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ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
ESSAYS IN PUEITANISM
BY
ANDEEW MACPHAIL
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
(Cfre jftitoergitie $re?£, CamferitJ0e
1905
MAR -
A 0*1
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY ANDREW MACPHAIL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published March IQ05
NOTE
The five essays which are contained in this book were first read before a company of artists who had the traditional antipathy of their class to- wards the spirit of Puritanism. Any one who should chance to read these writings is asked to keep that local circumstance in view. Else he might think that they betray the spirit of the amateur, of the dogmatist, of the pedagogue ; that is, if they be regarded as a wanton excursion into the precincts of literature. The persons to whom these pieces were addressed were of the opinion that Jonathan Edwards manifested the spirit of Puritanism in the pulpit ; that John Winthrop showed that spirit at work in the world; that Margaret Fuller's career was the blind striving of the artistic sense for expression ; that Walt Whitman's conduct was a revolt against the false conventions which had grown up in his world ; and that John Wesley endeavoured to make religion useful to humanity once more.
" Et quand personne ne me lira, ay je perdu mon temps, de rrCestre entretenu tant d'heures oisifves a des pensements si utiles et agreables : Combien defois m'a cette besogne diverty de cogitations ennuyeuses f " - — Montaigne, ii, 18.
CONTENTS
I. Jonathan Edwards . . . . 1
II. John Winthrop 69
III. Margaret Fuller 151
IV. Walt Whitman 221
V. John Wesley 275
JONATHAN EDWARDS
JONATHAN EDWARDS
There used to be a presumption that theology- had something to do with religion, and, inasmuch as religion undoubtedly has to do with God, the three, religion, theology, and God, were insensibly brought together into an unnatural trinity. It was not long before theology dominated the com- pact ; its devotees at once proceeded to define and limit the sphere within which Providence might exercise its beneficent influence, and religion was left entirely out of consideration. It is difficult in any compact for all the persons, if one might so name them, to sustain the ideal relations of equality in power and glory, and in this case the theologians went too far. The astrologers never undertook to say upon whom the sun should shine and the rain fall; there have been rain- makers, of course, but they lost all credibility long before the theologians lost theirs.
We must appreciate the strength of the belief that there is an essential association between theology and religion, if we would have any understanding of the times in which that belief
4 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
prevailed ; and we must not be deterred by the strangeness of the idea, for doubtless we ourselves possess notions which are equally curious. AVe hold that literature has a dominating influence upon life; that science has some bearing upon religion ; that art has something to do with mor- ality; that there is a perception of right and wrong, of good and evil, in nature.
It is a lack of seriousness on our part which prevents our appreciating the full import of any given system of theological speculation. AVe have come to look upon all systems as being alike interesting but useless ; we think there is a great gulf fixed between belief and conduct, that in fact these have little to do with each other. Nothing could be more fatal to the theologians.
Before we can begin to understand any system of theology, we must enter into the situation of the unhappy men who propounded and propagated it : we must appreciate their distress of mind at the eternity of punishment which was impending over their fellows, if not over themselves ; and we shall usually find an opposing theory in the nature of a revolt against this melancholy deduc- tion. All schemes in fact were an attempt to ex- plain or alleviate the unhappy situation in which men found themselves in this world, and if the
JONATHAN EDWARDS 5
f ramers did not get beyond a guess at the explana- tion, upon the whole, they certainly did some- thing towards instilling into the minds of men a hope of better things.
The earliest philosophic observation of which we have any record is that which took note of the lack of sequence between conduct and its reward. The wicked have always appeared to flourish and the good have been discouraged. This was the problem which Job had to face, and doubtless patriarchs even older than he must have discussed the anomaly in their pastoral leisure. This af- flicted patriarch could only take refuge in a blind faith that the judge of all the world would do right, a conclusion which did more credit to his piety than to his understanding. If we could assign a date to this observation, we should have a valuable mark in the intellectual and moral progress of the race ; if we say the Book of Job was written in the time it purports to describe, we admit the greatest miracle of literary history, that so profound a work should be produced in times so primitive ; if we assign to it a compar- atively recent date, we are face to face with another miracle, that the poem should be projected into the past with such artistic completeness. It is as if we were to discuss whether "Julius
6 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
Caesar " was written in the time of Elizabeth or in the first century. The very fact that there should be such a question testifies to the mar- vellous nature of the work ; but we are not here specially concerned with that, save in so far as it affords evidence of the profound attention that has always been fastened upon this problem of good and evil.
The only escape these old philosophers found from the dilemma was to predicate that this life is not all, that there is in the future some system of reward and punishment ; that, in short, the injustice which men behold here is not eternal. The Jews never got beyond a vague outline in the elaboration of such a system. The most poignant of their poets, the writer of Ecclesiastes. perceived that one event happened to all ; as it happens to the fool, so it shall happen to the wise : that the wise man dies even as the foolish ; that his days are sorrow ; that a man has no preeminence over the beast ; as the one dieth so dieth the other, and all go into one place : all are of the dust and shall return to the dust again. This the wise man cannot endure, and he takes final refuge in the spirit returning whence it came, after man had performed his whole duty ; which is about as far as we ourselves have got.
JONATHAN EDWARDS 7
The failure or success of the individual, his happiness or misery, were all observed to depend upon circumstances so fortuitous and so entirely beyond his control, that no principle of justice could be discovered in the events which happened to him. But human life must be looked upon in the mass and extent of its endurance, not as the junction of the past and the present in the indi- vidual. As Carlyle observed, " You must give the thing time." The great Hebrew preacher had previously recorded a similar observation in the words : " Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil ; though a sinner do evil an hundred times and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that in the end it shall not be well with him."
It would be a large matter even to take note of all the attempts which have been made to read the riddle, and it will be enough here to follow that straightforward course of reasoning which led to the definite, if not very comforting, conclu- sion embraced in the doctrine of Calvinism. The Calvinist falls back upon the will of God for a solution. If God allows the wicked to triumph for a time, that is proof that in the end they will be condemned. Certainly, no one can deny the fact
8 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
of their present prosperity. And this will of God was only made known to the Calvinist by re- velation ; but, as we enter more deeply into the matter, we are filled with the desire that, if any revelation at all had been made upon the subject, it might have been one which should leave the matter clearer than it was before. The trouble about all revelations is that they reveal so very little that people of plain common sense can understand ; and certainly such persons should have been considered in view of the likely event of their asking questions.
One who is fond of taking note of the mental structure of his race continually finds embedded in it isolated fragments from the past, which are entirely incapable of being moulded or modified by the more recent flow and growth. In the re- ligious part of the nature these fragments are peculiarly large and plentiful, and singularly in- tractable to any influence that might make for development. Many of the earliest instincts of the race, which in the outset were in no sense of a religious character, still persist in the domain of religion and are of considerable force.
The earliest organization of society proceeded upon the patriarchal theory that the eldest male ascendant was supreme in his own household.
JONATHAN EDWARDS 9
His dominion extended over life and death ; and in the case of his children and all that was theirs it was unbounded. Indeed, the quality of son- ship differed very slightly from the condition of slavery. Of course, this theory was abandoned sooner or later : by some races sooner than by others ; and its place was taken by other consider- ations, such as locality, or the advantage of union for the sake of success in attack or in defence. The patriarchal theory persisted longest in the Semitic race, or at any rate in that portion of the race occupying Lower Asia, from which we have derived most of our ideas of an organized reli- gion. In common with all ancient societies they regarded themselves as being descended from an original stock, and that was the only bond of union which they could comprehend. Their politi- cal idea had not yet extended even to the breadth of being provincial. These Hebrews observed that other races had outgrown or cast off this patriarchal mould, and they explained this wil- ful abandonment of the birthright by the Esau legend, on the grounds of inherent viciousness of nature, a practice which is still common enough amongst religious people.
The Calvinist based his religion upon this patriarchal theory. He adopted the Patriarch of
10 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
the Hebrews as his God. His conception of reli- gion was to placate a power higher than himself ; and he never got beyond the fear of that power, however much he might try to persuade himself that his conduct was determined by a dislike of hurting the susceptibilities of that Omnipotent Patriarch. The whole system of Calvin, then, takes its roots in the disobedience of Adam. The Calvinist God may have been all-powerful ; but power is not now held to constitute a valid claim to obedience. The whole progress of the human race bears witness that at times the main duty of man is disobedience. Adam's act at worst was a revolt against authority. "Whatever grounds there may be for visiting the punishment for moral faults upon the children to the third and fourth generation, there are none for so dealing with political faults. Not Sulla, nor James the Second, nor Judge Jeffreys would claim as much. But it is worth while enquiring a little more closely into this fault of Adam, taking the ac- count as it appears in the only record open to our inspection, namely, in those Semitic writings which have obtained so wide a circulation in the Western world. In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis we are told — in addition to many other things into which it is not necessary
JONATHAN EDWARDS 11
here to enter — that two trees were planted in a garden, one the tree of life, the other the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam was forbid- den to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the injunction was accompanied by the threat that if he did so eat, he would die that very day. After the advent of the woman, the serpent came upon the scene and categorically denied the validity of the threat, and volunteered the further information, that if they did eat of the fruit they should attain to a knowledge of good and evil. These simple persons followed this suggestion, and we have it upon the author- ity of the chief character in the scene — not to designate him by a holy name — that the opinion of the serpent was verified in every particular. The man became "as one of us to know good and evil," and that day he did not die ; on the contrary, he was turned out of the garden, lest he might eat of the tree of life also, and so live forever. Of course it is not pretended here that this is a true account of what really occurred, nor is it alleged that anything did occur, but this is the best information which we possess.
The only actor who came out of this transac- tion with unimpaired credit was the serpent, and, like many another speaker of the truth in oppo-
12 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
sition to authority, he got very little thanks from either side for his interference. Certainly, Adam, and we too, if we had any liability in so doubtful a transaction, might complain that we had not been treated with frankness, that there was an arriere pensee, a mental reservation in the opera- tion, inconsistent with a character which is en- titled to absolute obedience. That the Hebrews of lower Asia accepted this solution of the pro- blem of the origin of good and evil has nothing to do with us ; that persons of much higher intel- ligence in some things should accept it as the basis of a system involving the very serious matter of eternal punishment is a phenomenon of philosophic interest.
All systems of theology then were explanatory, and nearly all were humanitarian. But a place of reward was held to imply a place of punish- ment, which is a " new thing," in spite of the statement of the great writer before mentioned to the contrary. A full consideration of this fasci- nating subject would lead us far into esehatologv, which is a hard word in itself, but one who med- dles with theology at all feels bound to employ hard-sounding terms. This " doctrine of last things," as revealed in the Jewish Apocalypses, of which there were many, some of authority and
JONATHAN EDWARDS 13
some of very feeble force, was always a product of national or personal distress : the writings of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah will serve as par- tial examples. In these weird revelations two different views prevailed. According to one set of seers only favoured persons were to rise from the dead ; according to another all would come into their reward or punishment. In the Revela- tion, to which the same name is attached as that borne by the fourth Gospel, both suppositions are tastefully combined. As a matter of fact the Hebrew Scriptures contain no clear note of an immortality either of reward or of punishment. That was left for a Jew of Alexandria, but his Book of Wisdom never attained to any wide celebrity. Saint Paul himself seized upon these opposing views and certainly did not leave the matter any clearer than he found it. The situa- tion in which the early Christians found them- selves was so distressing that they were continu- ally turning their eyes for relief to the last things, and at one time it became so acute that many persons were troubled, lest when they awoke from their sleep of death, important events should already have taken place which might affect their future state.
Before pronouncing upon Calvinism we must
14 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
follow the lines upon which it is constructed. We cannot read the " Divina Commedia " with any intelligence unless we understand the geo- graphical and other relations of its various local- ities, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Para- diso. We cannot enter fully into the mystery of "Paradise Lost," or rather "hell discovered," unless we bring Milton's measuring apparatus with us. It was Milton and not Calvin who made a reality out of this evil shadow of good, and he did it with such elaboration of plan and precision in detail, that it appealed instantly to the imagi- nation and does so yet appeal. Calvin knew a great deal about men and this world ; about any other world he had no better information than we ourselves. That was left for Milton, and we have his conception in plan and section ; the empyrean occupying the upper area, with the throne at the zenith surrounded by flaming mists, a crystal floor dividing it from the lower hemi- sphere or chaos, and in a kind of antarctic region, hell proper. Nor are we left without a scale of measurement. The distance from the nadir of the starry universe to the upper boss of hell gate is shown to be equal to its own radius, which makes the distance from the hell gate to the heaven gate equal to the semi-diameter of the
JONATHAN EDWARDS 15
universe. These measurements may be correct, at any rate it is difficult to disprove them, for recent progress in mensuration has been along other and less speculative lines. If we were in- clined to push our studies further into this fas- cinating science, we might express the relation of distances in more abstract terms ; we could scarcely make them more precise.
The Calvinistic designers reverted to the method of the writers of the Apocalypses, who prophesied a great deal upon very inexact in- formation, though they appear to have possessed in that relation a marked advantage over the sweet and gentle Master, who occupied himself very little with such abstruse calculations. In short, while they disclose little real knowledge of the place itself, we have full information upon the ease, one would almost say, the certainty, of arriving at it. Yet for the comfort of those who may be disturbed, the truth is here revealed. In- stead of being a matter of divine revelation, this theory of an unending punishment for the viola- tion of the majesty of an Infinite Being has no better basis than an obscure passage in Aristotle's Ethics : Aquinas, Sum. Theol., quaest. xcix, art. 1 ; Calvin, Instit, 111, 25 ; Enc. Brit, vol. viii, p. 535.
16 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
All the authorities upon eschatology proceed according to the strictest principles of the math- ematicians ; they do not know what they are talking about, and they do not know if what they are saying is true. They begin with an assump- tion ; they end with an abstraction. So long as the theologians keep the discussion on this high plane no harm is done. When they attempt to reduce it to the level of common sense, we can only define our position and endeavour to secure our own safety by taking refuge in this : We do not know how the thing is, and if you tell us we shall not believe you. We have hardened our hearts. We are in the unhappy situation of the Wampanoag truth-seeker who was trying to com- prehend the doctrine of the Trinity, that three is not three but one. He lamented bitterly that he had no skill in the deeper parts of the arithmetic.
The controversy between theologians and men of ordinary common sense amounts to this : we talk about two different things in the same terms. There is nothing more harmless than such speculation, so long as those who do not care for the exercise are not reasoned into the one place or the other, a contingency not so re- mote as one would think, if one meddles with Calvinism at all ; for of all systems of theo-
JONATHAN EDWARDS 17
logical speculation, Calvinism has the greatest pre- tension to reasonableness. It does possess more than a pretension to reasonableness, for it ad- heres to the strictest method of logic; all other systems are reduced to an absurdity by the final admission that some higher power may intervene to vitiate their conclusions ; Calvinism does not blink at its own conclusion, which is that once a man is reasoned into hell, there is an end of the matter.
To state the proposition baldly, the final situa- tion of man depends in no way upon his own actions, good or bad, or upon himself in any way, but upon the arbitrary exercise of a power quite outside his influence. Nothing could be more shocking than such a doctrine stated in simple language, though a thing may be shocking and yet be true. Indeed there is something to be said for this view of the case, when we consider how little the situation of ordinary men, even in this world, is influenced by what they do or what they abstain from doing. Their situation depends upon their nature, their place and station of birth, and upon other circumstances beyond their control. Most men at the end of their lives will agree, that, good or ill, they could not have done much otherwise.
18 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
When we state the case less baldly, as we must, the reasonableness of Calvinism will be more apparent. The first man, Adam, was created in the image and likeness of God, in a condition of purity. From this he fell, and involved his decendants in his fall. Every man and woman is born with a due share of this inherent guilt, and, therefore, liable to all the pains of hell for- ever. Every child has in itself the seed of ini- quity, which in due season will bear its fruit. This fruit of the flesh is amply described by many writers and faithfully catalogued by Paul in his arraignment of the Galatians. To enable God to promulgate a plan of salvation out of his mere good pleasure, his son was permitted to take upon himself the punishment due to mankind. There was the way of escape ; but man must avail himself of it. We must first have faith : by which is meant, not the acceptance as true of things which our judgement tells us are false, but a will- ingness to accept the remedy. From this follow. in due sequence, justification by this imputed righteousness, adoption into the chosen number, sanctification or renewal into the original ima
It must be noted, however, that this initial faith is not of ourselves, it too is a gift conferred only upon certain persons. God, knowing all things
JONATHAN EDWARDS 19
in advance, knows upon whom this gift shall be conferred ; therefore, a class of elected persons is at once established. This reasoning is faultless ; the only escape from its relentless result is to question the data, and that we may safely do, for Calvin is now dead a long time. We may affirm that there never was any such system of Scotch or Jewish bargaining ; we may go so far as to admit that even if men were created in God's image, certainly God never was created in the im- age of Calvin, and we need not now be deterred by the fate of Servetus, who used words to that effect. The thing that strikes us as incomprehensible is the relative inefficiency of the doctrine of Cal- vinism. If we admit that God took any trouble at all about the matter, we cannot help wonder- ing why he should have chosen so inefficient a method for carrying out the beneficent purpose, when another and apparently less complicated procedure might have been adopted. At this late day it is no time to be suggesting any better plan, since, no matter how good it might be, its benefits could not be made retroactive any more than the benefits of Calvinism. When the system of Chris tanity was being elaborated by Saint Paul, this objection was thought of, and the benefits of the system were conferred by a simple
20 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
process upon those who had died before its discovery. The living were baptized for the dead. In Calvinism there was no such loop-hole. The tree had to lie as it fell, and the Scotch Reform- ers proclaimed in no uncertain language, that he who believed any otherwise should be damned, which is tolerably plain speaking.
It is hard for us to realize how these abstrac- tions should have come to influence men's char- acter and conduct. In reality, they did not much influence them. What a man believes is not the result of reasoning and conviction ; his belief arises from his nature or type of character, and has nothing to do with the laws of evidence, save in the minds of rigid scientific enquirers. Even in such cases they rarely get beyond an intellec- tual assent, and that is a long way short of con- viction, which is bound up with the emotions, and alone has any motive power impelling a man to act. Belief has so little to do with the intellect that it is in the least intellectual persons we find it most firmly fixed, and in very extreme cases we call it hallucination or delusion ; persons so gifted with the capacity for belief we class as insane. In a lesser degree it is the most ignorant persons who have the firmest belief upon ques- tions about which they cannot possibly possess
JONATHAN EDWARDS 21
any information, — upon the action of drugs, the future state, the habits of animals which they have never seen, the influence of the moon upon the weather, the Tightness or wrongness of eccle- siastical and political doctrines.
A man can doubtless arrive at true views in cases where truth is accessible, but, in such high matters as those pertaining to religion, his in- stincts and training lead him to certain inevitable conclusions with which truth has nothing to do. His reason will not be bound by anything so poor as the laws of evidence. By experience one may come to know that his strongest religious convic- tions are false, that the belief which he cherished most dearly has only a low degree of probability at best ; but fortunately this same experience teaches him also that it is hardly worth while discarding these conceptions for others, whose probability may be in a slight degree higher, and so he is content to leave the matter at that.
In reality, a man's conduct is always higher than his belief, and it is of rare occurrence that acceptance of a creed extends into the region of action. Even in Scotland, the straitest sect of the Calvinists behaved towards their neighbours much as if they really were not convinced that " the bulk of mankind " was reserved for an eter-
22 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
nity of suffering. They pretended to believe it, but in reality they did not. As Voltaire said of the Basques : " When they converse they pretend to understand each other, mais,je nen crois rien."
Epicureanism at no time flourished in Rome ; Stoicism had an abundant entrance and was glorified, as one might say. These stiff, austere people were attracted by the stiff and austere character of the creed, and their character was made thereby still more stiff and austere by being confirmed in its natural bent. It was a strong belief suitable for strong men. The people of Scotland somehow acquired the belief that by taking much thought they could find out what God and man is ; that by a purely intellectual process they could think out a religion of their own, and that this occupation was their main ob- ject in life. It does not, however, advance the position much to say that the adoption of Epicu- reanism by the Athenians, Stoicism at Rome, or Calvinism in Scotland, was a result of the pecu- liarity of the national character, for this national character is ever the last refuge of the bewildered enquirer ; yet the fact is there.
Calvinism has been so closely identified with Scotland that it is commonly looked upon as be- ing the mainspring of national action. In reality
JONATHAN EDWARDS 23
that form of religion was adopted merely because it appealed to the genius of the people, as Epi- cureanism appealed to the genius of the Greeks, or Stoicism to that of the Eomans. It was pre- cisely what the people of Scotland required: it was in abstract form ; it could be pursued to the bitter end ; it provided an explanation of the con- duct of more favoured people ; and it afforded some comfort in contemplating their prosperity. Finally it began to colour the character of the nation, and to dominate the intellectual life of the individual, so much so, that in the exquisite poem of their own Caroline Lady Nairne, so full of confidence in all one would love to believe of a future life, they can only find matter for wonder at the grounds for the " assurance " of the dying woman.
It is now time to enquire what manner of man this Calvin was. We have the word of Kenan for it that " Calvin was the most Christian man of his time," which of course is not saying much ; and one would like a better authority than Renan upon so subtle a matter. If Calvin's only claim to remembrance was his acuteness in propound- ing and his skill in solving theorems in divinity, he would long ago have been submerged in the flood of common sense that has been so steadily
24 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
rising. His claims are founded on other grounds entirely. Since the time of the founder of Chris- tianity no one has exercised so profound an influ- ence upon the minds of men as Calvin, and no single book was ever followed by such tremendous consequences as his " Institutio Christianae Relig- ionis." It contained only six chapters ; it was pub- lished without a name ; the author was not more than twenty-six years of age when it appeared.
Calvin's great work was that he first revealed to the world the worth and dignity of the indi- vidual, which is after all the essence of Puritan- ism and the heart of Emerson's doctrine. He proclaimed that man is called of God, that he is the heir of heaven, and that these are the only claims to consideration any one may advance. In view of this glory, common alike to king and noble, to the weaver at the loom, the trader in his shop, the toiler in the field, all worldly and tem- poral distinctions faded into nothingness. "When a man gets into his head that he is the son of God, that he is co-heir with Christ, his elder bro- ther, he is in a bad frame of mind to admit that the right of king or of priest is more divine than his own. It was by running counter to this be- lief that Charles the First learned at Cromwell's hand "that he had a bone in his neck."
JONATHAN EDWARDS 25
Calvin proclaimed that all power, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and temporal, proceeded from the individual, in whose heart and conscience it had been deposited by God himself. That doctrine forced its way through three revolutions in Eng- land, and stands untouched till this day in every nation which answers to the name of modern. Spain had a lesson in it not so very long ago ; Eussia is now at school; and one or two other peoples are ripe for instruction. Calvin defined the issue : Was it to be the monarch or the indi- vidual? The Covenanters decided against the kings and drew the sword : " No, it shall not be, and forthwith they put on their steel bonnets." The sword was out for a century and a half be- fore this question, so simple to us, was answered in the Toleration Act of William the Third, and in the Peace of Westphalia. Also, there were a few words said upon the subject under a tree in Massachusetts in the year seventeen hundred and sixty-five and in succeeding years.
This doctrine of the sovereignty of the individ- ual, subject only to the sovereignty of God, was the last lesson of the Renaissance. It was learned by those who had ears to hear, wherever they might be. Classes were formed here and there. There was a running together of learners from
26 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
all over Europe, to Geneva, to Zurich, to Edin- burgh, and to Frankfort. The teachers were now in one school, now in another, and at this time the master mind in Frankfort was John Knox, him- self a pupil of Calvin. It is worthy of note that the main object of the Frankfort exiles was, in the sneering words of an opponent, " to erect a church of the Purity." An offshooot of this church, which Calvin planted and Knox watered, was afterwards transferred to the austere New Eng- land soil, where it grew in stature and in favour, let us hope with God, if not with men.
It was only in Scotland that people obtained a complete " apprehension," as they would say themselves, of the profound subtlety of Calvin's theorem in divinity. They made it their own. They concerned themselves with the salvation of their own souls and the inferential neglect of the souls of less favoured persons, and these matters seemed of so much importance to them that they overlooked the far reaching political results of Calvinism.
The English Puritans on the other hand seized upon the very heart of Calvin's doctrine — the freedom of the individual. They eared nothing for the freedom of the will, so long as the man was free ; it was a matter too high for them.
JONATHAN EDWARDS 27
That has been the habit of Englishmen, ever since they landed in Britain, at least : a perception of facts, an inaccessibility to ideas. We have the authority of one of themselves for that. Life to them has always meant order and justice ; fight- ing and force the readiest means to these ends ; death and the future mysterious things inspiring awe, but incapable of being understood.
To this practical and experimental temper, the tenets of Calvin, the freedom, dignity, and sover- eignty of the individual, appealed with peculiar force. The doctrine of the Jesuits, at that time being diligently propagated, curiously enough, fitted well with this mood. The national temper was rising. The war with Spain was over. The House of Austria had been vanquished. The pre- tensions of the Papacy were abated. In the contest with the allied temporal and spiritual powers, the temporal and spiritual alliance had got the worst of it. The Tudors, who arose upon the ruins of the old feudal and religious fabric, finished their great work with Elizabeth. The Stuarts were an experiment. The soul of the Englishman was not a dogma ; it was a fact. Ee- ligion was now a matter for the individual. His soul was his own. There was the battle-ground between good and evil, between Heaven and Hell.
28 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
This was the doctrine of Calvin, and in the English mind it developed into Puritanism as we know it ; in the Scotch mind it just developed into Calvinism.
It would require a large book to describe all the influences, up to their source, which finally descended to form the broad spirit of Puritanism. That could be attempted, too, but it would de- mand a display of wisdom which might not be tol- erable. The thing was a growth, and who shall say exactly how even the flower in the crannied wall does grow. Without being wiser than the subject demands, it may be affirmed that the Puritan spirit was first considerably developed under the Tudors, and ended by upsetting that broad-founded house as it has upset everything since under which it has thrust its growing roots. Then the Stuarts tried an experiment with it, but they were a mere incident ; they came too late. Calvin and the Bible had been there before them, and Cromwell in good season put an end to the Stuarts' foolish business. The events which led up to the apparent failure of that cause, which had seemed assured at the death of Elizabeth, and again at the violent death of Charles, are the commonplace of history. At any rate the minds of men faltered at the failure, yet they looked
JONATHAN EDWARDS 89
over the seas where they might make the experi- ment anew.
Coming to this exodus, the greatest since the English left the shores of the Baltic, it is neces- sary to insist again npon the distinction between Calvin ist and Puritan, which is as clear as the distinction between the Scotch and English char- In the judgement of the Calvinist the unit of all organized society is the man himself. elected from all eternity, called of God. fore- ordained to eternal life or otherwise, as the case may be. The Puritan looked more to the fact that each man is his own priest and every such group of men a church, independent of all but of God. supreme in matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. The Pilgrims went a step further, and desired to add the control of temporal affairs to these functions and so make a "new experiment in freedom."
The church in Xew England never was a purely religious institution. Very few churches in those days were ; at least it is now difficult to per what religious purpose they could have served. It was purely political in its practices and aims, and was identical with the state : membership in the church was essential to citizenship : in the phrase of the time there could be no divorce
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between things civil and things religious ; and the utmost freedom which was allowed to those who were unwilling to adopt this view of the case was the liberty of going out into the wilderness, though it is on record that even this poor privi- lege was denied to some men and to some women too.
The success of Puritanism or of any great cause came through a series of reverses. The theocratic government — and, therefore, oligar- chic, for it is not to be expected that God will reveal his eternal purposes in connection with the erection and support of meeting-houses, the tax- ing of chimneys, and the impounding of cattle equally to all men — soon broke down utterly, and profanity overflowed the land like a second flood, as all the writers of the period testify. This tes- timony of preachers to the immorality of their times and to their own imperfect nature must be accepted with some reserve. The Apostle Paul accounted himself the chief of sinners, and if we had independent testimony bearing upon the con- dition of the Court of Herod, we might adopt a more lenient view than that promulgated by John the Baptist. It is always the dweller in the wil- derness who knows most about the immoralities of the Court ; it is to such places as Exeter Hall
JONATHAN EDWARDS 31
and Madison Square Presbyterian Church that we must look for an intimate knowledge of the conduct of important personages in this world and in the two dominions of the world to come.
It is easy to find independent confirmation of the pessimistic views entertained by the moral- ists upon the spiritual condition of New England at the end of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. It was one of those strange periods of dulness and stupidity which at times overtake the human race ; but if one went into this matter at length, he would be intruding in a field which Jonathan Edwards has made peculiarly his own, and claiming for himself an intimacy of knowledge with the Worker of Evil which no man in these days is willing to admit. That great philosopher described the evil agent as " the greatest fool and blockhead in the world," and gave as an instance of his wrongheadedness the sending of the people to New England, where he hoped they might be forever beyond the influ- ence of the gospel ; but then anything Edwards did not like was of the Devil.
If this view of the exodus across the sea be correct, and the identity of Satan as the great Pilgrim be acknowledged, it would appear that he acted with the subtlety peculiar to him in
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such cases, in view of the kind of gospel the emigrants were likely to receive, before the time of Edwards. The more closely we enquire into the religious condition of New England at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, the more are we inclined to applaud the far-sightedness of this great emigra- tion agent. There was little in New England to encourage a natural religion ; everything was in favor of the supernatural variety and it assumed the most fantastic forms. This supernaturalism quickly developed into the grossest and most degrading superstition, witchcraft, demoniacal possession, sexual immorality, and compulsory attendance upon church. The time was ripe for a great reformer, a great moralist, and a great preacher, and all three arose in the person of Jonathan Edwards.
Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703. He came of Welsh stock. His father was a graduate of Harvard College, an ordained minister for sixty years and a man of learning. His mother was a daughter of Sol- omon Stoddard, minister in Northampton, a woman " surpassing even her husband in native vigour and understanding." This must have been so, for he relegated to her all domestic affairs, a
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practice one could wish had been more generally- followed in New England. Jonathan was the fifth child, the only son in a family of eleven children, and all were brought up in accordance with the well-established traditions of a minis- terial household. At twelve years of age, the boy was writing letters to refute the idea of the material nature of the soul ; at thirteen he went to Yale College, and graduated at the age of seventeen. The next two years he remained at New Haven to prosecute his theological studies till he received a call to a newly organized church in New York, where he remained eight months, and then returned to Yale to take up the duties of tutor, at the time of the secession of so many of the teaching staff to the Episcopal Church. There he remained till he was twenty-three, and all this time he was exercising himself in the art of writing. Much of this writing was merely transcription, some of it a catching and setting down of the philosophical tissue which was flying in the air.
The nature of Jonathan Edwards was religious and not philosophical. The two are not identical or even complementary ; they may be in contra- diction. If we say his temperament was poetical, that would be a cryptic saying, in face of his own
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declaration that he had " a constitution in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flac- cid solids, vapid, sizy and scarce fluids, and a low tide of spirits, often occasioning a kind of child- ish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence, and demeanour." These are commonly regarded as the ingredients of a philosopher or theologian, but poets too have their own pecu- liarities. He had intuitions as a poet has ; his thought was resolved into emotion, and though he was continually striving to convert it into a logical form he was never able to distinguish be- tween emotion and thought. In any case we shall be safe in affirming that he had the apocalyptic sense.
A study of the child life of New England re- veals some of the strangest facts in psychology. The abnormal was the normal, and hysteria passed for the greatest good sense. The misery attendant upon the witchcraft delusion, the sto- ries of early conversion, accounts of the precocity of infants of four years of age, who indulged in secret prayer, in private religious meetings with children scarcely older than themselves, tor- menting themselves with visions of hell fire, — all these are a revelation of the morbid condi- tions which arose in that atmosphere. The child
JONATHAN EDWARDS 35
Edwards was one of these. He was continually engaged in looking into his little mind and form- ing resolutions for amendment of the faults he discovered there : " never to do, be, or suffer anything in soul or body but what might tend to the glory of God ; to live with all my might while I do live ; never to speak anything that is ridicu- lous or a matter of laughter on the Lord's day, and frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God."
From childhood Edwards's mind had been full of objections to the doctrine of God's sover- eignty ; and it seemed horrible to him, as it has done to many maturer minds since, " that God could choose whom he would, leaving them eter- nally to perish and be tormented eternally in hell." At last he became happy in the accept- ance of this strange dogma and spent his life in urging its acceptance upon others. This convic- tion was reinforced from time to time, when he resorted to secluded places, " to meditate upon the things of God, and indulge in reverie in the woods of an early morning ; to look into his own heart which seemed like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell." At such times, happily, " God's glory was revealed to him through the whole creation ; His excellency, wisdom, purity, and love seemed
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to appear in the sun, moon, and stars, in the clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers, and trees, in the water and all nature." On one occa- sion, when he had ridden into the woods — he had now attained to middle life — and alighted, " to walk in divine contemplation and prayer, he had so extraordinary a view of the glory of the Son of God and his wonderful grace, that he remained for upwards of an hour in a flood of tears and weeping aloud." All this was charac- teristic of the gentle mystic and not of the rigid divine.
Edwards was now ready for his work, and his opportunity came. In 1727, being in his twenty- fourth year, he was ordained at Northampton as the colleague of his grandfather, Solomon Stod- dard, who was in his eighty-fourth year, a man so venerable and of so much authority that the Indians referred to him as the Englishman's God. The new incumbent began his career by leading the life of an ascetic : he dwelt by himself and studied thirteen hours a day ; he abstained from all amusement and from any excess of food, and rarely visited his parishioners. This method of life only lasted a few months, for the young minister married a girl of seventeen with whom he had become acquainted at New Haven. Her
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name was Sarah Pierrepont ; her father was pro- fessor of moral philosophy at Yale, and on her mother's side she was descended from Thomas Hooker, the founder of the church in Connecticut. Edwards's habit of thought is revealed in a letter he wrote about this young lady some years before they were married, at a period it would seem before he had made her acquaintance. Unless upon the previous assumption that he was a poet, it is hard to guess the source from which he drew his information.
" They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him ; that she expects after a while to be received up where He is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into Heaven ; being assured that He loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from Him always. There she is to dwell with Him, and to be ravished with His love and de- light for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for it, and is unmind-
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ful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections ; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct ; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness and universal benevolence of mind ; especially after this great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly ; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her."
One result of this marriage was a family of eleven children, ten of whom came to maturity ; one of the daughters afterwards became the mother of Aaron Burr, who " murdered " Alex- ander Hamilton in a duel, became vice-president of the United States, and finished his career in a trial for treason on account of a foolish con- spiracy to set up a southern dominion.
The minister appears to have ruled well his own household. He was " thorough in the gov- ernment of his children, and bent them to his will ; he was a great enemy to all vain amuse-
JONATHAN EDWARDS 39
ments and pernicious practices." It is well that it was Aaron Burr the father, rather than the son, who broke into that well-regulated house- hold.
We shall leave at one side for the moment any consideration of Jonathan Edwards as a philo- sopher, though with the strange irony of events, it is upon this aspect of his character that chief attention has been fixed. He was a great preacher of righteousness; yet if we look only in his printed sermons, we shall not get very far in understanding the secret of his influence upon contemporary and subsequent life. The first edi- tion of Edwards's works, including his sermons, was issued in Worcester, Massachusetts, in eight volumes, in 1809, and was afterwards republished in four volumes. Both issues are still accessible ; also Dr. Dwight's edition published in New York in ten volumes, in 1829, and a London edition of eight volumes by Williams in 1817, with two supplementary volumes by an Edinburgh firm. There is also an edition in two large volumes by Bohn, which contains a good portrait.
There are very few persons now living who lay claim to having read largely of Edwards's ser- mons, and there are fewer still who have actually done so. They are hard to master, though an
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excellent discipline, and it is only by a process of slow growth that one brought up in the Calvinist faith arrives at the perception that there can be such a thing as nonsense in a sermon. Preaching must be a dull business where the speaker is not sure of making himself understood ; it is much worse when the preacher himself does not under- stand what he is saying ; and when his utterances are reduced to writing, the confusion is worse confounded. When a man talks about things he does not understand, to people who do not un- derstand the terms he is using, it is easy to guess what lucidity there will be in his reported utter- ances. A writer with a fine style can interest a reader in things which in themselves possess no interest whatever ; but Edwards had no fine style ; his style is more involved than his matter, and though he could write bad Latin, that did not qualify him for writing good English. As Haz- litt observed in his own ironic way, it is easy to be a great preacher if a man is allowed to start from no data and come to no conclusions. The same observation of course is true about writers also.
Edwards seized upon a theme and made it his own. He knew nothing of this world, and very little of heaven or of men ; he made people be-
JONATHAN EDWARDS 41
lieve that he knew a great deal about hell and devils. As a matter of fact he knew no more about hell than we do, and had no greater inti- macy with the Devil than we have, but he had the capacity of interesting people in the fearsome theme, because he himself was intensely con- cerned with it. Satan was God's emissary, and the fear of hell his chief weapon for reducing men to obedience and instilling into their hearts love for his being and a recognition of his bene- volent purposes.
Jonathan Edwards was a great preacher and a great moralist by reason of his hatred of sin. He held himself aloof from the things of this world, and rejected the concerns of this life. Engrossed in exalted matters, he was not tempted himself, and could not appreciate the power of temptation upon others. His own zeal for morality was so great, his piety so deep, his principles so fixed, his ideals so pure, that he had no sympathy with the lower concerns of other people nor any tolera- tion of the things that interested them. Occupy- ing this exalted position, he gave way to pride ; unchecked by the opinions of his fellows, he be- lieved he was right when he was surely wrong ; his mind became harsh and bare when it should have been genial and rich, for these qualities
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only come from a tried and varied life. To Edwards, the soul was nothing but moral. In- tellect and the artistic sense did not touch it, save in so far as they had to do with morality, and intellect and the artistic sense we know have not necessarily anything to do with morality. He demanded grandeur and purity alone, caring nothing either for beauty or for richness.
The normal mind appreciates certain things in nature and draws its own conclusions from them. That was how the Greeks arrived at their notions of religion. The Calvinists, and Edwards with them, found the source of religion in the mind, not in the world without, and they say they know how it was implanted there. All reasonable men agree that there is a moral principle in the human nature, a desire to do right, or at least a dislike of doing wrong. We do not claim to know how it got there, and if any one tell us we shall not believe him. The most we are willing to do is to make the feeble admission, along with Sir Leslie Stephen, that nearly all men go so far as to desire to do right, and that there are very few to whom wrong-doing is a positive pleasure.
