Chapter 17

MANDEVILLE. You remember the great free-soil convention at Buffalo, in 1848, when Van Buren was nominated. All the world of hope and discontent went there, with its projects of reform. There seemed to be no doubt, among hundreds that attended it, that if they could get a resolution passed that bread should be buttered on both sides, it would be so buttered. The platform provided for every want and every woe.

THE FIRE-TENDER. I remember. If you could get the millennium by political action, we should have had it then.

MANDEVILLE. We went there on the Erie Canal, the exciting and fashionable mode of travel in those days. I was a boy when we began the voyage. The boat was full of conventionists; all the talk was of what must be done there. I got the impression that as that boat-load went so would go the convention; and I was not alone in that feeling. I can never be grateful enough for one little scrubby fanatic who was on board, who spent most of his time in drafting resolutions and reading them privately to the passengers. He was a very enthusiastic, nervous, and somewhat dirty little man, who wore a woolen muffler about his throat, although it was summer; he had nearly lost his voice, and could only speak in a hoarse, disagreeable whisper, and he always carried a teacup about, containing some sticky compound which he stirred frequently with a spoon, and took, whenever he talked, in order to improve his voice. If he was separated from his cup for ten minutes, his whisper became inaudible. I greatly delighted in him, for I never saw any one who had so much enjoyment of his own importance. He was fond of telling what he would do if the conven-tion rejected such and such resolutions. He'd make it hot for them. I did n't know but he'd make them take his mixture. The convention had got to take a stand on tobacco, for one thing. He'd heard Gid-dings took snuff; he'd see. When we at length reached Buffalo he took his teacup and carpet-bag of resolutions and went ashore in a great hurry. I saw him once again in a cheap restaurant, whispering a resolution to another delegate, but he did n't appear in the con-vention. I have often wondered what became of him.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Probably he's consul somewhere. They mostly are.

THE FIRE-TENDER. After all, it's the easiest thing in the world to sit and sneer at eccentricities. But what a dead and uninteresting world it would be if we were all proper, and kept within the lines! Affairs would soon be reduced to mere machinery. There are moments, even days, when all interests and movements appear to be settled upon some universal plan of equilibrium; but just then some restless and absurd person is inspired to throw the machine out of gear. These individual eccentricities seem to be the special providences in the general human scheme.

HERBERT. They make it very hard work for the rest of us, who are disposed to go along peaceably and smoothly.

MANDEVILLE. And stagnate. I 'm not sure but the natural condition of this planet is war, and that when it is finally towed to its anchorage--if the universe has any harbor for worlds out of commission--it will look like the Fighting Temeraire in Turner's picture.

HERBERT. There is another thing I should like to understand: the tendency of people who take up one reform, perhaps a personal regeneration in regard to some bad habit, to run into a dozen other isms, and get all at sea in several vague and pernicious theories and practices.

MANDEVILLE. Herbert seems to think there is safety in a man's being anchored, even if it is to a bad habit.

HERBERT. Thank you. But what is it in human nature that is apt to carry a man who may take a step in personal reform into so many extremes?

OUR NEXT DOOR. Probably it's human nature.

HERBERT. Why, for instance, should a reformed drunkard (one of the noblest examples of victory over self) incline, as I have known the reformed to do, to spiritism, or a woman suffragist to "pantarchism" (whatever that is), and want to pull up all the roots of society, and expect them to grow in the air, like orchids; or a Graham-bread disciple become enamored of Communism?

MANDEVILLE. I know an excellent Conservative who would, I think, suit you; he says that he does not see how a man who indulges in the theory and practice of total abstinence can be a consistent believer in the Christian religion.

HERBERT. Well, I can understand what he means: that a person is bound to hold himself in conditions of moderation and control, using and not abusing the things of this world, practicing temperance, not retiring into a convent of artificial restrictions in order to escape the full responsibility of self-control. And yet his theory would certainly wreck most men and women. What does the Parson say?

THE PARSON. That the world is going crazy on the notion of individual ability. Whenever a man attempts to reform himself, or anybody else, without the aid of the Christian religion, he is sure to go adrift, and is pretty certain to be blown about by absurd theories, and shipwrecked on some pernicious ism.

THE FIRE-TENDER. I think the discussion has touched bottom.

