Sir
Roger—What have we here?
Giles—There is everything under the sun set down
with some show of reason; they run atilt at the world,
and treat men and manners as familiar as an old hat.
Sir Roger—Think you they protest too much? I like
a matter disposed bravely, but—
Giles—Methinks they have a genial tongue. Will
you hear them?
Sir Roger—Well, an’ it be not too long I’ll
have some sack, and you read on.
—
Old Play.
Of
the many inspiring phenomena that make this teeming
age wonderful and noteworthy, the most hopeful and the
most significant is the change which is so rapidly taking
place in the social position of women. The sentimentalist
of the old school looks askance, and pictures to himself
with disgust and dread the “masculine” woman
of the future. The rest of us need have no fear. Most
of the frivolity, the vice, the sordid brutality that
have characterized too much of human society in the
past have been due to the condition of comparative social
inferiority in which women have been forced to live.
Give them perfect independence, place them upon an exactly
even footing with men in all the activities and responsibilities
of life, and a result for good will be attained which
it is almost beyond the power of the imagination to
picture. In the first place the effect upon the institution
of marriage will be in the highest degree wholesome
and beautiful. The degrading necessity for marriage,
which is one of the wretchedest curses of society as
we see it, will be removed. The woman will marry from
choice, and the intellectual and moral training derived
from her improved condition will enable her to choose
rightly. The man will no longer choose a wife; it will
be the woman who will choose her husband. Who can follow
out in all their many branches the beneficent results
of this one gain alone. The high standard of excellence
which the woman will certainly look to in making her
choice, cannot but ensure the elimination or repression
of a great part of the fool and the brute that is in
men. Then as to those vices and dreadful degradations
which many of us pass over in ashamed silence when we
speak of the conditions of life, what will the effect
be upon them? Assuredly it will be great. Women, no
longer weak and dependent, no longer kept in an emotional
atmosphere of frivolity and sentimental irresponsibility,
but strong, active and self-reliant as men, will not
be subject or exposed to the same temptations, and above
all they will not be at the mercy of men. When the moral
and intellectual emancipation of women is fully effected
many a cloud will be lifted from human life, and no
sensible man will believe that the sex will have sacrificed
one whit of that grace and beauty which we think to
be its chiefest charm; rather there will be added to
these a power, a beneficence, a dignity which are only
the exception now.
L.
The
affair of Dollard on the Ottawa has been one of the
most popular stories of New France. Many poems and more
than one novel have been founded on it. But our latest
historian has refused to allow us to believe in the
heroic purpose of the expedition. Dr. Kingsford conceives
the facts to be as follow: “Dollard, who had left
France under a cloud, desirous of regaining his character
by some dashing act of gallantry, enticed sixteen young
men to join in an expedition against the Iroquois. The
intention appears to have been to surprise some of the
bands of the marauding Mohawks and to exterminate them,
and so give confidence and security to the settlement
and remove the feeling of terror which was paralyzing
it; at the same time inflict a lesson on the Iroquois,
so that they on their side would feel it was insecure
for them to approach Montreal with hostile intent. De
Maisonneuve reluctantly consented to the expedition.
The party either fell into an ambush or unexpectedly
became engaged with overpowering numbers. The fight
must have been desperate and determined, for all of
them were killed or made prisoners.” He concludes
that “the expedition had doubtless a defined end,
and one considered practicable of attainment, and was
so accepted by De Maisonneuve; he could never have foreseen
so unfortunate a result.” It is interesting to
note that the Jesuit Relations locate the encounter
at Chaudiere, in fact at Ottawa, although the Long Sault
rapid at or near Carillon has long been popularly fixed
as the scene of this desperate encounter. It would certainly
seem that the Relations, written in 1660, shortly after
the event, would be the best authority for a detail
of this kind. Dollier de Casson did not arrive in Canada
until 1666, and by that time the affair must have commenced
to take on “the strained and lofty accents of
romance.” But even at the time of writing the
Relations the whole occurrence must have been shrouded
in mystery. But the story of its romantic form has come
to live with us, and it is well. There is probably as
much foundation for it as there is for the majority
of the romances of history, and these are amongst the
dearest possessions of the race. Nothing can dim the
gallantry or overcloud the valor of the fight between
these sixteen young men and their Mohawk antagonists.