The fatal error in Edwards's doctrine, and in the Calvinists' too, is their explanation of the forgiveness of sin. Not the blood of any sacrifice
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can atone for it, nor the fires of the Calvinist hell purge away its stain, In the portentous words of Bishop Butler, " things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be." It seems more difficult in these days than in times past for men to discover the eternal purposes of God, and lay bare the methods of divine procedure. We have some reticence in affirming what God can do and what God cannot do, but we shall be well within the mark in as- serting that God himself cannot forgive sins in any such rough and ready, good-natured method as has been attributed to him. The healing of the sick, the raising of the dead to life, the arrest of the elements in their course — all these we can pretend to understand. But the divinest thaumaturgy of all is the conversion of evil into good. That is the only sense in which God can forgive sin, and it is by the conversion of evil into good that he reveals in the highest his in- finiteness of power, of patience, of mercy, and of justice, and it requires an eternity of time to com- plete the transformation. If it were not so, evil in the end must triumph over good, and that we do not believe, for we could not believe it and live. However, the value of this fear of hell is not to be despised as a moral agent, for in all
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times the average conception of religon has been to placate a power not ourselves. Certainly, Ed- wards's parishioners in Northampton received the full benefits of this moral agent, and it was not a bad device in so far as their minds were won over to serious things.
All writing about Jonathan Edwards is the merest trifling if one do not give some account of the part he played in the great revival that was coincident with the times in which he wrought. The present writer has lived through two of these manifestations ; as a detached observer, it is true, — in the earlier one on account of youthf ulness ; in the later, on account of hardness of heart or other incapacity. And these revivals too were associated with a still earlier one, and that in turn by tradition was directly traceable to what is known in evangelical circles as the Great Re- vival of Edwards. The most casual reader of history is struck by the frequent occurrence of these strange upheavals of the moral nature, at one time manifesting themselves by wholesale crusades against some fanciful infidel, by the burning of heretics, and again by the harassing of priests and the destruction of churches. At rare intervals they have taken the form of an awakening and a reformation of the individual
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character, as was the case in the great movement with which Wesley had to do.
However these revivals may be described, — as " a sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees," as " an outpouring of the spirit," as " a troubling of the waters," — at bottom they have been due to a revolt on the part of humanity against the accumulation of evil under which at length it felt itself to lie. They have always occurred when the people were seized with a great idea ; and in the case of the revival which is called "great" the dominating idea was the immediate association of the divine spirit with the soul of man. That idea arose in the mind of Jonathan Edwards with new force. Calvin had fixed a great gulf between God and man, yet even he made an attempt to bridge it by the work of the Spirit ; Luther endeavoured to bring the two into some kind of communion through the medium of devout feeling ; it was left for the Puritan churches to insist upon proof that the gulf had been bridged, and to Edwards to preach the doctrine of the immediacy of God, the same which Paul preached on Mars Hill, that "He is nigh unto every one of us." This then was the great work of the New England preacher, and it was taken up in due time by Wesley and
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Whitefield in England, and finally by Emerson and Whitman and the Unitarians in America. Who then shall say it was not a great work ?
Whilst the fervour lasted, there was much confusion : the minds of many men and women became disordered by excessive fear and concern. When they were convinced of the fate in store for them, they did not accept the situation calmly, but lay in agony, with wild outcries, and an in- ward fear that was unutterable. The pastor found nothing unusual in this manifestation of concern ; for did not John fall at the feet of Jesus as one dead? did not Jacob dislocate his thigh? and did not the disciples toil all night? Some few are said to have received an assurance that their fears were groundless, that they were safe from the divine vengeance ; and a man in that happy situ- ation is not apt to bear himself with humility ; indeed he is liable to take his stand behind a new- found security and presume that he may sin with impunity. However that may be, we soon find Jonathan Edwards confessing " that many of these high professors were fallen into great im- moralities, that their conversation was more in keeping with the character of a sailor than of a Christian, and that they were manifesting an incorrigible wildness in their behaviour."
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The reaction had come. The people of North- ampton had been told that "the bulk of man- kind was reserved for burning," that " innocent as children seem to us, they are not so in God's sight, but are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers ; " that they themselves, those decent village people, " were all over deformed and loathsome as a filthy worm, little wretched despicable creatures, vile insects risen up in con- tempt against the majesty of heaven and earth ; " but these statements did not receive any general acceptance. One man, however, did believe what he heard, and he adopted the sensible procedure of cutting his throat. Edwards took it as a mat- ter of course that " persons should murder them- selves under religious melancholy, who would not have done so had they remained in heathen dark- ness ; " but if all the people had believed, there would not have been trees enough in Massachu- setts whereon to hang themselves. They listened with more or less apathy, just as children, who are insensible to the sin and misery and sorrow which are in the world.
That is ever the fate of all appeals to the emo- tions; the stimulus must be increased, but at length the healthy nature will reassert itself. So long as Edwards was content to deal with sin in
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general terms, no one took offence, but when he undertook to apply his epithets to individuals, they took it for incivility, and all, good and bad, save twenty out of two hundred, united to turn him out of the community which he had served for twenty-three years. Yet it must have been with a sense of relief that they witnessed his departure. There would be peace, at least so long as they remained in this world, and that was something. They were content to let the Devil have his own way for a little ; probably familiarity with that important New England personage had bred con- tempt ; yet it must have brought consolation to the exile, to know that some of his parishioners who had been most zealous in stirring up strife were afterwards stricken with remorse, and even went so far as to apply to themselves the subject- matter of the imprecatory psalms.
The situation of the dispossessed minister was one of difficulty. He was past middle life ; he had a wife and ten children dependent upon him, and he was without means. Some help came from Scotland in the way of books and words of encouragement to continue the controversy, which perhaps was not the best advice. A call soon came from the church in Stockbridge, a frontier settlement composed entirely of Indians, and there
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Edwards went in 1751, under appointment from the Board of Commissioners for Indian Affairs in Boston, and with some support from England. This interest in the Indians was a form of exag- gerated sentimentality peculiar to the time, and it was fostered by all of those who took up the " Return to Nature " cry, raised by Rousseau and the poets of the eighteenth century, who were more gifted in folly than any poets before or since. Under its influence both Wesley and Whitefield had gone to preach in Georgia.
There is something irresistibly comic in the idea of Jonathan Edwards being ordained as a missionary to the Indians. Amongst the older writers it was a favourite theory that the Indians would readily be won over to the Christian reli- gion, and would accept with unquestioning faith their account of its mysteries. They were led to this conclusion, an erroneous one as it afterwards proved, by their misconception of the nature of the Indians and of the nature of Christianity also. This wild offspring of Adam's degenerate seed were able to comprehend the doctrine of the Jesuits in so far as it could be expressed in im- ages ; they never even got to the length of under- standing pictorial representations, because their knowledge of art did not extend to the subject
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of drawing on plane surfaces. To them a saint drawn in profile was only half a man. One con- vert apostasized as soon as it was revealed to him, through a more profound knowledge of ex- egesis, that the sword of the spirit was not pri- marily intended for the rending asunder of the joints and bones of his enemies, and another lost all consolation from the Christian religion when it was borne in upon him that the pains of hell were reserved for members of his own tribe also, and it might be for himself as well. It is no won- der then that the savages found the religion of New England too high for them, and if their new missionary had spoken his mind freely upon the subject of their future state, it would not have been more tolerable to them than it had been to the inhabitants of Northampton.
In the selections from the unpublished writ- ings of Edwards, by Gossart, we have the skele- ton of a sermon which he preached to his new charge through an interpreter. The subject was worthy of the occasion, and the treatment was after the best manner of the author of the M Free- dom of the Will." Calvinism from the mind of Edwards, through the mouth of an interpreter, to the mind of the North American Indian, is an ap- palling thing to consider ; yet the new missionary
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did not fail in his duty. He divided and sub- divided his subject ; he elaborated and condensed, and yet it is doubtful if his hearers comprehended the full import of his doctrine any better than we do.
The history of Indian affairs at Stockbridge was pretty much like the history of Indian affairs in other parts of the United States before and since, a record of peculation, oppression, and abuse. Against these Edwards made good head- way and drove the offenders from the field, but at the end of two years his congregation had van- ished further into the forest, and he was once more relieved from his charge. These years, how- ever, were years of " pleasure and profit " to the philosopher. He had leisure for writing, and the more he wrote " the more and wider the field opened before him." It was here he wrote and published the " Freedom of the Will," and his treatise on the " Nature of Virtue," and " God's Last End in the Creation of the World." Here also he wrote his famous work on " Original Sin," and besides these performances he had leisure to meditate upon a great matter. This was a history of the Redemption. It was to be a "body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of a history." It was to begin and
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end with eternity, and all great events were to be viewed sub specie aeternitatis ; heaven, hell, and earth were to be the scenes ; it was to in- clude " all divine doctrines, showing the admir- able contexture and harmony of the whole." Such a production would have been a fairly marvellous feat, but it never came to anything. All persons who write much have such visions of grandeur, but fortunately they never proceed very far to- wards the realization of them.
From these happy labours Jonathan Edwards was called in 1757 to be the official head of Princeton, then as now the earthly seat of all authority in the Presbyterian religion of the United States. He occupied the position for less than three months, and died on the 22d of March, 1758, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, as a result of inoculation with the virus of smallpox.
It yet remains to turn to that side of Ed- wards's nature which was essentially philosoph- ical. Many of the speculations with which the old philosophers tormented themselves appear to the ordinary man as so much rubbish. He thinks there is no use bothering with them, because he knows that, in what used to be called philosophy, the only certainty is that any given proposition is probably false. In some cases the probability
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may be high, and in others low, but when the thing is likely to be equally true and equally false, he thinks he might as well be pitching cop- pers. Many of these problems we have already solved to our own satisfaction ; in the words of Dr. Johnson, we know the will is free and that is the end of it ; some we are content to leave in obscurity, as Dr. Johnson also was obliged to do, when the revelation he was about to make upon the future state was interrupted by an untimely visitor ; about others we have no means of know- ing, and the remaining ones have no interest for us. But it has not always been so. There was a time when men had a passion for enquiring into those things which the Germans call the uncon- ditioned, about which nothing can ever be learned, and to leave aside those things of which the truth may be ascertained by diligent enquiry.
With the singular irony of events it is upon his philosophic speculations that the fame of Jonathan Edwards rests, and according to the measure of philosophers he was of no mean rank. The subjects he treated were as profound, his method as obscure, his course of reasoning as sin- uous, his conclusions as unintelligible, as those of any pioneer into the Teutonic mysteries. It does not interest us now whether the will be free
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or not, or what may be the nature of true virtue ; no one now defends or attacks the proposition of original sin, or claims that one is sometimes three. It may be so, but we have other things to bother about ; yet a mind that was interested in these subtilties and resolute to deal with them must always possess a profound interest for us. It is, therefore, worth while observing the work- ings of the mind of Edwards upon these sub- jects, leaving at one side as much as possible any consideration of the subjects themselves.
The earliest manifestations of Edwards's philo- sophic activity were revealed in his fourteenth year in " Notes on the Mind." These early notes contain the germinal thought of all Edwards's later philosophy, and deal with the will and its freedom, ideas abstract and innate, causation and the association of ideas. In his doctrine of ex- cellency one finds an agreement with Plato's con- ception of the good ; in his doctrine of the one substance, he is in agreement with Spinoza ; and his proclamation that the universe exists only in the mind of God is precisely that of Malebranche. Such expressions as " bodies have no existence of their own," " all existence is neutral," M the existence of all things is ideal," " matter is truly nothing at all, strictly and in itself considered,"
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" I had as well speak plain, space is God," are almost in their entirety a reproduction of the philosophy of Berkeley. Space may be God, but even so, the definition does not go very far towards clarifying our conceptions of either the one or the other.
If Edwards between the ages of fourteen and seventeen had elaborated such a body of doctrine as is revealed in his " Notes on the Mind," that would have been a record in precocity, and his biographers claim that he did so, on the ground that there is no evidence that he had read any of Berkeley's writings. These notes were written up to the year 1819 and perhaps later ; the " New Theory of Vision," the " Principles of Human Knowledge," and the " Dialogues," had been pub- lished several years earlier by Berkeley. There is another fact : Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College, New York, was dur- ing Edwards's career at college a tutor at Yale, and he was a warm friend and ardent follower of the great English idealist. At any rate there was something in the air, and at that time the interchange of ideas between the old world and the new was as complete if not so swift as it is now. If we assume — there are some things we cannot prove — that the lad was informed of the
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speculations of Berkeley, we avoid the admission of a miracle, which is always a desirable thing; but we must still wonder that so young a child should have taken so profound an interest in them as to put them in his own words, and that was a miracle in its own way. There is no dif- ficulty in assuming that the young philosopher had access to the writings of Malebranche, for the " Recherche de la Verite " had then been before the public for forty years ; two good trans- lations into English had been made before 1704, and Norris had worked over the material for his " Theory of an Ideal World " at least as early as that.
It matters little what other sources of sugges- tion he possessed, for, speaking absurdly, Locke's writings were in the hand of every schoolboy, and Locke had boasted to Lady Masham that he himself had read Descartes and Spinoza, and that what he read had been intelligible to him. Edwards acknowledged freely his indebtedness to Locke ; he makes no reference to his obliga- tions in other quarters, but we must bear in mind that he was of a reserved nature, and after some pages of cipher writing he adds : " remember to act according to the proverb, *a prudent man concealeth knowledge.' "
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Locke has been the source of more inspiration than that which Edward derived from him ; in- deed nearly all the good and much of the evil that occurred in the eighteenth century is trace- able to the wisdom and common sense, the calm reasonableness and reverence for facts of this great philosopher. The French Revolution was the logical deduction from his postulate that the ultimate sovereignty of a people rests on a virtual consent or contract to be governed. Of course the French went too far, as the Calvinists also did, in the destruction of the wicked ; the English alone can be trusted to stop short of absurdity in pushing conclusions home, because the English mind has a contempt for pure reason, a hatred of abstractions which are contrary to common sense, a distrust of speculations which do not fit in with some rule of thumb by which they have been working for three or four generations. Ethics and philosophy and even theology they think must be kept in their place, along with steam- engines, macadamized roads, and spinning-jennies, and all are to be brought to the same test of experi- ence. That is why the English philosophers have been kept from working mischief, in their own country at least.
But Edwards never got so far as to develop a
58 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
harmonious system. To him the works of Hobbes and Hume were only corrupt books, and yet in making virtue a second object of life, without knowing it, he fell into agreement with the utili- tarian theories of Hume, Bentham, and Mill ; his theory of the Will is now held only by professed agnostics, and by a few who call themselves Christians.
I shall speak in another place of the value of the mathematical method in solving historical problems. The analogy between mathematics and history is very close. There is a method of analy- sis by which relations are deduced amongst quan- tities by considering the relations existing between infinitesimal variations in those quantities ; that is to say, by the consideration of infinitesimally small quantities we may attain to finite results. The edifice of history is built up stone by stone, but from absolute lack of material, insignificant as that material may appear to be, there must be wide gaps in the structure. It is a favourite occu- pation of beginners in the integral calculus to prove strange things by the use of that method of analysis, that one is equal to three and three to one ; but the fallacy lies in the improper em- ployment of the symbols denoting Nothing and Infinity. The relation which exists between the
JONATHAN EDWARDS 59
diameter and the circumference of a circle is indi- cated by a symbol and cannot be completely expressed in any terms, words, or figures of which we have any knowledge. Every intelligent boy has amused himself in seeking a fuller expression of that relation by the addition of more decimal places, and always with the belief and secret ambition that by searching the thing could be found out ; but with more mature knowledge he is obliged to fall back upon the symbol. Jona- than Edwards had faith that he could express in set terms relations which can only be expressed by symbols, and he confused the symbols denot- ing Infinity and Nothing. That is why he has proved strange things.
In the text of the " Essay on the Trinity," as recently published by Professor Fisher, there are fine examples of the adaptation of the mathemat- ical method to the solution of " theorems in divin- ity," from which one illustration will serve : " In order to clear up this matter, let it be considered that the whole divine office is supposed to subsist in each of these three, namely, Gr., his under- standings, his love, and that there is such a won- derful union between them, that they are after an ineffable and inconceivable manner one in an- other, and as it were predicable one of another ;
60 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
as X. said of himself and the R, I am in the F. and the F. in me, so the F. is in the Son and the S. in the F., the H. Gh. is in the F. and F. in the H. Gh., the H. Gh. is in the S. and the Son in the H. Gh., and the F. understands because the Son is in him, the F. loves because the H. Gh. is in him, so the Son loves because the H. Gh. is in him and proceeds from him, so the H. Gh. or the divine essence subsisting is divine, but under- stands because the Son, the divine Idea, is in him." Edwards from this formula would con- clude : Q. E. D. We may be permitted to sub- stitute our own conclusion : " Which is absurd." We may also question the propriety of reducing the Lord Jesus Christ to the terms L. J. X.
One might be convicted of ignorance — and that justly — if he did not give expression to the suspicion which has been in the minds of some for the past half century, that Jonathan Edwards was tinctured with heresy. The thing is unthink- able to any but Unitarians ; it is as if one were to say that the Pope was not a Catholic. The most malignant of these disseminators of doubt was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who has since gone to his own place. It was alleged that an unpub- lished manuscript existed in which was revealed the true relation existing between the various
JONATHAN EDWARDS 61
Persons in the Trinity, a matter which Edwards refused to disclose in his published writings. The legends which grew up around this manu- script would be long to describe. Some pretended to have seen it, but no two persons could agree as to what they had seen, or recognize the thing when they saw it again. Some who had access to the writing affirmed that it was in two parts, a comparatively simple observation, one would think ; others held that it was divided only " in fact but not in form " into two parts, and when put to the question they could only make the feeble admission that on second view they " recog- nized " the document but could not " recall " what they had read of it on previous occasions. That hesitancy of recollection is not wonderful to one who reads the manuscript in its present published form. Whether the document acquits Jonathan Edwards of heterodoxy or not, I do not pretend to say, — Professor Fisher thinks it does, and one is willing to take his word for it, — but certainly this mysterious manuscript whicfi be- came so singularly involved with the persons of the Trinity still "leaves the matter in a state of obscurity."
The situation developed by Edwards was a seri- ous one. He began with the sovereignty of God
62 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
and the sinfulness of man ; he showed how deserv- ing of eternal punishment all mankind was ; he described a place which was in every particular most suitable for the purpose; and finally, near the end of his life, he wrote a great book to prove that no man had any choice as to where he should spend his eternity. The truth of the matter is that the argument won instant favour, because it dealt a heavy blow at the Arminians, who held the will to be in equilibrium, and it assisted men like Dr. Chalmers " to find their way through all that might have proved baffling and transcendental and mysterious in the peculiarities of Calvin- ism."
For the moment the Arminians were staggered and Edwards's posture of defence was unassail- able ; but in the course of time they found that the ground on which he stood was unsafe, because it was shifting. His definition of the will at one moment was " that by which the mind chooses any- thing ; " and again, " that by which the mind de- sires or inclines to anything." Between u choice " and " inclination " a great gulf is fixed. This may be a mere " nibbling " at his argument ; but if Edwards himself were to rise from the dead, lie wrould admit that, inasmuch as his argument is in large part based upon a purely idiosyncratic
JONATHAN EDWARDS 63
interpretation of Scripture, it must come to the ground. The dictum of Saint Paul is no longer recognized as sufficient foundation for the airy fabric of a metaphysical system ; as the German theologian observed, " I have read what Paulus says on the subject and I do not believe him." We are content, then, to leave at one side his ethical and metaphysical speculations as being merely of literary interest. They may be true; we have no means of knowing ; but they are of no further interest to us.
But Jonathan Edwards's influence in the sphere of morality is of supreme interest to us as reveal- ing his own personality and the nature of the people who came under its sway. It is as a preacher of righteousness, not as a philosopher, that he appeals to us, though we must admit that his philosophical reduction of transactions to abstract formulae inevitably gave form to his doctrines of morality.
In American literary history all appreciation has been based largely upon purely "idiosyn- cratic grounds," as Emerson said of Margaret Fuller's criticism of the plaster casts in the Boston Athenaeum. In the case of Jonathan Edwards again we are met with the same indiscriminating praise and blame. Over his grave one may read
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to this day an inscription in Latin, it is true, tes- tifying that he was second to no mortal man. Of course, one does not go to tombstones in search of truth, yet the view there established is in keeping with much that one reads elsewhere. Another writer says that since the time of Plato there has been no life more simple and imposing in grand- eur than that of Jonathan Edwards. Robert Hall regards him as the " greatest of the sons of men ; " another eminent divine was accustomed to look upon him as belonging to some superior race of beings ; and Chalmers, with his peculiar fecund- ity in words, writes that he esteemed Edwards as the "greatest of theologians, combining in a degree that is quite unexampled, the profoundly intellectual with the devoutly spiritual and sacred, realizing in his own person a rare harmony be- tween the simplicity of the Christian pastor and the strength and prowess of a giant in philo- sophy." As a corrective to this nonsense we may set down the opinion, which is also probably nonsense in its own way, of President Stiles of Yale College, as recorded in his diary : " "When posterity occasionally comes across Edwards's writings in the rubbish of libraries, the rare characters, who may read and be pleased with them, will be looked upon as singular and whim-
1
JONATHAN EDWARDS 65
sical as in these days are admirers of Suarez, Aquinas, or Dionysius the Areopagite."
This prediction of President Stiles has been fairly well verified. The philosophical writings of Jonathan Edwards have long since gone into the rubbish of libraries, along with much other philo- sophical rubbish, it may be added ; his sermons merely move men to scorn or mirth. Wherein, then, consists the secret of the power which Edwards exercised and does still exercise ?
He had a great and a good nature ; he lived a great and good life ; he was under the domination of great ideals, and his life was entirely detached from the things of this world. This great nature was the product of his Celtic inheritance, made serious by his more immediate Puritan ancestry and his solemn environment. He saw things which other men did not see, therefore he was a seer; he spoke for them, and was a prophet. He aroused them from habits of sloth and sensu- ality to a perception of serious things. True, the means he employed was the fear of hell, yet at times fear is the only moral agent of very much value, a means of grace of which this generation unfortunately is deprived.
One thing yet remains to be said — said again. Though Jonathan Edwards is dead, he yet speaks
GG ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
to us, and the message comes clearer from his dis- ciples than it came from him. His son expanded the doctrine of the efficacy of the atonement, and his grandson, Timothy D wight, by his preaching, turned back that mingled tide of atheism and deism which proceeded from France early in the last century. Nathaniel Emmons lived for ninety- five years and was engaged in actual ministerial work for fifty-four ; he trained fifty-seven pupils in his own family, and through them propagated the doctrine of disinterested love which he de- duced from Edwards's treatise on the u Nature of Virtue." How he did it we do not know. Samuel Hopkins disseminated the same views upon the obligation to love ourselves and our fellow men, and through the work of 'William Ellery Chan- nfng and his friends, the thing grew into the great humanitarian movement which, beginning in Newr England, spread over the whole nation and is yet spreading.
The only real good which ever comes to hu- manity is that which arrives by way of the emo- tions, and emotions arise out of a condition of mind. When the present devices of philanthropy shall have had their day, and their futility shall have been demonstrated, some great teacher will rediscover the old truth that salvation lies in a
JONATHAN EDWARDS 67
right condition of mind ; he will awaken the peo- ple and revive in them those emotions which are religious.
The old name for a revival was an awakening, and Jonathan Edwards awakened the people thoroughly. Once awake they could be trusted to find a way out for themselves. The path they followed has not been precisely the one which was marked out for them by the great divine, but it led in a new and right direction. To turn the people anew and aright is the greatest work that any man can accomplish, and it is for this supreme reason that the name of Jonathan Edwards is held in remembrance.
n
JOHN WINTHROP
JOHN WINTHROP
In dealing with the personality of John Win- throp, let it be understood that he lived at a time in the world's history when men had convictions upon subjects in regard to which we have none, and that their conduct was shaped by beliefs which do not influence us. These convictions had to do chiefly with what they caDed religion, a term which we shall continue to employ in the sense in which they understood it, laying aside our own preconceptions or conclusions as to what religion really is.
We, in these days, have the instinct for doing right, or, as Jonathan Edwards defined it, "a rectitude, a fitness of benevolence to the soul and the nature of things ; " we have the dislike for do- ing wrong even more highly than our fathers had, but in matters of religion we do not possess any- thing more than what that great divine described as " mere notional knowledge." The atmosphere in which we live is so free, the field is so wide and open, that we wander whither we will, with no outside force to drive us into this corner or into
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that. We know how hard it is to prove a thing, and that after all our conclusions may be wrong. Why then should we suffer or make others suffer for a conclusion which at best has only some de- gree of probability in its favour ?
Before notional knowledge can bear much fruit it must be vivified by emotion. A man may hold the belief in a general way that the celebration of the Mass is, or is not, an idolatrous performance, and according to his custom he may abstain from, or assist at, its celebration. If by compulsion his habitual practice is interfered with, then his re- ligious emotion is aroused, and a whole continent is aflame. That is the story of every religious war. The passion for religion is dormant in us. Nothing has occurred this century past to arouse it ; but it stirs uneasily at times, and only requires some rude shock to awaken it to full fury. It is not dead but sleeping.
No task to which the historian can set his hand is so difficult as the correct estimate of a situ- ation which has become involved in religious controversy, because in it the factors are so numerous, and the things which are low and the things which are high are so subtly mixed. The task has in itself all the difficulties inherent in the attempt to ascertain the truth about any
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event, whether occurring in times present, or in times past, and to it is added the problem of deal- ing with truth and falsehood uttered in passion.
" Truest poetry is most feigning " — we have the authority of the greatest of poets for that ; and the same observation is largely true of that form of writing which is called historical. Indeed, most history is most lying, and the mean between two lies is not always the truth. The makers of historical novels have reduced history writing to its legitimate conclusion.
This difficulty of arriving at the truth of matters which have happened in times past has long been a favourite subject of reflection, even for historians themselves, but they have not gone to the length of admitting the impossibility of the task. What, after all, is historical truth ? There is, of course, something like it, something that does duty in its stead ; and the most that can be claimed is that the thing is a theory of history, as theology is a theory of God.
The fact of the matter is that the truth about things past cannot be ascertained. No two persons^ will agree about the occurrence of an incident in a football match ; how then can more than two persons agree about the series of events which is called a battle, or the sequence of events which
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is called war ? No person can tell the whole truth about anything ; if two persons be employed upon the task, the chance of arriving at the truth is exactly halved. If historians are incapable of ascertaining the truth about the things which they have seen, how shall they tell us anything reliable about the things that interested past generations of men ? If the physician has some difficulty in arriving at the diagnosis of a case when the patient is alive, what chance is there, even with the assistance of a pathologist, that his judgement will be correct after their material has fallen into dust? All written history then is merely a probable or plausible explanation of what occurred. Instead of the historian revealing the past, his history only reveals the man who has written it, his race, nationality, politics, religion,
# temperament, and character. An historian is counted. great in so far as he can make the past to live ; but if he can make it live he can also make
<S it lie. Historians are dramatists. They choose their characters. They decide beforehand upon the effect they intend to produce and adjust their narrative accordingly; u for," as Montaigne observed, " since the judgement leans to one side. they cannot keep from turning and twisting the narrative according to that bias."
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A new way to approach history is by the mathe- matical method. A mathematician cares nothing for truth ; he cares only for the relation of the factors whose value he does know, or for the re- sults that will come from certain assumptions which he has made ; and, if a mathematically minded person were to apply himself to history, he would see at a glance that in dealing with historical events he should have to employ the method of assumption. He would devise some symbol to represent the truth of the case, which he would probably designate by the letter T ; he would let t equal the time elapsed since the al- leged occurrence of the incident, and n the num- ber of narrators, h the coefficient depending upon circumstances, and m a function varying directly with the narrator's motive for lying. Out of these elements, if that be the proper term to employ, an ingenious historian might construct a tentative formula for the solution of historical problems.
The value which should be assigned to these various factors would have to be determined by what the mathematicians call "investigation." The factor &, which is the coefficient of circum- stance, would prove to be the most indefinite element ; but one might begin by assigning to it
7G ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
a certain range of value, as between .01 for Froude, to take an example, and .001 for Cotton Mather. The range between what is considered reliability and open mendacity would, however, not be very great in any case. Enough has been said to indi- cate the method, as the mathematicians them- selves say, and it is put forward in all modesty as a basis for a new essay in history. Whatever be the ultimate result of the plan, it will prove a fascinating exercise, assigning a value to these coefficients in the case of the various representa- tions of past events. One who was well acquainted with Guizot said of him that the thing which he knew only since morning he pretended to have known from all eternity ; and another, who dis- liked Voltaire, affirmed that his method was to collect everything he knew to be false and write it down as history. Obviously the value of the coefficients as applied to these two writers would not vary widely.
One of the most historically fascinating pro- blems which has been presented to the human mind is that which goes by the name of Puri- tanism. The record of the series of events which culminated in that phenomenon is open to every enquirer ; and yet, even from an identic*] narra- tion, two persons will come to an exactly opposite
JOHN WINTHROP 77
conclusion in respect of the essential nature of the thing. To the one it will appear as a " panther," and its opposant a " milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged ; " and we all know the hard things which the New England divines were in the habit of saying about " the black sons of the scarlet woman," and of " the harlot who had her seat on the seven hills of Eome." Probably in both cases the factor which I have called a function varying directly with the incentive for lying, has an identi- cal value, and that a very large one.
If I were so far left to myself as to meddle with the matter of Puritanism at large, I should proceed according to the method outlined, tak- ing into account the time elapsed, the number of narrators, the variations in their narratives, the value of the coefficient depending upon the circumstances under which the accounts were written, making a particular estimate of that function which is concerned with the motive for lying, and I should endeavour to reduce this final equivalent to zero in the case under sup- position. The present intention, however, is merely to consider the personality of one wit- ness,—John Winthrop, — and to endeavour to ascertain the value of his evidence, as expressed in his work, by establishing his character.
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If we knew the heart of John Huss, John Cal- vin, John Knox, Oliver Cromwell and his great companions, as we know the heart of John Win- throp, we should be down among the roots of Puritanism. Knowing the heart of John Win- throp, we know the essential nature of the New England emigration, how it came about, and what it meant to the world. His life is open before us in his letters and journals, and with a singular candour of spirit they give the fullest expression to his most secret thought. We may read in them of his self-consuming love, the bit- terness of his grief and his overwhelming sorrow. We have a faithful account of the process by which he was led up to the greatest sacrifice which a man can make, of wife, home, family, and tradition. We may also read that he sent men away from his judgement seat to be whipped, because they held opinions contrary to his own. Surely then it is worth while reducing to small compass the presentment such a man makes of himself, doing it faithfully, and continually test- ing it by the abundant collateral information of contemporary events which is accessible to us.
John Winthrop was born in 1588, the year in which the Armada was defeated : and the gen- eration which had witnessed that defeat also wit-
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nessed the forces for which the Armada stood, entrenched behind the throne of England. The descendants of those stout sailors were resolute that they would not endure the thing, but they differed in their method. To Cromwell and his friends it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they should take a sword in their hands. To others the readiest way was to depart over seas and make a new experiment in freedom. John Winthrop was the leader and inspirer of those who adhered to the latter view.
The first fact to establish in estimating a per- sonality is the environment of the man ; his class, and hence the habitual bent of his mind; his family and friends; in short, his outlook upon the world. In the letters of John Winthrop, published in 1864 by Kobert Charles Winthrop, fifth in descent from himself, we find as frontis- piece a reproduction of a portrait of the First Governor, " by Vandyke," and another in the body of the book, " by Holbein," depicting his grandfather, Adam Winthrop the second. This portrait of Governor Winthrop is still to be seen in the old Senate Chamber in the State House in Boston, now used as a reception room. It cer- tainly adorned the austere walls of the Govern- or's New England home, and was given to the
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" town house " by his eldest son. There is, of course, no historical evidence that the portrait was painted by Van Dyck, but certainly it does possess many of the characteristics of that mas- ter, — a fine sense of proportion, an elegance of outline, and that precious blending of the figure with the background in light, shade, and colour. The picture by Holbein is in possession of the widow of the Robert Winthrop before mentioned, and rests on the walls of her house in New York, 38 East Thirty-Seventh Street. Of the authen- ticity of this picture there seems to be no doubt, even from an examination of the engraving, which is done on copper in line and stipple. If the portraits are authentic, it is significant of the position of the Winthrop family in the social order of England, though there is independent evidence of that. From a note upon the subject of these portraits, by R. C. Winthrop, Jr., one would gain the impression that he was read- ing a letter by the hand of the first Governor, on account of the singular similarity of the writing.
To this day we may read in the register of the parish church of Groton an entry recording the death of that Adam in 1562, and one may still look upon his tomb graven with the family's name
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and arms. The family mansion, which adjoined the church, has long since disappeared, but the garden plot is still marked by the traditional mulberry-tree, which reminds one of Professor Masson's acute observation, recorded in his " Life of Milton," that great men, wherever they go, invariably plant mulberry-trees.
All this is more interesting to the descendants of the Winthrops than it is to us, but even to us it is significant of the position which the First Governor occupied in the world. His father kept a diary and almanac, from which we can recon- struct the family life in its smallest detail, even to the hanging of the " great mastiff e, a gentle dog in the howse, but eyes oft blind." Winthrop's mother wrote charming and scholarly letters to her husband; curiously enough, one which remains is written in French, and deals with the forward- ing of a French bible. The family life was nobly lived.
John Winthrop's youth was passed in the man- ner proper to the son of an English gentleman of those days. He went to Cambridge, and upon his return he took up the duties and obligations of his station in life. Long years afterwards, in the New England fastness, he wrote an account of his Christian experience, but we must not lay any
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stress upon his confession, that in his youth " he was very lewdly disposed, inclining unto all kinds of wickedness, such as writing letters of mere vanity." He protests, however, that he never attained to the length of " swearing and scorning religion/' All great and religious men have fallen into this habit of self-accusation, and if we be- lieved what the Apostle Paul and John Bunyan tell us of their early lives, we should say that they were well worthy of the galleys and the gaol.
There is a profound psychological reason for this self-accusation, on the part of the great relig- ious men of New England especially, and some persons may endure reading it, if it be set down shortly. Up to the time of Jonathan Edwards, admission to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was more or less a social and political test, an acknowledgement on the part of the authorities that the communicants were free from the more open forms of vice and from opinions hostile to the welfare of the community. If a man commit- ted adultery, or refused to pay his taxes, or spoke slightingly of the ministers or magistrates, the table was " fenced " against him, as we used to say. If he observed the ordinary usages of the society in which he lived, and kept his mouth shut, no questions were asked. The Sacrament
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then was a means of grace, a converting ordinance, out of which some good might come. Edwards's own grandfather, the venerated Stoddard, adhered to this view, which was the one openly recognized in all the New England churches.
But from the beginning there was a secret dis- sent from this practice, and many of the best men felt in their hearts that coming forward to the table was an open sign that the communicant had attained to a newness of life, to a submission of his will to the will of Grod, and a union of his spirit with the spirit of God ; that, in short, it was an affirmation of his justification, a proclaiming to the world that he had undergone that mysterious change commonly called conversion. Edwards's own mother declined to come forward for ten years after her marriage, until she had attained to a full assurance of the completeness of that change. As Edwards's ministry grew, he gave entire assent to this awful significance of the Communion, that men and women who took the mysterious elements in their hands and partook of them unworthily did but eat and drink damnation to themselves. It was upon this vital question that the great preacher was banished from Northamp- ton still farther into the wilderness. In order, then, to signify to themselves the completeness of
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their conversion, and if possible its instantaneous- ness, these good men were fond of dwelling upon their early iniquity, in proof of their present justi- fication. If sin did not exist, they were obliged to create it, and that is the source of most religious confessions from the time of Saint Paul to last night's experience meeting.
It would be the business of a great writer and the subject of a great book to trace the develop- ment of John Winthrop's nature, as it grew from strength to strength, to follow its course until at length a great light dawned upon him, and he saw in all its hideousness and nakedness the stupidity and wickedness and sorrow in which his country lay. The moment of that perception is the starting point of all movements towards good. In a complete record of AYinthrop's life we should also find expression of his love and tenderness and bitter sorrow over his own ; pity and concern for his neighbours ; industry and energy in the dis- charge of his public duty ; indignation and wrath against those who were working prblic evil.
At length the time came when he was willing to forsake all and pursue into the wilderness the chimera of perfection. He drew up his reasons for it, which were : to carry the gospel : M to pro- vide tabernacles and food as a refuge for the
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church against the time she must fly," and for his fellow men, " the most precious of all creatures, who were become of less price than a horse or a sheep." He saw " a whole continent lying waste, whilst it was impossible for a good and upright man to maintain his charge at home ; fountains of learning were polluted," — in short, the time had come.
There was a great correspondence and a furious running to and fro, as when a company of bees decides to swarm. In a letter to his " verye lov- inge wife," dated October 20, 1629, Winthrop writes : " So it is that it hath pleased the Lorde to call me to a further trust in this business of the Plantation (being chosen by the Company to be their Governor). The only thinge that I have comfort in, it is that hereby I have assurance that the Lorde hath called me to this work."
Governor Winthrop's record of his voyage to New England in the Arabella has the freshness of narration which one observes in the account of the casting away of that Alexandrine ship in which Saint Paul sailed to Italy. Thus : " We tacked again and stood W., but about noon the wind came in full W. a very strong gale, so we tacked again and stood N. and by E. ; at night we took off the main course, and took in all our
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sails save only the main and mizzen. The storm continued all the next day, the wind as it was and rainy. In the forenoon we carried our forecourse and stood WSW., but in the afternoon we took it in, the wind increasing and the sea grown very high, so lying with the helm aweather we made no way but as the ship drove." This was evi- dently Winthrop's first adventure upon the sea, for he takes note of everything ; how a tub in which some fish were salting was overturned, how a swallow, a wild pigeon, and another small land bird perched in the rigging. He also observed the decreasing declination of the pole-star, the apparent smallness of the moon, and the contin- ued coldness of the weather, no matter from which quarter the wind blew.
A good discipline was observed on board the Arabella ; that was the Governor's way. On the third day out, whilst a fast was being observed, two of the landsmen pierced a rundlet of strong waters ; for this they were laid in bolts the whole night through ; in the morning the principal of- fender was openly whipped, and both were kept upon bread and water for the day. Shortly after- wards two young men fell at odds and the quarrel ended in a fight. This, it appears, was contrary to orders, which had been duly published, and the
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passionate fellows were adjudged to walk upon the deck till night with their hands tied behind their backs. Another young man, for using contempt- uous speech in presence of the notable persons on board, was also laid in bolts till he submitted himself and presented open contrition for his offence. The passengers must have been persons of some consideration ; most of them were accom- panied by servants; some bore titles ; and the daily life was conducted with a degree of grandeur.
