sky, and threw across the path the shadow of the old apple-tree that stood beside the house. Margery remembered how full of pink and white blossoms the tree had been that spring when she first came here as John's bride, and how they showered down like snow, while now a ripe apple occasionally dropped from the branches with a heavy plump.