Читать книгу American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women - Kate Stephens - Страница 6

Table of Contents

During a great national struggle for human rights, Laurel Town was touched by the high seriousness which rises from sincerity to the idea of human liberty and the laying down of lives in defence of that idea. Its baptism and its early years were thus purely of the spirit.

A miniature burg, it snuggles upon broad, fat lands, semicircling the height that rises to the west. From the hill-top the tiny city is half-buried in green leaves. Looking beyond and to the middle distance of the landscape, you find rich bottoms of orchard and of corn, and the Tiber-yellow waters of a broad river running through their plenty.

First immigrants to this country—those who came in back in the fifties—discovered the hill’s likeness to the great Acropolis of Athens, and determined that upon it, as upon the heights of the ancient city of the golden grasshopper, the State’s most sacred temple should be built. Thus were inspired library and museum, laboratories and lecture-rooms, of the University of Hesperus, whose roofs are gleaming in the vivid air to-day just as in some ancient gem a diamond lying upon clustering gold sends shafts of light through foliations of red metal.

The brow of this hill beetles toward the south, but instead of the blue waters of the Saronic Gulf which Sophocles in jocund youth saw dancing far at sea, Hesperus students sight hills rolling to the horizon, and thickets of elms and poplars fringing Indian Creek, and instead of the Pentelic mountains in the northeast they catch the shimmering light of the green ledges and limestone crests of the northern edge of the valley the river has chiselled.

But how, you ask—thinking of the fervor of the immigrants of 1854 and ’55—how did this university come into being? In stirring and tentative times. The institution was first organized by Presbyterians, who later accepted a fate clearly foreordained, and sold to the Episcopalians. This branch of the church universal christened the educational infant Lawrence University, after a Boston merchant, who sent ten thousand dollars conditioned as a gift on a like subscription. The institution to this time was “on paper,” as these founders said of early towns—that is, a plan, a scheme, a possibility. It finally became the kernel of the University of Hesperus when the State accepted from Congress a grant of seventy-two square miles of land.

“There shall be two branches of the University,” the charter reads, “a male and a female branch.” In clearer English, the institution was to be open to men and women.

Seeds of the convictions which admitted women to instruction had long been germinating, even before the independence of women was practically denied by the great Reformation. The idea was in the mind of our race when we were north-of-Europe barbarians. It found sporadic expression all through our literature. It is back of Chaucer in annals of the people and later in such chroniclers as Holinshed. Bishop Burnet, historian of his “Own Time,” and also Fuller, he of the human “Worthies,” determined that “the sharpness of the wit and the suddenness of the conceits of women needed she-schools.” Later Mary Woolstonecraft wrote: “But I still insist that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral but rational creatures, ought to endeavor to acquire human virtues by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half-being.” And that moral and prudent sampler, Hannah More, declared: “I call education not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to confirm a firm and regular system of character.”

A score of the names of these fore-workers for human liberty are known to us. But the names that are not known!—the pathos of it! that we cannot, looking below from our rung in the ladder, tell the countless who have striven, and fallen striving, that we are here because they were there, and that to them, often unrecognized and unthanked, our opportunities are due. They foreran their times, and their struggle made ours possible.

“ ’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!”

But the immediate thought or impulse to make our Western State institutions co-educational, to give to the daughters the collegiate leisure and learning of the sons—to whom or to what shall we trace this idea! They used to explain it in Hesperus by telling you, “The people about us are for the most part New Englanders in blood, you know, perhaps not one, certainly not more than two generations removed to more genial lands, and still retaining the rigor and tenacity and devotion to principle of that stock.” But one naturally answered this by saying, “In New England they did not in the fifties and sixties give their daughters the educational opportunities they gave their sons. In those decades there were attempts at women’s colleges outside New England, but none in the neighborhood of Williams, Dartmouth, Amherst, Harvard, or Yale.”

The better reason is the historic—noted in every movement of our Aryan race. In this is found what New England civilization has done, not in Hesperus alone, but in Wisconsin, in California, in Minnesota, and wherever else it has united with other forces, and lost the self-consciousness and self-complacency which in our generation are distinguishing and abiding traits upon its own granitic soil. Prejudices which eat energy and dwarf activity colonists have commonly left behind, whether they have entered the swift black ship of the sea or the canvas-covered wagon of the prairie. This was said of those who sailed westward and built up ancient Syracuse some twenty-six centuries agone, and it is true also of the colonists of these later days.