The discipline was impartial. Complaint was made to the captain that one of his under-officers had done grave injury to a landsman, whereupon he was ordered to be tied by the hands with a weight about his neck ; but at the strong inter- cession of Winthrop the punishment was recalled ; that was also Winthrop's gentle way. A much more intricate case had to be adjudged. It ap- pears that a servant of one of the Company had sold to a child a box which was said to be worth threepence, and made the excellent arrangement that he should receive in lieu of a money payment one biscuit a day whilst the voyage lasted. This thrifty trader then sold the biscuits to his fellow servants ; but when he had obtained about forty biscuits, his sharp practice came to light, and he was sentenced to have his hands tied to a bar,
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a basket of stones was suspended about his neck, and there he stood for two hours. That is the earliest record of trade methods in the annals of the United States.
The voyage of the Arabella was not free from the miseries attendant upon sea travel in those days, arising from want of room, sameness, if not actual scantiness, of food, and sea-sickness. Com- plaint was made by the captain " that the landsmen were very nasty and slovenly, and that the gun- deck where they lodged was so noisome with their victuals and beastliness that the health of the ship was endangered." The Governor " after prayer " dealt with this also in his resolute way.
The remedy for the disorder of sea-sickness then, as now, was indulgence in alcohol, and one maidservant went so far with that prophylactic measure as to become senseless. The Governor observed, as many another transatlantic traveller has done since, that it was a common fault amongst grown people at sea to give themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately. At the end of a fortnight, many children, and adults too, lay groaning in the cabins ; they were driven out and were made to stand, some on each side of a rope, which they swung up and down till they were merry again — a pretty device against the
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malady. Other trivial exercises followed, in which Winthrop noticed the usual tendency on the part of sailors to play the wag with the passengers. •
In those days a ship was a little world ; children were born and people died; the observances of religion were attended to, and the voyage was arranged as if it were never to end. Even on the high seas small boats were continually passing from ship to ship, to convey and accept invitations to dinner, to procure the services of a midwife, to borrow fresh water or hooks for Catching codfish. One visitor at breakfast on board the Arabella was Captain Burleigh, " a grave comely gentleman of great age, who offered much courtesy and re- ceived a salute of four shots out of the forecastle for a farewell." He had been an old sea-captain in Elizabeth's time, and being taken prisoner, was kept in a Spanish dungeon for three years, but he and his three sons were afterwards captains in Roe's voyage. Another visitor encountered upon the sea was Sir David Kirke, whose adventures in Canada and Newfoundland entitle him to a place amongst the English seamen of the sixteenth century.
The voyage of the Arabella was not without its spice of danger. It was threatened by what was thought to be ten sail of Dunkirkers, and every
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precaution was taken to meet them resolutely. The officers took down some cabins which were in the way of the ordnance, they threw overboard everything which was subject to taking fire, hove out the long-boats, put up the waist-cloths, and served out arms and ammunition. Finally, when the women had been sent below into a place of safety, and all arrangements completed, Winthrop and his company went to prayer upon the upper deck, putting their trust in the Lord of Hosts and " the courage of their Captain," as the recorder was prudent enough to observe. The danger from the elements, however, was a real one, and the whole account of the voyage is one dismal record of " stiff gales and stormy boisterous nights, in which the sea raged and tossed exceedingly.', The voyage lasted from Easter Monday, the 29th of March, to the 12th of June, — 75 days. After sighting Cape Sable and skirting the Maine coast, the adventurers finally cast anchor inside Baker's Island, and at two o'clock John Endicott, Gov- ernor of Salem, came on board, all with due firing of cannon, for the thing was done in proper fashion. Governor Winthrop had begun his work. Within forty days he had opened his court and assisted at the ordination of a minister, elders and deacons, and sent a man to prison for injuries
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offered to the Indians. Next he attacked social problems, and by example and precept restrained the intemperate use of drink.
Death, too, was busy. The Lady Arabella of the house of Lincoln died within a few days of her arrival in the country, and her husband a month later. The people lay in tents and contracted scurvy, of which many died, and for the first few years we read continually that scores died on the passage out. Men were drowned by the upsetting of canoes, by falling through the ice, or were cast away on the ledges and shoals that skirted the coast. They were lost and frozen in the woods and marshes, and sometimes were succoured and some- times murdered by the Indians. The Governor himself passed a night in the woods, but, " what with gathering wood, what with walking to and fro by the fire singing psalms," he wore away the time.
Within twenty days of landing the Governor makes this entry in his journal : " My son, Henry Winthrop, was drowned at Salem." That is all, and there it stands in its reticence and austerity. Henry Winthrop was not a helpful son. He had ventured to the Barbadoes as a planter, and there he received such a letter from his father as many another wandering son has deserved. Amongst
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other things, he was told that the tobacco he had sent home was " ill-conditioned, foul, full of stalks, and evil-coloured." But now the boy was dead.
The father did not wince ; he had already looked death in the face : " On Thursday in the night she was taken with death, and about midnight called for me. When I came to her she seemed to be assured that her time was come and to be glad of it. In the mean time she desired that the passing bell might ring, and when the bell began to toll, some said it was the four o'clock bell, but she, conceiving that they sought to conceal that it did ring for her, said there was no need as she heeded it not and it did not trouble her. At noon, when most of the company were gone down to dinner, I discoursed with her of the sweet love of Christ, and she showed by her speeches and gestures her great joy and steadfast assurance. When I told her that she should soon see her Redeemer with those poor dim eyes, she answered cheerfully; when I told her that the day before was twelve months she was married to me, I perceived she did mistake me. While I spake to her she would lie still and fix her eyes steadfastly upon me, and if I ceased a while, her speech being gone, she would turn her head to- wards me and stir her hands as well as she could,
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till I spake, and then would lie still again." The Wednesday following she was buried in Groton chancel, " and her child was laid with her."
We can form no estimate of what Winthrop did, unless we are clear about what he aimed to do. His object was to set apart a body of men who entertained identical views as to their rela- tion, purpose, and place in the eternal order of things, and desired to subsist by the exercise of their faculties, unhampered by influences which lay beyond themselves. Winthrop did not formu- late his purpose in these large words ; probably he thought it would be best expressed by the term " trading church."
To attempt such an enterprise was quite legiti- mate and proper. Other colonies had been estab- lished in the New World with as definite an object in view. Virginia owed its existence to the taste for tobacco, which European men had acquired. Pennsylvania was settled by men who believed that trade could be carried on with kind- liness. Khode Island was a purely commercial enterprise without much concern about religion or charity. New Netherland was a single colony seated on Manhattan Island, and it was most concerned about rum and slaves. Albany was a centre for the fur trade, anxious chiefly to keep
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on good terms with the Indians. Even in Massa- chusetts there were numerous colonies, each ani- mated by its own guiding principle. The pil- grims who settled in Plymouth, for example, desired in reality the opportunity of worshipping God in their own way. They were reasonably willing that others should exercise the same privilege and yet remain within the community. The people of Boston entertained a different view.
There are colonies, nearly as old as Winthrop's, which exist to this day, and are yet admirably ful- filling the purpose for which they were founded, trading, paying dividends, and guarding their rights to an exclusive commerce. The Hudson's Bay Company has been in existence these three hundred years. It was founded for a specific purpose, and there is no evidence that its officials have ever manifested an extreme degree of cor- diality towards unauthorized persons, who would interfere with them. Even the eminent philan- thropist who is now at the head of that great Company would probably not lay claim to any great toleration of interlopers.
In accordance with this idea of a trading church, a colony was established on the inner shore of Massachusetts Bay, at Boston, and at Newtown,
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since called Cambridge. Those who were of like mind with the founders were free to join. Those who held contrary views were free to go else- where, and no one was compelled to adopt the ideas, or conform to the views which the majority of the colonists entertained. When the church in Salem was being set up, two persons protested that they were dissatisfied. They were desired to take ship and proceed to England. When Roger Williams declared that he was not in harmony with the principle upon which the community was established, he was privately notified by Win- throp that he was free to withdraw beyond the jurisdiction of the Company and join with per- sons whose views were more in accord with his own. He followed this advice and set up for him- self on Narragansett Bay. When Mrs. Hutchin- son and her friends discovered their dissent, they also were urged to depart. Some of the Com- pany proceeded to New Hampshire and there established towns. Others went to Rhode Island and laid the foundations of Providence. From these colonies in turn new dissenters went out into the wilderness, and in new places found free- dom of thought and action, with no interference from their neighbours. The greatest exodus of all was toward Connecticut, and there in reality
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was laid the foundation of the United States as we know it to-day. The movement was perfectly free. Men who were dissatisfied with their strange environment returned home, or sought refuge in some other community ; or, failing to find satis- faction there, they boldly sat down by themselves. There is a provision in many seeds for their dissemination. In like manner the seeds of Puri- tanism were sown broadcast throughout New England.
The proceedings of that court in London at which the new governor was chosen were not so transparent as might appear. The thing was a revolt. The Massachusetts Company was at the mercy of the King whilst its headquarters re- mained in London, so they resolved to transfer legally the whole government beyond the seas. Once entrenched behind the rocks of New Eng- land they considered themselves safe. They wen safe, and are to this day. It was John AVinthrop who did it.
However the emigrants might attempt to dis- guise it from themselves, the exodus was a revolt from the church and state of England, as sincere, if not as open, as the rebellion of Cromwell. The formal declaration of their intention was post- poned, it is true, for a century and a half, but
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the events which culminated in 1776 were only the culmination of events which began to operate long before 1620. The American Kevolution, we know, was in no sense the last desperate effort of despairing men, groaning under oppression and goaded by tyranny. No men of English breed have ever groaned or been goaded long; they always looked to the matter with the first weight or the first thrust. They, at least, — what- ever the Hebrews of Lower Asia did, — always could and always did kick against the pricks. The New England exiles were no oxen. Their rebellion was systematic, and was so understood in England.
Once they were safely over sea the minds of the colonists quickly grew familiar with the idea of an absolute separation. As early as the year 1634 all the ministers in the colony met at Bos- ton, at the summons of the Governor and assist- ants, to consider what ought to be done if a gov- ernor-general were sent from England ; and they agreed that " in such an event we ought not to accept him, but defend our lawful possessions, if we were able, otherwise to avoid or protract." That is the way of success in all rebellions, to defend our lawful possessions if we are able, otherwise to avoid or protract.
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Not all the inhabitants were of this politic mind, or the magistrates either. John Endicott, Governor of Salem, with his sword slashed the red cross of Saint George from the banner of England, and so left no doubt of the political and religious sentiments which he entertained. The court was wise enough to notice the incident, but because they could not agree, the case was deferred till the next general meeting. The com- missioners for military affairs gave order, " for the meantime," that all ensigns should be laid aside. At the next meeting a suspiciously formal enquiry was made, and Endicott was adjudged worthy of admonition, on the grounds that, w> if he judged the cross to be a sin, he did content himself to have reformed it at Salem alone, not taking care that others might be brought out of it also, laying a blemish upon the magistracy, as if they would suffer idolatry, and give occasion to the State of England to think ill of us." No men- tion was made of the offence itself, but the magis- trates undertook to write to England in this sense, " expressing our dislike of the thing, yet with as much wariness as we might, signifying that though we were very clear that the fact, as concerning the manner, was very unlawful."
The possibility of an attempt to force a gov-
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ernor-general upon the colonists was ever before their eyes. The colony was not five years old when tidings were received of the commission issued to the Archbishops and ten of the Council to regulate all plantations, to call in patents, to make laws, and raise tithes. They were advised at the same time that ships and soldiers were on the way to compel them by force to receive a governor and the discipline of the Church of England. All this occasioned the magistrates to " discover their minds to each other, which grew to this conclusion, that five hundred pounds more were raised to hasten our fortifications."
When war finally broke out between Cromwell and the King, the interest which the colonists took in the matter was purely academic, or rather theological. At a court in 1644, Captain Jenyson, whose military and political qualifications are set forth with singular enthusiasm, was brought to task for questioning the lawfulness of the Parlia- mentary proceedings in England. He made the ingenious defence that being a church member he should first have been dealt with in a private way, and the magistrates came under censure for their precipitancy. The culprit satisfied both sides by " professing that he was assured that those of the Parliament side were the more godly, and
LofC.
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though if he were in England, he might be doubt- ful which side he should take, yet if the King or any party should attempt anything against this Commonwealth, he should make no scruple to spend estate and life and all in his defence against them." That was in the true New England spirit, so Captain Jenyson "was dismissed to further consideration." Loyalty to them was no blind un- reasoning fealty. At an earlier court than that in which Captain Jenyson was dismissed to further consideration a scruple arose about the oath which the magistrates were to take, — " you shall bear true faith and allegiance to our Sovereign Lord, King Charles." After due consideration it was " thought fit to omit that part of it for the pre- sent;" which was avoiding and protracting again. AVhen the King finally made his submission to the Parliament, the colonists were advised to 44 send over some one to solicit for them, the Parliament giving hope that they might attain much ; " but these wily old Puritans, having con- sulted about it, " declined the motion on the grounds that if they should put themselves under the protection of the Parliament, they must then be subjected to all sueh laws as the Parliament might impose, in which ease it might prove very prejudicial to them."
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The fact of the matter is that the colonists regarded themselves as independent from the first moment of setting foot upon New England soil, and from that moment their every effort was directed towards some form of government which should meet their new conditions. At length, in 1639, by the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a state government was called into existence. A general republic was created, composed of three towns, with equality of representation, with a governor and upper house, elected by a plurality of votes. In none of the articles of this Constitu- tion was the slightest mention made of any coun- try or any sovereign beyond the seas. Nor were there any theoretical considerations of equality and liberty. The thing was taken for granted. The towns and their inhabitants were the re- positories of all authority. Finally, in 1643, all the inhabitants between the seacoast and the Con- necticut River prepared to bind themselves into a confederacy, of which the articles were most ex- plicit, and gave no account of any allegiance owed to any other country whatever.
Nothing was further from Winthrop's mind than the establishment of a " democracy " in the new world. He had another purpose entirely, which was to establish an absolute community of
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church and state ; but he was soon to learn that his project was impracticable. He turned away from it quickly and endeavoured to find a new and better way. This hesitancy of mind between the old and the new explains his mingled severity and kindliness, his conciliation and repression, his untried experiments, and his holding fast to that which he knew.
Once Winthrop had cast aside the old theo- cratic idea of government, he had to feel his way between the bigotry of Endicott, the rashness of Dudley, and the foolishness of John Cotton ; between the sheer obstinacy of the elders and magistrates on the one hand, and the recalci- trancy of the people on the other. If we would follow the tortuous course of early New England history, we must take John Winthrop for our guide. We should find the Governor now lead- ing, now following, at one time stumbling over justification by faith, again turning aside from a covenant of works, and always with the hesitancy of a man who has left behind the guiding prin- ciple which had once been so sufficient for him.
It would require a great expanse of writing, and it might not be worth the trouble, if one were to enter into the interminable debates in which are found the mutual recriminations of
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these bewildered legislators, and to describe all the provisional conventions by which their dis- agreements were temporarily composed. The most we can do is to survey the main obstacles which Winthrop encountered in his efforts to govern New England.
Under ordinary circumstances the historical records of any community fall into four divisions, according as they deal with autocracy, oligarchy, hierarchy, and the final rule of the people. That has ever been the course of human events, from despotism to the government by a few, from that to priestly control, and then a gradual enlargement until all have obtained a due share. It is usually only by slow stages that the freemen arrive at any share in the control of public affairs. It is only by winning their rights that the people prove their right to possession, and by holding them that they establish their ability to hold that which they have won. These people had been cast upon a foreign shore, without any body of opinion or law for the government either of church or of state. Accordingly, the government was purely a despotism, and that is the only method by which a primitive community can be governed. John Winthrop was the despot, and it is fortunate that it was so, for he was quick to realize the inevit-
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ableness of the final conclusion. So, in New England the stages of advance were short and the progress rapid. Governor Winthrop was too wise, the magistrates were too feeble, the min- isters were too foolish, and the people were too resolute, to permit of the issue being long de- layed. Indeed, the stages were so short that no one system had time to become well organized. Neither the Governor, the magistrates, nor the ministers ever got beyond a pretension to au- thority, and that pretension was continually being disputed. Indeed, there were practically only two divisions. The Governor, the magistrates, and the ministers stood together, and quarrelled only incidentally ; the common people were in opposi- tion to all three. This is true in the main, but it is easy to find instances of the Governor's irrita- tion against the magistrates, and against the ministers, and those two bodies often called him to task.
As early as 1635 there was a strong feeling in the church of Boston against the Governor, and the members were earnest with the elders to have him called to account. But he took occasion to forestall them by stating openly that if he had been called to account he should have desired first to advise with the elders whether the church
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had power to call in question a proceeding of the civil court ; and second, he would have consulted with the rest of the court whether he might dis- cover their concerns in the assembly. Though he affirmed " that the elders and some others did know already that the church could not enquire into the justice and proceedings of the court, he would go as far as to further declare his mind upon the matter." He showed that if the church had such power they must have it from Christ ; but Christ disclaimed it in his practice ; and though Christ's kingly power was in his church, it was not that kingly power whereby he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Further, he would submit that if in pursuing the course of justice, though the thing were unjust, yet he was not accountable to them.
A book was brought into court wherein the institution of the standing council was pretended to be a sinful innovation. The Governor ruled to have the contents of the book examined, and if there appeared cause, to enquire after the author. But the greater part of the court having some intimation of the author, and being friendly to him, would not consent to the Governor's pro- posal.
The ministers ruled that no member of the court
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ought to be publicly questioned by the church for any speech in the court, without the license of the court ; " that in all such heresy and errors of any church members, as are manifest and dangerous to the state, the court may proceed without tarry- ing for the church ; but if the opinions be doubt- ful they are first to refer them to the church." Shortly afterward, Mr. Wheelwright was brought up to be questioned for a sermon which seemed to tend to sedition, whereupon nearly all the church of Boston presented a petition to the court for two things ; that as freemen they might be pre- sent in cases of judicature, and that the court should declare if it might deal in cases of con- science in advance of the church. This was taken as a groundless and presumptuous act, and was rejected with the answer, " that the court had never used to proceed but it was openly, but for matter of consultation and preparation they might and would be private." There was so much heat and contention that it was moved that the next court should be kept at Cambridge, but that resolution came to nothing.
Upon one occasion the Governor and council countermanded an expedition against the Narra- gansetts, and some of the people protested. The Governor denied the right to protest, but after-
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wards lie permitted the expedition to proceed " rather to satisfy the people than for any need that appeared." The Governor was continually taking offence at the interference of the ministers, though he admitted their right to proceed in what he called a churchlike way. At one general court for elections a disturbance resulted upon some question of procedure. There was great danger of an open tumult, " for those of one side grew into fierce speeches, and some laid hands on others, but seeing themselves too weak they grew quiet." The people of Boston elected deputies who were disliked by the court, and the magis- trates found means to send them back home alleg- ing that two of the freemen had no notice of the election, and so they declared the election void. The people of Boston next morning returned the same deputies, "and the court not finding how they might reject them, they were admitted." Charles the First had not so much sense.
Again, the deputies proposed that all affairs of the Commonwealth, in the vacation of the general court, should be transacted by a commission of seven magistrates and three deputies. The magis- trates ruled that the court alone should treat of those affairs, and the freemen replied that the Governor and assistants had no power but what
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was given them by the general court. The whole situation was finally summed up by one of the deputies who protested: "Then you will not be obeyed."
The question of the relation of one authority to another finally culminated " in a great busi- ness which fell out upon a very small occasion," commonly known in New England annals as the " sow business." It appears that there was a stray sow in Boston, which was brought to one Captain Kaine ; he had it cried abroad and sev- eral came to see it, but none claimed it for nearly a year. But Captain Kaine had a sow of his own, which, when the time was ripe, he killed in the usual way. Then the wife of one Sherman, who alleged that she had lost a sow, came to examine the stray animal and had to admit that it was not hers. Then she resorted to the feminine strata- gem of alleging that the sow which had been killed probably belonged to her. The matter was brought before the elders of the church as a cause of offence. Many witnesses were examined and Captain Kaine was declared innocent. The woman brought the case to another court, where the man was again cleared, and was allowed twenty pounds against the complainant for slan- der. The matter was opened up again in the
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Salem court, and the best part of seven days was spent in examining witnesses and debating the case. But even then no decision could be arrived at, for the deputies voted one way and the magis- trates the other. The upshot of the matter was that in 1644, " upon the motion of the deputies, it was ordered that the court should be divided in their consultations, the magistrates by them- selves and the deputies by themselves ; what the one agreed upon they should send to the other, and if both agreed then to pass, etc." The founda- tion of the government of the United States was laid, and it was not laid in blood. That is John Winthrop's claim to greatness. Had the Stuarts been as wise, they would have been upon the throne of England at this day.
It took the world a long time, it took the min- isters of religion a longer time, to learn what was their true relation to the state. There have been occasions when there was no other body than the church which was competent to carry on the gov- ernment or the ordinary business of a civilized society. That happened when the Roman Em- pire went to pieces ; it happened again when the New England colonists found themselves in a new world, an unorganized mass of humanity. It took Europe eighteen centuries to learn the
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difference between the sword of the flesh and the sword of the spirit, and the lesson is not well learned yet. New England learned the first rudi- ments in eighteen years. The history of those eighteen centuries is in large part a record of the attempt of the church to perform the duties of gov- ernment, and, when that failed, of its insistence that it should tell the rulers and then the people what they should do, and how they ought to do it. It is only within our own time that the church has learned that its business is to deal with every political event, not in relation to the kingdom of this world, but in relation alone to the kingdom of God. The first Governor of Massachusetts saw in a glass darkly, but what he saw was enough for his sane mind, and he laid a foundation of knowledge, which is yet the basis of government in the United States, and always will be.
The next difficulty was the need of a body of fundamental laws, and Mr. Cotton and other ministers were called in to the assistance of the magistrates. The best Mr. Cotton could do was to present a "model of Moses, his judicials," but the magistrates had the wisdom to take them into further consideration till the next court. The people considered their position unsafe, whilst so much power rested in the discretion of the magis-
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trates ; and yet, for very weighty reasons, " most of the magistrates and some of the elders were not very forward in the matter." Their hesi- tancy was based upon the soundest consideration of policy. In their judgement there was a " want of sufficient experience of the nature and con- dition of the people, considered in relation to the condition of the country and other circum- stances." They conceived that the only sound laws are those which arise pro rei natura ; the fundamental laws of England arose in that way ; under their charter they were expressly denied the right of making laws repugnant to the laws of England, and the laws of England they would not have. Therefore they preferred to " avoid and protract," and so they would have none. They would permit of no set penalties even for such offences as lying and swearing ; but their reluctance in this case probably arose from the determination of the magistrates that their au- thority should not be lessened or taken away. The deputy governor at this time was Mr. Dudley, " a wise and stout gentleman, who would not be trodden under foot by any man," but in the end even he was compelled to become amen- able to the hundred laws, which came to be known as the Body of Liberties.
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The casual reader of New England history gains the impression that the church and state were identical ; as sometimes happens, the casual reader is wrong. The church was one with the state only incidentally, and that for a very short period.
The resolution of the people that they would have none of clerical control is amply revealed in the Congregationalism of the early churches. It was the custom of the ministers to meet once a fortnight at different houses in turn. Roger Wil- liams took exception to this practice, fearing it might in time grow into a presbytery, but all were clear in their minds that the fear was groundless, inasmuch as " no church or person can have power over another church." Yet the churches were bound by an agreement to assist each other by what was called advice, and they had frequent re- sort to it. On one occasion there was a difference between the church of Charlestown and their pastor, Mr. James, who, it appears, was a very melancholic man and full of causeless jealousies, for which he had been dealt with publicly and privately. Chosen men, mostly elders, were sum- moned from various churches, and they agreed that the melancholic minister should be cast out, if he persisted in his course.
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Again, it was proposed to begin a new church in Dorchester, and the inhabitants desired the appro- bation of the other churches, but permission was refused, on the allegation that the applicants had builded their comfort of salvation upon unsound grounds, some upon dreams and ravishes of spirit and by fits, others upon the reformation of their lives, others upon duties and performances. En- quiring further into the nature of this apostasy the elders discovered three especial errors : that the residents in Dorchester had not come to hate sin because it was sinful, but because it was hurt- ful ; that they had made use of Christ only to help their own imperfections ; that they expected to believe through some power of their own. The inhabitants of Woburn, " a village at the end of Charlestown bounds," had gathered a church and were about to ordain a minister. They would not permit the elders of any other church to assist, lest it might be an occasion of introducing a depend- ency of churches, and then a presbytery, so they ordained their own minister. The Governor dis- closes his own opinion in the remark, that the function was performed " not so well and orderly as it ought."
The undercurrent of revolt against hierarchy was at all times strong. The money demanded of
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the people for the support of the church was great in proportion to their means, and it was usually raised by a direct tax. " which was very offensive to some." That we can well believe. One Bris- tow, of "VVatertown, " who had his barn burnt," AYinthrop observes, as if there was some con- nection between the contumaciousness of the man and the destruction of his property, being grieved because he and others who were not church mem- bers were taxed, wrote a book against the imposi- tion. That was ever the New England way — to write a book. Winthrop admits that the man's arguments were weighty ; but he could not be permitted to cast reproach upon the elders and magistrates, so he was convented before the court. With perfect fairness nothing was required of him in respect of his arguments, but he was fined ten pounds "for some slighting of the court. "
The casual reader is in possession of another misconception — that the greater part of the colo- nial activity was consumed in theological con- troversy. This current misapprehension of the actual state of affairs which prevailed in that period of expansion arises from the fact that the persons who were mixed up in theology, and con- sequently in dissensions, left most painstaking records of their proceedings, whilst the trad«
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rum, fish, cattle, ships, and negroes were content to carry on their enterprise in silence. A reader of the jargon in the Wall Street edition of to- day's newspaper, or of the proceedings of a Meth- odist Conference, a Presbyterian Assembly, an Episcopal Synod, or a political convention, would get a very definite notion of some things which are going on in the world, but he would be astute enough not to be led into thinking that the events therein recorded concerned the people at large.
There was, however, so much bickering over re- ligious matters, and they yet loom so large, that we must endeavour to gain some notion of the pro- blems in divinity which agitated the little com- munity, and a dull business it will be. Looking at the matter broadly, the whole contention turned upon the meaning of Sanctification and Justifica- tion. To us the question presents no difficulty ; but it must be kept in mind that we have the Shorter Catechism in our hands, and this sum of saving knowledge was not devised for some fifteen years after the period of which we are speaking. It is hard for a Calvinist to realize that there ever was a period in the world's history devoid of the blessings inherent in that work. Had those seekers after truth but apprehended the simplicity of the thing — that justification is an act and
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sanctification a work, that effectual calling in the Catechism is placed textually before both, and adoption between them — many a sincere disput- ant would have been spared the whipping-post, the prison, and the wintry forest. But these things, which have been revealed to us, it was not suffered unto Winthrop to know. As a result, the com- munity was divided into two parties, as distinct as Catholics and Protestants in other countries, namely, those who were under a covenant of grace and those who were under a covenant of works. It was Arminianism and Calvinism in one of their opposing aspects.
With the appearance of the Shorter Catechism a great calm fell upon the religious world. At least one hundred and seven questions were dis- posed of; whether settled right or wrong, they were settled ; but it required the united skill of the theologians of two kingdoms, and Cromwell, to keep the peace between them, whilst they were engaged upon the task. With these two fundamen- tals, Justification and Sanctification, undecided, it is easy to understand the minor errors which would accompany or flow from that state of un- certainty. The conditions in New England grew so bad by the year 1(331 that a great diet or assembly was held at Cambridge, or Newtown as
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it was then called, to which came all the teach- ing elders throughout the country, and some who were newly arrived out of England. A summary was presented of the opinions which were spread abroad ; they were eighty in number, " some blasphemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe." These were condemned by the whole assembly, and all present subscribed their names, some protesting even whilst they signed. As this body of error was revealed in all its grossness, many took offence, as if it were a reproach laid upon the country, and they insisted that the persons should be named who held these errors. Upon the refusal of the moderators to bring the errors home to individuals, the delegates from Boston departed and came no more to the assembly.
So far as one can make out there were five main points in question between Mr. Cotton and Mr. Wheelwright on one side, Winthrop and the elders taking the opposite side. It is worth while setting forth these questions, to illustrate the temper of the persons who became excited over such things, and thought they understood them. The first was, whether persons are united with Christ before the stage of active faith ; the second was, of course, about the evidence of justification ; the third, that the new creature is not the person of the believer,
r)
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but a body of saving grace in such an one ; the fourth, that God does not justify a man before he is effectually called ; and the fifth, that Christ and his benefits may be offered to a man who is under a covenant of works, " but not in or by a covenant of works."
In handling these questions both parties deliv- ered their arguments in writing. These were read in the assembly, and afterwards the respect- ive answers were given, and a decision taken. As soon as these monsters were expelled, the assembly determined to drive out the little foxes also. The women of Boston were giving trouble as early as 1631, and it appears there was a set of sixty persons which met every week to listen to their leader, " who took upon herself the whole exercise in a prophetic way." Her misconduct was declared to be disorderly and without rule. In this the Governor concurred. There was a practice of asking questions after the sermon, and under cover of the question occasion would be taken to revile the elders, and to reproach the ministers and magistrates. This subtle device was also utterly condemned.
There was great hope that this assembly would have some good effect in pacifying the dissensions about matters of religion, but " it fell out other-
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wise ; " for though Mr. Wheelwright and his party- had been clearly confounded and confuted, they persisted in their opinions ; they were as busy as ever in nourishing their principles and drew up a petition affirming their truth. The general court, which assembled some time after, took the matter up. One of the recalcitrants was dis- franchised and banished, and word was sent to Boston that deputies must be sent who would be more amenable to argument ; but the town per- sisted in sending the same deputies. The end of it was that Mr. Wheelwright was disfranchised and banished. He appealed to the King. The appeal was not allowed to lie, and he was given fourteen days to remove himself out of the juris- diction. Nor did the valiant Captain Underhill escape, for he with some five or six others was disfranchised, and they were removed from their public places. The court ordered that all those who had subscribed to these doctrines and would not acknowledge their fault should be disarmed. The church in Boston did not receive this chastisement with a good grace, and proceeded to call the Governor to account. He forestalled them, however, by opening up the question of the jurisdiction of the civil court over the church. He proved his case by referring to Uzzia, to Asa,
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who put the prophet in prison, to Solomon, who removed Abiathar from the priesthood, and finally justified the banishment by the example of Lot, and by the sending away of Hagar and Ishmael. At Roxbury, also, the church proceeded on simi- lar lines, and spent many days in public meetings to bring the petitioners to a comprehension of the full enormity of their sin, but the best they could do was to cast them out of the church. At Wey- mouth, however, the elders had better results in reconciling the differences between the people.
The errors cited above were merely the more open and notorious, but it appears that there were many secret opinions which were scarcely less tolerable ; some went so far as to hold that there was no inherent righteousness in a child of God ; that neither absolute nor conditional promises belonged to the Christian ; that the Sabbath was but as other days ; that the soul was mortal till it was united to Christ : and finally that there was no resurrection of the body. The town of Providence appears to have been the head centre for the propagation of these evils, and it was ordered that if any of the residents were found within the jurisdiction of Boston, they should be sent home and charged to come there no more under pain of imprisonment.
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It would be tedious to enumerate all the ques- tions which agitated the community ; that faith is a cause of justification ; that the letter of the Scripture holds forth a covenant of works, and its spirit a covenant of grace ; that a man might have special communion with Jesus Christ and yet be damned. It would be more tedious still to enumerate all the attempts that were made to solve the doubts. To Mr. Cotton, sixteen points were presented in writing, and all business of the court was put off for three weeks, that they might bring matters to an issue. Looking at the matter narrowly, these incidents were merely church quarrels, such as happen even yet in every Protestant community, and never gain a wider currency than in tea-table talk or village scandal. In the early days they were the subject matter of history, because the church was inci- dentally the state. The place of these contentions is now taken by the equally trivial matters which transpire in the corridors of legislative halls, or in the secret meetings of small politicians. The indwelling of the Holy Ghost is as profitable a subject of discussion as many of the political theories which are now agitating the public mind.
We should not fail to take note of another of Winthrop's main difficulties, which was the men-
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tal disorderliness of the people, at times amount- ing to actual hysteria. Strong emotion acting upon a weak mind always produces disorder. In this case it was the religious emotion. It fell with full force, and even normal minds were affected by it. The mind of the Governor himself was influenced by it, but its worst effects were witnessed in the case of women and children. A woman of the Boston Congregation, having been in much trouble of mind about her spiritual state, at length grew into bitter desperation ; she could endure the uncertainty no longer, and decided to set the matter for ever at rest ; so one day she took her infant child and threw it into a well, saying now she was sure she would be damned. It is always a mark of a disordered mind in a woman, when she manifests excessive concern about her own soul, or any concern whatever about the souls of persons outside of her own household. Of course, very few women went to the extreme of throwing their children into wells, but sixty women of Bos- ton used to meet together every week to M resolve questions of doctrine.''
At Providence also, " the devil was not idle : men's wives claimed liberty to go to all religious meetings, though never so often." A meeting was organized to censure a domestic tyrant named
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Udrin, and some were of opinion "that if he would not suffer his wife to have her liberty, the church should dispose her to one who would use her better." One Greene, who spoke out of the fulness of his experience, for he had married a woman " whose husband was then living, and no divorce," gave testimony to a phenomenon with which we are not entirely unfamiliar, "that if they should restrain their wives, all the women in the country would cry out against them." The devil — that was Winthrop's interpretation of the spirit which was at work — continued to dis- turb the peace through his agent, the wife of a Salem man named Oliver. As an indication of her obstinacy of nature, Winthrop notes that whilst in England she would not bow her knee even at the name of Jesus.
This woman stood up in the church on Sacra- ment Day and demanded the sacred elements, " and would not forbear before Mr. Endicott did threaten to send the constable to put her forth." This went on for five years, and in the end the woman was adjudged to be whipped, which was certainly an extreme measure.
This abnormal excitability has not yet dis- appeared from the expanded New England com- munity now known as the United States, and
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some have thought that they have witnessed its manifestations in many other quarters than those in which women dwell. It does not require a very acute or trained observer to detect the operations of that spirit in the church, in the colleges, in schools and in homes, in the legislatures, in the newspapers and in the political assemblies, in the streets, in offices, and at the lunch counter. It is easily traceable from the beginning, at times con- tracted and insignificant, and again broadening out till the normal structure of society was almost entirely replaced by the horrid growth. It was seen at its worst during the period of the witch- craft delusion, to a less extent during the Edwardean revivals and in the early forties, and again at the outbreak of the Spanish War and through the whole course of the Philippine opera- tions. It would not be hard either to trace its effect upon the lives of individuals, even down to the time of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Ward Beecher. One of them it slew, and the other it almost brought to the ground. Unfortunately, in Beecher's time there was no Governor Winthrop in Plymouth church, with whip and cleft stick.
The head and front of this revolt of the women was Mrs. Hutchinson, M a woman of ready wit and bold spirit," and she was allied with a party
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which almost rent the community in twain, by- insisting that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. To the disgust of the Governor, meetings and conferences had to be held. Mrs. Hutchinson at first appears to have had her own way, though she did make the unwilling reservation that the indwelling of the Holy Ghost might not amount to a personal union. The heresy spread ; more meetings were held, and the matter was concluded by a conference, "in which there appeared some bitterness of speech." As the speech stands before us, the bitterness is apparent, but the sense is not, though the last sentence of the reported utterance contains 126 words and three sets of brackets. But the temper of the magistrates was up. Mrs. Hutchinson was arraigned upon the definite charge of alleging that none of the ministers, save Mr. Cotton, were preaching a covenant of free grace. After "many speeches to and fro, she could contain herself no longer, but gave vent to revelations," portending evil to the young community. That was her real offence, and she too was banished; but because it was the winter time, they committed her to a private house, with permission only for her own friends and the elders to visit her. Though the opinions which she entertained do not appear very
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dangerous to us, they may have appeared so to the persons who understood those things.
In all these religious strivings we are apt to lose sight of the actual business that was being done in New England ; but, fortunately, we are not left without information of the attitude of the common people towards the sea of strife in which the politico-theologians were involved. The people at large are never much concerned about anything else than that out of which their livelihood comes.
The movement of population was most remark- able. Within six weeks in the year 1635, fourteen ships arrived with "store of passengers and cattle ; " sloops, shallops, and small boats of all kinds were passing from island to island, with mares, heifers, goats, and sheep ; traders were coming to port with beaver skins, corn and hemp, sugar, strong waters, tobacco, and other com- modities ; whole communities, men, women, and children, swine and cattle, were migrating in all directions to find new places in which they might " sit down." Ships were built to prosecute the whale and herring fishery ; trade was opened with neighbouring colonies and witli Virginia, the West Indies, and the ports of Spain. Wars were prosecuted against the Indians, against one or other of the French factions which claimed inter-
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est about the Bay of Fundy, and provision was made against attack by the Dutch, the Spaniards, or England herself.
Besides all this, there were continual adven- tures by sea and by land undertaken by adven- turous soldiers, which betray anything else than the traditional temper of religious sectaries. Thomas Wanerton was " a stout man and had been a soldier, but for many years he had lived very wickedly in whoredom, drunkenness, and quarrelling ; he had of late come under some ter- rors and motions of the spirit by means of the preaching of the word," but he succeeded in shaking them off, and with twenty men undertook an attack upon Penobscot, which was held by D'Aulnay in opposition to La Tour. It does not matter what the issue of the attack was, save that " there was a knocking at the door with swords and pistols ready, and a great deal of shooting backwards and forwards."
Two new ships, the one of 250 tons, built at Cambridge, the other of 200 tons, built in Boston, set sail for the Canaries on the same day, laden with pipe-staves and fish. Upon another day five ships sailed from Boston, three of them built in that port, two of which were of 300 tons burthen. The following day a ship arrived from Teneriffe
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with a freight of wine, pitch, sugar, and spices, and a ketch of 30 tons, bought from the French, which was ready to sail for Trinidad, blew up in the harbour.