If they had no fort to shelter them, but only a breastwork
hastily thrown up, their defence becomes still more
heroic. It requires no labor of the imagination to conjure
up the scene on their leaving Lachine for that wilderness
of the Ottawa. They made their progress to death through
a lovely landscape which then must have been more romance
than it is now; the Lake of Two Mountains with its sheeny
distances, its pale and shallow lights, its shores covered
with rising forests and dappled with immense shadows.
I can never pass Carillon and see the Long Sault tossing
its white foam without a thought of Dollard and his
heroes.
S.
One
of the strongest and most remarkable personalities of
this century has just passed away at Camden, New Jersey.
By the death of Walt Whitman, America loses her most
distinctively national poet, in the sense that he was
the voice of the greater part of the people. Not one
of the great New England school, not even Emerson nor
Lowell, with all their natural and untrammeled vigor,
voiced, as did Whitman, the American life and sentiment.
Emerson was universal in his largeness of intellect,
but in his local characteristics was essentially New
England. Lowell, the laureate of the civil war and of
the republic at its best in Lincoln, voiced the aspirations
of the more cultured few with regard to the republic.
Longfellow was essentially the laureate of the home
and of the higher sentiments of a large class who are
now already passing away. But if we want to find a poet,
and a great one, who was as truly the singer of the
great, crude, material and yet aspiring republic, as
Dante mirrored the Italy of the middle ages, we must
go to Whitman. Much of his verse has rightly been called
grotesque and even brutal in its barbarous egotism;
but in this he was essentially the voice of the larger
part of the common American people of the last quarter
century. His very grossness of expression and untrammeled
search for individual freedom show him to be the point
at which the greater, cruder and unformed part of the
republic had found its poetical consciousness. If we
were to have dreamed a poet for the era of the republic
just gone, Whitman is the sort of individuality that
might have been prophesied. His very simple and unaffected
egoism, his intense enjoyment of life and his ever-abiding
interest in the country and nation as a whole, has no
parallel in any other American poet. His was a largeness
of heart and sympathy that was in keeping with the great
institutions and the marvelously gigantic natural scenery
of the republic. There is much in Whitman that jars
on and repels the sensitive mind the cultured artistic
sense, and a large part of his verse would hardly be
admitted by many within the canons of recognized poetry.
But this is nothing more than should be expected of
the natural poet, who is the poetical voice of that
strange, heterogeneous and magnificent but grotesque
and inconsistent humanity which went to make up the
larger part of the great American republic during the
last 30 years. Of course even now the nation is outgrowing
the Whitman era, and a larger culture and a new conservatism
is coming in that Whitman could not have dreamed of
nor have understood. But when history looks back to
the golden age of the greatest republic of modern times
she will note two Titanic figures stand out as the blossom
of the development of the age, the statesman Abraham
Lincoln and the poet Walt Whitman. Both are grotesque
and rude as was the age, but both must be judged not
by any social standard of human culture, but both being
judged by natural standards of a large and robust humanity,
which, leaving the old world trammels behind, found
a new development and blossom of characteristics, both
will be found unique in the history of the world—Lincoln,
the flower of the best ideals of the new republic; Whitman,
the voice of its unmentionable reality of thought and
existence.
C.
A
late critic of Mr. William Morris’ last book of
poems occupied two full pages of The Athenæum
in a dissertation on the inexactness of the nomenclature
of the poets generally and the probable effect that
the spread of scientific knowledge would have on the
knowledge would have on the value of the impressions
intended by the use of certain definite words. His whole
argument was hung on the line in the poem, “The
Folk Mote by the River,” “Woke up the swallows
under the thatch,” the point being that it was
martins Mr. Morris meant and not swallows. The critic
avers that the line as it stands may now give us a vivid
picture of “the snowy throats gleaming and throbbing
through the little doorways of their nests,” but
that it will be less so to a reader equipped with a
more exact vocabulary. This may be so, but the time
which will elapse before that day makes the discussion
profitless. As a picture of the early morning, the lines
from Mr. Morris were very beautiful and impressive,
but the impression from the line quoted will not be
such as the critic supposes. Surely it refers merely
to the sudden stir and twitter of the swallows (I use
the inexact word) in their nests disturbed by the “clattering
latch.” In the first line of the next couplet
we learn that it was too dark for the men to see their
scythes. “It was dark in the porch, but our scythes
we felt.” So that the impression of the snowy
throats of the swallows has to be forced into the line
at first quoted. But it serves the purpose of a very
subtle discussion, and Mr. Morris’ book, although
it plays a prominent part in the first columns, is gradually
lost sight of until the writer finds himself dealing
with the decay of the epic.