III

I never felt so much the value of a house with a backlog in it as during the late spring; for its lateness was its main feature. Everybody was grumbling about it, as if it were something ordered from the tailor, and not ready on the day. Day after day it snowed, night after night it blew a gale from the northwest; the frost sunk deeper and deeper into the ground; there was a popular longing for spring that was almost a prayer; the weather bureau was active; Easter was set a week earlier than the year before, but nothing seemed to do any good. The robins sat under the evergreens, and piped in a disconsolate mood, and at last the bluejays came and scolded in the midst of the snow-storm, as they always do scold in any weather. The crocuses could n't be coaxed to come up, even with a pickaxe. I'm almost ashamed now to recall what we said of the weather only I think that people are no more accountable for what they say of the weather than for their remarks when their corns are stepped on.

We agreed, however, that, but for disappointed expectations and the prospect of late lettuce and peas, we were gaining by the fire as much as we were losing by the frost. And the Mistress fell to chanting the comforts of modern civilization.

THE FIRE-TENDER said he should like to know, by the way, if our civilization differed essentially from any other in anything but its comforts.

HERBERT. We are no nearer religious unity.

THE PARSON. We have as much war as ever.

MANDEVILLE. There was never such a social turmoil.

THE YOUNG LADY. The artistic part of our nature does not appear to have grown.

THE FIRE-TENDER. We are quarreling as to whether we are in fact radically different from the brutes.

HERBERT. Scarcely two people think alike about the proper kind of human government.

THE PARSON. Our poetry is made out of words, for the most part, and not drawn from the living sources.

OUR NEXT DOOR. And Mr. Cumming is uncorking his seventh phial. I never felt before what barbarians we are.

THE MISTRESS. Yet you won't deny that the life of the average man is safer and every way more comfortable than it was even a century ago.

THE FIRE-TENDER. But what I want to know is, whether what we call our civilization has done any thing more for mankind at large than to increase the ease and pleasure of living? Science has multiplied wealth, and facilitated intercourse, and the result is refinement of manners and a diffusion of education and information. Are men and women essentially changed, however? I suppose the Parson would say we have lost faith, for one thing.

MANDEVILLE. And superstition; and gained toleration.

HERBERT. The question is, whether toleration is anything but indifference.

THE PARSON. Everything is tolerated now but Christian orthodoxy.

THE FIRE-TENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of external achievements, but I take it that real progress ought to be in man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what he can produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years ago. The best paintings are several centuries old. We study the finest architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are Shakespeare, Homer, Isaiah, and David. The latest of the arts, music, culminated in composition, though not in execution, a century ago.

THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take a long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is growth toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has reached his height, some other genius will still more profoundly and delicately express the highest thoughts.

HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed by the Calliope.

THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add church-bells and cannon to the orchestra.

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer express ourselves with the bass-drum; there used to be the whole of the Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.

MANDEVILLE. We certainly have made great progress in one art,--that of war.

THE YOUNG LADY. And in the humane alleviations of the miseries of war.

THE FIRE-TENDER. The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted advance in the comforts and refinements of society is the facility with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external accidents of their lives are changed. We have always kept a fringe of barbarism on our shifting western frontier; and I think there never was a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.

THE YOUNG LADY. That is because women were absent.

THE FIRE-TENDER. But women are not absent in London and New York, and they are conspicuous in the most exceptionable demonstrations of social anarchy. Certainly they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there was a city widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization. No city was so beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well ordered for the comfort of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of pandemonium of savagery. Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed its own monuments of civilization. I don't mean to say that there was no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded it, but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how little restraint all the material civilization was to the beast.

THE MISTRESS. I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that pretty much all you have been saying is in effect untrue. Not one of you would be willing to change our civilization for any other. In your estimate you take no account, it seems to me, of the growth of charity.

MANDEVILLE. And you might add a recognition of the value of human life.

THE MISTRESS. I don't believe there was ever before diffused everywhere such an element of good-will, and never before were women so much engaged in philanthropic work.

THE PARSON. It must be confessed that one of the best signs of the times is woman's charity for woman. That certainly never existed to the same extent in any other civilization.

MANDEVILLE. And there is another thing that distinguishes us, or is beginning to. That is, the notion that you can do something more with a criminal than punish him; and that society has not done its duty when it has built a sufficient number of schools for one class, or of decent jails for another.