The first ship built in Boston was the Trial, of 160 tons, Thomas Graves, master, M an able and a godly man." This small craft was contin- ually going and coming to Bilboa with fish ; thence to Malaga; back to Boston with wine, fruit, oil, iron, and wool ; then to trade with La Tour, and so along the eastern coast towards Canada. The launching of this ship was attended with religious services, and Mr. Cotton was in- vited to discourse before the " divers godly sea- men " who formed the crew. Their godliness did not interfere with their enterprise, for they sailed to Fayal, where they found an "extraordinary good market " for their stores and fish ; there they took on board wine and sugar for the West Indies, which they exchanged for cotton and tobacco in the port of Saint Peter's. During their stay they engaged in an enterprise of salvage, ami by the help of a diving-tub took up forty guns, anchors, and cables ; so with some gold and sil- ver, which they got by trade, they sailed away for Boston, and through the Lord's UesSU Winthrop alleges, "they made a good voyage.
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which did much encourage the merchants, and made wine and sugar and cotton very plentiful and cheap in the country."
Winthrop's journal bears upon nearly every page evidence of the extraordinary vitality and activity of the young community. Ships were sail- ing from Salem and Providence to all ports — to the Dry Tortugas, with " salt fish and strong liquors, which are the only commodities for those parts " — and bringing back cotton, tobacco, and negroes in exchange. Unless these seventeenth century seamen are sadly belied, they engaged in other enterprises of more questionable morality than the slave trade. It would be as reasonable to regard the New England harbours as nests of pirates as of religious fanatics, though of course a man may be a religious fanatic and a pirate too.
I shall relate but one instance to illustrate the temper of the men who formed the front of the community, and appeal to any reasonable person to say if he thinks that the relation of sanctifica- tion to justification was the dominant concern of their lives. " Here arrived one Mr. Carman, mas- ter of the ship called [name omitted], of 180 tons. He went from New Haven in lOber last, laden with clap-boards for the Canaries, being earnestly commended to the Lord's protection by the church
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there. At the Island of Palma he was set upon by a Turkish pirate of 300 tons and 26 pieces of ordnance and 200 men ; he fought with her for three hours, having but twenty men and but 7 pieces of ordnance that he could use, and his muskets were unserviceable with rust. The Turk lay across his hawse, so as he was forced to shoot through his own hoodings, and by these shot killed many Turks ; then the Turk lay by his side and boarded him with near 100 men and cut all the ropes, etc., but his shot having killed the cap- tain of the Turkish ship and broken his tiller, the Turk took in his own ensign and fell off from him, but in such haste as he left about 50 of his men aboard ; then the master and some of his men came up and fought with those 50, hand to hand, and slew so many of them as the rest leaped overboard. The master had many wounds on his head and body and divers of his men were wounded, yet but one slain, so with much difficulty he got to the island (being in view thereof), where he was very courteously entertained and supplied with what- soever he wanted."
The passengers coming from England were con- tinually bringing money, and so long as that lasted trade prospered. They had left England because the posture of affairs in the homeland did not suit
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them ; and when at length tidings came that the Scots had entered England, that a parliament was to be called, and there was a hope of a thorough reformation, many began to think of returning home ; some did return home, and certainly the tide of immigration ceased. At the same time there was a failure of the crops ; Virginia was offering strong inducements to colonists and the most tempting reports were being received from the West Indies. The New England colony was on the verge of ruin. This was Winthrop's hour. Ships no longer arrived with money and commod- ities in exchange for the products of the colony. The quick market and good profits were at an end. Money had disappeared, as it has a habit of doing in hard times. The price of cattle fell to one half, to a third, to a fourth. Corn would buy nothing ; merchants would sell no wares but for ready money, and prices of foreign goods were rising. The country was on the verge of bankruptcy ; it could not pay its obligations abroad.
When these difficulties began to be felt the magistrates resorted to the usual expedients. They made an order that a musket bullet should pass for a farthing ; that corn should pass at a specified rate ; that carpenters should work for a certain wage. The ministers applied their
w
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wisdom to the situation. Mr. Cotton on the next lecture day, laid it down as a false principle that a man may sell as dear and buy as cheap as he can ; if he lose by casualty at sea in some of his com- modities, that he may raise the price of the rest ; that he may sell as he bought, though he pay too dear and though the price of the commodity be fallen in the mean time ; that as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of another's ignorance or necessity. Thereupon the minister laid down the true rules for trading : that a man may not sell above the current prices ; when a man loses in his commodity for want of skill, he must look to it as his own fault or cross, and must not lay it upon another ; when a man loses by calamity at sea, it is a loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease him- self of it by casting it upon another. This was as wise as most theories upon economics, but the result was the same : the country was still closer to ruin. The people went so far as to prosecute the traders, amongst whom was that Kaine who figured so largely in the " sow business."
This man was made the object of peculiar ani- mosity, because M he had been an ancient professor of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy, and having but one child, having come over for
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conscience' sake and for the advancement of the gospel ; " this added aggravation to his sin in the judgement of all men of understanding ; yet most of the magistrates acknowledged clearly enough that the deputies had gone too far ; because there was no law in force to limit or direct men to appoint a profit in their trade; because of the common practice in all countries for men to make use of advantages for raising prices ; because a certain rule could not be found out for an equal rate between buyer and seller. There is wisdom in that judgement.
Governor Winthrop took the matter in hand and discovered the true and only device for the prosperity of a nation or an individual — that is, self-dependence. He decided to build ships. He allowed the artisans to go where they did best, " employing persuasion alone in a voluntary way." He set the people to work curing fish, sawing clap-boards and planks, sowing hemp and flax, making their own cotton from materials obtained by exchange in the West Indies, breed- ing their own cattle, and practising economy. Through the intervention of friends in England, he had all goods proceeding to and from the col- ony declared free ; by another ruling all stocks employed in fishing were relieved from any pub-
, 1 1
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lie charge for a period of seven years. Finally he sent commissioners to England to explain to their creditors the true state of affairs, and the colony was saved.
The tendency of colonists is to become entirely absorbed in their own local affairs. It was not so in New England. From their first landing they became engaged in high politics of far-reaching effects ; and by the wisdom, insight, and modera- tion of their first Governor, they laid a founda- tion in the world's history which has never been removed. Their conduct towards Lord Sey, and towards the Commissioners who arrived, or whose coming was threatened from England, was marked by consummate wisdom. In one case they got out of their difficulties by proving that " the com- mission itself stayed at the seal for not paying the fees." The King must not be defrauded. This scrupulosity for the King's authority stood them in good stead on many occasions, and for men so well versed in the scriptures of the Old Testament it was easy to find a suitable answer to the most embarrassing demands. When they were in doubt as to whom they should assist. La Tour or D'Aulnay, in the struggle for supremacy in the French possessions, they took time to dis- cuss the line of conduct which was pursued under
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similar circumstances by Jehosheba, Ahab, Josiah and Amazia. By the time they had solved their doubts all necessity for action had passed away. In our own day we have seen the admirable re- sults of this subtle method of diplomacy.
When trouble arose with the Dutch of New Netherland, and an ultimatum was received, either the day was too wet to consider it, or the magistrates were not at home, or the matter would have to be referred to a general court; so, meanwhile, the Governor would write in his own name, giving his own private views, being compelled thereto by the unfortunate circum- stances of the case, and "his answer for the present must be rather a declaration of his own conceptions, than the determination of their chief est authority, from which they would receive further answer in time convenient." In the mean time the Governor would declare his grief over the difficulties between them, which might be composed by arbiters in England, or Holland, or elsewhere ; the difference was so small that it was not worth considering in view of their past amity and correspondence, nor worthy to cause a breach between two peoples so nearly related and in possession of the Protestant religion ; and if the matter should be decided against the Dutch,
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as it probably would be, they, being a God-fear- ing people, would see the wisdom of it and refrain from following in an unrighteous course. Also, but always in the mean time, the Governor would take occasion to remind the Dutch of a claim for forty pounds which a godly seaman of Piscat had against them for having fired upon him and com- pelled him to weigh anchor, and that upon the Lord's Day. There is only one person known to modern history, and that a Dutchman, who could frame a suitable rejoinder to such a letter as that.
If Governor Winthrop were known to us merely as the leader of that colony which overshadowed all New England, as the only statesman who ever granted, without prejudice, constitutional govern- ment to a people whom he was entitled to rule, and did rule until the time came, with justice and humanity and wisdom, it would be easy to mark his proper place in history. But he had to descend to the smallest affairs of village life and perform duties which are usually left to the curate or minister, the schoolmaster, the constable, or the meanest police magistrate. To many persons he is known only by his performance of these trivial functions.
Being without a body of laws, without any
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defined responsibility, or any real notion of his rights and privileges in relation to the other ele- ments in the community, "Winthrop was compelled by necessity to adjudge specifically every manner of offence, from excessive adornment of the per- son, the intemperate use of alcohol and tobacco, desertion from service, seditious speeches in pri- vate and public, to the weightier matter of English jealousy and Dutch intrigue. It is quite true that his estimation of the relative heinousness of crime was at variance with our notions of jurisprudence, and that his judgements were drawn aside by his religious nature and his abhorrence of sin. For example, he had before him two men who had committed an offence arising out of a mutual though perverted regard for each other. The animus of the prosecution seems to have been directed less against the crime itself than against the fact that it had been committed " on the Lord's Day, and that in time of public service." A ser- vant, "a very profane fellow given to cursing, etc., did use to go out of the assembly upon the Lord's Day to rob his master ; " being threatened with an appearance before the magistrates, he was far-sighted enough to go and hang himself.
Taking into account the barbarity of the Eng- lish law, in which Winthrop had been trained, the
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worst of the punishments which he inflicted were humane, merciful, and reasonable, and usually were awarded with good sense. One godly minis- ter, for example, upon conscience of his oath and care of the commonweal, discovered to the magis- trates some seditious speeches of his own son, de- livered to himself in private. The magistrates did not think it proper to take notice of the charge, being loath to have the father come out in public as the accuser of his son, so they had resort to the rather indirect method of seeking out other and more easily proven charges against the boy. In- deed, Winthrop was often brought to task for his leniency, and was convinced " that it was so." He promised "that he would endeavour, by God's assistance, to take a more strict course, whereupon there was renewal of love " between him and his advisers.
The domestic servants had to be dealt with, for they were a source of annoyance then as now. One troublesome fellow was merely " put in mind of hell, but he made no amendment, and shortly suffered a manifest judgement of God, by being drowned." In these days, it would appear as if the loss of a servant were a judgement which was manifest upon the master. At another court " a young fellow was whipped for soliciting an Indian
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squaw to incontinency ; she and her husband were present at the execution, and professed themselves to be well satisfied." The following year, a trader in Watertown was convicted for selling a pistol to an Indian ; he was whipped and branded on the cheek. The persons who were whipped were almost invariably menials, and whipping was a common method of remonstrance against their misdoings in many well-ordered families. It ill becomes us to set up our opinion upon the manage- ment of servants, seeing the pass to which we our- selves have been brought by the abandonment of that salutary practice.
Justice, indeed, was often tempered by worldly wisdom. Captain John Stone, though a most troublesome individual, was a stout soldier. He carried himself dissolutely and was finally taken in adultery; his punishment was a fine, which was not levied, and the woman was bound to her good behaviour. At the same time a luckless in- dividual, named Cole, was condemned to wear a red D about his neck for the unaggravated offence of drunkenness. The practice of adultery was one which gave great trouble to the magistrates, and from Winthrop's account it would appear as if Samuel Johnson's conclusion had some foundation in fact, that the disorder is as common amongst
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farmers as amongst noblemen. In Captain Under- bill's case it was looked upon as a frailty ; in tbe case of tbree otber persons wbo were tben in prison, a point of legal niceness arose as to tbe constitutionality of tbe scriptural practice. How- ever, " it was thought safest that they should be whipped and banished," probably a satisfactory issue to the case. The misconduct of Stephen Batcheller was unmistakeably heinous, for he was pastor of the church at Hampton ; he had suffered much at the bands of the bishops in England ; he was about eighty }rears of age, and " had a lusty comely woman to his wife, yet he did solicit the chastity of his neighbour's wife, who acquainted her husband therewith." The whole case is very painful. The pastor of Dover also fell into a similar unfortunate situation, but it is always difficult to arrive at the facts of an affair between the pastor and a widow of his flock. The case of James Britton and Mary Latham, both of whom suffered death, is well known. Their conduct certainly was shameless.
This Captain Underbill was a turbulent per- son. He was continually under censure for his un- seemliness of conduct, his looseness of behaviour, and incautious carriage, and as often repenting and promising amendment : " yet all his con-
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fessions were mixed with excuses and extenua- tions, and he was cast out of the church ; whilst he remained in Boston he was very much dejected, but being gone home again, he soon recovered his spirits and gave not that proof of a broken heart as was hoped for." He must have been a proper rake indeed, for we find him " charged by a godly young woman to have solicited her chastity under pretence of Christian love ; " yet he was elected Governor of Piscat, and committed one of his fellow magistrates to prison for declar- ing that he would not sit with an adulterer. In the end, however, by the blessing of God upon the excommunication, the captain came before the church, " in his worst clothes, being accus- tomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness, without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes, and standing on a bench he did with abundance of tears lay open his wicked course." If the remainder of his oration is correctly reported, he must have been a pro- found theologian, for Winthrop commends his doctrine of sin, " save for his blubbering, etc." It is questionable if his amendment was sincere, for we come upon his tracks for years afterwards in strange places for a man of a humble and con- trite spirit.
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I have said that the colonists were cast up in a new world, without laws or traditions for regu- lating the affairs of church, state, or society at large, and contrary to belief there was a consider- able number of vicious persons who required the strongest measures to compel them to conform to the ordinary usages of civilized men. It is the pressure of public opinion alone which prevents the average man from adopting the habits of a beast. We all know what went on in the days of the early adventurers to Canada, when it was looked upon as a noble act of self-abnegation for a trader to possess only one wife in each village. We also know the means which were required in the Western mining communities, not so very long ago either, to restrain the more unsocial vices. The authorities in New England had the same difficulties to face. There was amongst the colonists a large number of male house-servants, a class which has been in possession of special vices from the time of Pliny until now. Gov- ernor Winthrop had no hesitation in referring to their habits ; he had as little hesitation in applying the correction, the rope and the whip, two incitements to decency, which are by no means to be despised.
The vice of drunkenness was not common, and
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as such was not dealt with, save that a general court put itself on record by making an order to abolish the custom of drinking healths, on the ground that it was a thing of no good use, that * it was an inducement to drunkenness, and occa- sion of quarrelling and bloodshed, that it occa- sioned much waste of wine and beer, that it was troublesome to many, especially to masters and mistresses of feasts, who were forced to drink more often than they would.
There were, of course, many instances of drink being associated with disorders. A troublesome business arose in Boston over its effects. A ship arrived from Portugal and left behind two Eng- lishmen. According to the inalienable right of his race, one of them became " proper drunk," and was carried to his lodging. The constable, "a godly man and zealous against such disor- ders," took him from his bed and placed him in the stocks. A Frenchman of the entourage of La Tour, who was then in the town, was passing that way and released the prisoner. The constable sought out the Frenchman, and " would needs carry him to the stocks," but he refused and drew his sword, at the same time protesting his willing- ness to go to prison, but not to submit to the indignity of public exposure. He was disarmed,
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and with a curious reversal of procedure, he was first set in the stocks, then as if to meet his for- eign scruples, he was taken to prison, and finally was brought before La Tour. The magistrates " admonished the constable in private for having without warrant or authority taken a man out of his bed, and in the second place for not setting a hook upon the stocks." With their usual com- mon sense, they would lay nothing to his charge before the assembly, but Winthrop in his private journal expresses the necessity of upholding the authority of the magistrates, and refers bitterly to these " last fruits of ignorant and misguided zeal." The sailors who came into those ports would appear to have behaved in accordance with the habits of their time and the tradition of their race, and Winthrop found a melancholy satisfac- tion in recording the disasters by which they were overtaken. But as nearly all the mariners of that time came to an untimely end, it does not appear that vengeance followed them specifically for the deeds of drunkenness, quarrelling, and evil speaking which are recorded against them.
The thing that seems intolerable to us in Win- throp's conduct is his punishment of men and women for their opinions. The Governor of New England was quite frank about the matter. He
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thought it entirely proper that if a person uttered opinions which were dangerous to the community he should be punished for it. In this the Governor was right : " the government must be carried on." But the punishments inflicted for political offences were not numerous — perhaps a dozen in the twenty years of Winthrop's influence. Henry Lincoln was whipped and banished for writing letters to Eng- land. We do not know what he wrote ; but even if he wrote only the truth, he may have deserved what he got. It is not an inalienable right of a citizen always to tell the truth about his country to his country's enemies, and England as a whole was an enemy to the colony at that time. Major Andre* was not allowed the opportunity of " writ- ing letters into England." In New England, for the time being, the church and state and court were united into a trinity in which the personality of each could not be distinguished, so rebellion against one was an attack upon all three. In these days, one who speaks against the church may be a harmless fool or a sincere reformer, neither of whom should be interfered with ; one who rails against the court is liable to find him- self in gaol, and it does not require a traitor's ghost to come back to tell us what will happen to those who plot against their country.
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As late as the second session of the Fifty- Seventh Congress of the United States, held in the present century, which is yet comparatively young, an enactment was made commencing in these terms : " No person who disbelieves in." It does not matter for our argument what is the sub- ject of belief or disbelief ; in this case it is disbelief in all organized government, or affiliation with any organization entertaining or teaching such disbelief. The legislators of Massachusetts are separated from the legislators of the United States by the distance and events of three hundred years. Their attitude toward this question of belief is identical. The court of Massachusetts under Win- throp punished men and women by banishment and by whipping, not for the contrariety of their opinions, but because their speech and conduct made government difficult, and in the judgement of the magistrates tended to make it impossible.
Of course, no one would think of going to the Fifty-Seventh Congress as the ultimate lair of political wisdom. It is not pretended that their enactment was abstractly right ; but government has never yet been carried on, and never will be carried on, by an adherence to abstract principles, even if those principles could be discovered. The law in question will not be enforced, because the
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common sense and conscience of the people will not permit it. In the early days the people had less experience and more conscience, a phenome- non which is common enough, and they did en- force similar laws. But they laid a foundation of government upon obedience and order, so that their descendants can afford to neglect opinions which seem for the time being to be contrary to common sense, until it is fully proven that they are not so. Then we shall have sense enough to adopt them. Carlyle was wrong. The folly of the fools is more precious than the wisdom of the doctrinaires, for purposes of government.
The fascination which one finds in a study of the men and events of early New England is akin to that which a naturalist feels in watching the growth of an organism in vitro : it is so small, so simple, and the growth is so rapid. Every element in a national life is seen in the colony, but all is in miniature. Questions of free trade, of currency, of exports and imports, of the inter-relations of governor, magistrates, deputies, and voters, of the balance between church and state, are all working themselves out to their inevitable conclusions ; and above all there is the spectacle of men and women leading a life of intense activity, as if one were observing a swarm of bees at work within a hive
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of glass, and over this activity a wisely guiding mind.
The same problems which still perplex eighty millions of people perplexed that little colony, and it is easy to discover the revelation which they made of themselves in dealing with those pro- blems. The stage was so small, the actors so few and their parts so distinct, if one may employ a profane simile in connection with so serious a subject, that we have no difficulty in comprehend- ing the slightest detail of the little national life, and the finest characteristics of its governor.
Governor Winthrop himself was tender of con- science, and those whom he had to govern were ten- der of conscience, too ; that is, he disliked doing what he thought was wrong ; and his people also dis- liked doing what they thought was wrong. There are always opposing views of right, and that is what makes government difficult in a free country. Government is always easy when one party is will- ing to submit to what it believes to be wrong, without bothering about it. That is what makes government easy in the United States to-day. A man may ease his conscience by the subterfuge that his whole duty is performed in submitting to the law, even if he think that law is wrong ; but in New England that poor excuse was denied be-
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cause there was no law. The conscience had free play.
What Winthrop undertook to do he failed in doing. He demonstrated by his failure that an identity of church and state is intolerable to free men, and that the domain of religion lies entirely beyond the reach of human authority. Cromwell, by his failure, made the same demonstration in England, but he died before he had found a bet- ter way. Every one admits that it is possible to attain to a union of the spirit of man with the spirit of God, to a newness of life, to a fresh con- ception of the heinousness of sin, and to a know- ledge or assurance that evil can be transformed into good. No one now pretends to say how that state of affairs comes about — whether it has its origin in some movement of the will of God from all eternity, or whether the act of volition may be initiated in the man himself — but all agree that it is arrived at only by great strivings of spirit, and not by human authority. It is in virtue of this struggle after perfection alone that John Winthrop and those exiled Puritans attained to greatness.
ra
MARGARET FULLER
MARGARET FULLER
The literary history of the United States is full of enigmas, which are unsolved to this day, be- cause we have no contemporary criticism of any value to guide us. All just appreciation is lost in the adulation of friends and the calumny of enemies. There has always been a lack of that balanced judgement, which gives us so accurate a notion of French and English writers of a time even much anterior to that of which we are about to speak. George Sand we know, George Eliot we know, but what manner of person was Mar- garet Fuller ?
The case is the more difficult, inasmuch as it concerns a woman. A man can know very little about a woman, even under circumstances the most favourable for procuring knowledge. Lord Byron admitted that much ; and he is generally accredited with diligence in pursuing all paths which might lead to information, and employing every means that might minister to his curiosity.
One who writes anything worth reading is bound to find dissenters, but the worst foes of
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a literary person are those of his own household. All that is required for the hasty condemnation of any one is the publication of everything which is publicly known, told secretly, or imperfectly remembered. We know how the Carlyles and Kuskins suffered ; but Margaret Fuller suffered worst of all, because her friends were so highly endowed with folly. Malice is powerless to bring down a reputation ; silliness will lay it in the dust.
This "gifted woman" — it is well, at once, to commence using the epithets of her biographers — save for a little published criticism which now seems obvious enough, left not behind her the expression of a single thought which is essentially worth remembering. Yet her friends have aspired to set her in a place above Elizabeth Barrett Browning, above the two Georges, Sand and Eliot ; they have brought her lower than Mary Baker Eddy. After the manner of all foolish dis- ciples, they have so distorted the object of their worship that it is now difficult to see her as she was. That is why the personality of Margaret Fuller is an enigma.
There are two methods of writing biography, the exhaustive and selective. In the one case, everything that is known or surmised is reported with ^discriminating fidelity ; in the other, the
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facts, surmises, and probabilities are taken as a whole and duly considered. The writer himself forms an image and presents it as a true epitome, after the manner of any artist. At first sight it would appear that if we had all contemporary knowledge of individuals, we should know them as they are ; but this is not so. We have to create the image for ourselves, and it will be coloured by the insistence which we place upon this fact or upon that. But, after all, the manifestations of the individual life are too elusive to be caught and transmitted in any such rough fashion, even if we admit the utmost good faith on the part of the reporters ; and that is an admission which we are not always justified in making.
Margaret Fuller's life has been treated in this exhaustive way. The hysterical vagaries of her childhood, the follies of her over-mature youth, the absurdness of her young womanhood, are all preserved to us by writers little less hysterical and quite as absurd as herself. This mass of pseudo-information is contained in five bulky vol- umes of printed and written material, in volumes of letters to and from notable persons of the time, in diaries, numerous and minute, and in reminiscences by every one who might remember anything. These reminiscences, however, were
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written for the most part at a time when their authors' memories had failed, and they spent a great deal of labour in remembering very unim- portant things.
This raw material has been handled over and over again : in earlier days by James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing — cousin of one William Ellery and nephew of the other. It may be necessary to remind this generation that Clarke was founder of the Church of the Disciples at Boston in 1841, and pastor of the flock till his death ; that Channing was close to the formula- tors of American Unitarianism, and allied with the Fuller family, his cousin Ellery having mar- ried Ellen, the sister of Margaret. Neither was Emerson himself wholly free from blame. At a later date, Julia Ward Howe, herself an important personage in New England, became Miss Fuller's formal biographer, and still later, Mr. Higginson, whose appreciation is in some degree tempered by a just criticism.
Two or three illustrations will serve to show what kind of doctrine we are likely to expect from these biographers. In striving for an ex- planation of Miss Fuller's authority, Mrs. Howe never got beyond asking the question : M What imperial power had this self-poised soul, which
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could lead in its train the brightest and purest intelligences, and bind the sweet influence of starry souls in the garland of its happy bowers ? " The present writer does not know. Again, when Miss Fuller was passing through the stage com- mon to all young ladies, and desired to protest her resolution to remain in the unwedded state, she expressed herself after this manner : " My pride is superior to any feelings I have yet ex- perienced, my affection is strong admiration, not the necessity of giving or receiving assistance or sympathy.'' In this innocent remark Mrs. Howe finds proof that "she acknowledges the insuffi- ciency of human knowledge, bows her imperial head, and confesses herself human." Thirdly, when Mr. Higginson is describing the diverse elements present at the inception of that strange literary product, the " Dial," he refers to it as an " alembic within which they were all distilled, and the priestess who superintended this intellec- tual chemic process happened to be Margaret Fuller." All this time, he admits, he had in his possession documents pertaining to an early love affair, which, if published, as they have since been, " would bring her nearer to us, by proving that she with all her Roman ambition was still a woman at heart." If Margaret Fuller be treated
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as an imperial being, who only in a mood of self- depreciation, or in a moment of magnanimity bows her head and confesses herself human ; if she be looked upon as a Roman priestess superin- tending a chemical process going on in an alem- bic, or as a " rapt sylph " — this was Bronson Alcott's view, expressed in sonnet form, as if she were a Sixth Avenue seer — we shall never get much further.
If, however, she be considered merely as a woman, we may get some light upon her person- ality ; but if this matter be too high for us, cer- tainly we shall get some light upon the person- ality of that strange group which has written it- self down as her friends. They all lived together during a period of folly, it is true ; but that is not the whole matter. A New England prophet has always had the most honour in his own coun- try, amongst his own kin ; and, contrary to the observation of Emerson, the ship from a Massa- chusetts port has ever been more romantic to its own passengers than any other which sailed the high seas.
At any rate, Margaret Fuller was an interest- ing personage, interesting even yet, and we shall first show forth fully the presentation her bio- graphers make, before enquiring what manner of
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woman she really was. Mrs. Howe protests that " to surpass the works of Clarke, Emerson, and Channing is not to be thought of ; " but she has surpassed them and made their " precious remi- niscences " more precious still. She found ready- to her hand a most unfortunate document, namely, the introductory chapter to an autobiographical romance, entitled " Marianna," written by Mar- garet Fuller herself, which was seized upon and dealt with as authentic history. It deals with her childhood, and when elevated out of its proper place, conveys an impression of the individual which is totally wrong. Few men, and fewer women, could desire that the vagaries of their childhood should be remembered against them. Even the sick-bed delirium of the neurotic child is preserved for our admiration. As delirium it is excellent, as biography it is misleading.
Margaret Fuller was a neurotic child and suf- fered from actual hysteria. Ideas controlled her body, and as the ideas of a child are of the slightest fabric, it may be imagined what that control amounted to. In the children of New England from the earliest time there has been a streak of hysteria which has occasionally broad- ened out into a dark pool of human misery and deception.
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At nine years of age the little Margaret was sent to school in Groton, where she amused and tormented teachers and pupils by her fantastic freaks. In return they penetrated a bit of plea- santry upon her, with the result that she went to her room, locked the door, and fell into convul- sions. Quite naturally for a child in her condi- tion, she "did not disdain to employ misrepre- sentation to regain the superiority in which she delighted," and when convicted, " she threw her- self down, dashed her head upon the iron hearth, and was taken up senseless." Old Judge Stough- ton of Salem thought he understood the import of such manifestations.
No wonder the child's character " somewhat puzzled her teacher ; " it has misled her bio- graphers too, and will be certain to puzzle them till the essential nature of hysteria is disclosed. They should not have been puzzled. By heredity the child was endowed with a nervous organisa- tion, mobile and abnormally sensitive, and her environment was not peculiarly suited to her temperament. All of her paternal relations wore eccentric, some of them were of unstable will, and she herself was accredited with genius. The Puritan girl has ever been a pitiable and I figure. The child's education could not have been
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worse devised. Timothy Fuller, her father, was a lawyer, politician, and son of a country clergy- man, bred in the Harvard of those days, absorbed in the interest and business of his profession, " in- tent upon compassing the support of his family," all of which proves his incapacity as educator of his own child. The mother is described as " one of those fair flower-like natures," which abounded in the early days. These pilgrim mothers doubt- less had their own trials. Had the management of the child been left to her, we might have escaped all this pathological record of hysteria. The incapacity of every father is now, I believe, a subject of free and frequent comment in the domestic circle ; in those days the father's wisdom and authority went unquestioned.
The child's surroundings, we are told, were devoid of artistic luxury, and that was quite proper, if these surroundings be regarded merely as the " prophetic entrance to immortality ; " but she had to frequent them a weary time before she found the door. Truly, as Mrs. Howe says, there was an absence of frivolity and a distaste for all that is paltry and superficial, — small danger that her " inner sense of beauty would be lost or over- laid through much pleasing of the eye and ear." No wonder the child acquired a great " aversion
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to the meal-time ceremonial, so long, so tiresome," that her aunts cried out upon the " spoiled child, the most unreasonable child that ever was, if brother could but open his eyes to see it." After being kept awake for hours, waiting till her father should return to hear her recite the labours of the day, no wonder her aunts were puzzled at her un- willingness to go to bed. These good women did not know that as soon as the light was taken away the little girl saw colossal faces advancing slowly, the eyes dilating and each feature swelling loathsomely, to return again after being driven away by her shriek of terror. When at length she did go to sleep, it was to dream of horses trampling over her, or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being amongst trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out, whilst the blood became a pool and splashed over her feet, rising higher and higher till soon she dreamed it would reach her lips. No wonder she arose and walked in her sleep, moaning, all over the house, or found drenched with tears, in the morning, the pillow on which she had been dreaming that she was following her mother to the grave. Where was the mother all this time ? Alas for our poor mothers !
Another example of her father's perspicacity
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still remains, in his opinion that " she would go crazy if she did not leave off thinking of such things," little suspecting that he and his system were the enchanters that called forth these night monsters. At the age of six, this infant was em- ployed in the study of Latin, though her young life was " somewhat " enlivened by the lightness of English grammar, " and other subjects various as the hours would allow." At eight, the Latin language had opened for her the door to many delights, for the Roman ideal, definite and resolute, commended itself to her childish judgement : in Horace she enjoyed the courtly appreciation of life; in Ovid, the first glimpse of mythology carried her to the Greek Olympus — at least her biographers say they think so, but that is probably a guess. The modern counterpart of this " wonder child " is the " laboratory child," whose food is weighed and calculated in calories, the result of it measured by all the processes of kinetics.
One Sabbath morning the young child was cast- ing her eyes over the meeting for religious pur- poses, in a vain search for the Eoman figures she knew so well, for the characters from Shakespeare that she loved. They only met the shrewd honest eye, the homely decency, or the smartness of the New England village ; or her gaze rested upon a
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family occupying the next pew, which was her particular aversion, for, as she tells us, " the father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness and entire self-complacency." As she looked about, her attention was next arrested by a woman foreign to that scene, with her fair face, her strange dress, the unusual arrangement of her hair, her reserved, self-possessed manner. Such an " apparition " would arrest attention in Cambridgeport even in these times. The stranger proved to be an English lady who possessed the two remarkable accomplishments of painting in oils and playing on the harp. It appears that there were others who admired the stranger in their own way ; " but she lightly turned her head from their oppressive looks and fixed a glance of full- eyed sweetness on the child." The relation be- tween the two was delightful, till at length the stranger " went across the sea." They corre- sponded for many years, as the habit then was, and even her " shallow and delicate epistles M did not serve to disenchant the growing girl. This is not the usual result of a long correspondence.
Left alone, Margaret fell into melancholy again, and her father, who further reveals himself in his " distrust of medical aid generally," appears to have had a conversation with his sisters, during
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which some heat was manifested. At any rate, he concluded to send his daughter to school with her " peers in age." The school chosen was the Misses Prescott's at Groton, as has already been indicated. There, as Mrs. Howe observes, she was content, " so long as she could queen it over her fellow pupils, but the first serious wounding of her self-love aroused in her a vengeful malig- nity,"— fearful words to employ in relation to a girl of tender years.
Doubtless these things occur in boarding- schools at this day, if we can believe what we hear; when they are made the material of an autobiographical romance they are apt to assume a false importance. It was in this school that the foolish bit of pleasantry occurred. The children, shocking as it may sound, were permitted to indulge in play-acting, in which Margaret had a peculiar facility. To help the illusion, they were allowed to heighten the natural colour of the face, but Margaret did not observe the unity of time and place in respect of the rouge ; she employed it at unseasonable times. The pleasantry arose out of that, and was followed by the turbulence of conduct on Margaret's part which " somewhat puzzled " her teachers, as it would not have puzzled the judges of Salem. Mrs. Howe further
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notes that, during the progress of the affair, " Margaret's pride did not forsake her ; she sum- moned to her aid the fortitude of her Komans and ate her dinner quietly," though she afterwards conducted herself in a wholly Gallic fashion.
Fortunately the pupil was dealt with by a teacher who wrought upon her by narrating the circumstances of her own life, which had made it one of sorrow and sacrifice ; a common enough practice, I believe, amongst governesses, but one would dearly love to know the secret story of this New England school-teacher. At any rate, Margaret left the school at the age of thirteen, and returned to her father's house, "much in- structed in the conditions of harmonious relations with her fellows," qualities very essential to peaceable living in the Cambridgeport of those days.
Margaret, as her friends called her, omitting the first name Sarah — they called Emerson. Waldo — returned from school at the end of her thir- teenth year. Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, whose one sufficient claim upon our notice is that he was her friend, gives us a lively picture of her at this time, lie was a student at Harvard : allow- ance must be made for that, as students at Har- vard, or any other college for the matter of that.
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must not be followed absolutely in their estima- tion of a feminine personality.
According to this authority, her precocity, men- tal and physical, he also notes, was such that she passed for a much older person, and had already a recognized place in society. She was in bloom- ing and vigorous health, with a tendency to over- stoutness, which he thinks gave her some trouble, though he does not quite specify in what way. She was not handsome, nor even pretty, he admits, but we all know the combination of feminine features and qualities which college students con- sider handsome and pretty. She had fine hair and teeth, he adds with discrimination, and a peculiarly graceful carriage of the head and neck which redeemed her from the charge of plain- ness. Sixteen years afterwards, this same neck seems to have impressed Mr. Channing, who dwells with much feeling upon its pliancy and other qualities ; " in moments of tender and pen- sive feeling its curves were like those of a swan ; under the influence of indignation its movements were more like the swooping of a bird of prey." He mentions a habit of opening the eyes and fluttering them suddenly, with a singular dilation of the iris, which must have deepened this im- pression of her likeness to a bird. Nor are we
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left without Emerson's observations upon her appearance : " She had a face and frame that would indicate fulness and tenacity of life " — the philosophers of those days were hard bitten by phrenology. " She was then, as always, care- fully and becomingly dressed, and of lady-like self-possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness, a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eye- lids, the nasal tone of her voice, all repelled. Soon her wit effaced the impression of her unattract- iveness, and the eyes which were so plain at first swam with fun and drollery." This was in 1836. She was in her twenty-seventh year, he was thirty-three — these facts are worth noting — but in Mrs. Howe's judgement, " Emerson's bane was a want of fusion, the ruling characteristic of Mr. Channing a heart that melted almost too easily."
Miss Fuller's studios did not cease upon being admitted as a recognised member of Cambridge- port society. Her " pursuit of culture " was ar- dent, and she was resolute to track it to its lair. She rose before five, walked for an hour, practised on the piano till seven, had breakfast, read French till eight, then attended two or three lectin Brown's philosophy. At half-past nine she went
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to Mr. Perkins's school, and studied Greek till twelve, when she went home and practised on the piano till two. If the conversation were very- agreeable she sometimes lounged for half an hour at dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, when she could, she read two hours in Italian ; at six, she walked or drove, then sang for half an hour before retiring for a little while to write in her journal. This is doubtless what she intended to do ; but as Sir James Fitzjames Stephen ob- served, " you cannot always infer from the state- ment of the fact to the truth of it."
It is true, however, that Miss Fuller was en- gaged in serious study. Moved by the brilliant expositions of Carlyle, she commenced the study of German, and within a year had read Goethe, Schiller, Tieck, Korner, Richter, and Novalis — fine-sounding names. She was able to appreciate " the imperfection of Novalis, and the shallowness of Lessing." She thought him " easily followed, strong, but not deep." Impressed with the value of a fixed opinion on the subject of metaphysics, she applied herself to the study of Fichte, Stuart, and Brown — the Scotch schoolmaster who at- tempted to fill in with hollow rhetoric the gulf between youth and Presbyterianism. This ambi- tious young woman, after a year's study of Ger-
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man in New England, entertained the idea of writing a life of Goethe, and constructing six his- torical tragedies, which would have been a fairly marvellous production. In spite of all this em- ployment, she continued to feel " a merciful and providential interest in her friends."
At twenty-one years of age this strange person found " the past worthless, the future hopeless." The occasion of this discovery was Thanksgiving Day, the place, church. After dinner the outlook was rather more gloomy, and she sought to free herself from anguish by a long quick walk. This was a thoroughly sound physiological proceeding, and she hoped to return home in a state of prayer. Luther in a similar case had recourse to a draught of strong sweet wine. It was a sad and sallow day, and, driven from place to place by the conflict within her, she sat down at last to rest beside a little pool, dark and silent, within the trees. This must have been about five in the afternoon ; dinner was at two ; we all feel that way at times, but if we are wise we do not speak of it. Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds, and " the inward conquest was sealed by the sunbeam of that sallow day." Then she saw that k% there was no self, that it was only because she thought self real that she suffered, that she had only to
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live in the idea of the all, and all was hers." This sounds strangely familiar in our ears.
Two years later, in 1833, Margaret Fuller and her family, in the false language of the period, "exchanged the academic shades of Cambridge- port for the country retirement of Groton " — Mr. Higginson himself speaks of Artichoke Mills on the Merrimac as " a delicious land of lotos-eating." She did not, we are glad to learn, take the position of a malcontent, but busied herself in teaching her brothers and sisters, in needlework, and in assisting her mother, a thoroughly useful occupa- tion. But soon we find her at a careful perusal of Alfieri's writings and an examination into the evidence of Christianity, for it would appear that infidels and deists, some of whom were numbered among her friends, had instilled into her mind distressing sceptical notions. It will be observed that it was deists, and not atheists, who poisoned this young New England mind.
