Three Villages - William Dean Howells

Скачать книгу

and rhythmic pace was like a sort of Hawaiian lomi-lomi to our toughened sensibilities; it tickled, it lulled us, it was almost a caress. The editor of our paper had warned us not to reject what truth there was in Mr. Arnold's “Word,” and we set ourselves dutifully to seek it. We could not quite maintain with our compatriot, whose declaration seemed to have evoked the Word, that there was in every little American town a circle of cultivated people; at the most we could assert that there was a circle of people who wished they were cultivated, and cordially and modestly and intelligently appreciated cultivation; but at the bottom of our hearts we were aware of not being Murdstones, or even in an ill sense Methodists. This conception of us appeared to us lamentably mistaken; we could not so readily have proved that we were not in a low condition from the national tendency to irreverent humor; we have certainly a bad habit of laughing at serious things, even our critics; but at the same time we could not see how we could be so generally wanting in sweetness and light, and yet be so often Mr. Arnold's readers and admirers. Given English middle-class Puritanism, we ought logically to have been what he imagines us; the camel could not complain that it had not been scientifically evolved from the philosopher's consciousness; and yet it felt itself, in its dumb helplessness, to be quite a different sort of beast. I suppose this must be always somewhat the case; and heaven knows how the ancient Greeks and Hebrews like Mr. Arnold's notions of them. I have myself attempted to say things of the English which have not been found just by the few English people who read them, and in fact I suppose it would be better to let the writers of each nation aggrieve their own. I shall not, therefore, presume to say that Mr. Arnold is right about the English middle class; but if we are like what he conceives of them, I should say yes, we are perhaps the English middle class, but with the lid off. This appears to me an advantage.

      At any rate this was the sum of the talk over Mr. Arnold's paper among the boarders of the Massachusetts House in Lexington. It was a purely fortuitous assemblage of people, such as one is apt to encounter at summer hotels in New England. They were of various complexions as regarded creeds and callings; but neither their creeds nor callings appeared to characterize them; they kept their individualities free and apart from the accidents of business and belief, in a way that I own I should be somewhat at a loss to explain. There were Unitarians, Episcopalians, Swedenborgians, Orthodox Congregationalists, and, for all I know, Baptists among them, but I think no Methodists; and of that numerous and respectable sect there happens to be no congregation in Lexington. There is a Unitarian church, which was formerly the prevailing faith; the Orthodox church is earnest and growing; there is a large Irish Catholic church; but the greatest advance has been made by the Baptists, under the ministrations of a lay preacher, formerly a colonel in the Union army, who has lately reconstituted that body out of very perishing fragments, and made it strong and flourishing. I heard it said that he had done this by rendering the church “attractive to young people.” There is very little religious excitement of any sort in New England, now; the church in small places becomes more and more a social affair; and perhaps it was chiefly in the social way that the Baptist body was rehabilitated in Lexington.

      It was our good fortune to be there on Decoration Day, the anniversary when all over the country the Americans of both sections decorate with flags and flowers the graves of those who fell in the Civil War, and the soldiers who have since died. In the cities the day is celebrated with civic pomp, with parades of militia and steam fire-engines; but in the villages its observance is an act of religion, of domestic piety; and it is touching, after the day is past, to see the garlands withering in the lonely country graveyards, and the little flags feebly fluttering about the graves till the weather quite wears them away. Every year the graves increase in number and the soldiers are fewer and fewer who come to lay the flowers on them; and it is in the country that this waste of life is most sorrow fully noticeable. At Lexington, two new graves had been added to those of the year before, and of the young men who went to the war from the town only a score of middle-aging veterans remained. These facts were touched upon in the address with which the ceremonies of the day were closed in the Town Hall at night, and the sad and glorious associations of the past were invoked by a speaker who had himself been part of those great events. He was now the Unitarian minister of the village, and he had been preceded in prayer by the Orthodox Congregational minister; the gentleman, by the way, through whom the Duke of Northumberland presented Lord Percy's portrait to the town. There was excellent singing by a choir of men's voices; and for the rest there was very earnest attention on the part of the people who filled the hall to overflowing. The audience was not of unmixed Yankee race; the Irish quarter of Lexington was duly represented, but all were one in a sense of the gravity of the occasion, and the whole assembly was subdued, old and young alike, to a Puritanic seriousness of demeanor. It is sometimes a little amusing to find how aptly the Irish settled in the rural communities of New England take on the prevailing type of manners; they are perhaps, with the Celtic conception of democracy, that “one man is as good as another and a dale better too,” a little more American in some things than the natives themselves; but it appears to be their ambition to conform as closely as possible to our social ideal. The imitation is by no means superficial; they are industrious and thrifty, and except that they unfailingly vote for whatever is illiberal and retrograde in politics, they are not bad citizens in such communities, whatever they are in the larger towns. I was not near enough to the veterans occupying the front benches to see how many were of Irish birth; but it is known how well they served in the army; and I dare say no one present took greater satisfaction in the expressions relating the second war for freedom to the part Lexington had borne in the struggle against England. The Revolution was remembered in the special decoration of the statues of Adams and Hancock and the Minute-Man with wreaths of hemlock and pine, which, in a season that denied the usual profusion of flowers, did duty for them throughout the day.

      One night we had a concert in the Town Hall, which was so curiously American as regards the artists that I wish I could give a thoroughly intelligible idea of the affair. They were all of one family, — father, mother, and nine children between nineteen and five years old, — two children younger still being left at home out of regard to their tender age. They were from utmost Oregon, and they had gone about the whole country, singing and playing, apparently ever since any of the children could walk. They had visited the White House in Washington, and had been very acceptable everywhere to Sunday schools and scrupulous pleasure-seekers because of the edifying character of their entertainments, which were certainly exemplary from the moral side. I cannot say much as to the artistic quality of their programme; it commended itself by dealing with those themes of domestic and obituary interest in which our balladry delights; it was varied with a very little very modest dancing, and sketches of infantine drama; but they were nevertheless gifted people, and while they conformed to the popular taste in their performances, they were all working hard at the science of their profession under a German master. They stopped at our hotel, and we had the advantage of seeing them in private as well as in public, and of witnessing the triumph of the family among them over the temptations of their difficult and hazardous experiment; the young people were quiet and well-mannered; the little ones far less spoiled than might have been expected of babes encored several times every night; and there was a spirit of mutual affection and of discipline manifest in them which I should like to claim as characteristic of the American family under less arduous conditions. The father talked freely of his theories for maintaining a home-life in his nomadic tribe; and the author sojourning in the hotel did not think the less of his methods when he said he had read the author's books, and introduced his children as versed in them. This author had long had his ideas of what those novels, those travels, those unsalable poems, those intheatricable dramas, rightly understood, might do for mankind, and here. . . .

      I was very glad that the Lexington people gave the singing and playing family a good house, and I fancy that they do not refuse any fit occasions for amusing themselves. The young men seem not to go away from home so generally as they do from most country towns in New England; it is perhaps because their pleasant village is so near the city; at any rate they remain at home even after being graduated at Harvard. They have sleigh-rides, and dances at the Town Hall during the winter; I was told that the Lexington “germans” are not despised by the undergraduates of Cambridge; and “Oh, I tell you,” I heard it said by one of themselves, “the Lexington girls have a good time!” In the summer there are of course picnics, and of late horseback-riding has come greatly into vogue in the country all about Boston. The rigors of our winters

Скачать книгу