The drawing up of the charter of the University of Hesperus shows how humanly, simply, and freely State building may be done. Judge Chadwick, of Laurel Town, gives the candid narrative:

“In the spring of 1864 the Misses Chapin and Miss Elizabeth Watson, who had established a school here, and who were anxious that the University should be organized, besought Governor Robinson to see that it was done. He, or they (or perhaps but one of them), came to me and insisted that I should go to the capital and secure the passage of an act organizing the University. The session of the Legislature was near its close. I went to the capital. In the State library I hunted up the various charters of similar institutions, and taking the Michigan University charter for my guide, drafted the act to organize the University of the State. … Judge Emery was the member of the House. … I do not remember who was the Senator. … I gave the draft to Judge Emery, who introduced it into the house, and by suspension of the rules got it through. It went through the Senate in the same way, and was approved by the governor—Carney.”

But the seed of fire from which this University sprang in the days when men were fighting for unity, for an idea—this you cannot understand without a word about the brilliant essence that enwraps you in that land—Hesperus air and light. This ether no man can describe. It is as clear as a diamond of finest quality, and each infinitesimal particle has a thousand radiant facets. You think to take it in your hand. It is as intangible as a perfume, as illusive as the hopes of man’s ultimate perfection. The colors of liquid rose are hidden in it and the glow of gold, and it gives flame to the dullest matter. It glances upon a gray tree-trunk, and the trunk glitters in purple and silver-white. It is so limpid and dry that a hill or a bush, or a grazing sheep far away, stands out in clear relief. It vitalizes. It whispers of the infinite life of life. Like the sea, it presses upon you a consciousness of illimitability and immeasurable strength. It is “most pellucid air,” like that in which the chorus of the “Medea” says the Athenians were “ever delicately marching.”

It is as like the atmosphere of Italy as the sturdy peach-blossoms which redden Hesperus boughs in March are like the softer almond-flowers. The same indescribable grace and radiance are in both essences. But there are the Hesperus blizzards—vast rivers of icy air which sweep from upper currents and ensphere the softness and translucent loveliness of the earth with such frosts as are said to fill all heaven between the stars.

Under such dynamic skies young men and women have been gathering now these forty years—before the September equinox has fairly quenched the glow of summer heat. During a long æstivation a sun burning in an almost cloudless heaven has beaten upon them day by day. The glow has purified and expanded their skin, has loosened their joints, and clothed them in the supple body of the south. Through the darkness of the night ten thousand stars have shone above their slumbers, and wind voices out of space have phu-phy-phis-pered through secretive pines and rolled tz-tz-tz upon the leathery leaves of oaks. Such days and nights have been over them since the wild grape tossed its fragrant blossoms in damp ravines in the passion of May.

These students have come from all kinds of homes, from meagre town houses, from the plainest and most forlorn farm-houses, and from other houses laden and bursting with plenty—and plenty in Hesperus is always more plenty than plenty anywhere else. Many of these young people have been nurtured delicately, but a large number have doubtless tasted the bitterness of overwork and the struggle of life before their teens.

Perhaps their parents came to Hesperus newly wedded, or in the early years of married life with a brood of little children. If their coming was not in the stridulous cars of some Pacific or Santa Fé railway, then it was over the hard-packed soil in most picturesque of pioneer fashions—a huge canvas-covered wagon carrying the family cook-stove, beds, and apparel, and, under its creaking sides, kettles for boilers, pails for fetching water from the nearest run, and axes to cut wood for evening fires. Every article the family carried must answer some requirement or use. The horses, too, have their appointed tasks, for, the journey once accomplished, they will mark off the eighty acres the family are going to pre-empt, and afterwards pull the plough through the heavy malarious sod.

On the seat of the wagon the wife and mother, wrapped in extremes of cold in a patchwork quilt, at times nursed the baby, and in any case drove with a workmanlike hand. John Goodman was sometimes back with the collie, snapping his blacksnake at the cattle and urging them on. But oftenest father and mother were up in the seat, and boy and girl trooping behind in barefooted and bareheaded innocence, enjoying happy equality and that intimate contact with the cows which milky udders invite.