It was during this period that Margaret Fuller met Miss Harriet Martineau, and the stranger appears to have been rather free in her remarks, for we have it on record that her depreciation of Hannah More grated on Miss Fuller's sensibil- ities. The two ladies went to church together, and the minister gave them the distinction of being
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prayed for. This induced Margaret herself to utter a prayer which she afterwards committed to writing, though the uttering of it may have been a dramatic afterthought. Some sceptics affect to question the efficacy of the minister's prayer, for one of the persons to whom it was addressed be- came in time an " enthusiastic disbeliever." This imputed unrighteousness, however, occurred after the publication of Miss Martineau's book, " So- ciety in America," in 1836. In this work, as well as in her " Autobiography," she indulged in some tolerably plain speaking. She sets it down for a fact that she found the coterie in Boston occupied in talk about fanciful and shallow conceits which they took for philosophy, and that Miss Fuller was spoiling a set of well-meaning women by looking down upon people who acted instead of talking finely. However this may be, we have Margaret's opinion of the book in an M immense " letter addressed to its author, in which she tells her she found in it a degree of presumptuousness, irre- verence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, ultra- ism, and many other evil things. Ten years later, the ladies met again, but no heat appears to have been developed. It was to Miss Martineau the young lady was indebted for an introduction to Kinerson, " whom she very mueh wished to know,"
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and all three became very good friends. Emerson speaks of his impression of these early interviews with a polite reserve, as if he were writing a letter of commendation for a friend whom he wished to be rid of. " I believe, I fancied her too much in- terested in personal history, and dramatic justice was done to everybody's foibles." It is pretty hard to take any comfort out of that, yet again he insists that "her good services were somewhat impaired by a self-esteem which it would have been unfortunate for her disciples to imitate." It is certain that those disciples were not deterred by this gentle remonstrance from manifestations of self-esteem. It was unfortunate, but then Emerson had already laid himself open to the charge of " a want of fusion."
In the autumn of 1835 the father, Timothy Fuller, died, leaving his property " somewhat di- minished," as many a worse man has done. If it were the present intention to deal with that heroic period in the world's history of which the Puritan development in New England formed a part, especially dwelling upon the strength and splen- dour of character therein displayed, we could not do better than follow the fortunes of the Fuller family up to its source. The origin of the family, in America at least, was in Lieutenant Thomas
174 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
Fuller, who came over in 1638. We have his own word for it in verse :
In thirty-eight I set my foot
On this New England shore, My thoughts were then to stay one year,
And here remain no more.
The great-grandson of this lieutenant and poet was Timothy Fuller, and the eldest son of this Timothy was another of the same name, the father of Margaret. Miss Fuller's grandfather grad- uated, or was graduated as it was the fashion of that time to say, from Harvard College in 1760, and settled in Princeton (Massachusetts) as a clergyman.
It is the custom to suppose that the events cul- minating in the American Revolution were of an entirely spontaneous origin. As a matter of fact there was much contention, much bitterness, and many opponents of extreme measures. This cler- gyman was a firm opponent, and on the occasion of taking up arms he addressed his parishioners from a text which is susceptible of much vindict- iveness in the handling. As a result he was dis- missed from his charge, and he brought suit to recover his salary. The affair appears to have been adjusted, for we find him once more in his pastorate, but recalcitrant as ever, voting in
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the State Convention against the acceptance of the Constitution for the United Colonies, on the ground that that instrument did not define the relation of human slavery to free institutions. Some will consider this old Puritan a far-seeing man. His five sons were all lawyers, and so far as one can judge did not attain to any great emi- nence for winsomeness of nature or agreeableness of behaviour. It would appear that Margaret inherited some of those qualities which are not designed to win the public heart; indeed, one observer, himself a man of intemperate speech, thought he found in her " the disagreeableness of forty Fullers."
Margaret's father was the eldest of these five lawyers, not to designate them by so humane a name as sons, and he must have been a person of some consideration. He was, of course, a gradu- ate of Harvard, a representative in Congress, Chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs, and an intimate friend of John Quincy Adams. Indeed, the President visited Mr. Fuller and was present at a dinner and ball given in his honour. At this time Mr. Fuller lived in the fine old house built by Chief Justice Dana, and, what is of more interest to us, this was the occasion of his daughter's first public appearance.
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To show how faithfully the field has been gleaned, we are not left without an exact account of the figure that the young lady made at this ball. She is described as a young girl of sixteen, with a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head. She was laced so tightly that she had to hold her arms back as if they were pinioned. Her dress was of pink silk with muslin over it, low in the neck, and badly cut. She danced awkwardly, and was so shortsighted that she could hardly see her partner. It will appear at once that this description is by another young lady, and therefore that the reporter's con- temporary was of an attractive personality.
The Fullers did not long occupy this mansion, but made several moves before retiring to Groton in 1833, where the father died two years later. The consequent family cares prevented the daugh- ter's acceptance of a proposition made to her by Mr. Farrar, professor of astronomy at Harvard, and his wife, to visit Europe in company with Miss Martineau. Margaret prayed that she might make a right decision — an operation wholly needless, one woidd think, as the answer was so obvious from her resources. In the pious enquiry of one of her admirers, " Of all the crownings of Margaret's life, shall we not most envy her
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that of this act of sacrifice? " one finds a revela- tion of the meretricious surroundings in which she lived — as meretricious as the surroundings in which Mark Pattison lived at the same time, when Oxford also was overtaken by folly.
In 1836 the young woman went to Boston, under engagement with Mr. A. Bronson Alcott to teach Latin and French in his school. To these lan- guages she added Italian and German. One would think from the published accounts that she had the gift of tongues, and was able to confer it upon her pupils — a gift of doubtful utility where women are concerned, as a wise old Puritan observed in the bitterness of his spirit, during the troubled time when Mrs. Hutchinson was turn- ing the world upside down. One young woman maliciously circulated the report that their teacher thought in German. Yet when Miss Fuller went to Paris she " might as usefully have been in a well," for all the good her French did her. When she met her Italian husband in Rome, she could only exchange a few guide-book words; six months after that meeting, she still " spoke very bad French fluently." When she called upon George Sand, that lady greeted her with the familiar " C'est vousf " Miss Fuller replied : "21 me fait de bien de vous voir" which is bad French,
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but amusing. Her biographers are careful to alter the expression to "II me fait da Lien de vous voir" which is better ; but the incident illustrates their incapacity to tell of a thing as it occurred and their uncontrollable desire to exag- gerate.
It appears there were " worldlings " in Boston in those days and that they held Mr. Alcott in as much honour " as the worldlings of ancient Athens did Socrates." It " made them smile " to hear their verdict confirmed by Miss Martineau from the other side of the Atlantic : hence the vigour of speech in the letter condemning her book. Mr. Alcott appears to have had his own troubles. There was a serious proposition to prosecute him for blasphemy, and on the appearance of his book, "Conversations on the Gospels," a professor of Harvard is quoted as affirming that one third of it was absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene. In a very short time this famous school contained only five pupils — three of them Mr. Alcott's daughters, a colored child, and one other. Miss Fuller's labours as a teacher in Boston were at an end, so she went to Providence to teach in Colonel Fuller's school. Her salary was to be a thousand dollars, but there is some question as to whether it was ever paid. Miss Fuller re-
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mained in Providence two years, and during that time made the acquaintance of many persons whose names we know, amongst them Kichard Henry Dana, and his son, who had just returned from his wanderings over the sea. Colonel Ful- ler, who was no relation of Margaret, shortly afterwards went to New York on the staff of the " Mirror," then conducted by K P. Willis and George P. Morris, but he did not remain long, as he " got tired of supporting two poets." In those days, it would appear, newspapers were conducted by men of literary taste, and this course seemed as natural to the readers as that a ship should be commanded by a sea-captain.
All these volumes of memoirs, reminiscences, letters, and diaries, and even these present writ- ings, may seem a great thing about a very small matter, for we have not yet heard one word of sense from Margaret Fuller herself. But that is part of the enigma. If you ask her biographers wherein consisted the capacity of this woman, they will answer with one accord, " in her conver- sations ; " a statement obviously difficult to dis- prove at this distance of time. The converse of the Platonic proposition, that ideas are inseparable from speech, is not universally true, and we can- not now say what was the ratio of ideas to words.
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Certainly there was a great deal of speech. All authorities agree upon that, though Miss Marti- neau for one did not attach any high value to it. Dr. Hedge, one of Miss Fuller's earliest admirers, remarked upon her conversation, " brilliant and full of interest, but with a satirical turn, which became somewhat modified in after life." Mr. Clarke bears the same testimony, but admits that she was haughty and supercilious to what he calls the multitude, and attributes this to her being " intensive " rather than " extensive," though this explanation does not advance our enquiry very far. Strangers, we are further told, were wary of her on account of a haunting fear of being reduced to an absurdity. For all these reasons we must infer that her talk was interesting to the immediate circle of her friends.
When Miss Fuller returned from Providence, she decided to turn to account her ability to talk, and in 1839 began her celebrated " Conversations" in Miss Peabody's rooms, West Street, Boston. She talked for five years, not without intermissions of course, but that was her principal occupation till she left New England. M Unfortunately." as Mrs. Howe judged, " the pulpit and the platform were interdicted to her sex, but here was an oppor- tunity to arouse women from their prone and
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•
slavish attitude." At the first meeting twenty- five ladies were present, " who showed themselves to be of the elect by their own election of a noble aim " — Unitarian doctrine truly, Arianism, Socin- ianism, for less than which men, and women too, had been hanged in that very Boston. The first Conversation was devoted to Mythology, as being sufficiently separated from all exciting local subjects; but it is hard to say what subjects might not have excited the Boston of those days ; it became excited over less.
In spite of the evidence of direct observers to the contrary, Margaret Fuller is said to have ap- peared positively beautiful in her chair of leader- ship ; even her dress was glorified, although it was known to have been characterized by no display or attempted effect. However that may have been, it is certain that these people could not see clearly, for we are asked to credit the statement that twenty-five Boston ladies of the year 1840 " seemed melted into one love." In addition to the meetings for ladies, there was a series of five meetings to which " gentlemen " were admitted. Mr. Emerson was present at one of them, and he testifies that it was encumbered by the headiness or incapacity of the men.
These happy labours continued for six winters,
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•
and came to an end in April, 1844, but in the mean time they had not consumed all of Miss Fuller's energy. She was actively engaged in the study of art. The masters of art were studied by means of casts in the Boston Athenaeum, in a collection of Allston's paintings, and some sculp- tures of Greenough and Crawford. Upon these rather fragmentary data she appears to have at- tained to some finality of opinion, though, accord- ing to Emerson, a certain fanciful interpretation of her own sometimes took the place of a just estimate of artistic values. If the Boston of those days was less rich in art treasures than it is now, we have it on high authority that it was " richer in the intellectual form of appreciative criticism." It may be so ; one of their own has said it. At any rate, Emerson considered that Miss Fuller's taste in art was not based on universal but on idiosyncratic grounds. No one blames the young woman for being so foolish, but the people around her must have been extremely foolish to listen and to praise her. And so she lived surrounded by flat- terers, and the most subtle flattery of a woman ii that which is addressed to her intellect, because it helps to allay the suspicion that she has none. There are but two incidents yet to relate before emerging into the air. The one is Miss Fuller's
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editorship of the " Dial ; " the other, her connec- tion with Brook Farm. The painter Newton made the remark that in London he met occa- sionally such society as he met in Boston all the time, which in itself is a dark saying, but at any rate it was necessary that these friends should have an organ of printed speech. As Leigh Hunt said of one of the fraternity, they were wavering between something and nothing, and now they looked for permanency in the " Dial." This jour- nal appeared in 1840, and was issued at intervals, more or less regular, for four years. Good or bad, it cost a great deal of precious time from those who served it, and from Margaret most of all ; that was Emerson's view of the publication. The idea of a journal was promoted by the appear- ance in England of the "New Monthly Maga- zine," whose editor, Heraud, is described by Carlyle as " a loquacious, scribacious little man, of middle age and a parboiled greasy aspect."
The " Dial," then, was the organ of the Tran- scendentalists — the word would slip out at last ; the meaning of it is that their utterances had passed beyond the limits of good sense — and as such it is a treasury of information, containing, as it does, work fresh from the hand of Emerson, Lowell, Thoreau, Cranch, the Channings, Alcott,
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and Parker, upon such subjects as, the Interior of the Hidden Life, the Outworld and the In- world, and many other large subjects, which we do not now comprehend. It would appear that even in those days of enlightenment there were some who cared for none of these things, and the editor of the Philadelphia " Gazette " so far for- got himself as to call the writers a pack of zanies, and to apply to them other opprobrious epithets of plainer meaning.
Those were curious times ; men were full of hope and everybody had a gospel of his own. Graham preached the regeneration of the world through the medium of unbolted flour, and we have not yet freed ourselves from the heresy ; Alcott preached a " potato " gospel, and Palmer re-discovered the source of evil to be, not in the love of money, but in money itself. A strange fruit of the materialism of their doctrine is found in the fact that the best reward they held out was a long life, as if that in itself were a wholly desir- able thing.
It is easy at this distance of time to speak of that ingenious experiment in altruism known as Brook Farm with calmness and understanding. It was an innocent form of folly and the motives of the associates were wholly good. These ex-
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tremely speculative persons manifested a pure and fresh spirit, and an unquestioning faith in the regeneration of men, qualities excellent in themselves, but the leaven was very little and its force soon spent. Including the preliminary period of talk, the whole fanciful affair only lasted some four or five years, and then vanished into the void with other good and aimless intentions. There was abundant enthusiasm and amiability, qualities one may see in a company of otherwise serious-minded men riding through the streets of a Western town on the backs of camels, with strange banners in their hands ; but, as Mr. James observes, there were degrees of enthusiasm, and there must have been degrees of amiability too. The failure of the experiment arose from the nature of the case. J. Gr. Holland, who was one of them, wrote :
We hope, we resolve, we aspire, we pray, And we think we mount the air on wings Beyond the recall of sensual things, Whilst our feet still cling to the heavy clay.
Precisely ; this is not very good poetry, but it is good sense. Their feet too were in the clay.
The people who composed the Brook Farm community were for the most part insignificant. Emerson was gently sarcastic and mildly critical
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throughout. In the cloud of talk we hear his voice : u truly it is not instruction, but provoca- tion, I can receive from another soul." Haw- thorne gloomed in a corner for hours at a time, holding a book before him, but seldom turning the leaves. His companions accused him of com- ing to the place as a sort of vampire, for purely psychological purposes. His attitude is revealed in one of his notes : " I was invited to dine with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was very thankful." Even Margaret herself thought that one of the best things about the Farm was its nearness to the woods, and escape so easy : she was sagacious enough to observe a "great tend- ency to advocate spontaneousness at the expense of reflection." A curious way in which this spon- taneity revealed itself was in designating the cows by the names of the inmates. Margaret felt the evils of want of conventional refinement in the impudence with which one of the girls treated her. This same young woman, however, was afterwards brought to see the enormity of her offence, and on the following Saturday, as Mar- garet was leaving, u she stood waiting with a timid air " to bid her good-bye. On another occa- sion she observed a M lack of the deferenee she
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needed for the boldness and animation of her part, and so did not speak with as much force as usual."
The movement illustrates well the vagaries of philosophic speculation. No one can tell whither it leads or where it will end if it be allowed free play. It would be long to trace the origin of the movement, for its ways were long and devious. It is sufficient to say that it came from France, through Fourier, who in turn derived his inspi- ration from Rousseau, and he in turn from Locke and his school ; but that is far enough.
In England, when the speculation had reached a certain point and the conclusion was seen to be logically inevitable, the common sense of the English mind came to the rescue. The people perceived that the course of life can never be determined by a priori reasoning. In France the doctrinaires gained control, and were determined to push their reasoning to a conclusion. The issue was the entirely logical Eevolution, and they accepted it, just as the Calvinist accepts hell. Their great cry was " Eeturn to Nature," but it was modified by the German voice, and modu- lated by some suggestions of Hellenism, before it came across to New England as a faint echo.
There was a new spirit in the air. In England
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people had turned aside and applied themselves to the amendment of their lives, after the method of AVesley ; in America its result was seen tempo- rarily, and perhaps accidentally, in the clouds of transcendentalism — if that be not too for- midable a word to employ — but finally in the humanizing results of the great Unitarian move- ment.
Margaret Fuller herself was quick enough to perceive that Fourierism was entirely material- istic in motive and aim, " making the soul the result of bodily health, instead of body the mere clothing of the soul." It is not by any material thing that either the individual or the mass will be altered for the better.
But, after all, is Nature only Nature as seen on a rare day in June, in the sweet fields and woods of New England ? Is it not to be looked for also when we lift up our eyes to the mountains, scarred by catastrophe or seamed by the frosts of winter, and proclaiming the effect of the slow invulner- able forces that make for disintegration and decay? If those who carried this cry farthest had ears to hear, and had listened on the sweetest evening, they would have heard the rustle of the viper in the dead leaves, the stealthy tread of some small beast relentlessly pursuing a smaller
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beast of prey ; they would have heard the cry of the hunted and the anguished scream of the last agony. The very wood of West Koxbury was a world of plunder and death ; Nature, there too, was one with rapine ; the Mayfly was torn by the swallow; the sparrow speared by the shrike — • that is, if shrikes inhabit New England in June.
It is only in semi-rural communities that there is a desire to escape farther from civilization. Zola knew the soil and what it brings forth — squalor and brutality. Nature worship is as false a religion as the worship of any other material thing. It is Ashtoreth in another guise, save that amongst the Brook Farmers the false worship was not in the slightest degree associated with sexual immorality, and that was the only strange thing about it. Yet platonic love is always silly, and sometimes it is dangerous, according to the judi- cious observation of the Master of Peterhouse. Not since the days of the Assyrian King have men become sane by being turned out to grass ; and those who talk of the regeneration of the race through Nature, " talk as a bull would talk." We have Johnson's word for that.
These people attempted to realize Dryden's dream of an early age, " when wild in woods the noble savage ran," or in reality, as Mr. Bagehot
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prefers it, " when lone in woods the cringing savage crept." Emerson tried to teach them that heroism lies in doing the daily work. Innes after- wards proclaimed that beauty is in the meadow and the woodland of the back lot, as he had learned from Rousseau, Dupre, Daubigny, and Millet, that the paysage intime contains that beauty which we are all prone to go far to seek. Innes was always protesting that " rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky, and the clouds can only convey their sentiment to those who are in the love of God and the desire of the truth."
The Transcendentalists of New England had those two qualities, love of God and love of the truth, and any Calvinist could tell where they ob- tained them. Certainly it was not in West Rox- bury. And yet to this day these devotees are unthinkingly held up to our admiration — men who declined the duties of everyday life, who, like the melancholy Democritus, M forsook the city, lived in groves and hollow trees upon a green bank by a brookside or confluence of wati day long and all night." They saw the evil that is in the world as clearly as we see it, but they thought there was a remedy in exchanging the old physicians for new quacks. We know there
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is none, save that which comes in the ordinary- course of events.
It must not be supposed that Margaret Fuller and her friends had it all their own way. The American public saw to that. There was humour in the land then as now, and there was common sense. The little coterie made a large noise and their successors took up its echoes, but it must not be inferred that the voice of the men of com- mon sense was either still or small. They met with neglect and ridicule ; Cranch made carica- tures ; Lowell wrote doggerel. One of his stanzas in "A Fable for Critics" thus describes Mar- garet Fuller under the guise of Miranda :
She will take an old notion and make it her own
By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone,
Or persuade you 't is something tremendously deep,
By repeating it so as to put you to sleep ;
And she well may defy any mortal to see through it
When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.
In short, then, Margaret Fuller became, in the minds of sensible people, the watchword for all that was eccentric and pretentious, the embodi- ment of all that was ungraceful and unf eminine ; yet if any of those scoffers thought Margaret Fuller a fool, he was vastly mistaken, though there was something to be said for that view of the case ;
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if lie arrived at the same conclusion in respect of her friends, who fostered all this folly, this is not the place to contradict him.
In 1844 Margaret Fuller went to New York. She seems to have had her eyes opened to the futility of the life in Boston. In a letter to a friend written not long before the change, she confessed she had " gabbled and simpered long enough ; " but we do not know if the confession was made with as much sincerity as the occasion demanded. The immediate cause of her departure was an en- gagement with Horace Greeley to join the staff of the " Tribune," and she lived in his house so long as she remained in the United States. There is a fact to quiet mirth. Horace Greeley knew merit when he saw it. He knew good work and good writing, and his opinions upon the members of his staff were always full of matter. He has left it on record that the new contributor won his favour by her solid merit, by her terse and vigor- ous writing. At first their relation was one of friendly antagonism. Mr. Greeley himself tells us so, and that he kept his eye clear, resolute to resist the fascination which, he had heard, she exercised over her former friends. On her side she considered her employer " a man of plebeian habits, but with a noble heart, his abilities in his
MARGARET FULLER 193
own way great, and believing in hers to a surpris- ing extent." Therefore, they became great friends. After three years she was the one to whom Mr. Greeley wrote, when his little boy died: "Ah, Margaret, the world grows dark with us; you grieve, for Rome is fallen ; I mourn, for Pickie is dead."
Miss Fuller was placed in charge of the literary department of the " Tribune," and whilst she held sway in that office she had occasion to deal with the writings, then coming out in rapid succession, of Emerson, Lowell, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Carlyle, George Sand ; and it is in her critical analysis of them that she first reveals her power. One or two illustrations of her method will be enough.
An illustrated edition of Mr. Longfellow's poems had just appeared, and it was reviewed by her. It is easy enough now to say and to see what she then saw and said, but it demanded in- sight to see and courage to say what was entirely missed by that generation : " Longfellow is arti- ficial and imitative. He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows, so that it has a hollow, second-hand sound. He has a love of the beauti- ful, and a fancy for what is large and manly, if not a full sympathy with it. His verse breathes
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at times much sweetness, and though imitative, he is not mechanical. Nature with him, whether human or external, is always seen through the windows of literature."
Lowell got his dose too : " He is absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy. His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself. His great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound." There are fables for poets as well as fables for critics.
Browning is introduced to the American public for the first time in " Bells and Pomegranates," and with singular fitness the reviewer was com- pelled to send to Boston for his poems, as they could not be obtained in New York. Miss Fuller recognized at once in Miss Barrett's poetry "vigour and nobleness of conception, depth of spiritual experience and command of classic allusion, the vision of a great poet, but little of his power."
George Sand was at that time at the height of her fame, to some the female incarnation of evil, to others an inspired prophetess ; but this Yankee woman was not deceived : kk George Sand smokes. wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as mon
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frere. Perhaps, if she found those who were as brothers indeed, she would not care whether she were brother or sister. Those who would reform the world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse; their lives must be unstained by passionate error, if they would not confound the fancies of a day with the requisi- tions of eternal good." Margaret Fuller was right. The world is yet unreformed, and it is not by George Sands or George Eliots that the work will be done.
About this time, too, appeared her " Women in the Nineteenth Century." The edition was sold in a week, and eighty-five dollars were handed to her as her share. " This was a most speaking fact ; " that she could hear the voice, speaks for her growing, sense. The book enlarged her repu- tation and made her name known abroad. It proclaimed her opinion of the capacity of women for a wide activity and demanded an outlet for it : " Let them be sea-captains if they will."
But her most formal work was a series of papers on "American Art and Literature." In the outset she sets herself right by disarming " critics who may accuse her of writing about a thing that does not exist." She accords to Pres- cott industry, the choice of valuable material,
1% ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
the power of clear arrangement, with an absence of thought ; to Bancroft, leading thoughts by whose aid he groups his facts. There is the true doctrine of history. Bryant is placed at the head of the poets, though his genius is " neither fertile nor comprehensive." Irving, Cooper, and Miss Sedgwick are spoken of with " characteristic appreciation ; " and finally, the Magazine itself comes in for its share. " The style of story cur- rent in them is flimsy beyond any texture that was spun or dreamed of by the mind of man." It would be interesting to have her opinion of Haw- thorne, who it will be remembered declined at one time to dine with her at Mr. Bancroft's house.
The way this young woman talks back at Carlyle proves her courage, good sense, and in- sight. " We shall not be sneered or stormed at," she says, and that, too, at the time when Carlyle was yet alive. " If he has become interested in Oliver or any other pet hyena, by studying his habits, is that any reason why we should admit him to our Pantheon ? He rails himself out of breath at the shortsighted, and yet sees scarce a step before him."
Of Alfred de Vigny, she says : M To see and to tell with grace, often with dignity and pathos, what he sees is his proper vocation ; M of IV'rauger :
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" his wit is so truly French in its lightness and sparkling feathery vivacity, that one like me, ac- customed to the bitterness of English tonics and Byronic wrath of satire, cannot appreciate him at once." Nor did Miss Fuller disdain poetry on her own account. Some of it is as good as some of George Eliot's, though this latter writer does not usually pack into a sonnet line more feet than the law demands, a matter about which Miss Fuller was not so particular.
All this is good criticism, strong and keen, and its author cannot have been the absurd creature her glorifiers would have us believe. Even in New York they could not leave her alone. She was not allowed to visit Blackwell's Island without " shed- ding the balm of her presence upon the hardened and wretched inmates, because she came like the great powers of nature harmonizing with all the beauty of the soul or of the earth." This of course is rubbish. What these people said about their own inward state may have seemed to them true enough ; they were incapable of telling the truth about the common things of which truth can be told.
Now that we know the nature of the person with whom we are dealing, we shall be able to estimate the value of the words which she employs.
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Words depend for their meaning upon the one who uses them. "When Carlyle said remorse, he meant regret ; when his wife spoke of the cruelties she endured, she merely referred to the ordinary inconveniences of the married state. Victor Hugo described Sainte-Beuve as an eagle, and a royal meteor ; but in France all writers are masters, and those who attain to any distinction are immortal. We find Tennyson charging his niece to reveal to the world how great a sacrifice he made, when at length he placed on his head the coronet which had been thrice pressed upon him and twice put away. Artists in colours are incapable of repre- senting with truthfulness the things that any one can see. Artists in words, as a rule, are unable to tell of a thing as it occurred, unless it be Thomas Campbell, who alone is remarkable for his fidelity to fact, as in his relation in verse of the founder- ing of a troop-ship. But when a literary artist attempts to reproduce in words his own mental processes, then it is obviously very hard to con- tradict him.
Margaret Fuller set down on paper a relation of the impression made upon her mind by a man : which is to say she wrote a series of documents known as love-letters. Fortunately, most persons pass through that stage before they have attained
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to the power of expression, and the emotion ex- pends itself in sighs, in secret verse, and in toss- ings to and fro. But she had arrived at complete fluency and produced a volume of correspondence which is peculiarly near being nonsense. The letters are addressed to a Hamburg Jew, Nathan by name, who died not many years ago, and they have only recently been made public, though their existence has always been known to those who were interested in such matters. One example will help to show the inconvenience of experi- encing the passion after the glory of youth is fled, or at any rate the folly of simulating it in the maturity of life. The Hebrew lover disap- pointed the lady by not coming to a concert of music at Horace Greeley's house, and the next day he received the following letter :
" The shades and time of evening settled down upon me as dew upon the earth. You came not — And now I realize that soon will be the time when evening will come always, but you will come no more. "We shall meet in soul — but the living eye of love, that is in itself almost a soul, that will beam no more. O heaven, O God, or by what- soever name I may appeal, surely, surely, O All Causing, thou must be all sustaining, all fulfilling too. I, from thee sprung, do not feel forced to
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bear so much as one of these deep impulses in vain. Nor is it enough that the heavenly magic of its touch throws open all the treasure chambers of the universe, if these enchanted doors must close again. "Wilt thou prepare for me an image fair and grand enough of hope? Give that to man at large, but to me send some little talisman that may influence the secret heart. And let it have a diamond point that may pierce without any throb swells. I would not stifle one single note, only tune all sweet. My head aches still and I must lean it on the paper as I write, so the writ- ing goes all amiss. "
As Mr. Birrell says of Hazlitt, we must be on our guard against the sham raptures of literary persons, since great gifts of expression always de- mand employment. At that very moment the fas- cinating Jew was preparing to sail for Germany.
In 1846 Miss Fuller accomplished her desire to visit Europe. She sailed from New York on the old Cambria of the Canard Line. Pier biographer still pursues her, and finds her, upon the moment of landing in Liverpool, paying a visit to the Mechanics' Institute, and afterwards " expressing appreciation of the British Museum." The a in the Boston Athenaeum, about which we have heard so much, loomed large in those days.
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The traveller visited Wordsworth at his home, and found " a reverend old man, clothed in black, and walking with cautious step along the level garden path." She met Dean Milman at the Martineaus', Dr. Chalmers and De Quincey in Edinburgh, and there saw the portrait of " hate- ful old John Knox, and his wife who was like him."
During an excursion to the Highlands, Miss Fuller had a misadventure and passed the night on the hills in a Scottish mist, and was none the worse for it. This would appear to dispose of the fiction of her frail health. Eeturning to England, she was soon installed in London ; it was the London, and those were the days, of Dickens, Thackeray, Sidney Smith, Moore, Lord Brougham, the Duke of Wellington, and Car-
lyle.
Miss Fuller began in a small way by visiting Joanna Baillie, and then felt competent to pre- sent her letter of introduction from Emerson to Carlyle. It does not matter now what Margaret thought of Carlyle, though she did say two or three things that seem very probable ; it matters a great deal towards our enquiry what Carlyle thought of her, for he had some knowledge of women and knew a fool when he saw one. He
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has put it on record that he and Mrs. Carlyle held Miss Fuller in real regard, that he found in her papers " something greatly superior to all I knew before, in fact, the undeniable utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a true heroic mind, altogether unique as far as I know among the writing women of this generation, rare enough too, God knows, among the writing men. She is very narrow sometimes, but she is truly high. Honour to Margaret and more and more speed to her." Honour to Margaret, to the real Mar- garet, not the ridiculous precieuse of the Xew England coterie.
Two other persons she knew before going to Paris : Mazzini intimately ; and casually, " a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, who told stories admirably, and served a good purpose by interrupting Carlyle's harangues.' ' This could be none other than George Henry Lewes. The meeting with Mazzini was a fateful one to her.
In Paris Miss Fuller was not unknown, for translations of her social studies had appeared in the " Revue Independante." She was at once taken up by George Sand, and introduced to Chopin, with whom that illustrious moralist had formed an M alliance " — that, Sir Leslie Stephen believed to be the correct word to employ in such
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cases. It is altogether likely that much which went on in that household was concealed from the short-sighted vision of this middle-aged Puritan maiden. It was no place for her — if we can trust Browning's description of the society which was to be encountered there : " the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical ; men who worship George Sand a genou 5as, between an oath and an ejection of saliva." Artists resemble Calvin- ists in this respect alone, that they have a com- mon tendency to fall into the Antinomian heresy of John Agricola, and hold themselves superior to the obligations of the moral law ; of course, the mental process by which they arrive at this com- forting conclusion is not identical in each case. The great musician played to her, and Mickiewicz talked to her whilst the music was going on. She heard the debates in the Assembly and saw the Queen at a ball; also Leverrier, the discoverer of Neptune, " wandering about as if he had lost, not found, a planet." That is what might be called " smart."
From all this it will appear that Miss Fuller was a person of some consideration in the highest literary circles of Europe. But we must not over- rate the importance of this. Literary people, as a rule, are ignorant of many things, and easily
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swayed one way or the other by influences of slight force. It may have been that they were carried away by wonder, not that Margaret Fuller could write so well, but that this outland stranger of unprepossessing appearance and nasal voice was a woman and could write at all — like Dr. Johnson when he saw the dancing bear.
In May, 1847, Margaret Fuller arrived in Rome, having come by way of Marseilles, Genoa, and Naples. There she remained two months, and then proceeded northward by way of Perugia, Florence, Ravenna, and Venice, to Milan. From that place she visited the Italian lakes, went on to Switzerland, and returned to Milan early in September, and to Rome by way of Florence near the end of October. At Lake Como she enjoyed the society of the Marchesa Arconati Visconti, whom she had previously met in Flor- ence. The impression she made upon the accom- plished Italian is recorded in a letter from that lady to Emerson :
" Je n'ai point rencontre, dans ma vie, de f emme plus noble, ayant autant de sympathie pour ses semblables, et dont Tesprit fut plus vivifiant. Je me suis tout de suite sentie attireo par elle. Quand je fis sa connaissance, j'ignorais que ce fut one femme reinarquable."
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Though Miss Fuller had now been in Italy less than half a year, and that spent mostly in travel- ling, she had already gained the complete con- fidence and esteem of Young Italy, the revolu- tionary party, whose watchword was the unifica- tion of the Italian States into a republic. This intimacy was but natural, for a strong bond of sympathy had been established between her and Mazzini in London. Being interested in ideas herself, she enjoyed the company of these young radicals, and as she belonged to a republic, and as a republic was believed to have something to do with liberty, they had much in common. /In- asmuch as Miss Fuller's future was afterwards bound up with theirs, and as out of this union arose the tragedy of her life, it will be necessary to indicate briefly the posture of public affairs.
At the collapse of the fabric which Napoleon had so painfully reared, the little Italian sover- eigns returned from their exile more resolute than ever in tyranny, with Austria approving of their reign of terror. Tyranny was met with con- spiracy, and revolt with vengeance. This state of affairs lasted till 1847. Most men were agreed that a change must come; there was no agree- ment as to what that change should be. Italy must be unified ; one party was for unity under
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republican forms, another party was in favour of a limited monarchy. Mazzini was for a republic, Cavour and Garibaldi put their trust in a king. The faith of Cavour and Garibaldi was afterwards justified, but only through much shedding of blood. The revolution in France, which drove Louis Philippe from the throne in February, 1848, encouraged Mazzini and his friends. Some months previously, the miracle of all miracles had happened ; a gleam of political sense eman- ated from the papal throne. Pius IX declared himself a liberal ; he proclaimed a political am- nesty ; he organized a national guard, and began to form a constitution for the Roman State.
Things looked promising for Mazzini and his friends, and Margaret Fuller was of their num- ber. Another of her friends was the Marchese Ossoli, a young Roman of twenty-eight, of a noble but impoverished house. In less than two months the pope had fled from Rome, and was breathing out threats of excommunication against his recent allies. In February, 1849, Rome was declared a republic under three dictators, with Mazzini at their head. A few days later the dictators escaped on board a British warship ; in April, the French were at the gates of Rome, and after a successful assault held the city for the pope. The dream
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was at an end. Margaret Fuller had " played for a new stake and lost it." That was her view of the case as contained in a letter to Emerson, dated July 8, 1849. What was the nature of that " play " ?
Shortly after her arrival in Rome, in the spring of 1847, Miss Fuller, on the evening of Holy Thursday, went to vespers at Saint Peter's with some friends. The party became separated and she was at a loss what to do. " Presently a young man of gentlemanly address came up to her, and begged, if she were seeking any one, that he might be permitted to assist her." At last it became evident beyond a doubt that the party could no longer be there, and as it was then quite late and the crowd all gone, they went into the piazza to find a carriage. There were no carriages, so Margaret was compelled to walk with her stranger friend the long distance between the Vatican and the Corso. At her door they parted, and Mar- garet, finding her friends already at home, related the adventure. This is Mrs. Story's account. This chance acquaintance was the Marchese Ossoli. Within a few weeks he made an offer of marriage, which was declined, and Miss Fuller left for the North. They met again in the follow- ing November, the offer was renewed, and within
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a few weeks the pair were married. When, where, or by whom, we do not know to this day.
" I have heard that from the beginning," says Emerson, " Margaret Fuller idealized herself as a sovereign. She told a friend that she early saw herself to be intellectually superior to those around her, that for years she dwelt upon the idea that she was not her parents' child, but an European princess confided to their care." Here, then, was an opportunity ready at hand for realiz- ing this very un-American ideal. If the revolu- tion had succeeded, as seemed not at all unlikely to the revolutionists, she would have come pretty near being a " European princess " — at any rate she would have been the first lady in the land, and that is closer than one usually comes to the real- ization of one's childish fancies.
This is not offered as the whole explanation of Miss Fuller's conduct — the motives for any mar- riage are never very simple — but it is a pretty good guess at her central thought. All we know of the Marchese is entirely to his credit, and it is altogether probable that Miss Fuller, " wearied with the over-intellection and restless aspiration of the accomplished New Englander of that time, found in the simple geniality of the Italian na- ture all the charm and novelty of contrast." Let
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us hasten to add that no word ever escaped her or her friends, that would indicate the least re- gret for her hasty action.
The action was hasty. In May, 1847, let us repeat, she arrived in Eome for the first time, and remained only two months. She was back again in Eome at the end of October, and her child was born on the 5th of September follow- ing. That would be considered hasty in Ameri- can society in these days at any rate.
The central fact in the life of Margaret Fuller is, as in the life of most women, that she married and became a mother, and it made a correspond- ing noise. The whole proceeding was perfectly regular, natural, and simple. She gives us a straightforward and truthful account of the se- quence of events, which is entirely convincing until her friends begin to supply evidence upon a subject on which no evidence was needed. That makes us ask, not what they say, but what they can prove.
During the winter in Eome after the child was born, when her trouble was sore upon her, the Marchesa, as she now was, sent for Mrs. Story, wife of William Wetmore Story, the sculptor, and confided the " secret " to her. She also gave to her confidante certain papers and parchment
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documents to keep, in view of her death, which she feared was impending. Mrs. Story, with laudable self-abnegation, declined to read the papers, save one or two, though she had perfect liberty to do so. We could now wish that she had read them all, and informed us of her re- searches, or else kept absolutely quiet about the matter.
At the time of Mr. Higginson's writing, he had before him Mrs. Story's original letter, and on the strength of it states that Margaret showed to Mrs. Story the certificate of her marriage with Ossoli. This same letter had been published long before in the Memoirs. All that Mrs. Story tells in the letter is, that, at the time of handing over the packet, they read together a document written in Latin on a piece of parchment. The utmost she claims is that it was a certificate given by a priest to the effect that Angelo Eugene Ossoli — the name of the child was Angelo Eugene Philip — was the legal heir to whatever fortune and title should come to his father. To this was affixed his seal, with those of the other witnesses, and the Ossoli " crest " was drawn in full upon the paper. This is the relation, and this is the document to which Mr. Higginsou refers as a marriage certi- ficate, with Mrs. Story's original letter before
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him. If this be offered as evidence, then it is fair to say it is no evidence at all. Mrs. Story prob- ably could not read Latin, especially the Latin likely to be written by an Italian priest of those days ; the document, according to her showing, could not have been a marriage certificate, for the name of the heir is not usually specified in such writings; the "crest" drawn in full upon the paper does not increase its authenticity, and the witnesses were witnesses — to what ?
When the crisis was past, the papers were returned to the Marchesa, and were lost in the final disaster. In her own writings, so far as published up to this time, Margaret assigns no date to her marriage, though she probably gave the details in a "little book" which perished with her. Her friends conclude, on purely physi- ological grounds, that it took place on or before December 5, 1847. Therein lies the penalty of all secret marriages.