HERBERT. It will be a long time before we get decent jails.

MANDEVILLE. But when we do they will begin to be places of education and training as much as of punishment and disgrace. The public will provide teachers in the prisons as it now does in the common schools.

THE FIRE-TENDER. The imperfections of our methods and means of selecting those in the community who ought to be in prison are so great, that extra care in dealing with them becomes us. We are beginning to learn that we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infal- lible justice. Perhaps half those who are convicted of crimes are as capable of reformation as half those transgressors who are not convicted, or who keep inside the statutory law.

HERBERT. Would you remove the odium of prison?

THE FIRE-TENDER. No; but I would have criminals believe, and society believe, that in going to prison a man or woman does not pass an absolute line and go into a fixed state.

THE PARSON. That is, you would not have judgment and retribution begin in this world.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Don't switch us off into theology. I hate to go up in a balloon, or see any one else go.

HERBERT. Don't you think there is too much leniency toward crime and criminals, taking the place of justice, in these days?

THE FIRE-TENDER. There may be too much disposition to condone the crimes of those who have been considered respectable.

OUR NEXT DOOR. That is, scarcely anybody wants to see his friend hung.

MANDEVILLE. I think a large part of the bitterness of the condemned arises from a sense of the inequality with which justice is administered. I am surprised, in visiting jails, to find so few respectable-looking convicts.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Nobody will go to jail nowadays who thinks anything of himself.

THE FIRE-TENDER. When society seriously takes hold of the reformation of criminals (say with as much determination as it does to carry an election) this false leniency will disappear; for it partly springs from a feeling that punishment is unequal, and does not discriminate enough in individuals, and that society itself has no right to turn a man over to the Devil, simply because he shows a strong leaning that way. A part of the scheme of those who work for the reformation of criminals is to render punishment more certain, and to let its extent depend upon reformation. There is no reason why a professional criminal, who won't change his trade for an honest one, should have intervals of freedom in his prison life in which he is let loose to prey upon society. Criminals ought to be discharged, like insane patients, when they are cured.

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a wonder to me, what with our multitudes of statutes and hosts of detectives, that we are any of us out of jail. I never come away from a visit to a State-prison without a new spasm of fear and virtue. The faculties for getting into jail seem to be ample. We want more organizations for keeping people out.

MANDEVILLE. That is the sort of enterprise the women are engaged in, the frustration of the criminal tendencies of those born in vice. I believe women have it in their power to regenerate the world morally.

THE PARSON. It's time they began to undo the mischief of their mother.

THE MISTRESS. The reason they have not made more progress is that they have usually confined their individual efforts to one man; they are now organizing for a general campaign.

THE FIRE-TENDER. I'm not sure but here is where the ameliorations of the conditions of life, which are called the comforts of this civilization, come in, after all, and distinguish the age above all others. They have enabled the finer powers of women to have play as they could not in a ruder age. I should like to live a hundred years and see what they will do.

HERBERT. Not much but change the fashions, unless they submit them- selves to the same training and discipline that men do.

I have no doubt that Herbert had to apologize for this remark afterwards in private, as men are quite willing to do in particular cases; it is only in general they are unjust. The talk drifted off into general and particular depreciation of other times. Mandeville described a picture, in which he appeared to have confidence, of a fight between an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus, where these huge iron-clad brutes were represented chewing up different portions of each other's bodies in a forest of the lower cretaceous period. So far as he could learn, that sort of thing went on unchecked for hundreds of thousands of years, and was typical of the intercourse of the races of man till a comparatively recent period. There was also that gigantic swan, the Plesiosaurus; in fact, all the early brutes were disgusting. He delighted to think that even the lower animals had improved, both in appearance and disposition.

The conversation ended, therefore, in a very amicable manner, having been taken to a ground that nobody knew anything about.

NINTH STUDY

I

Can you have a backlog in July? That depends upon circumstances.