S.
It
is the nature of men never to be satisfied. We complain
of the length of severity of our writers; of the shortness
of the summer months, those periods of enchantment that
rush upon us with leaf and flower and vanish like a
tumultuous dream; of the restless and violent alternations
of heat, and tempest, and rain, of foliage and frost.
How seldom we reflect upon the real and solid advantages
we derive from these very circumstances. Does not the
return of the year, the sudden and golden dawn of our
summers, come to us with an energy of exhilaration quite
unknown to the people of southern latitudes? In those
gorgeous countries of the tropics, for which it is our
nature to yearn, with all their teeming glory of life
and color, there is a voluptuous monotony, enervating
alike to body and mind. With us the coming of spring
is the signal for a physical and intellectual revolution
and revival a new birth of buoyant and unconquerable
energy rendering us capable of undreamed-of labors and
immense undertakings. Our summer heats are keen and
wholesome, and neither depress nor enervate. Autumn
with its refreshment of splendid colors and its tonic
days comes before we have lost anything of the vital
impetus, and carries us on with renewed energy into
the depth of that trying season which is our severest
test. Yet even through the winter months, bitter but
bracing, labor is a moral necessity, and we continue
to prosecute it with strenuous energy, if not with actual
joy. In Canada with the snows and frozen months of Stockholm
or St. Petersburg we combine the long days, the blue
sky and the splendid sunshine of the north of Italy.
There has never been any other nation on earth so situated,
and we cannot but suppose that our people will in the
future develop an unusual buoyancy and novel energy
of character.
L.
The
comfort and enjoyment that many men find in their pipes
is afforded to me by an open fire. A coal grate is cheerful
and attractive, but for really delightful reverie give
to me the crackle and blaze of a wood fire, especially
one of maple or beech. A not over-large room with book
shelves lined with volumes, enough curtains of a dark,
rich shade to add suggestion of warmth, two or three
easy chairs and an open grate or fire-place to light
all with its glamour of heat or radiancy, is to me the
ideal of the earthly paradise of the man of thought
and aspiration.
I have often
thought that my remote ancestors must have been sun
or fire worshippers, for in the genial seasons of the
year, when the lord of day is at his meridian, I find
it almost impossible to stay indoors, but choose rather
the sunny slopes and the golden ray-kissed shades of
the leafy-tented woods; but when nature withdraws her
warmth and shrinks into lifeless sleep, and in the frost-nipped
seasons of long, iced nights and short, dull days, I
need the companionship and inspiration afforded by a
wood fire. Nothing seems to me more unbearable than
the semi-modern manner of heating houses and rooms by
a concealed heat. As a literary workman, my fancies
are dulled and my faculties repressed by such a room.
The crackle and glow, or even the smoulder of embers
on the hearth, stir and inspire my imagination as nothing
else can within doors.
There is something
very marvelous and mysterious in this influence of light
and heat. As a boy I always enjoyed the camp fires we
built in the great woods or on the shingly beach of
some lone lake shore, when the stars came out and peered
down on the windy darkness and swallowed up the sparks
and flames from the crackling logs and dry branches
we had heaped up; while the local warmth and radiance
added a contrast to the outside vastness and mystery
of darkness and void.
The fireplace
as a social centre must be an institution of great antiquity,
and must have owed its origin to the chance discovery
of some of our remote cave-dwelling ancestors, who found
the convenience of the smoke draught in the roof, and
who, when they began to make artificial dwellings, at
first rudely, and afterwards more accurately, copied
the idea, until after long use and improvement we have
the modern mantel and hearth of to-day.
Much of the
glamour of the old-time Christmas season of the past,
so beautifully described by the genius of Washington
Irving, Dickens and other writers, is closely associated
with the old-time, large, open fireplaces in the inns,
hotels and private mansions, which are now largely a
thing of the past.
This, sad to say, is an age of hurry and change, but,
if the family circle is to be preserved, the home comfort
and sacredness to remain, I would advise all persons
of even moderate means to have one room in the house—that
in which the family usually congregates—ventilated
and heated by one of those old-time fireplaces. We hear
a wide grumble as to waste of fuel and the extra trouble,
but if home wives and mothers only knew that such a
spot of rest and comfort in every home, with its unique
attractions, can do much to enlarge the humanity and
create a fellow and social feeling in the misanthropic
mind, no home in the land would be without its cosy,
warmly-curtained rooms, its genial bookshelves and its
open fire.
C.
|