The motives for keeping the marriage a secret are perfectly obvious. The old Marchese Ossoli was about to die and the patrimony to be divided. He had three sons, one employed in the Papal Court as Secretary of the Privy Council, one as a member of the Guard ; the third and youngest was on the side of the Ke volution; he was a
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Catholic, married in secret to a Protestant ; the courts, civil and ecclesiastic, were in the hands of his enemies. Above all, the success of his cause was not yet assured.
The situation of the woman was pitiable. Mar- ried in secret, and secrecy in such cases carries shame ; without a friend to share her trouble, in the midst of the alarms of war, her husband's life in peril, she retired to the mountains of Rieta in poverty and solitude, and there endured the curse of Eve and inherited the blessing. In seven weeks the brave New England woman was back in Rome, and spent the momentous winter of 1848 in the city, with occasional visits to Rieta, where she had left her child in the hands of attendants who proved both cruel and treacherous. In April came the horrors of the siege ; long days and nights in hospitals filled with wounded and fever- stricken, her husband at his post of danger on the walls, and she at times by his side. There was the real Margaret Fuller, the Puritan woman in her New England heroism and austerity. 'By the first of July all was at an end ; at an end, too, all foolish dreams of unreal greatness. Then she wrote the whole story to her mother.
The friends of Margaret Ossoli were naturally much surprised, but most of them were too well
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bred to manifest it. Her mother sent her words of comfort and expressions of endearment. The Marchesa Arconati loved her the more, " now that we can sympathize as mothers." To Mr. Story, who appears not to have received the secret from his wife, she wrote, " Moral writers cannot exag- gerate the dangers and plagues of keeping secrets ; " and she had brotherly love in return. There was at this time a large colony of her fel- low countrymen in Italy, for we have heard her desiring to be delivered from the sound of the English language ; and from them she received every consideration. At home, she complains, there was some meddling curiosity. Her letters, written during the period when the marriage was yet unacknowledged, have a curious interest, par- ticularly those addressed to Emerson. They are singularly truthful and sincere, and yet disclose nothing.
Notwithstanding the loss of the intellectual riches of New England, those days of Italian poverty were Margaret's happiest days. In a let- ter to her sister, the wife of William Ellery Chan- uing, she says : "In my child I find satisfaction for the first time to the deep wants of my heart." She dwells upon the purity and simple strength of her husband's character. "He is capable of
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sacred love ; he showed it to his father, to Rome, to me ; now he loves his child in the same way." To her mother she wrote : " Of all that is con- tained in books he is entirely ignorant, yet he has excellent practical sense, a very sweet temper and great native refinement. I have never suf- fered a pain that he could relieve ; his devotion when I am ill is to be compared only with yours." This is not a bad assemblage of qualities in a husband, and her testimony is confirmed by all the Americans in Italy who knew him, Mr. and Mrs. Story, Lewis Cass, W. H. Hurlbut, Horace Sumner, Mozier, Chapman, and the Greenoughs.
The family remained nearly a year in Italy after the fall of Rome, chiefly in Florence. Of this halcyon time Mr. Hurlbut, consul at Turin, gives rather a free account. He admires their domestic life without stint, and gives a pretty picture of Ossoli, seated by his wife, dressed in a dark brown coat, reading some patriotic book. Mr. Hurlbut always found him at home, save when a number of American and English visitors came in. On those occasions he used to take his leave and go to the cafe, but we must not blame him too severely for that.
Neither Margaret nor her husband, nor both together, possessed the six hundred dollars a year
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necessary for living in Italy, and as all avenues of employment were closed to him on account of his birth and politics, the pair turned their faces to America, where the wife with rare courage proposed to take up the burden on behalf of her own family, which she had borne with such fidelity for her father's.
From motives of economy, they sailed from Leghorn in the merchant ship Elizabeth, a barque commanded by Captain Hasty ; it was the 17th of May, 1850, before the ship got under weigh. Before Gibraltar was reached, the captain lay dead of the small-pox, and on the ocean voyage the child contracted the disease, but recovered handsomely.
On Tuesday, the 18th of July, the Elizabeth was off Navesink on the Jersey coast ; the weather thick, the wind from south of east. To make a good offing and in the morning run down before the wind, past Sandy Hook, the mate, who was now in command, stood to the east of north, sail- ing well in the wind. By nine o'clock a stiff breeze was blowing ; it grew into a gale, and by midnight the weather was very heavy. The Eliza- beth was now under reefed lower sails and head- sails, everything aloft made snug, and all hands on deck. The gale increased to such a hurricane
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as had not been known for years, and what with wind and what with tide, the master of the Eliza- beth overran his course, drifting to leeward all the time, and piled up his ship about four in the morning on Fire Island, the grave of many another good craft before and since. The main and mizzen were cut away, but in spite of the relief the bow held hard ; the stern swung round till the barque was broadside and hard aground, and the seas made a clear breach over her. The heavy cargo of marble went through the bilge, and now the Elizabeth was at the mercy of the sea. Between-decks everything was awash, and the few passengers were huddled together to wind- ward. By daybreak they gained the shelter of the forecastle and saw the shore not a cable's length away, with wreckers and their wagons ready for salvage, but not for rescue. By noon, eight hours after the stranding, a lifeboat arrived from Fire Island, which was less than four miles away, but not the slightest attempt was made to launch it. Davis, the mate, behaved most credit- ably, according to his own story. He devised a plan of escape and proved its efficacy by swim- ming ashore in company with the widow of his late captain ; all but four of the crew also prow. I its feasibility; the plan was primitive, though
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practicable, and yet not the slightest attempt was made to launch the lifeboat into a sea in which men could swim with safety. By three o'clock the cabin had gone adrift, the stern settled down, the forecastle filled, and the refugees were driven to the open deck, where they were soon huddled about the foremast. Presently this went by the board, carrying the decks away. Two remaining members of the crew swam ashore and two were drowned; the steward seized the child and plunged in; their bodies were washed ashore a few minutes later. Margaret and her husband went down together. The mate said it was their own fault; that is what he might have been expected to say. Their bodies were never recov- ered. When the lifeboatmen were derided for their cowardice, they excused themselves by saying they did not know there was any one of importance on board.
The story of life-saving on the coast of the United States goes back to 1786, when Noyes, the blind physician of Boston, organized the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Mas- sachusetts. The National Congress laid its para- lyzing hand upon the movement in 1849, by passing an appropriation of ten thousand dollars for the work ; until 1876, the service was put to
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the basest uses by the politicians, and during that unhappy period more vessels than the Eliza- beth were sacrificed to the greed of the crippled and degenerate proteges of the politicians.
This was the end of the tragedy of Margaret Fuller's life. The real tragedy would have begun, had she had to commence again her life with a foreign husband in New England.
If we possessed only the record of Margaret Fuller's life from the time she left Boston and came under the sane influence of the editor of the " Tribune," until its untimely end, we should miss much of the pathology of hysteria as mani- fested in herself, in other women, and in the men amongst their friends who were like women ; but this record would show her to be entirely admir- able. This normal life covered less than five years. She died at the age of forty. George Eliot was older than that when her first notable work appeared ; Madame de Stael was forty-one, and George Sand nearly as old.
It is useless to speculate upon what Margaret Fuller might have accomplished had life been spared to her. Nothing is more futile than such speculations. If Kingsley had ceased writing at thirty-six, and Mr. Kipling had succumbed to his attack of pneumonia in New York, their names
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would be held in mysterious reverence ; and the public would busy itself with wonder as to the nature of their future accomplishments and with lamentations at their untimely fate. The public mind would surely have been wrong ; probably it is wrong also in surmising that Margaret Fuller might have accomplished something.
Poor Chatterton understood the import of this. Sad indeed his fate, but sadder still, had he lived to see his pure stream stagnant in the sand, or contracted into a brawling brook.
All we can say, to conclude the matter, is that the personality of Margaret Fuller was a romantic one, that she and her friends were in the habit of talking romantically about it, that is, without enquiring too clearly into the truth of what they said ; that romantic things really did occur, and that, with the irony usual in such cases, nothing came of it after all.
IV WALT WHITMAN
WALT WHITMAN
In the year 1855, a thin quarto volume was pub- lished in Brooklyn. It was entitled " Leaves of Grass," and the author's name was given as Walt Whitman. The little book contained about a dozen poems, or " pieces," as the contents were designated by the writer, and it was ill received by the public to whom it was addressed.
Most persons who are capable of forming an opinion upon such matters are now agreed that " Leaves of Grass " was the most important work in poetry which had appeared in the United States up to that time, and that the author, Walt Whitman, is a poet in very truth, with all the rights and privileges pertaining to that order. Indeed, there are some who hold that he is the greatest of American poets ; that is, if one poet can with any degree of justness be compared with another.
This question of the relative importance of poets, it is unnecessary to discuss, even if it were possible to arrive at a decision in such a case. The present business is to enquire how it was
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that the generation to which Whitman spoke was so blind to the beauty of his poetry, and so insensible to the significance of his philosophical speculations, as to greet him with execration or laughter. This task will involve some consider- ation of the poetry itself, some estimate of the personality of the writer, and obviously, some comment upon the people amongst whom he lived.
When a new method of literary presentation is put forward, those persons whose business it is to inform and direct the public mind have legiti- mate employment, but the effect of their criti- cism is merely for the time being. A critic is always correct in his judgement of cases about which it does not matter much whether he is right or wrong. In the unusual case, which does matter, he is sure to be wrong, because the prin- ciples by which ordinarily he comes to a conclu- sion fail to apply. He sees a man who is off the beaten path, and by all the rules and directions that man has lost his way. The critics must go safely in the middle of the road. They have au office to perform and a reputation to sustain: the eulogists are under no necessity beyond gratifying their own good-nature.
All things pertaining to literature will right
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themselves if they be given time. The value of all discussion, whether it be in the public speech of the political assembly or in printed words, lies in this, namely, that the matter is kept in a con- dition of flux until it is entirely ready to assume a permanent form. Most literature and all crit- icism is merely talk about things. What was said of Whitman — the railing of his enemies, the adulation of his friends — is of value only as an expression of the current thought of the time ; it had no influence in shaping the estimate in which he will finally be held. If men do not un- derstand what a poet says, no amount of comment will enlighten them. Poets have perceptions, but no matter how great their capacity for resolving those perceptions into words, they have little power of compelling others to see immediately as they see. The most they can do is to persuade men to open their eyes. In time, somehow, men's eyes do get opened, and they see things which the poet saw long before. Then they say that the thing is true, and that the man is a poet. The value of criticism, then, is that it reflects contem- porary thought, or rather discloses the main drift of it. At its worst, it reveals the writer of it ; at its best, it elucidates the opinions which were held by the generation for which it assumes to speak.
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This, in the main, is true of all poetry and of all comment upon it. De Quincey, who was one of Wordsworth's earliest friends and ad- mirers, had occasion to quote one of his splen- did passages, which contains the noble descrip- tion :
There, towers begirt With battlements, that on their restless fronts Bore stars.
Yet De Quincey felt constrained to refer to Wordsworth merely as "a great modern poet," and would not formally mention his name. " I shrunk with disgust," he said, "from making any sentence of mine the occasion of an explosion of vulgar malice against him." Burns's poems, when they first appeared, were, in the judgement of the leading authority of the English-speaking world, " nothing more than disgusting nonsense written in an unknown tongue." To the same reviewers the " Ancient Mariner " was " a rhap- sody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence ; " " Christabel " was rude and unfeatured ; M Tin- tern Abbey " was " tinctured with gloomy, nar- row, and unsociable ideas of seclusion from the commerce of the world." The only world which these reviewers knew anything about was tin4 mechanical world of their own Adam Smith.
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Utopia and Paradise were less desirable to them than a well-contrived iron mill, with its due observance of the eternal relations between the various kinds of capital, and proper division of labour, with due profits upon its stock.
In the case of Walt Whitman, too, the wise men were singularly unanimous in their judge- ment ; and as it afterwards turned out, they were mainly in the wrong. They were also wilfully, and, upon the whole, viciously harsh. They were, as usual, under the domination of their time ; yet in the end, when we understand all the circum- stances of the case, we shall not blame them, any more than we blame the leaders of public opinion upon that celebrated occasion which arose in Judaea. Indeed, there is something worthy of admiration in the conduct of any set of Pharisees who resist a doctrine which they believe to be false. To the generation which lived half a cen- tury ago, Walt Whitman was nothing more than the son of a carpenter, born of themselves, a man who spent his life amongst the toilers, chiefly where they suffered most ; a man who uttered a few sayings which did not look like poetry when they were printed in a book. So he was reviled by the many and blessed by the few ; and these few in their turn reviled his enemies. To complete
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the relation, this poet endured great suffering of mind and body, and died as the result of that suffering, when he was a little past the middle of life. Unfortunately, though he remained as an amiable presence, he was not buried for long years after.
The burden of the complaint against the poetry of Whitman was not that it was strange and queer and unmetrical, without good sense or agreeable sound, but that it was unclean. We are, therefore, compelled to examine the state of mind of the people who laid this charge, as well as to consider the poetry upon which the charge was founded.
It is the fashion to speak lightly of the early Puritans who settled in New England ; to explain the narrowness of their lives by their hard en- vironment; and to account for their insensibility by the lack of stimulation. If their lives were narrow, they were lofty ; if they were insensible to what appeals to us in art and literature, they had ideals of their own, which so far transcended the things of this world that art and literature were not worth bothering about in comparison with them. To attain to a knowledge of God was the end of their striving, and in the struggle everything that we are making such a fuss about
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was trampled under foot. When a man gets it into his head that by searching he can find out God, he cares very little for the flower in the crannied wall, much less for the pictures of it or for the rhymes which the poet makes. Of course, it is not pretended that the infertility of the coun- try to-day in the various forms of art is due to a preoccupation with the things of God. The utmost that is urged is that the bent of the people in the early days was toward theology and away from art, and that as time went on they finally attained to an attitude of strict neutrality or indifference to both.
The period preceding the events which led up to the Civil War was, in many respects, the queer- est in the annals of the United States ; and the people who lived at that time could not know that there was a poet in their midst speaking for a generation which was not yet born. There was very little value set upon artistic expression of any kind, and but slight discrimination between what was good and what was bad in any form of art. Emerson was ranked above Montaigne as an essayist, and even the pretension to an acquaintanceship with Longfellow was enough to make a man's reputation. The people were yet under the shadow of their ancestral tree. They
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did not care whether any given poetry was good or bad. They had no interest whatever in poetry. They knew that it was wrong to hold their fellow men in bondage, and they were resolute to put an end to that form of evil at least.
Every age and every community has its own notions in a general way, as to what is right and what is wrong. In Scotland, at one time, unsoundness of theological doctrine was an evidence of inherent viciousness ; cattle-lifting, a national, and, under ordinary circumstances, praiseworthy characteristic. In the early commu- nities of the Western States no great stress was laid upon correctness of belief, but a good deal was made of the stealing of horses. To Cellini, murder was a whimsical pastime ; to a publican, the theft of his pewter pots is the ultimate expres- sion of human depravity.
The New England community inherited such a hatred of sin as a theological entity that they were incapable of estimating the relative heinous- ness of vices so far apart as piracy and sleeping in church. The commoner forms of wickedness, Sab- bath-breaking, profanity, and uncleanness, were regarded together as equally deserving of God's wrath and curse. But they had very especial and very erroneous views upon the moral significance
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of those acts which have to do with the propaga- tion of the species ; and to this day the New England mind has not rid itself of the conviction that drinking and drabbing are worse than lying and stealing. This state of mind at length came to colour their whole view of life, to govern their estimate of conduct, and influence their judgement of art.
Foreign observers of American life are filled with wonder at the fixedness of this attitude to- ward conduct and life. They have seen a man, dishonest in his relations with his fellow men, with no religious convictions, or false to those which he pretended to hold, recreant to the public trust which had been confided to him, cynical in his friendships and violent in his enmities, yet observing the conventions in respect to his domestic affairs — and he was advanced to still higher place.
The invariable result of a narrow way of life is a wrong perception between good and evil, and a failure to recognize the relative and negative value of the various forms of wickedness which prevail in the world. Any given bodily action is in itself neither right nor wrong. It is right or wrong, only when taken with the whole contexture of events of which it forms a part. Every vice is
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the counterpart of some virtue. In a narrow community the virtue and the vice are confused, and the confusion results in prudery, which quickly passes into hypocrisy. A moderate con- sumption of alcohol is confounded with debauch- ery; an enquiring mind is evidence of atheism and proof of vicious living. Worst perversion of all : the dominant passion of humanity is regarded as being at one with libidinousness.
Thoreau, when he heard of Whitman, said, " He is democracy." Lincoln, when he saw the poet, cried out, " He is a man." But the mass of the people were only dully conscious that he had offended against the dearest traditions of New England life. Whitman lived in New York, it is true ; but the standards by which he was judged were New England standards. The rule of life which he transgressed was the Boston rule. From the point of view which prevailed in New York, it did not matter that a man, even were he a poet, should have a ruddy face and wear big whiskers, that he should cross the ferry in the pilot-house of the steamer, that he should ride on the top of an omnibus and talk with low people, even tread with bare feet the shore of Long Island, or swim naked in its waters.
The poets of Boston did none of these things.
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They kept out of the rain and the sun. They found enjoyment in things which Whitman disdained. In a letter from James Russell Lowell to Miss Emelyn Eldredge we have some indication of what the great ones of Boston found entertaining : " I, yesterday, returned from Salem, where we had spent Fast Week. We had a very good time indeed, doing, of course, just what we pleased. We waltzed, or acted charades, or enjoyed tete-a- tetes on the stairs or in the library, or joked, or did something, all the time. An ingenious friend, who was patient enough to count the number of puns made in the space of twenty minutes, found them to be seventy-five, or a little more than three in a minute. The recoil from such a state of mind is either into stupidity or a greater degree of non- sense." Judging from some publications which appeared about this time, it would seem that this final observation of Lowell was probably just — that such diversions are apt to lead to stupidity and nonsense on the part of those who indulge in them.
Nor are we left without knowledge of the kind of jokes which passed current in the community, scattered, as they are, through the pages of letters which have been so ruthlessly made public within the past five years. When William Wetmore
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Story was in Italy, Lowell wrote to him to en- quire : " What do you do for cigars? I know that the Virginian nepenthe is so much esteemed there, that one of the popular oaths is Per Baccof I know that Vesuvius smokes, but do the people generally?" Lowell did not care whether the Italians used tobacco or not ; he was only anxious to find an opening for his little joke. The incident is typical. The men of his time and class cared only for certain aspects of life ; for them " litera- ture" was the thing.
Mr. Story, in a letter to Lowell, dated from Boston in 1855, bemoans that his fellow country- men " have little blood and few sensual tempta- tions." We may dissent at once from this impli- cation, that the main office of the blood is to minister to sensuality ; yet it is significant that such was the connection in the New England mind. To Whitman this spirit in the blood was a noble creation for a divinely appointed and glorious purpose. He magnified it and made it honourable ; the wise men of New England strove to put it underfoot ; or rather, the thing died of inanition, and they took credit to themselves for having destroyed it.
We may accept the statement of Story as being correct, and we can find a natural explana-
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tion of the phenomenon in the facts of physiology. If we were more willing to follow the practice of that Judaean king of perfect heart, and seek unto the physicians for information upon these deep matters, instead of laying them to the charge of the Devil without further investigation, we should have safer grounds for procedure. A good physi- cian and great physiologist has written in his book : " Idleness is the mother of lechery. There are other altars than those of Venus upon which a young man may light fires. He may practise at least two of the five means by which, as the physician Eondibilis counselled Panurge, carnal concupiscence may be cooled and quelled — hard work of body and mind."
From the time of the earliest settlement, the inhabitants of New England had hard work of body in their endeavour to subsist ; they had hard work of mind in their endeavour — a vain one as it afterwards proved — to discover the whole purpose of God. In addition to this, there was no organized class of idle rich or idle poor, and so the people were unfamiliar with the vice of uncleanness. To them it was a hideous monster. Hatred of the vice caused a hatred of hearing about the normal circumstances of which this vice is the counterpart.
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The chief end of man, notwithstanding a great authority to the contrary, is to propagate his species. The present writer has been told, by one of the many philosophers who love to meditate in secret, that life is the condition of matter which enables an organism to perpetuate itself; and that the eternal purpose of the Universe is to endow matter with the capacity for sentient en- joyment. The whole fabric of creation is indis- solubly bound up with this natural propensity, and with it the passion for maternity. As one decays, the other dies. Numerical diminution of the race and individual decadence go together. That is the curse of Eve. But we are not speak- ing of present times. The history of all society is determined by the attitude which it adopts to- ward this fundamental conception : and to come to the matter in hand, it is only in communities where a correct view prevails that fulness of life is found, and artistic expression, the flower of life, is possible.
The Puritans held other views as to the mission of the race, either adopting Saint Paul's convic- tion that the end of the human species, as such, was at hand ; or Calvin's belief, that if any indivi- dual of the species were to escape eternal punish- ment, it would be but by the skin of his teeth ; or
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the judgement of Jonathan Edwards that the balk of mankind was reserved for burning. Obviously, a species with so gloomy an outlook before it was not worth reproducing, and men had a ready means of bringing to naught the sinister purposes which they attributed to Providence. Yet Ed- wards himself had ten sisters and eleven children, which is a singular illustration of the slight degree in which the dominant passion of humanity is in- fluenced by extraneous beliefs. Whitman's career, then, was in the nature of a revolt, and we should fail to understand it, had we not, at some length, gone into the matter against which he rebelled.
However much the literary coterie of New Eng- land might pretend to be satisfied with their en- vironment, in reality they were not so. They dis- closed continually their discontent in the letters which they were incessantly writing to each other. To return again to the correspondence of William Wetmore Story. In a letter to Lowell about Allston, it is asserted that he " starved spiritually — there was nothing congenial about him — he was stunted by the cold winds of that fearful Cambridgeport — the heart grows into stone — there is no hearty love of anything." This was in Boston. In more fashionable places it was no better. When Mr. Story was in Newport, he
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gave some account of the condition of affairs, which he observed at a meeting of the aristocracy in that resort of society : "I did not see a hand- some face — all wan and worn and haggard.
There was a famous Miss , Jewish in style,
hollow -cheeked, with two drum-sticks for arms, broken, and sharpened off at the elbows. To her immense attention is paid, because she is rich. All the talk here is about dollars, how much money this and that one has got, and a dreary and monotonous thing it is to hear it so con- stantly." All this concerns merely the dryness and dreariness of New England life. I have re- frained of set purpose from making any mention of the wickedness of it, though the letter-writers of the time manifest no such reticence. In a let- ter to Lowell from Story, the sculptor adds to the bloodlessness and the absence of sensual tempta- tions the fatal words, "but they do not resist what temptations they have." This appears to me to be merely ill-natured, though Mr. Story does illustrate his saying by some shocking gossip about the very delicate matter of cuckoldry — to employ an old phrase. This, then, was society, and Whitman had no social ambitions. He had no desire to enter it. He was a force. He moved in his own lines. He was untrammelled. Indeed,
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there is a rumour to the same effect current in the frontier stations of India in connection with Mr. Kipling. That is the one thing which society- will not tolerate — a lack of social ambition, an outsidedness of all cliques.
Walt Whitman was born free from the con- ventions, good or bad, which hedged in his fellow countrymen. He had the virtues inherent in the New England stock and was free from many of its vices. His first American progenitor came from England to Connecticut in 1635, in the True Love, a ship only a little less famous than the Abigail or the Mayflower. The family remained in New England for two generations, then migrated to Long Island, in the State of New York, and was established there for four generations before the poet was born. He came from a mingled blood. His mother's people were Van Yelsors, and he obtained a Celtic strain from his maternal grand- mother, who was a Williams. The occupation of the family is also worthy of note. The Whit- mans, and the Van Velsors, too, farmed their own lands, raised horses and cattle ; and some of the younger members of the family, with Amer- ican versatility, turned to seafaring, carpentry, or other means of livelihood. Born anew in New England, nourished in New York, enriched by
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fresh strains of blood, ennobled by independence, self-reliant through success in varied occupations, such a family was well qualified for the produc- tion of a free man.
Walt Whitman, then, was " well begotten, and raised by a perfect mother," and soon proved him- self worthy of his high birth and training. He was the second of nine children, and was usually called Walt to distinguish him from his father, whose name also was Walter. The qualities in the Whitman family, which have been already enumerated, manifested themselves early in this boy, and at the age of thirteen he was competent to take his place in the great world. He began by learning to set type, an occupation which has been peculiarly fertile of great men. A thirteen-year- old typesetter in a modern printing-office is usually a product of domestic necessity. In those days an American-born boy took to work as naturally as English children of the same age obtained a com- mand of men in the army or navy. The printer's case soon lost its interest, and he forsook it in order to teach a school. It was not long before he was back in the world again, writing for news- papers and setting the type, and at nineteen he be- gan editing a paper for himself. Then he removed to New York, where he remained for ten years,
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setting type, printing, editing, writing, spending summers in the country at farm work, speaking at debating societies and political assemblies ; in short, earning his living, and living in any way that amused and interested him.
Whitman now knew the world in so far as it was contained in New York ; but he wished to know more. Being then about thirty years of age, he began a slow journey with his brother through the Middle and Southern States, and reached New Orleans. He returned by the Western States as far north as Canada, and, making a wide circuit, returned to New York after an absence of two years. He had seen the great American people at work and was meditating upon what it meant ; and whilst so doing, he continued writing and editing, building, buying, and selling houses ; but " being in danger of getting rich," he abandoned these lucrative if absorbing employments.
The poet's education was now complete, and it bore fruit in this little book of twelve pieces. It was printed at the house of Andrew and James Kowe, corner of Fulton and Cranberry streets, Brooklyn. Whitman himself assisted in setting the types, so that the strange arrangement of the lines is not the fault of the proof-reader or printer, as many alleged at the time of publication.
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Whitman had seen life at first hand, he was now to look death in the face. In 1862 the news came that his brother had been wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, and he started for the camp on the Rapahannock. After caring for his brother, he joined the hospital corps, and assisted in conveying the wounded to Washing- ton. There he remained for three years, min- istering to the sick soldiers in the hospitals, supporting himself in any way he could, chiefly by writing letters to the newspapers. Then he fell ill, and after a short visit to his home returned to the hospitals. About the close of the war he was appointed to a clerk's place in the Department of the Interior, and was afterwards transferred to the office of the Attorney- General, where he became so efficient as to earn a salary of sixteen hundred dollars a year. In 1873 he was stricken with paralysis ; he removed to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived on the edge of poverty till 1892, and then died.
Walt Whitman, we have seen, was born free. He lived a life of freedom. He saw that his countrymen possessed some of the elements of freedom, and he wished to set them wholly free. He addressed them as a prophet, that is, as one who speaks for another. He examined himself as
1
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the son of humanity, and disclosed the record of his observations. As a result the people said that he was possessed of a devil, that he was insane ; and when Emerson hailed the " Leaves of Grass " in the words, " I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I wish to see my benefactor " — the " Boston Post " could only account for the commendation of such a "prurient and polluted work," on the ground that Emerson also was suffering from temporary insanity, and was impure-minded as well. " Woe and shame," this newspaper cried, " for the land of liberty, if its literature's stream is to flow from the filthy fountain of licentious corruption. No merits can atone for the exulting audacity of the obscenity which marks a large portion of the volume ; its vaunted manliness is the deification of self and defiance of the Deity ; its liberty is the wildest license ; its love the essence of the lowest lust." It cannot be alleged that this was a mere hasty utterance, for it was written in 1860, five years after the book appeared.
Another Boston newspaper writer was less temperate; he thought the title of the book ridiculous, and the work itself a heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense. As if this were not enough, he continued : " The
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beastliness of the author is set forth in his own description of himself, and we can conceive no better reward than the lash for such a violation ; the book should find no place where humanity urges any claim to self-respect, and the author should be kicked from all decent society as below the level of the brute ; there is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems to us he must be some escaped lunatic raving in pitiable delirium.', This was printed within the year of the publication of the " Leaves of Grass."
The vilification of Whitman was not confined to any one locality, but was general throughout the United States. In Cincinnati, a writer for the " Commercial " assumed that his readers were ignorant of the achievements of Whitman, which was probably not an unjustifiable assumption, although the book had appeared five years pre- viously. He then proceeds to enlighten them by declaring that the author was " a person of coarse nature, blurting out impertinence under a full assurance of originality."
In New York the appearance of the book was greeted with a general horror, which was well expressed in the " Criterion : " " Thus, then, we leave this gathering of muck to the laws, which certainly, if they fulfil their intent, must have
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power to suppress such obscenity. In our allu- sions to this book we have found it impossible to convey any, even the most faint, idea of its style and contents, and of our disgust and detestation of them. The records of crime show that many monsters have gone on with impunity, because the exposure of their vileness was attended with too great delicacy. " The exposure of crime in the United States to-day is not handicapped by any such disability.
By the year 1857, "Leaves of Grass" had grown to a volume of 384 pages, containing thirty-two poems, and was published in New York. The third issue was in 1860, by Thayer and Eldredge, of Boston, a handsome volume, in which were included one hundred and fifty-four poems. It might be thought that after five years of deliberation, and with so large a mass of mate- rial, the writers for the best magazines in the country should not have gone so far astray.
In 1876 a magazine in New York, bearing a great name, went into the matter very fully, and declared its settled belief that Whitman was " a mere trickster." After falsifying all the history of his life, and assigning to his most ordinary actions the motives of a charlatan, that magazine set down as its deliberate conclusion that " Leaves
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of Grass " was " a performance of unparalleled audacity, an outrage upon decency, and not fit to be seen in any respectable house. Impudent and ridiculous as the book was, it would not have been easy to get it before the public, but accident and the author's cunning favoured him."
The late Bayard Taylor, writing editorially in the " Tribune," repeated the same conclusions, and in 1881 that journal returned to the charge, classing the " dilettante indelicacies of Mallock and Oscar Wilde with the slop-bucket of Walt Whitman. The verses have been printed irreg- ularly, and read behind the door. Some have valued them for their barbaric yawp, some for their nastiness and animal insensibility to shame ; it is the author's mission to proclaim that garbage is as good as nectar, if you are only lusty enough to think so ; neither anatomy, sentiment, nor susceptibility to physical beauty has anything to do with it — it is entirely bestial, and the gross materialism of the verses represents art in its last degradation."
This was about the time of the appearance of the fourth edition of " Leaves of Grass," by James K. Osgood and Company, and, as a result of the outcry, the district attorney served a notice upon the publishers that unless the issue were stopped,
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the firm would be prosecuted in pursuance of the public statutes respecting obscene literature. This happened only twenty years ago.
As late as 1882 the leading magazine in the United States, in its review of literature, could spare only three lines to say of the final edition of " Leaves of Grass " as we have it to-day : " It is a congeries of bizarre rhapsodies, that are neither sane verse nor intelligible prose.' ' The same magazine, ten years later, a date which many now living can remember, declined to publish an original poem by Whitman, on the ground that it was a mere improvisation. During the year just ended a writer in an important American review blamed Whitman, because " by his peculiarities he had blinded men's eyes to the real masters of American verse."
In certain quarters in England which were dominated by the same ideas of morality, it was no better. The " Critic," then, as now, an arbiter of public taste, declared that Whitman was a poet " whose indecencies stink in the nostrils," that he was " as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics. His poems," that authority protested, " are innocent of rhyme, and resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red In- dians ; this Walt Whitman reminds us of Cali-
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ban flinging down his logs and setting himself to write a poem ; the man who wrote page 79 of the 4 Leaves of Grass ' deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner's whip; we call it the expression of a beast."
In one small circle in England, however, Whit- man won instant recognition, and he was admitted into that brotherhood which had for its motive truth, sincerity, and earnestness, which appealed to things themselves to find out if that, was true which was being continually repeated about them. Rossetti, indeed, published selections from Whit- man's poetry, and lent to it the sanction of his name and pledged the reputation of his friends.
It may be urged now that these expressions did not represent the sentiments of the people at large. We must not assume that everything which is printed in a newspaper is necessarily false. Besides, we have other evidence. Official notice was taken of Whitman's conduct. In 1865 he was employed as a clerk in the Department of the Interior, under the Secretary, James Harlan, and was dismissed from his post. The reason put forward for his dismissal by Secretary Harlan was that he had ten years before written a book which was full of indecent passages, and that the author was a very bad man and a free-lover. This
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action of the Secretary for the Department of the Interior met with general approbation, as may be gathered from the newspaper comment upon it at the time. Though James Harlan was Secretary of the Interior, and had been a Methodist clergy- man and president of a small college, he was not a great man. A great man, a poet, who lived in Cambridge, was visited by a stranger, who was on his way to visit Whitman also ; but his host turned him aside, affirming that the author of the " Leaves of Grass " was no fit company for so distinguished a personage, that he was " a com- mon street blackguard, and nothing but a low New York rowdy."
The defamers of Whitman were not all found in newspaper offices. Even Emerson appears to have repented of his first generous outburst. He had intended sending a copy of the book to Car- lyle, and described it as a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength ; but hesitated, as "it wanted good morals so much.'' However, he thought better of it and sent it to Carlyle, with this intimation, " After looking into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it." Emerson had a curious faculty for taking on the colour of his
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environment, and for assuming the tone of the persons to whom he wrote.
There is a vice of praising as well as a vice of detracting, and Whitman suffered from both. His friends, though few, were not silent. Indeed, they were scarcely more temperate in speech than his traducers. One of his chief advocates, a warm-hearted, hot-blooded Irishman, described an opponent of Whitman as a lewd fellow and a dirty dog; another opponent, he asserted, had a narrow mind and a rotten heart ; and the pub- lishers were peddlers. This writer next turned upon the critics, and called them poetasters, plagiarists, hypocrites, prudes, eunuchs, fops, poisoners, blackguards, snakes, hogs, gnats, midges, vermin, monkeys, a paltry and venomous swarm condensed into a demon in the garb of an inquisitor, and by many other ingenious terms, which he claimed were descriptive.
Intemperateness of speech is yet the character- istic of American literature. This wildness of statement, this unqualified praise and undiscrim- inating blame, this defiance of standards, are best observed in that form of art which is known as magazine writing. In a number of the " Cen- tury," so late as November, 1904, judgement is passed upon Gilbert Stuart's portraits of men,
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and the picture of Judge Stephen Jones is de- scribed as a " living portrait, which for brilliant colouring, bold handling, firm modelling, natural pose, and strong individuality, must for ever stand unsurpassed ; " and the dictum of " Jouett, the Kentucky painter," is quoted : " Upon the whole, the most remarkable face and painting that I have ever seen." It may be so, but the evidence is not sufficient to convince those whose taste in portraiture is influenced by other standards than those which prevail in Kentucky, or even in the United States as a whole. The feeling yet re- mains that such admirable painters as Velasquez, and Rembrandt, and Raeburn are entitled to some consideration. Similarly, the conviction persists that neither the friends nor the enemies of Whitman spoke the truth.
Indeed, Walt Whitman's reputation was not much better served by his friends than by his enemies. We have already seen that they were intemperate in their speech, cursing where cursing was unnecessary. They were also injudicious in their praise and were continually putting foolish notions into the poet's head. This was during the twenty years of his illness, and few reputations can stand up against twenty years of invalidism. In the end his friends gathered together and
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published a most foolish book, which contained all that had ever been said for or against the poet, and all that any one could remember of the most unimportant details of his daily life. Even the chart of a travelling phrenologist, whatever kind of quack that may be, was pressed into service by the poet's friends, to prove that he was not devoid of admirable qualities.
Whilst Whitman had a vigorous life, we are glad to hear of his noble physique, his cleanly and comfortable, if unconventional dress, his daily ablutions, the sweetness of his breath, the splen- did flow and colour of beard and hair, and the tint of his bodily integument. But we could well spare the records of his long illness, of the med- icines which he took, and the pharmacological effects of his potions. The personal matters of an old man are rarely lovely ; the chamber life of an invalid is of interest only to a hospital nurse when she converses with a house surgeon. This spirit of curiosity did not cease to exist even when Whitman was dead, and we are fur- nished with the loathsome particulars of the autopsy. Even to professed pathologists, it can be of no interest to read that the dead poet's sigmoid flexure was unusually long, or that the pericardial sac contained an abnormally small
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amount of fluid. Greatness was never claimed for Whitman on the ground of the condition of his entrails. As a matter of fact, the cause of death was tuberculosis, but the autopsy does not appear to have disclosed the nature of the lesion which caused paralysis in a man of fifty-three.
There are many persons still living who knew Whitman well, and it would be easy to fill a vol- ume with their reminiscences of the poet, but it would be a dull book. Those with whom I have spoken testify with one voice to his candour, sim- plicity, and winsomeness, and refer to a quality which they call magnetic. They do not know what magnetic means, nor we either, save that it has nothing to do with magnetism. At any rate, he had an attractiveness, which made even the most casual acquaintance love him.
No task to which a critic can set his hand is so difficult as the right appreciation of a book in which he thinks that he discerns qualities of nega- tive moral value. The people, high and low, offi- cial and plain, missed the mark in their aim at the morality of Whitman. They were insensible also to the poetical value of his work. The book of poetry and the book of nature lay open before them, and yet their eyes were blind to the lyric beauty of " Leaves of Grass." The temper of the
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time will explain the opposition to Whitman's doctrines ; it does not fully elucidate this strange phenomenon of literary blindness. A new moral- ity combined with a new poetry was too much.
Poetry is a strange, elusive thing, made up of great thoughts, fitly, and, therefore, beautifully spoken, with rhythm, cadence, and sometimes rhyme. To be easily recognized it must have form, and to the casual reader form is the great- est of these qualities, greatest because most useful. It is by its form they recognize the thing. We are, therefore, compelled to examine the form of Whitman's poetry; and we shall find that its peculiarity, not to say its defect, of form, was another cause which prevented its acceptance.
The makers of English poetry have only a few established forms into which their verse can be forced ; and verse which cannot be so fitted must go with such form as they choose to provide. French poets, on the other hand, have a form for everything ; or rather, they have no verse which will not fit the mould. It is as easy to write French verse in general as it is to write an Eng- lish sonnet ; it is as easy to recognize a French poet as an English sonnetteer. When we consider form in English poetry, the sonnet naturally arises before the mind, because its rules are the
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most firmly established. In modern literature the sonnet is a poetical arrangement of fourteen rhymed verses set in a prescribed order, but there is to this day no agreement as to what that pre- scription shall be. The practice of Petrarch was to arrange the verses in an octave of two rhymes, and a sextet of two or three rhymes. Pierre delle Vigne arranged his verses in two quatrains and two tercets, the alternate lines of the quatrain rhyming ; and of the tercets, the first and fourth, the second and fifth, the third and sixth must rhyme. To mention one form more, for the sake of completing the illustration, though there are many others, Shakespeare set his verses in three quatrains of alternate rhymes, and finished with a couplet, though he made one sonnet entirely of couplets — and only six of them ; he put fifteen lines into one of the compositions and left yet another with a broken verse.