In northern New England it is considered a sign of summer when the housewives fill the fireplaces with branches of mountain laurel, and, later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at the front door. This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which has no other means of gratifying itself

In the most rigid circumstances, the graceful nature of woman thus discloses itself in these mute expressions of an undeveloped taste. You may never doubt what the common flowers growing along the pathway to the front door mean to the maiden of many summers who tends them; --love and religion, and the weariness of an uneventful life. The sacredness of the Sabbath, the hidden memory of an unrevealed and unrequited affection, the slow years of gathering and wasting sweetness, are in the smell of the pink and the sweet-clover. These sentimental plants breathe something of the longing of the maiden who sits in the Sunday evenings of summer on the lonesome front doorstone, singing the hymns of the saints, and perennial as the myrtle that grows thereby.

Yet not always in summer, even with the aid of unrequited love and devotional feeling, is it safe to let the fire go out on the hearth, in our latitude. I remember when the last almost total eclipse of the sun happened in August, what a bone-piercing chill came over the world. Perhaps the imagination had something to do with causing the chill from that temporary hiding of the sun to feel so much more penetrating than that from the coming on of night, which shortly followed. It was impossible not to experience a shudder as of the approach of the Judgment Day, when the shadows were flung upon the green lawn, and we all stood in the wan light, looking unfamiliar to each other. The birds in the trees felt the spell. We could in fancy see those spectral camp-fires which men would build on the earth, if the sun should slow its fires down to about the brilliancy of the moon. It was a great relief to all of us to go into the house, and, before a blazing wood-fire, talk of the end of the world.

In New England it is scarcely ever safe to let the fire go out; it is best to bank it, for it needs but the turn of a weather-vane at any hour to sweep the

Atlantic rains over us, or to bring down the chill of Hudson's Bay. There are days when the steam ship on the Atlantic glides calmly along under a full canvas, but its central fires must always be ready to make steam against head-winds and antagonistic waves. Even in our most smiling summer days one needs to have the materials of a cheerful fire at hand. It is only by this readiness for a change that one can preserve an equal mind. We are made provident and sagacious by the fickleness of our climate. We should be another sort of people if we could have that serene, unclouded trust in nature which the Egyptian has. The gravity and repose of the Eastern peoples is due to the unchanging aspect of the sky, and the deliberation and reg-ularity of the great climatic processes. Our literature, politics, religion, show the effect of unsettled weather. But they compare favorably with the Egyptian, for all that.

II

You cannot know, the Young Lady wrote, with what longing I look back to those winter days by the fire; though all the windows are open to this May morning, and the brown thrush is singing in the chestnut- tree, and I see everywhere that first delicate flush of spring, which seems too evanescent to be color even, and amounts to little more than a suffusion of the atmosphere. I doubt, indeed, if the spring is exactly what it used to be, or if, as we get on in years [no one ever speaks of "getting on in years" till she is virtually settled in life], its promises and suggestions do not seem empty in comparison with the sympathies and responses of human friendship, and the stimulation of society. Sometimes nothing is so tiresome as a perfect day in a perfect season.

I only imperfectly understand this. The Parson says that woman is always most restless under the most favorable conditions, and that there is no state in which she is really happy except that of change. I suppose this is the truth taught in what has been called the "Myth of the Garden." Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and re-creates. She is the experimenter and the suggester of new combinations. She has no belief in any law of eternal fitness of things. She is never even content with any arrangement of her own house. The only reason the Mistress could give, when she rearranged her apartment, for hanging a picture in what seemed the most inappropriate place, was that it had never been there before. Woman has no respect for tradition, and because a thing is as it is is sufficient reason for changing it. When she gets into law, as she has come into literature, we shall gain something in the destruction of all our vast and musty libraries of precedents, which now fetter our administration of individual justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not so sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature; being less poetical, and having less imagination, they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make less failures in business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for their flowers which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part with a leaf or a blossom from their family. They love the flowers for themselves. A woman raises flowers for their use. She is destruct-ion in a conservatory. She wants the flowers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, for the Lord on Easter day, for the ornamentation of her house. She delights in the costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She never sees a flower but she has an intense but probably sinless desire to pick it.

It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been thwarted by the accidental superior strength of man. Whatever she has obtained has been by craft, and by the same coaxing which the sun uses to draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees. I am not surprised to learn that she has become tired of indulgences, and wants some of the original rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to which she has been denied and subjected, and especially her condition among the primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a platform of grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is not, unless a better civilization has wrought a change in her behalf, permitted to eat people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything wanting to this picture of the degradation of woman? By a refinement of cruelty she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries who are sent out by--what to her must seem a new name for Tantalus--the American Board.