To illustrate the confusion of mind that exists upon the subject of form in English versification, it may be recalled that there was a time when many persons contended that Shakespeare did not write sonnets at all, but only continuous poems of fourteen lines each. If we enquire of the poets what a sonnet is, they will tell us that they do not know and do not care. They write the thing in
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their own way. If we enquire of the wise men, they will reply that it is a deep-brained thing. They will compare it to the rise and fall of a wave, to a sky-rocket, to the apocalyptic beast with a sting in its tail. Wordsworth, who knew something of the sonnet, tried his hand at defini- tion, and the best he could do was to describe it as a convent cell, a garden plot, a key, a lute, a pipe, a gay myrtle leaf, a glow-worm lamp, a trum- pet, and, finally, in despair, as a Thing.
The sonnet is the most firmly established form in English poetical composition ; and yet no one can tell what it really is, nor say which of its many forms is the best. How, then, shall we decide in what form poetry at large shall be written, and by what law shall we cast aside Whitman's pieces, upon discovery that they do not reveal a Miltonic observance of the usual practice of composition ?
Now that we are so far entangled in this matter of literary form, it is as easy to go forward as to go back. Whitman, in a like case, freed himself at one stroke, by declaring that there was no such thing as style. He advised a person to write down the thing which he had in his mind, in the most suitable words which he could find, and if he found fitting words, and the thing were worth finding words for, then he would be writing in good style.
WALT WHITMAN 257
Similarly, he would advise a painter, who had a great conception, to select suitable pigments and lay them on in the proper way. A great artist who has a thing to say can say it with the end of a burnt stick. That was Whitman's method.
To say that Whitman's writings are not like other poetical productions is to affirm that a fish is not like a dog. Both are excellent creatures in their own way. No one now finds fault with Mil- ton because he failed to apprehend the humor- ousness of early Japanese civilization, or of life in the King's navy. That was left for Mr. W. S. Gilbert, and he in turn lacks something of the sobriety of the great Puritan poet; but we must not find fault with him for that.
When Whitman said there was no such thing as style, he meant that all things are not to be said in the same way. There are different species of compositions, as there are different media in which an artist may work, though some may suit his temperament better than others. Matthew Arnold knew something about literary composi- tion, and yet he once said to Mr. Russell : " People think I can teach them a style ! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can, that is the only secret of style."
Whitman's friends took his saying literally;
258 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
and all writing which had a semblance of style they declared to be false. Macaulay was their pet aversion. They said that he had the one way of saying everything, whether it was a description of the battle of Marathon or the pelting of a parliamentary candidate. One partisan was so extreme as to characterize that great writer as a brilliant, thimble-rigging, Scotch scoundrel. Strange to say, that is the error into which Whit- man has fallen. He evolved from himself a form which was capable of expressing adequately the supreme beauty of poetry. He misused it sorely by putting it to purposes for which it was never intended. He employed it on common occasions, and it served badly. Prose would have answered equally well for the most of his doctrine.
Yet there is something in the human mind which revolts against the bizarre and grotesque, only because it is unfamiliar, like Japanese draw- ings, with their strange perspective, or even im- pressionist pictures, with their masses of form and colour. We cannot help it. There are some who bewail in secret their incapacity to compre- hend the poetry of Browning, and they are con- sumed with envy of those who have the hardihood, as they think, to pretend that they understand it. An eminent critic has acknowledged the shame
WALT WHITMAN 259
he felt, because Whitman's poetry offended his sense of form, and so provoked him to anger. It was only when he read the poetry in the French translation that he was able to enter into the heart of it ; because what was uncouth in English seemed probably enough to be an established form in the French, and so did not offend.
A great poet sees the whole of life intimately and records his observations in a beautiful way. Life to him is so important and beautiful that he has no inclination to dwell upon any particular aspect of it. He has no doctrine to teach, no dogma to enforce. Poetry is not the best medium for propagandism. Other and greater poets than Whitman have set their hands to the task of enforcing political doctrine. Heine set out gayly as a soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity, and ended up in his " mattress-grave." Goethe was more modest in his ambition, and aimed only to be the liberator of Germany. "He became eighty years old in doing it," and humanity and Germany remained pretty much as they were. Byron in our own country shattered himself against forces which he did not understand ; and Shelley beat himself to death in his divine rage. Reform does not come in that way.
Whitman, also, was more concerned with his
260 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
doctrines than with his poetry ; and poetry is a jealous muse. She will turn aside unless followed wholly for herself. She is a kittle creature and will balk or go lame, if compelled to drag any- thing so heavy as politics or philosophy. Much of Whitman's writing is not poetry at all. Indeed, Whitman knew that as well as we do, and said so openly. For a similar reason some persons say that they find Browning's poetry unsatisfactory. Indeed, Carlyle advised him in the strongest terms to abandon the practice entirely and con- fine himself to prose. That great writer also was so absorbed in the deep things which he had in his mind, that, occasionally, it seemed to him quite unnecessary to find better rhymes than " well swear " and " elsewhere ; " " monster " and " at once stir ; " " is he " and " busy ; " kk lion " and " eye on ; " " tail up " and " scale up."
But Whitman's fatal defect was that he did not see clearly. His vision was blurred. He had intuitions which he failed to resolve into adequate words. Only at times did his vision pierce the clouds, and extend to height and serenity, as in "Memories of Lincoln," with its splendid lyric, " Come, lovely and soothing death," and its noble apostrophe : " O Captain ! my Captain ! Our fearful task is done ; " which passes the measure
WALT WHITMAN 261
of words into " Tears ; Tears ; Tears." There is a common belief that it is only Browning and Wordsworth who wrote a great deal of bad poetry. That is a delusion. There are passages and pages in all poetry, with the single exception of Spenser's, which can only be matched by those gems of thought which find an adequate setting in the corner of a country newspaper. Most of Burns's poetry is bad; much of Browning's is merely grotesque ; and some of Tennyson's is silly. Wordsworth was not clearly revealed to the world until Matthew Arnold had stripped from his work what was merely a laborious writing of tracts. If the same good office were performed for Whitman, only a small pamphlet would remain; but surely men are intelligent enough by this time to perform that humble editorial office for themselves.
Whitman had the poet's faculty for bringing out the occult meaning of words in phrases which have become part of the language. They are scattered profusely in his writings, and appeal instantly by their wonderful clearness and per- fection: "the shuddering organ;" "with floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous sinking sun ; " " the coming eve delicious ; " " the welcome night and the stars ; " " the large imperial waves; " " the
262 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
huge and thoughtful night; " " the white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing ; " " whom fate can never surprise nor death dismay." To pass from such phrases, taken at random, noble in con- ception and felicitous in expression, as they are, it would be easy to mention whole compositions of sustained beauty and splendour : " When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed ; " " Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking ;" "At the last tenderly;" " Vigil strange, I kept on the field one night."
These things could not be so adequately said in any other way, and no one but Whitman could express them in that manner. That is the test of style. When our first parents were engaged in their great work of classification, it is claimed by a high authority that a dispute arose over the nomenclature of a genus which was typical of the Rhinocerotidae : " Why do you call it a rhi- noceros ? " " Well, what else could you call it ? " was the sensible retort. So it was with Whitman. How else could these pieces have been written ? The sense and the sound are as inseparable as the music and emotion of the Mcintosh's lament when heard in a Highland glen.
When Whitman's poetry first appeared, it was as full of poetical quality as it is now ; yet the people who read it were so dominated by the
WALT WHITMAN 263
spirit of their time, and so confused by the strangeness of its form that they could see in it nothing save his unconventional speech, his ungrammatical construction, his self-complacency, his misplaced Spanish and French words and phrases, and the turgid nonsense in much of his serious poetry.
Apart from these spontaneous outbursts, Whit- man strove to do with deliberation what great poets have done unwittingly. His ambition was to give an expression of the Cosmos, which he understood to be the United States of America ; and he spent most of his time in telling how he was going to set about it. He was to do it by a series of glittering images, and he does produce the impression which he sought upon a reader who will give himself unreservedly into his hands, a willing victim to the poet's will. Wordsworth produced the same effect in four lines, and he did it quite incidentally, concerned as he was only about the death of a child :
No motion has she now, no force ;
She neither hears nor sees ; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The bent of Whitman's mind, also, was in reality toward the Infinite ; or rather he perceived
264 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
no severance of mind from matter, of the finite from the infinite. That was a characteristic of the best New England philosophy. Emerson had it in perfection, and he was continually being derided for his "pantheistic prattling." Whit- man took the thing for granted. The specula- tions of Spinoza were beneath him — that the attributes of mind alone ; of Strauss — that the attributes of matter alone ; of Hegel — that the attributes of both together — are embodied in the Universal Being. To Whitman as to all the poets,
God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds, Himself and Nature in one form enfolds, Thus all that lives in Him, and breathes, and is, Shall ne'er His power nor His spirit miss.
Whitman spoke for that large class which can- not speak for itself, and, indeed, is not conscious that it has anything to say. Mr. Kipling spoke for the same class, but he did it with so much literary skill that they did not recognize his voice for their own. The mass of humanity does not express itself in words. The firemen who live a life of heroism amidst the disasters of a city ; the farmers who spend their years in patient toil ; the open- throated, hairy-breasted pioneers, cattle-breeders, miners and frontiersmen, who have pushed their
WALT WHITMAN 265
way against barbarity and desolation — these have quite other voices.
Whitman also spoke for the openly vicious, and said to them, " Go and sin no more." To him there was nothing common or unclean. Nothing was outside of his sympathy. He sat at meat with publicans and sinners, with female "peri- patetics," who are technically called walkers-of the-street. He indulged in a way of life which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature and good feelings. He said to his companions : " Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you."
There is the gospel of hope. He went about with the people amongst the soldiery in camp and hospital, amongst the negroes of the planta- tions, and the wandering journalists of great cities. He perceived that out of one blood are all men made, that toil and suffering is their portion, and he proclaimed in strong, sinewy sentences that the remedy for the evils which he witnessed was Love — the same which Jesus proclaimed in Nazareth. He strove to ameliorate the labours of men by the Institution of the dear love of com- rades :
By the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
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Upon the earlier occasion when the doctrine of love was being preached, only a few of the Phari- sees of Judaea were filthy-minded enough to sup- pose that anything else was meant.
Whitman's outlook was so wide that he in- cluded even the animals within his view. He established the brotherhood between mankind and the rest of the animal creation, though he did not push it quite to a relationship with marine engines and tramp steamships. Animals as well as men pleased him. They brought him tokens of himself :
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make one sick discussing their duty to God.
There is a common expression, " to stand on one's manhood," which has now become the cant of thieves. It is the habitual phrase in a news- paper called the " Star of Hope," which, some may not know, is an organ of opinion written entirely by convicts in the prisons of the State of New York. To Whitman the thing had a meaning. Because a living creature was a human being, and yet alive, however degraded or prostituted, in virtue of his humanity he might yet stand up and face the world. More than that, he proclaimed the awful fellowship which we all hold with " felons, with convicts in prison cells, with sen-
WALT WHITMAN 267
tenced assassins, chained and handcuffed with iron," because evil is also in us.
Those who have had the patience to inform themselves of the views upon human life which prevailed during the time of Jonathan Edwards, will observe that Whitman looked upon the mat- ter in a different light. To those fathers in New England, humanity was a poor thing, a vile worm, loathsome, deformed, altogether filthy, and re- served only for burning. Whitman looked on the thing as it is, " not through the eyes of the dead, not as a spectre in books." He went to the bank by the wood. He looked at humanity undisguised and naked. " Clear and sweet was its soul : clear and sweet in all that is not its soul." To this poet it was yet the evening of the sixth day, when God surveyed everything which he had made, and behold it was very good. The Puritan theologians saw only that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, that every imagination of the thoughts in his heart was evil continually ; and whatever may have been the sentiments of the Creator toward His own handiwork, certainly it repented them that man had been made on the earth, and it grieved them to the heart.
To Whitman's eyes, everything was beautiful, in the full light of the sun, which was ugly and
268 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
distorted in the fearful gloom which brooded over the world of the theologians. That gloom was yet heavy over New England when Walt "Whitman came, crying out that all things should stand forth in the light.
Fifty years have passed away since this loud voice disturbed the New England calm. In this half century there has been time for the people at large, friends and foes, to return to their senses, and apply a sane judgement to those two extreme views. In so far as Whitman dealt with the domi- nant passion of humanity, he was in the right. But it is a ground of offence which can never be removed, that he attempted to drag into litera- ture those secret functions of the human body, which, necessary as they are for carrying out its purpose, are not fit subject for mention outside of a laboratory, a hospital, or a sick-room. There are subjects which a professor of physiology may handle freely in his class-room. The consensus of mankind is that he shall not mention them in a mixed company which is not assembled for that specific purpose. It is conceivable that such a professor might consider it to be his duty to utilize every occasion for propagating knowledge; but such conduct would surely lay him open to misconstruction. He might be animated by the
WALT WHITMAN 269
loftiest of motives, yet this conduct would render him liable to be classed with insane persons and beasts, who habitually conduct themselves in a shameless way in public places. At least their conduct seems shameless to us.
We admit to the uttermost that there is nothing obscene in nature, save the single exception of obscene persons. We also admit that there is such a thing as good taste. Every community and every age has its own notions as to what sub- jects are fit for mention, and what for reticence. In England there is a tacit agreement that the Pulex irritans shall not be referred to in polite society; the Pediculus, in all its varieties, is a proper subject for discussion. In the United States a contrary custom prevails. Half a cen- tury ago, in New England, it was not considered proper for women to regale each other, even in private, with an account of the pathology of the various organs of the body, as discovered by their most recent medical adviser; and there remain to this day some persons who consider such con- versation to be essentially obscene.
Whitman's friends protest that there are not more than eighty lines in all his writings which can be challenged on this ground of offence, and they enumerate far more in the Hebrew scriptures
270 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
and other writings of undoubted moral value. A great deal can be said in eighty lines, and we may admit at once that the conversation between two patriarchs in Lower Asia might be offensive to a person of very moderate susceptibilities. Old persons and primitive people are habitually free in their speech. But it is the universal opinion that there are matters which are not fit subject for poetry, or even for discussion between decent and civilized men. The enquiries of children are sometimes embarrassing to perfectly sensible people; but if a child gloried in such public exhibitions, we should say he was branded with the mark of the beast.
In the " Song of Myself," and in much else- where, Whitman has committed this offence, and we cannot acquit him even on the grounds of naivete. An anatomical catalogue, even when enlivened by occasional reference to the physio- logical functions for which the various organs are designed, is without essential beauty. No amount of genius can clothe it with the grace of poetry. No excess of " naturalness " can justify a writer in holding up such things to public view. The attempt to do so will always end in failure, for people will turn away their eyes. The thing is an offence to the human mind, and has been an
WALT WHITMAN 271
offence ever since humanity differentiated itself from the rest of the animal creation. Therefore, we can understand why Whitman's generation turned its eyes away from the spectacle of human- ity which he held up, even if it missed thereby much that was valuable and beautiful. We, with our wider experience and more distant point of view, have learned to neglect the objects which should offend, and happily do offend us. For us remains the beauty alone.
Nor can we consider it a ground of praise that Whitman devised a new form of expression, un- less we are convinced that the forms established by long usage were worn out. There have been great poets, who have gone deep and far, perhaps as deep and far as Whitman went, and yet gave no signs of being hedged about. Whitman knew little about established forms of expression in art, and cared nothing. But he knew and cared for the things out of which art is created. More than any other, he fulfilled the saying of Hazlitt that poetry is the stuff out of which the life of the people is made.
He had a perception and knowledge of the beauty of the human form and of the meaning and beauty of every created thing. The leaf of grass was as wonderful as the stars ; the tree-toad
272 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
was a master work of the highest, and the run- ning blackberry would adorn the fabric of the heavens ; the hinge of the hand put to scorn all other machinery, and the cow in the pasture sur- passed any statue.
All interest in Whitman's vagaries of speech and conduct and doctrine, and in the conditions against which he was in revolt, has passed away, save for the interest which we all feel in the phenomena of literature. As this interest disap- pears, we behold the just measure of his poetical genius, and assent to the truth contained in those lines which appeared at the time of his death, in an English periodical, where Americans do not look for such things. They are remarkably just
— though they do not at all indicate a sense of his philosophic importance, or of the gift which he conferred upon his fellow men of this latter day
— namely, in opening our eyes to the beauty and dignity of human beings and human things, and breaking down one, at least, of the false conven- tions of Puritanism ; somewhat as Wordsworth opened the eyes of the generations which came after him to the beauty and grace of inanimate objects ; as Burns revealed the poetry of lowly life ; as Rousseau " introduced something green into literature.'*
WALT WHITMAN 273
" The good gray poet," gone ! Brave, hopeful Walt !
He might not be a singer without fault.
And his large, rough-hewn rhythm did not chime
With dulcent daintiness of time and rhyme.
He was no neater than wild Nature's wild,
More metrical than sea winds. Culture's child,
Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt,
Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built,
As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang
True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang
Of brotherhood, and freedom, love, and hope,
With strong, wide sympathy which dared to cope
With all life's phases, and call nought unclean.
Whilst hearts are generous, and whilst woods are green,
He shall find hearers, who, in a slack time
Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme,
Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice.
His " yawp barbaric " was a human voice ;
The singer was a man. America
Is poorer by a stalwart soul to-day,
And may feel pride that she hath given birth
To this stout laureate of old Mother Earth.
JOHN WESLEY
JOHN WESLEY
A British subject from an outland region of the Empire, who had suffered in heart, person, and estate through the turmoil in South Africa, went to London in search of restoration and comfort. He found neither the one nor the other. It was during the events preceding the Coronation, and he lay in his lodgings too weak to resist the temptation of reading the morning papers, and yet, unfortunately, with strength sufficient to perform that labour. From them he gained the impression that the great things which had been done were effected by men who arranged the routes of processions, who gathered on the Dover pier to welcome important personages, who turned neat diplomatic phrases, and skilfully resisted the importunities of claimants for places in the Abbey, or other social distinctions. To test the correctness of such an impression, this bewildered subject left his bed and began a tour through the Fen country, following in the steps of a man who in his own way had performed great deeds from Saint Ives to Ely and back to Sidney
278 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
Sussex College, to Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Dunbar. The impression proved to be wrong; he learned that the great deeds have always been wrought by men who did not take much thought about the appearance of things ; that history is not made by actors ; that it is made by people who are fulfilling their life functions, with a fine unconcern as to the impression which they are creating.
We can never get beyond the merest guess as to why any given series of events occurs. We do not even know how it is that we digest our food, and how its elements are transformed into force. We can mark certain stages separated from one another by a mystery of change ; we observe the results which are pleasurable or painful, or, as we call them, good or bad. The first business of an historian is to ascertain about any given period whether the main drift was in the direction of good or evil ; and events are only to be inter- preted in their relation to this main current. One portion of the people will do evil continually; another portion will do evil for a while ; but all the people will not do evil together for any great length of time. It is not the nature of the human mind to do only evil continually ; and this view is put forward with confidence, in spite of some
JOHN WESLEY 279
considerable authority to the contrary. The move- ment of the race is away from the beast. It will probably excite the laughter of fools to hear once more that the only greatness is that which assists in this movement. All other excursions after greatness end in blind alleys. Napoleon, for example, who, above all men, desired to attain to greatness, got himself into a pretty bad hole by following his own estimate of things. " When a king is said to be a good man," he declared, " his reign is unsuccessful ; " and again, " A prince who passes for good in the first year of his reign is a prince who will be ridiculed in his second." If Napoleon is now a subject of ridicule, it is certainly not due to any excess of goodness on his part.
Our impressions of a period are based upon the characterization of persons whose conduct lends itself readily to literary treatment; and if it is amenable to the dramatic form we fall into the error of believing that they had all to do with the shaping of events. The eighteenth century is fixed in our minds as a period of frank brutality, because Johnson was brutally frank; of ill- natured jesting, because Pope was an ill-natured jester ; of intricacy and finesse, because Horace Walpole was a shrewish tale-bearer, and Selwyn
980 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
a snickering gossip : as an age of rhetoric, because Burke persuaded himself that what he was saying was true, and, in some degree, still imposes his belief upon us.
As we get further away from the eighteenth century, we shall see that it was one of those periods in which the human race had reached one of its low levels of degradation. We shall also see that the portion of the race which occupied the British Islands began an upward movement toward better things. It is one of the fascina- tions of history to note the predominance of good or evil in any given epoch, and to follow the course by which those conditions came to prevail. We cannot trace all the steps of the gradual descent by which the English people arrived in the slough of the early part of the eighteenth century ; nor can we follow the upward movement by which they emerged into the light toward the close of that period, any more than we can follow the slow upheaval of a continent, by which por- tions here and there lift up their heads. But we can note the points at which this movement in either direction is most perceptible.
This downward career began at the Restoration of Charles, and it is the fashion to explain the evils which followed that event by the formula :
reaction against Puritanism. The truth is that -word in its Land under tion, and all but perished by the sword. H rid was to have ha
own way for a space. The spirit which animated the Puritans had forsake .red for
cantem: .? a hundred
years, till th vlism ca. rth.
Puritanism was not a r.
I the bat rv>r the satis-
I a high A view and
a wide outk ,se who take refuge
in Puritanism a^ e ribb'd, cabined, and con-
fined/' Rather, it in to them a ** convent's narrow room, a pen prison to which
they doom themselves is in truth no prison to them. There are qualities which find their best development where there is not too much liberty. It is given unto nations as unto individuals "to walk in the woods." There is a refuge from sorrow in the spirit as well as in the senses. It has been on: of the spirit that all die
prophets have called men, when they perceived that their misery was sore upon them ; and in that lies the secret of the attraction of Puritanism. It was unto tins spirit that Jeremiah appealed, when he declared that no nation can be righteous when
282 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
the life of the individual is impure ; Isaiah, that national power lies alone in righteousness ; Micah, that there is a God of the poor and an avenger of them ; the prophets of the Restoration, that re- ligion with form or without form may be equally acceptable ; and the great Unknown Prophet, that unrighteousness is only to be overcome by suffer- ing. But the finest type of Puritanism is Saint Francis, who attained to such a mastery over the things of the world that he was enabled to cry, " Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body."
This upward movement toward righteousness is usually slow and imperceptible. At times it is accelerated, and the upheaval is accompanied by much dislocation and many faults. The latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed such a violent disturbance, and it is associated with the name of John Wesley. It was he who drew the spark ; therefore he is the great figure of the eighteenth century, as Cromwell is the great figure of the seventeenth, Calvin and Luther of the sixteenth, Savonarola of the fifteenth, Jesus of Nazareth and Saul of Tarsus of the first.
Of all these great men, John Wesley — his names were John Benjamin — is the best known to us. We know him through contemporary writ-
JOHN WESLEY 283
ers : at least we know what they said that they thought of him ; we have full and elaborate ac- counts at the hands of his enemies ; and above all, we have his own journals in twenty-six volumes of manuscript, copious extracts from which have been published. But these extracts have not been made public with entire frankness. They are meant to show every side of Wesley save that which interests us most. They are profitable for instruction unto godliness; they are hortative and mandatory to Methodists ; but to the reader at large these excerpts afford little information of the wealth of human material in the manuscript volumes.
If there be any persons in these days who en- gage in the laborious occupation of keeping a jour- nal, it is certain that a hundred years hence they will be derided for neglecting to record events which will then appear to have been of real im- portance. Wesley's life covered practically the whole of the eighteenth century ; he lived in the midst of affairs which we are accustomed to look upon as the subject-matter of history, and he had a knowledge of men whose names are associated inseparably in our minds with that period. Yet in his journal we find no mention of, or only the scantiest references to, the two desperate
284 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
attempts of the Pretender to regain the throne, to the events by which India and Canada were won, and the American Colonies lost to England. The truth is, the people were not profoundly interested in those operations, any more than the readers of the newspapers the other day were permanently interested in the eruption from a mountain which destroyed the lives of fifty thousand persons. Wesley was close to the heart of England, while Walpole and his associates stood entirely aloof from its passion and enthusiasm. They believed in the efficacy of a lie ; and persons like Wesley, who believed in the truth, were looked upon as merely eccentric or ignorant or ill-bred, and in any event not worthy of consideration.
The character of the literature which that age produced would alone reveal the stagnation out of which it arose ; Johnson's ponderous diction- aries, the raillery of Swift, the distillation of Pope's ill nature, the indolence of Thomson, the servile dedications and the tedious vulgarity of the novelists, and the outpourings of the doctrin- aires. Literature had become entirely dissociated from morality as well as from life. Gray was writing elegies in churchyards. Wesley took his stand upon his father's tomb in Epworth and preached : " The Kingdom of Heaven is not meat
JOHN WESLEY 285
and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and
joy-"
It would at first sight appear superfluous to add anything to what has been said upon the subject of Wesley, this century past, in the numerous lives of him which have been written, more par- ticularly during the recent celebration of the bi-centenary of his birth, from 89,087 pulpits, by 48,344 ministers, and 104,786 local preachers, to nearly twenty-five million adherents. Yet in the feeble hope that this cloud of witnesses may have left something unrevealed, and in a well-grounded belief that outside these twenty-five millions of sealed ones there are some who have an interest in serious things, it is worth taking the event as a pretext for making one or two observations, which, if they have no new bearing upon Wesley, may have something to do with the spirit of the time in which he lived, and with the people who are called by his name.
To one who has tasted and found the richness of Calvinism, it is no use appealing with the doc- trine of Wesley. He was merely an Arminian, and any Calvinist knows what that means. He believed that men could be led, and that they could not be driven ; that the God of Calvin was " a tyrant and executioner ;" that the decrees of
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God were conditional upon human action ; that the sovereignty of God is compatible with the freedom of man ; that man is free and able to will and perform the right ; that every believer may be assured of his salvation ; and very much other blasphemy besides. The fact is, Wesley was no theologian. He was not qualified by nature for that high office ; he " never had a quarter of an hour's lowness of spirit since he was born."
It was Wesley's capacity for seeing the correct proportion of things which prevented him from becoming a mere theologian. With his strong common sense, he perceived that there are "many truths it is not worth while to know, curious trifles upon which it is unpardonable to spend our small pittance of life." He had a great heart, if not a mind of the proper texture for theological invention. The fact which was of supreme import- ance in his eyes was that the individual should have a correct attitude of mind toward the things which are right, and toward the things which are wrong, and the attainment of this correct attitude he signified by the term Conversion. But there was something more. He was not satisfied with a mere intellectual assent, a passive toleration of goodness and a theoretical dissent from evil ; he demanded that the intellectual process should be
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quickened by emotion into an intense conviction of the heinousness of sin, accompanied by an ardent desire to turn away from it with hatred and horror.
But theologians who place this doctrine of con- version in the forefront of their argument are prone to the discouraging inference that sinners alone can attain to any great degree of saint- liness. To Wesley, therefore, is attributed all manner of evil. He is spoken of by his friends as a profligate, who entered school as a saint and left it a sinner. The period during which this degra- dation occurred was that between his twelfth and sixteenth year. As he went immediately to Christ Church as a scholar, his transgressions could not have been very revolting. Wesley himself rather lends colour to the belief in his sinfulness by his desperate confession that he was wont to console himself with the delusion that he was not so bad as other people, that he had merely a kindliness for religion, and read his Bible and prayers in a perfunctory way. Even to-day, in Oxford, such a state of mind would not be accepted as proof of any great debauchery.
The only specific crime that can be laid to Wesley's charge was his going in debt, and that, according to Benjamin Franklin, is the first of all
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vices, lying being the second. But the sin is less heinous when committed by a man with fifty pounds a year, than it is when his income amounts to fifty thousand pounds. He did borrow money, and his mother once wrote to him express- ing the great concern which she felt for the man who had lent him ten pounds. The Wesley fam- ily always lived on the edge of poverty, which is a much worse situation than penury, and there is something heroic in the struggle of the father against the pressure of limited means. In his early days he had been imprisoned for debt, and all his life it was a struggle with the grim spectre. There is nothing more tragic in life than an honest man in the toils of pecuniary necessity. To his son he writes : " I will assist you in the charge for ordination, though I am myself just now struggling for life ; the last ten pounds pinched me hard, and I am forced to beg time of
to pay him the ten pounds you say he
lent you. What will be my fate God only knows, yet my Jack is fellow of Lincoln." There is the heroism of a noble father.
It may be said at once that Wesley's youthful career was beyond reproach, that all the domestic relations within his father's family were entirely admirable and marked by the strongest common
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sense, if we omit the unfortunate affair of his sister Hetty, of which Mr. Quiller-Couch has re- cently informed us so fully. The father was cap- able of the highest sacrifice, the mother appears to us as a woman of soundest judgement ; and we need not make too much of the complaint in a letter to her son : " It is an unhappiness almost peculiar to our family that your father and I sel- dom think alike." Even his sister Emilia revealed the family trait of good sense in a manner that was marvellous in one so young, when she wrote to her brother: "Never engage your affections before your worldly affairs are in such a posture that you can marry." If all young persons were but to apprehend the soundness of that advice, they would save themselves and others from much misery.
Sanity of conduct and reasonableness of be- haviour are the great characteristics of Wesley's career; that is to say, his actions were always those of a gentleman; and those who are now called by his name will probably take an undue interest in the fact that he was a gentleman in other senses as well. His family was bound up with the De Wellesleys, and they had a seat at Welsme in Somerset from time immemorial, cer- tainly since the time of Athelstan, and that is
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long enough. This quality of urbanity comes out in every page of his journal, giving offence or disrespect to none, and insisting upon the respect that was due to himself.
Wesley illustrates this quality well in his famous interview with Beau Nash. The position accorded to that notorious man reveals to us the qualities which were considered admirable in those days. This son of a glass-maker, as poor in means as in birth, by sheer effrontery raised him- self to the eminence of a king. To-day he would not be tolerated in London by the police, and even in New York he would figure, in the daily press for one week, in the district magistrate's court for one day, and thereafter would be heard of no more for at least five years, unless his sentence were reduced by conduct which is officially called good.
Wesley was entreated not to preach in the pre- sence of that ruffian, " because no one knew what might happen." However, he did preach, and pretty plainly too. He told his hearers, M they were all under sin, high and low, rich and poor, and many seemed to be a little surprised.,, Beau Nash, however, overcame his surprise at this in- civility, and coming close to the preacher, en- quired by what authority he said those things.
" By the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to
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me by the now Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid hands upon ine and said: 'Take thou authority to preach the gospel.' "
" This is contrary to Act of Parliament ; this is a conventicle."
" Sir, the conventicles mentioned in that Act are seditious meetings, but this is not such ; here is no shadow of sedition."
" I say it is, and besides, your preaching frightens people out of their wits."
" Sir, did you ever hear me preach ? "
"No."
" How, then, can you judge of what you never heard?"
" Sir, by common report."
" Common report is not enough. Give me leave, sir, to ask, is not your name Nash ? "
" My name is Nash."
" Sir, I dare not judge you by common report."
" I desire to know what this people comes here for?"
"You, Mr. Nash, take care of your body; we take care of our souls, and for the good of our souls we come here," a listener broke in ; where- upon Mr. Nash replied not a word, and walked away.
Some Methodists may also be interested to
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know that the founder of their church always en- joyed a certain social distinction. He was enter- tained by admirals ; his portrait was painted by Reynolds and Romney ; toward the end of his life he had more invitations to preach in churches than he could accept ; he became " an honourable man, and scarce any but Antinomians durst open their mouths " against him. Of eighty let- ters written by him in one year, nearly half are addressed to titled ladies ; which shows that titled ladies in those days were pretty much the same as they are now.
It would be long to trace all the influences that made for Wesley's opportunity, influences affect- ing himself and the community at large. The world is never left without witnesses to the truth, though their voice may be small and its crying only in the wilderness. The voice of Bunyan was unheeded for a generation, and two small books lay unnoticed till suddenly their spirit blazed up in Wesley's time. These were the " Serious Call," and "Christian Perfection." In them Law pro- claimed the necessity for a change of nature, self- denial, and a life of devotion for all who would serve God truly. This spirit was working quietly in Oxford even in the time of Samuel Johnson, who freely acknowledged its influence upon him-
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self, though it must be confessed that the out- ward manifestations in his case were not great.
William Law, the author of these books, having declined to take the oath prescribed at the acces- sion of George the First, lost his fellowship in Emmanuel College ; and he also left the Church to become tutor to Edward Gibbon, the father of the historian ; but he had created an atmosphere congenial to the serious men who came after him.
The movement was the exact counterpart of that which took place in Oxford a hundred years later. There was the same tendency to asceticism, to a patristic interpretation of the Scripture, and a slavish following of the rubric. Those who were under its influence fasted and prayed; they strove against fanciful sins and practised self- denial for the sake of practising it. The Tracta- rian manifestation, as in the case of Methodism, was dominated by a single mind ; both began in a small way, and remained so whilst they were confined to their purely local environment. But to the more modern men religion always appeared as an aesthetic exercise ; to Wesley it was a power for the amendment of the individual life, without which that life could not be amended.
So long as Wesley remained in the Church, bound by her traditions and her rigid rubric, he
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was powerless to do very much ; but the Church saw to it that he did not remain there long. H Our minister," so runs one of the many communica- tions which he received, " having been informed you are beside yourself, does not care you should preach in any of his churches."
When Wesley began his career at Oxford, he had no idea where it would end. He had been curate in his father's parish, and returning to his college, he joined with his brother and a few companions who were in the habit of partaking weekly of the communion — certainly not a re- markable manifestation of evangelicism. From this exercise they passed on to the study of the Greek Testament and to private devotion, and from that to the visitation of the poor, the sick, and prisoners. It is a curious commentary upon the times that such ordinary avocations should have excited any notice whatever.
This little band had no cohesion ; they had no plan of campaign, and each individual was to proceed upon his own lines. The Wesleys alone arrived at a lasting distinction. Whitefield con- sumed his life in the fervour of popular preach- ing, voyaging here and there — to Georgia, to New England, to Scotland and Wales — raising a wave of emotion everywhere, but doing nothing
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toward its advancement. Impulsive, but lacking logical skill and self-restraint; gifted with ora- torical power, dramatic force, and pathos, he was able to move the people, so that " the tears made white gutters down their black cheeks;" but Wesley was at hand to direct the forces which "Whitefield had evoked. John Clayton, another of the coterie, settled in Manchester and remained a Jacobite and high-churchman to the end of his days. Benjamin Ingham became an out-and-out dissenter, which Wesley never did. Gambold became a Moravian Bishop, and James Hervey was seized with the tenets of Calvinism.
About this time, the rising conscience of the people took notice of the condition of those who were imprisoned for debt and bearing the penalty due to felons alone. It was proposed as a rem- edy to send them to the New World, where they might better their own condition and improve the country which they were made to adopt. The promoters laboured under the curious fallacy that intellectual belief has something to do with con- duct, and they had as an arriere pensee that the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, and the Creeks, who inhabited the borders of Georgia, might be improved by a commerce with those apostles from the English prisons.
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It would appear that Wesley himself had an exaggerated notion of the ripeness of the Indians for instruction on account of their freedom from preconceptions. He argued that they were fit to receive the gospel in its simplicity, because they were " as little children, humble, willing to learn, and eager to do the will of God." To him the Indian mind was virgin soil ; " they have no comments to construe away the text, no vain philosophy to corrupt it ; no luxurious, sensual, covetous, ambitious expounders, to soften its un- pleasing truths." But these erroneous views arose out of the sentimentality of the times. Coloniza- tion was looked upon as the sovereign remedy for disposing of the heathen at home, and for correct- ing the errors of the heathen in the places to which these missionaries were to be sent. It is difficult to see what good was to accrue to the savages, for they were commonly held to be already the pos- sessors of all manly qualities and all domestic virtues.
It was in this frame of mind that Wesley went to Georgia, to convert the Indians, as if there were not work enough in his native land ; but it did not take any considerable enquiry to convince him that he " could not find or hear of any In- dians on the continent of America, who had the
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least desire of being instructed." He at once consulted with his friends as to whether God did not call him back to England ; and upon the way- home he arrived at the valuable conclusion " that he who would convert others must first be con- verted himself."
The immediate circumstances which led to Wesley's return from America are singular, when considered in relation with the after events of his life. His mission of course was bound to be a failure ; all missions are which are conducted in the spirit of a priest, and the spirit of Wesley was, as yet, as priestly as any which ever eman- ated from Oxford. The colony also was a fail- ure, as all bodily transportations always have been. Men do not change their natures by chang- ing their sky, and those who were fit for a prison in England were probably more competent still after their long comfortless journey across the sea.
Wesley was in trouble from the beginning ; his spirit was intolerant, his parishioners were corrupt and headstrong, and before long the breach came. He thought he observed " something reprovable in the behaviour " of one Mrs. Williamson, and he told her so ; " whereupon she appeared extremely angry, and at the turn of the street through
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which they were walking home, went abruptly away." The young curate repelled her from the communion table, and the following morning her husband had him arrested for defamation, and claimed a thousand pounds damage. Wesley, like a true cleric, took his stand that the young woman had not some time the day before signi- fied her intention of communing ; and he weak- ened his position by quoting the authority given to all curates "to advertise any who had done wrong." He does not specify his objections in this particular case ; but we have the other side of the story at any rate, for on the next day Mrs. Williamson swore to and signed an affidavit that Mr. Wesley had many times proposed marriage to her, and that she had rejected his advances in favour of Mr. Williamson's.
Another law-suit arose out of this, and certainly Wesley was reprimanded in the court for calling the lady's uncle a liar and a villain, although, according to all accounts, his statements were well within the truth. He was required to give bail to answer to the suits, and upon refusing he was put "on the limits." It was at this propitious moment that he consulted with his friends, in a purely impersonal way, " as to whether God did not call him to return to England." They agreed.
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and Wesley himself " saw clearly the hour was come for leaving that place ; " so, bail or no bail, about eight o'clock at night he shook the dust of Georgia off his feet and disappeared along with three companions, whose identity does not interest us.
Like many other levanters, they did not find the way an easy one. They were lost in the woods; they waded streams and struggled in swamps; they suffered from hunger and thirst, and the sharpness of the cold, lying abroad in the wet and frost ; yet they commended them- selves to God, and He renewed their strength. Finally they arrived in Charleston, and after "a thorough storm" and a "proper hurricane," followed by a " small fair wind," Wesley arrived safely in England once more.
Shortly after his return to England, Wesley fell in with Peter Bohler on " a day much to be remembered." This evangelist from the Moravian Brethren afterwards became instrumental in his conversion. That is Wesley's own account, though other claimants arose, amongst them the friends of Jonathan Edwards, who held that the austere New England divine was responsible for the change. His journal contains an exact account of the event. " In the evening," it reads,
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" I went very unwillingly to a society in Alders- gate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for sal- vation ; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."
This was in 1738, and Wesley's work had begun. He further qualified himself by a pil- grimage and residence of three months in Ger- many amongst the Moravian Brethren, who had much in common with Methodism as we know it to-day. This sect still constitutes a society de- voted to good works within the German Protest- ant Church, and so far as one can judge, it is the possessor of a most Christian form of doctrine, as one would expect from the lineal descendants of John Huss. The body of doctrine which now bears the name of Wesley was in reality trans- ported from the Moravians, and a new force given to their tenets : that Scripture is the only rule of faith and practice : that human natur totally depraved ; that the law of God the Father is supreme; that the Godhead of Christ is
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real as His humanity; that reconciliation and justification come through His sacrifice by the operation of the Holy Spirit. The insistence upon good works, the fellowship of believers with each other and in Christ, the belief in the second coming, and the resurrection of the dead unto life or unto condemnation, complete the identity of the two systems.
Wesley was resolute not to go outside the Church. His aim was to found a society of seri- ous people within the Church, as an ecclesiola in ecclesia, after the Moravian pattern. As late as 1756 a conference was closed with a solemn declaration never to separate from the Church, and " all the brethren concurred therein." He was continually warning people against the " madness of leaving the Church." On one occasion he went so far as to threaten a society, that if they left the Church they would see his face no more. The question came up formally again at a conference in 1788, when Wesley was 85 years old, and the sum of the deliberation was, that in fifty years they had not varied from the Church in one arti- cle of doctrine or discipline. If the Church of England had enlarged itself to allow free play for this new spirit, it would be to-day, not the Church of England alone, but the church of all who
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dissent from the doctrine or practice of Rome. Wesley was a churchman to the last, and always adopted the churchman's view, as in his descrip- tion of the people of the Isle of Man, wherein he says : " A more loving, simple-hearted people than the Manxmen I never saw, and no wonder, for they have but six Papists and no Dissenters or Calvinists in the island." But he was driven out of the Church — at least out of the churches — he had loved so well, the Church his father and grandfather had served faithfully, as well as many other ancestors, during at least two centuries.
Wesley did not take to field preaching as a matter of choice ; " he sympathized with the Devil in his dislike of it ; for he loved a commodious room, a soft cushion, and a handsome pulpit." To the end of his life it was a cross to him ; but he knew his commission and saw no other way of preaching the gospel to every creature. But as he had no intention of holding his peace, and as the churches were closed against him, he followed the sensible procedure, for a preacher, of going where the people were ready to be preached to, in the streets and fields. It was a hard matter, but it was not of his choosing. " I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, having been all my life so tenacious
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of decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church."
Three successive entries in the Journal read : " I preached at St. Lawrence in the morning, and afterwards at St. Katherine Cree's Church. I was enabled to speak strong words at both, and was, therefore, the less surprised at being informed I was not to preach any more in these churches." " I preached in the morning at St. Ann's Alders- gate, and in the afternoon at the Savoy Chapel : upon free salvation. I was quickly apprised that at St. Ann's likewise I am to preach no more." " I preached at St. John's Wapping, at three, and at St. Bennet's, Paul's Wharf, in the evening. At these churches likewise I am to preach no more."
However, he came to it, and began near Bris- tol by expounding the Sermon on the Mount, which, he observes in his Journal, "was one pretty remarkable precedent for field preaching, though I suppose there were churches at that time also." The next day he " submitted to being more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation to about three thousand people." The following Sunday, he preached to a thousand persons in Bristol at seven o'clock in the morning, afterwards to fifteen hundred on the
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top of Hannam Mount in Kingswood, and still again to five thousand in the afternoon. He went to Bath, and was not even " suffered to be in the meadow where he was before, though this occa- sioned the offer of a more convenient place, where he preached Christ to about a thousand souls." It was upon this occasion that Wesley had his famous interview with Beau Nash.
The world was now his parish, and he com- menced a systematic ministration, preaching free salvation to the condemned felons in Newgate : to a society in Bear Yard, remission of sins : to a meeting in Aldersgate Street, the truth in love : and the efficacy of prayer in the city prison of Oxford. At Blackheath he preached to twelve thousand people, in Upper Moorflelds to seven thousand, and upon the same day to fifteen thou- sand more at Kennington Common. Next day he was off to Bristol, and " as I was riding to Rose Green," we read, "in a smooth, plain part of the road, my horse suddenly pitched upon his head and rolled over and over. I received no other hurt than a bruise on one side, which for the pre- sent I felt not, but preached without pain to six or seven thousand people, on that important di- rection : 4 Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God.' '
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The bodily manifestations of mental disturb- ance, which appeared in the course of the preach- ing, have been a feature of all revivals in every country. Jonathan Edwards witnessed them in America ; the Disciples observed them in Judaea. The explanation of the phenomenon is as simple as the explanation of hysteria. The will, which ordinarily controls the body, becomes dominated by emotion, and the body is left to be swayed by the new force. Self-control, or control by the will, is an admirable thing, but it is not the greatest thing in the world. Evil emotions or good emo- tions may at times gain control of the body, and the idea has long ago been abandoned that it was an evil spirit that gained control of men's wills during revivals. If the body be deliberately handed over to the emotions, an abnormal situa- tion is created, and that is ever the danger in the surrender of the will.
Wesley believed that Whitefield's objections to these manifestations " were chiefly grounded on gross misrepresentations of matter of fact," but presently he had occasion to inform himself ; " for no sooner had he begun to invite all sinners to believe in Christ than four persons sank down close to him, almost in the same moment ; one lay without sense or motion, a second trembled
30G ESSAYS IN PURITANISM
exceedingly, the third had strong convulsions all over his body, but made no noise unless by groans, and the fourth, who was equally convulsed, called upon God with strong cries and tears." As his ministry progressed, these violent manifestations disappeared ; " none were now in trances, none cried out, none fell down or were convulsed ; only some trembled, a low murmur was heard, and many were refreshed with the abundance of peace." Wesley saw as clearly as we do that there were two dangers : to regard these things as if they were essential to the inward work ; and to condemn them altogether.
About this time Wesley was in some trepidation because the powers of evil were so complacent, but very soon he was freed from any anxiety on that score. It was at Bristol that he had the first of his long, varied experience at the hands of the mob ; " all the street was filled with people, shouting, cursing and swearing, and ready to swallow the ground with fierceness and rage." Some of the ringleaders were arrested, but they began to excuse themselves before the mayor by laying charges against the preacher. The magistrate made the sensible answer: "What Mr. Wesley is, is nothing to you : I will beep the peace ; I will have no rioting in this city." In
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the same place, a young man rushed into the meeting, " cursing and swearing vehemently ; " but before he left, " he was observed to have the Lord for his God."
The Journal is full of the rough humour of a semi-civilized people. In London, the rabble drove an ox into the assemblage, which was listen- ing to a discourse upon doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly. At Pensford they had baited a bull with dogs, and by main strength partly dragged and partly thrust him against the table ; but Wesley was unmoved, and, as the Jour- nal says, " once or twice put aside his head with my hand, that the blood might not drop upon my clothes, intending to go on as soon as the hurry should be a little over." One of the converts " became exceedingly angry because those base people would fain have interrupted, but she was quickly rebuked by a stone which lit upon her forehead ; in that moment her anger was at an end and love only filled her heart." Wesley gives but an ill account of Newcastle. "I was sur- prised," he says ; " so much drunkenness, cursing and swearing, even from the mouths of little children, do I never remember to have heard before in so small a compass of time."
The savagery to which Wesley was exposed
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is almost incredible. He was stoned ; he was seized by a press-gang ; he was caught by the hair and struck in the face; the buildings in which he preached were torn to pieces and set on fire. On one occasion he was attacked on a bridge, and it came into his mind, " if they throw me in the river, it will spoil the papers which are in my pocket ; " but he did not doubt that he could swim, as he had on a thin coat and a light pair of boots. No wonder he was brought to exclaim, " O, who will convert these English into honest heathens ! "
This man now began to be talked about, and well he might, for he was turning the English world upside down. He was interesting hundreds of thousands of people in the serious matter of their own sinfulness, and, if he did not insist as strongly as he might upon the necessary punish- ment of it, he certainly made it very clear how they might amend their ways.
Amongst the numerous crimes laid to Wesley's account was a conviction for selling gin ; that lie was receiving large remittances from Spain in order to make a party amongst the poor : that as soon as the Spaniards landed he would join with twenty thousand followers : and that he kept two kk Papist priests" in his house. One, who claimed
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that he was an eye-witness, testified that Wesley had hanged himself, and that only the breaking of the rope prevented the fatal issue ; another, in con- versation with a Jesuit, asserted that Wesley was one of them ; upon which the Jesuit, with all the perspicacity of his race, uttered the devout wish : " I would to God he were." From one pulpit it was preached that John Wesley had been expelled from his college, and even the character of his mother was attacked ; the nastiest calumnies were uttered against those who attended the meetings by night ; but within a year, " one minister, who was very forward, grew thoughtful, and shortly afterwards went into his own necessary house, and there hanged himself."
This mother of Wesley is the last person in the world, one would think, whose conduct was open to censure, judging from the manner in which she conducted herself toward her husband and her children. We are at no loss for exact informa- tion as to the conditions under which they were brought up, for she has set down at some length her method of procedure in educating her numerous family. She first lays down her prac- tice for their securing a regular course of sleeping, and when they were turned a year old, "they were taught to fear the Lord and to cry softly, by
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which they escaped the abundance of correction they might otherwise have had ; and that most odious noise, the crying of children, was rarely heard in the house. " At dinner they were suffered to eat, and drink small beer, as much as they would, but not to call for anything ; drinking or eating between meals was never allowed, nor was it suffered to go into the kitchen to ask for any- thing of the servants. After family prayers they had their supper. At seven the maid washed them, and beginning at the youngest she undressed them, and got all to bed by eight ; " there was no such thing allowed in the house as sitting by a child till it fell asleep."
In order to form the minds of children, Mrs. Wesley writes in a general way, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will, and bring them to an obedient temper ; for the subjecting of the will is a thing that must be done at once, and the sooner the better ; for, by neglecting a timely correction, they will contract stubbornness and obstinacy, which is hardly ever after conquered. Whenever a child is corrected, we are assured, it must be conquered ; and when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of its parents, then a great many childish follies may be passed by. Self-will, she
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protests, is the root of all sin and misery; so, whoever cherishes this in children ensures their after-wretchedness. The children were quickly- made to understand that they might have nothing they cried for, and they were instructed to speak handsomely for what they wanted. So, we may well believe, " that taking God's name in vain, cursing and swearing, profaneness, rude, ill-bred names were never heard among them."
Her way of teaching was this : One day she allowed to a child wherein to learn his letters ; then he began at the first chapter of Genesis, and was taught to spell the first verse ; then he read it over and over, till he took ten verses, which he quickly did. It is almost incredible, she says, what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year if he have good health. In addition to this general system, the mother had certain specific rules, which probably were carried out to the letter. " Whoever was charged with a fault of which they were guilty, if they would ingenu- ously confess it and promise to amend, should not be beaten ; " — this rule she was sure pre- vented a great deal of lying; — that no sinful action, as lying, pilfering, playing on the Lord's Day, or disobedience, should ever pass unpun- ished ; that no child should ever be chid or beat
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twice for the same fault ; that every single act of obedience should be always commended and fre- quently rewarded, according to the merits of the cause ; that the properties should be inviolably preserved, and none suffered to invade the pro- perty of another in the smallest matter ; that promises be strictly observed ; that no girl be taught to work till she can read very well. This is the very reason, she discovered, why so few women can read fit to be heard, and never to be well understood.
Wesley himself had some very definite ideas upon the education of girls, and he was firmly of the opinion that if parents had the desire to send their daughters "headlong to hell," they could not do better 'than send them to a fashionable boarding-school. He had seen girls acquire pride, vanity, and affectation in these institutions of learning ; and others since his time have in ado the same observation.
Wesley's own marriage was not a success, at least in so far as success in that relation is com- monly estimated. An emotional man is usually unhappy in his domestic life ; his wife always is. The popular evangelist had been in many perils from women, and his own ardent temperament was continually forcing him into needless dan-
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gers. Love for the race is apt to condense into love for the individual, but it quickly vaporizes again.
We have documentary evidence that he made proposals to Mrs. Williamson in Georgia, when she was Miss Hopkey ; at least that lady made affidavit that he had ; but he was a curate at the time, and his avowal must be interpreted in that light. This affair with Miss Hopkey was serious, and he was in such sore distress about it that he had recourse to the elders of the Moravian Church for advice. They exacted a pledge from him that he would abide by their decision, and when they decided against the union, he did so abide, con- soling himself with the text — " Son of man, be- hold I take from thee the desire of thine eyes." Yet, fifty years afterwards, when he recalled the experience, he confessed that he had been pierced through as with a sword. The thoughts of youth are long-lasting.
The love affairs of Wesley, harmless and slight as they were, are as difficult to follow as the amours of Horace. He was plotted against and he was planned for. He had the usual affair with a sister of a college friend ; he carried on a long correspondence with a young widow, the niece of Lord Lansdowne; and with a singular
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catholicity of taste he had another series of let- ters running to her mother, under a fanciful name. But his most notorious entanglement was with Grace Murray, the widow of a sailor, who had sought relief from her bereavement in do- mestic service. Wesley appears to have behaved with great good nature, and complacently allowed her to transfer her affections to another quarter. Under the ministrations of yet another woman he came to have serious doubts upon the sound- ness of his views as set forth in his " Thoughts on Marriage." A conference of the brethren was ordered, and in a full and friendly debate they convinced him " that a believer might marry without suffering the loss of his soul.,, The per- son who effected this change of mind was Mrs. Vazeille, " a woman of sorrowful spirit," and he married her after an acquaintance of fifteen days. If his marriage was a mistake, certainly he had had the benefit of advice from his friends ; his brother, when he heard of it, " groaned all day and could eat no pleasant food ; " another parti- san leaves it on record that " he felt as though he could have knocked the soul out of the woman ; " and Southey, who was a writer with a taste for classification, brackets Mrs. Wesley in a triad with the wives of Socrates and Job.
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Yet Wesley did his duty by the lady, at least in the way of offering advice. On one occasion he wrote in a spirit of remonstrance : " Attempt no more to abridge me of my liberty. God has used many means to curb your stubborn will and break your temper. He has given you a sickly daughter. He has taken away one of your sons ; another has been a grievous cross, as the third probably will be ; he has suffered you to be defrauded of money, and has chastened you with strong pain. Are you more humble, more gentle, more placable than you were? I fear the re- verse." These are scarcely the words in which to inculcate the virtues of humility, gentleness, and placability upon a woman of high spirit.
The unhappiness of the pair was a matter of public comment, and the solution arrived at by one pious follower was that his sufferings were the chastisements of a loving father ; hers, the immediate effects of an angry and bitter spirit. Wesley bore the chastisement with great resolu- tion, and wrote to his housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, who was not exactly the most suitable confidante, as she had at least two husbands living, the plaintf ul words : " I cannot say, ' take thy plague away from me,' but only, ' let me be purified and not consumed.' "
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With perfect truth it may be affirmed that the great Evangelist bore the marks of his wife's violence upon his body ; yet he endured his trial with patience, and consoled himself by reverting to his original views upon marriage, and finding further evidence in the Scripture that a person in his situation should have remained single ; but he afterwards praised God for the slight mercy that he had been enabled to remain unmarried so long as he actually did. After twenty years of married life his wife left him, purposing " never to return ; for what cause I know not to this day." Her husband made an entry in his diary, employing the Latin tongue to give full force to his thought, " Non earn reliqui ; non dimisi ; non revocabo."
Into the merits of the case it is unnecessary to enter further, but one cannot prevent the suspi- cion that Wesley's zeal in going to and fro in the Kingdom, from Aberdeen to Land's End, cross- ing and re-crossing the Irish Channel continually, may have arisen partly out of his domestic rela- tions. He recalls " an odd circumstance," which gives a deep insight into his mental make-up, and suggests a psychological reason for his marital unhappiness : " I never relish a tune at first hear- ing, not till I have almost learned to sing it : but as I learn it more perfectly, I gradually lose my
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relish for it. It is the same in poetry, yea, in all the objects of imagination. I seldom relish verses at first hearing ; till I have heard them over and over they give me no pleasure, and then give me next to none when I have heard them a few times more, so as to be quite familiar. Just as a face or a picture, which does not strike me at first, becomes more pleasing as I grow more acquainted with it, but only to a certain point ; for when I am too much acquainted it is no longer pleasing." It is easy to appreciate the situation of a woman in the face of such a disposition as that.
If Wesley failed to rule his domestic household well, it cannot be laid to his charge that he neglected the discipline of his ecclesiastical charge. He wrote to his preachers, lay and clerical, on all possible subjects ; he admonished, reproved, and remonstrated ; and when these gentle measures did not avail, he had free recourse to expulsion from the society. To Hugh Sanderson, one of his Irish preachers, he writes with great plain- ness: "Avoid all familiarity with women; you cannot be too wary in this respect ; use all dili- gence to be clean ; free yourself from lice, they are a proof of laziness ; do not cut off your hair, but clean it and keep it clean ; cure yourself and your family of the itch — a spoonful of brimstone
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will do it ; let not the North be any longer a pro- verb of reproach to all the nations." Wesley- went to the facts ; that was his motto as well as Voltaire's.
He assembled his preachers together and gave them lessons in elocution. Success in public speaking, he told them, consists in nothing but " a natural, easy, and graceful variation of the voice, suitable to the nature and importance of the sen- timents we have to deliver ; and the first business of a speaker is to speak that he may be under- stood without babbling with his hands." He divided his disciples into classes, and read lectures to them from Pearson on the Creed, from Aid- rich's " Logic," and " Rules for Action and Utter- ance."
But Wesley's activity was not wholly consumed in spiritual exercises : he assumed a large know- ledge of physical ailments ; and when a person has once got it into his head that he can cure all manner of bodily diseases by the simple device of the laying on of hands, or the scarcely more com- plicated procedure of prayer, he is apt to acquire a deep disdain for those who employ the slow and uncertain methods of medicine and the painful operation of the knife. It was so with "WosW. He practised medicine on his own account, and
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was particularly impressed by the value of elec- tricity in the cure of various diseases ; indeed, he held what one might call an outdoor clinic every day, " wherein any that desired it might try the virtue of that surprising medicine ; " and he testi- fied that thousands had received unspeakable good. He looked upon electricity as a thousand medicines in one, and the most efficacious in nervous disorders which has ever been discovered. Many parts of the Journal read like an advertise- ment in the daily press ; for example : " After the sermon in Brechin, the Provost desired to see us, and said, 4 Sir, my son had epileptic fits from his infancy; Dr. Ogilvie prescribed for him many times, and at length told me he could do no more. I desired Mr. Blair last Monday to speak to you, and I gave him the drops you advised. He is now perfectly well and has not had one fit since.' "
In " reflecting upon the case of the poor woman who had continually pain in her stomach," the great preacher could not but remark the "in- excusable negligence of physicians, who pre- scribed drug upon drug, without knowing a jot of the matter concerning the root of the disorder, and without knowing this they cannot cure, though they can murder the patient. Why, then, do not all physicians consider how far bodily
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disorders are cured or influenced by the mind ; and why are these cases outside of their sphere? Because they know not God." All this, too, sounds strangely familiar to our ears.
He did not find the state of the profession any better in Ireland, and all his spare time was taken up with poor patients. " Blisters for anything or nothing were all the fashion during his previous visit to Ireland ; this time, the grand fashionable medicine for twenty diseases was mercury sub- limate. Why is it not a halter or a pistol ? They would cure a little more speedily." He was called to a house, " where a child was dying of the small- pox, and rescued her from death and the doctors, who were giving her saffron to drive out the disease."
Nor had Wesley a very high opinion of the law. In the early part of his life he " first saw that foul monster, a Chancery Bill, a scroll of forty- two pages to tell a story which needed not to have taken up forty lines, stuffed with stupid, senseless, improbable lies, many of them quite foreign to the question." Twenty years later he saw "the fellow of it, which was called a Declaration," and he was led to enquire : " Why do lawyers lie for lying's sake, unless it be to keep their hand in."
The Journal touches life at every point : music,
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painting, travel by land and by sea, books and decoration, farriery and farming, food and drink, besides the deeper matters of Calvinism and Anti- nomian pietism. After listening to the oratorio "Judith," he records with some vehemence : " There are two things in all modern music which I can never reconcile to common sense — one is singing the same words ten times over, the other is singing different words by different persons at one and the same time." He was particularly struck by a picture of Rubens ; yet could not see " either the decency or sense of painting the fig- ure stark naked ; he thought it shockingly absurd, and that nothing could defend or excuse the practice, even if an Indian were to be the judge. " From his experience of sea travel he formulated the very sensible rules : Never pay till you set sail ; go not on board till the captain goes, and send not your luggage on board till you go your- self. He passed judgement upon the " high enco- miums which have been for many years bestowed on a country life," in the words, " there is not a less happy body of men in all England than the farm- ers ; in general their life is supremely dull and usually unhappy too." He conducted many experi- ments in dietetics upon his own person, in the way of abstention from meat and alcohol, and for
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a year would drink nothing but water — a form of self-denial which was apparently less common then than now.
Wesley was a man of education, that is to say, he had a familiarity with all the writings then extant. The names of Shakespeare, Homer, Vir- gil, Pascal, Luther, Dryden, are scattered every- where in his Journal, and he has recorded very pertinent observations upon their works. The writings of Rousseau, and of his " brother infidel Voltaire," he knew very well ; Swedenborg he thought an entertaining madman ; the " Senti- mental Journal Through France and Italy," he thought should read " Continental, as sentimental is not English ; " but he fully approved of John- son's " Tour," and thought the " observations very judicious."
We are continually struck by evidence of his sound sense, which, as has already been remarked, was a leading family trait. Once in seven years he burnt all his sermons, thinking it a shame that he could not write better ones then than seven years ago. After reading a book to prove that the moon was not inhabited, he made the sensible observation : " I know that the earth is ; of the rest I know nothing." A reformed pirate once attempted to wean him away from the habit of
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writing books, on the ground that men ought to read no book but the Bible. But the wise evan- gelist showed his good judgement by declining " to enter into a dispute upon religion with a sea captain seventy-five years old." At Edinburgh four children were brought for baptism, and as the visitor had previously seen the minister perform the ceremony, he was at no loss how to proceed ; in other places he followed the practice of im- mersion.
It must be confessed, on the other side, that Wesley wrote two letters to the newspapers, and after being desired for nearly forty years to pub- lish a magazine, he yielded at length, and began to collect materials for it. Amongst the temporal business he had to settle in his eighty-fourth year was the dismissal of his editor for " causes that were insufferable." He had borne with him for twelve years, and finally, when he had inserted in the magazine " several pieces of verse," with- out the proprietor's knowledge, that gentle pub- lisher could endure it no longer, so he made an effort to amend the editorial management "for the short residue of his life." Looking at the " Arminian," which was the name of the magazine, one is inclined to adopt Wesley's view of the case, and applaud his radical measure.
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Wesley had a pretty gift for description. The town of Clonmel he described as " the pleasantest beyond all comparison, which I have found in Ireland. It has four broad, straight streets of red brick houses which cross each other in the centre of the town. Close to the walls on the south side runs a broad, clear river. Beyond this rises a green and fruitful mountain, which hangs over the town. The vale runs many miles east and west and is well cultivated." The observations which he made upon the state of Ireland are remarkably just, unless the Irish have been sadly belied. " There is no country on earth where it is so necessary to be steadily serious," he writes, "for you are generally encompassed with those who, with a little encouragement, would laugh and trifle from morning to night." At Birr he was preaching in the street to " a rude, senseless multitude," when a Carmelite friar cried out, "You lie." "Knock the friar down," the audi- ence shouted ; " and it was no sooner said than done."
Edinburgh he thought the dirtiest city he had ever seen, "not excepting Colen in Germany. The situation of the city on a hill shelving down on both sides, with the stately castle upon a craggy rock, is inexpressibly fine. The main
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street, so broad and finely paved, is far beyond any in Great Britain ; but how can it be suffered that all manner of filth should be thrown into it continually ? Where is the magistracy, the gentry, and the nobility of the land, that they allow the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street in it, to stink worse than a common sewer? I spoke to them as plain as ever I did in my life, but I never knew any in Scotland offended at plain speaking." Dumfries he found to be a clean, well-built town, having two elegant churches, the mountains high but extremely pleasant.
The itinerant evangelist was greatly surprised at the entertainment which he received in Scot- land. The food proved to be good, cheap, in great abundance, clean as any one could desire, and well dressed. Above all, he was amazed that " not any person did move any dispute of any kind, nor ask him any questions concerning his opinions, so that the prejudice which the Devil had been several years planting was torn up by the roots in one hour." Every Scotchman knows where that pre- judice comes from, but it is not often that an Englishman makes so clear an avowal.
The Scotch character was ever a source of won- der to Wesley, as to many a foreigner before and since. Upon one occasion he spent some hours in
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the General Assembly, and was surprised to find that any one was admitted, even lads twelve or fourteen years old ; that the chief speakers were lawyers ; that a single question took up the whole time, " which, when I went away, seemed to be as far removed from a conclusion as ever, namely, ' Shall Mr. Lindsay be removed to Kilmarnock Parish or not ? ' Indeed," he observed, " there is seldom fear of wanting a congregation in Scot- land ; but the misfortune is they know everything, so they learn nothing. Every one here loves at least to hear the word of God. Certain this is a nation swift to hear and slow to speak, though not slow to wrath." The implication is very subtle, that in the Scotch mind the whole duty of man ends with the hearing of the Word. He went to church in Aberdeen, and though he lis- tened with all his attention he only understood two words, " Balak " in the first lesson, and " be- gat " in the second.
In Edinburgh he went so far as to sing a Scotch psalm, "and fifteen or twenty people came within hearing, but with great circumspec- tion, keeping at their distance as though they knew not what might follow." At Inverness he was struck by the remarkable seriousness of the people — an observation that has been made by
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less acute persons — though he thought this less surprising, when he considered that at least for a hundred years they had had a succession of pious ministers. Finally he adds : " Amongst all the sins they have imported from England, the Scots have not yet learned to scoff at sacred things." It has always been a fixed belief in Scotland that any evil which manifested itself north of the Tweed was received from some extraneous source — from England, or France, or from the Devil.
Wesley witnessed the celebration of the com- munion in the West Kirk, Edinburgh, and from his description it would appear to this day that the Church of Scotland is faithful to its tradi- tions. " After the usual morning service the min- ister enumerated several sorts of sinners, whom he forbade to approach to the table, and I was informed that the communion usually lasted till five in the evening." Wesley should be the last person to complain of the length of a service, for he habitually preached for three hours at a time, and sometimes far into the night. However, after visiting Scotland with a fair degree of regularity up to his seventy-seventh year, he made the hu- miliating discovery, " that he was not a preacher for the people of Edinburgh." Upon this last visit he writes : " I did not shun to declare the
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whole counsel of God, and yet the people hear and hear, and are just what they were before."
Wesley had the same peculiar genius as George Borrow for chance encounter with rare characters, and as that genius is usually associated with the literary gift, it is hard to know just how much reliance is to be placed upon the accounts of what is alleged to have taken place. Certainly the accounts as we have them are amusing. In Bris- tol he lit upon a " poor, pretty, fluttering thing, lately come from Ireland, and going to be a singer in a playhouse. She went in the evening to the chapel, and thence to watch-night, and was almost persuaded to be a Christian."
At Hull the coach in which he was crowded was attacked by a mob, who threw in at the windows whatever came next to hand ; but a large gentle- woman who sat in his lap screened him so that nothing came near him. Going up a steep narrow passage from the sea, he encountered a man at the top, and looking him in the face said : " I wish you a good-night." The man " spoke not, nor moved hand or foot," but replied to the civil salutation, "I wish you was in hell."
Upon a certain visit to London he was " nobly attended : " behind him on the coach were ten convicted felons, loudly blaspheming and rattling
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their chains. By his side sat a man with a loaded blunderbuss, and another upon the box.
At Newark one big man, " exceeding drunk, was very noisy and turbulent till his wife seized him by the collar, gave him two or three hearty boxes on the ear, and dragged him away like a calf."
At Tullamore he met a man who had been under water full twenty minutes, " which made him more serious for two or three months." In the midst of a sermon, the preacher saw a large cat leap down upon a woman's head, and run over the heads and shoulders of many more, " but none of them cried out any more than if it had been a butterfly." At Eotherham, an ass walked gravely in at the gate, came up to the door of the house, and stood stock still in a posture of deep attention. " It is well," Wesley adds, "only serious persons were present." Near Bradford, " the beasts of the people lifted up their voice, especially one called a gentleman, who had filled his pockets with rotten eggs ; but a young man coming unawares clapped his hand on each side and mashed them all at once, and he was perfume all over." At Brough in Westmore- land, he preached " at a farmer's house under some shady trees, when a little bird perched on a branch and sang without intermission, from the beginning of the service to the end."
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The following bit of narrative is inimitable even by the author of " Lavengro : " A poor man, special drunk, came marching down the street with a club in one hand and a large cleaver in the other, grievously cursing and blaspheming, and swearing he would cut the preacher's head off. When he came nearer, the Mayor stepped out of the congregation, and strove by good words to make him quiet, but could not prevail ; on which he went into his house and returned with his white wand. At the same time he sent for the con- stables, who presently came with their staves. He charged them not to strike the man unless he struck first ; but this he did, as soon as they came within reach, and wounded one of them in the wrist. On this the other knocked him down, which he did three times before he would submit. The Mayor then walked before the constables on either hand, and so conducted the man to gaol.
Wesley toiled at his desk as well as upon the road. He wrote books, dedicating to them the hours from five in the morning till eight at night, which was M all the time he could spare." He would write a sermon or a tract as he sat upon a stone waiting for a ferryman, and if they were as hard to write as they are to read it was a marvel- lous feat of endurance. The bulk of printed
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material which, he left behind him is incredible, and the task of mastering it can only be likened to reading the contents of a theological library or a Methodist "book concern" — concern is the proper term to employ. His writings are not books, they are in reality concerns. Even during the period of his courtship — a short period it is true — whilst he was confined to the house with a sprained sinew, he employed his time in writing a Hebrew Grammar and lessons for children ; he had previously constructed a grammar of the Greek and French languages.
"Make poetry your diversion, not your busi- ness," was the advice given to Wesley by his wise old mother, and it would have been well if he had submitted cheerfully to the injunction. He wrote rhymes upon all occasions; he made hymns which, at first, look well and sound well, but they never rise into the clear atmosphere of poetry, much less of spiritual attainment. During half a century he and his brother issued nearly forty hymnologies, which were of much greater value in those days than they are now. This humane man had a passion for falling in love and for writing verses ; he was thoroughly cured of the one, but he never was able to eradicate the other quality from his nature.
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The fact that stands out most clearly in Wes- ley's teaching is that conversion must be followed by amendment of conduct in every relation of life, a fact which many of those who are called by his name have lost sight of. He spoke with those who had votes in an ensuing election ; he would not allow them to eat or drink at the expense of him for whom they voted ; five guineas had been given to one member of the society, but the virtuous elector returned them immediately, and when he learned that his mother had received money privately, he could not rest till she had sent it back. Wesley expelled dishonest debtors, and the defrauding of the revenue was not toler- ated by him. He told the society at Sunderland, specifically, that none could stay in it unless they parted from all sin, particularly " robbing the King, selling or buying smuggled goods, which he would no more suffer than robbing in the highway." In Norwich he told the society in plain terms that they were the most ignorant, self-conceited, self-willed, fickle, intractable, dis- orderly persons he knew in the three kingdoms, and " God applied it to their hearts."
Another discovery of Wesley's was, " that the preaching like an apostle, without joining together those that are awakened, and training
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them up in the ways of God, was only begetting children for the executioner; without discipline nine in ten of the once awakened were soon faster asleep than ever." To this end he established societies, classes, and bands, with leaders, helpers, and stewards. They were entirely non-sectarian in character, but pressure from without, espe- cially the denial of the sacraments to them, drove them into the form of a sect or church, though Wesley strove against the development continu- ally, and warned the people against the madness of leaving the Church. Toward the end of his life, however, he saw that the movement was irresistible ; and he took the high ground that he had as much right as any primitive missionary bishop to ordain officials to administer the rites of an organization, which had now grown into a church ; as the connection grew, the possession of property was forced upon it, and to conserve it he was obliged to throw the societies into legal form.
At the very beginning of his work, Wesley displayed that capacity for organization which finally brought his followers together as a distinct sect, and after his death enabled them to rise to the dignity of a church. He built and acquired meeting-houses — a name he abhorred ; he estab-
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lished labour colonies, to keep the needy amongst his followers from want and idleness. He was continually propagating schemes for the payment of debts, a form of activity from which the leaders of the Methodist Church are not yet wholly free. He raised money for the clothing of the French soldiers, who were living in misery in English prisons, appealing to the people in the strong words : " Thou shalt not oppress the stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." His pri- vate charity was unbounded and it was given with open eyes as well as with open hand. After relieving the necessity of a certain Dutchman, he makes the wise observation, "I never saw him since, and reason good, for he could now live without me."
Wesley's bodily vigour, his unfailing health, his capacity for enduring hardships and toil, have been a source of wonder from his time to our own. He preached three and four times a day. He rarely rode less than five thousand miles in a year, and some days from seventy to ninety ; he was beaten and stoned ; he lay in the open air till his clothes were covered with frost ; and he was drenched with the seas of the Irish Channel. His constitution does not appear to have been
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unusually robust. From ten to thirteen, that is when he was a scholar at the Charterhouse, and the bigger boys used to seize the little fellows' meat, he tells us that he had little but bread to eat, and not plenty of that ; all his life he ate sparingly, and drank only water ; at seven and twenty he began spitting blood, and that con- tinued for several years. He was brought to the brink of death by a fever, and afterwards fell into the third stage of consumption ; though, for all his medical knowledge, we may well question his diagnosis of his own case. Yet upon his seventy-second birthday, he was led to consider how it was that he found just the same strength as he did thirty years before ; that his sight was better and his nerves firmer ; that he had none of the infirmities of old age, and had lost several which he possessed in his youth.
Toward the end, as is ever the habit with old men, Wesley occupies the pages of his Journal with considerations of his youthfulness and his phenomenal health. After much discussion he concludes that his good physical condition was due to his rising at four o'clock for about fifty years, to his practice of preaching at five o'clock in the morning, which, he assures us, was one of the most healthful exercises in the world, and to
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never travelling less, by sea or land, than 4500 miles in the year. This view of preaching as a healthy exercise is a new one, and a hygienic precaution, which, it is hoped, will not be too generally followed. One reads with envious long- ing of his gift for sleeping, and would willingly accept the most ultimate tenets of Methodism, if only they were accompanied by Wesley's " ability, if ever I want, to sleep immediately." Probably that is a vain hope, unless it also brought his evenness of temper : " I feel and grieve, yet I fret at nothing."
The accounts of his growing age are pathetic. He found that with increasing years he walked slower, that his memory was not so quick, that he could not read so well by candle-light. At eighty-five he was not so agile, and could not run so fast as formerly ; he found his left e}^e grow dim, some pain in the temple from an old blow of a stone, yet he felt no such thing as weariness in travelling and preaching, and was not conscious of any decay in writing his sermons. In the last year of his life — he died at 87 — he confesses that his eyes are dim, his hand trembling, his motions weak and slow, jTet he felt no pain from head to foot ; only, it seemed as if " nature was exhausted." And so it was.
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Prophecy is not an exact science. The issue of it is ever uncertain ; but if the prophets were to agree, the thing would come to pass. The He- brew prophets prophesied for a thousand years, and the Messiah came. They were a little astray in their geographical predictions and in some other details ; but in the main they were right, because they relied upon the profound knowledge that religious aspiration is a primal instinct, like the desire for food or the passion for propagat- ing the species. The bloodiest savages possess it; the great Apostle testified to its immanence amongst the Athenians, and we are not yet grown so mighty that we have put it underfoot. The voice has been still and small these forty years, whilst we have been wandering in the scientific wilderness. But the spirit of religion "revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most when most inact- ive deemed." Of science we may now say :
His giantship is gone somewhat crest-fallen, Stalking with less unconscionable strides.
The strife is over ; and silence has fallen upon the clatter of Huxley's shrewd knocks, upon the wild outcries of Bishop Wilberforce, and the tumult of the crowds which stood afar off to wit- ness the conflict, and either lamented or blas- phemed. We have settled all that. We have
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relegated the theologians to their own place, along with the logicians and the schoolmen. They had been fighting a corporeal presence writh a fine dialectical point. The scientists were thrusting at a spirit with their clumsy weapons. We have sent Science back to its laboratories, and every time it performs something useful to humanity we shall hear it gladly.
Dull thing-, I say so, that Caliban Whom now I keep in silence. . . . But, as 't is, We cannot miss him : he does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serve in offices That profit us.
If one were engaged in the laborious exercise of writing a tract, he might enlarge upon this ; but for the present I shall content myself with one remark. The Spirit of Eeligion, which is the larger part of Puritanism, is reviving ; it is amongst the men of science — the men who habitually deal with truth — that its operation is most clearly manifest, though probably some of them will be swift to deny the amiable charge. It is also manifest amongst the toilers for their daily bread, who deal with truth of another kind. They are saying at this moment,
Be of good courage ; I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me, which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts.
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" The law is a schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ," said Saint Paul. There is a law of fear and a law of love. It is a strange phenomenon of the human mind that the thing which we fear greatly and justly, we afterwards grow to love. All men fear Death; in the end they come to love it. The voice of the Old Testament is, fear God. The Puritans, according to the saying of Joubert, were children of the Old Testament. In New England they were led into a new and better way by the spirit of the time, which was revealed chiefly in the Unitarian movement. In England the voice which bade fear give place to love was the voice of Methodism. It was through John Wesley that voice was given to the world.
But even that is not enough for us. We have done with fear. We have need for love. And lest it be forgotten that I am speaking to a com- pany of artists, I shall say that we have the need also for beauty. In the future what is good in Puritanism we shall have ; that is, the beauty of holiness. What is good in Science we shall have — the beauty of Truth. What is good in Art we shall have — the beauty of Nature.
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