Now this, or some way like this, was the introduction of a quota of Hesperus men and women to their fat earth and electric atmosphere. It is therefore not to be wondered at that these young people come to their University with little of the glamour nourished by delicate environment and the graces of life. Their earliest years have been spent upon the bed-rock of nature wrestling with the hardest facts and barest realities. They have suffered the deprivations and the unutterable trials of patience and faith which the world over are the lot of pioneers; and they have had the returns of their courage. Every self-respecting man and boy has been, perhaps still is, expected to do the work of two men. Every woman and girl to whom the god of circumstance had not been kind must be ready to perform, alike and equally well, the duties of man or woman—whichever the hour dictated. “Hesperus,” says an unblushing old adage of the fifties—“Hesperus is heaven to men and dogs and hell to women and horses.”

But from whatever part of the State the students come to their University, he and she commonly come—they are not sent. The distinction is trite, but there is in it a vast difference. In many cases they have made the choice and way for themselves. They have earned money to pay their living while at school, and they expect, during the three, four, or five years they are in their intellectual Canaan, to spend vacations in work—in harvesting great wheat-fields of Philistia, or in some other honest bread-winning. They are so close to nature, and so radiantly strong in individuality, that no one of them, so far as rumor goes, has ever resorted to the commonest method of the Eastern impecunious collegian for filling his cob-webbed purse with gold. The nearest approach I know to such zeal was the instance of the student who slept (brave fellow) scot-free in an undertaker’s establishment. He answered that functionary’s night-bell. Then he earned half-dollars in rubbing up a coffin or washing the hearse; adding to these duties the care of a church, milking of cows, tending of furnaces, digging of flower-beds, beating of carpets, and any other job by which a strong and independent hand could win honest money for books and clothing and food. It was as true for him now as when Dekker, fellow-player with Shakespeare and “a high-flier of wit even against Ben Jonson himself”—to use Anthony à Wood’s phrase—when Dekker sang—

“Then he that patiently want’s burden bears,

No burden bears, but is a king, a king.

O sweet content, O sweet content!

Work apace, apace, apace,

Honest labor bears a lovely face,

Then hey nonny, nonny; hey nonny, nonny.”

To one young man, whose course was preparing him for studies of Knox’s theology upon Knox’s own heath, a harvest of forty acres of wheat brought a competence, as this arithmetic will show: 40 × 50 × $0.50 = $1000. He planted, he said, in the early days of September, before leaving for college, and cut the grain after commencement in June. The blue-green blades barely peeped through the glebe during winter. When springtime came, and the hot sun shone upon the steaming earth, and the spirit of growth crept into the roots, an invalid father—the young planter being still in academic cassock—kept the fences up and vagrant cows from mowing the crop under their sweet breath. Other men often told of like ways of earning not only college bread but also college skittles.

Women students had commonly not so good a chance at wresting German lyrics or Plato’s idealism from a wheat-furrow. Report of such advantages at least never reached my ear. But this may be due to the fact that women are reticent about the means of their success, while men delight to dwell upon their former narrow circumstances and triumphant exit from such conditions.

Some Hesperus girl may have made money in hay, and indeed have made the hay as charmingly as Madame de Sévigné reports herself to have done—and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sévigné relates. Now and then a young woman did say that she was living during her studies on funds she herself had earned. One doughty maiden, “a vary parfit, gentil knight,” her face ruddy with healthy blood, her muscles firm and active—such a girl said one day, in extenuation of her lack of Greek composition, that “her duties had not permitted her to prepare it.”

“But that is your duty, to prepare it,” I answered. “Are you one of those students who never allow studies to interfere with ‘business’?”

“No,” she said, quickly; “but let me tell you how it happened. The boarding-house where I stay is kept by a friend of my mother. She offers me board if I will help her. So I get up at five in the morning and cook breakfast, and after I have cleaned up I come up here. In the afternoon I sweep and dust, and it takes me till nearly dark. The evening is the only time I have for preparing four studies.”

What became of this girl, you ask? She married a professor in an Eastern college.

It is well to reiterate, however, in order to convey no false impression of Hesperus sturdiness and self-reliance, that many, probably a majority, of the students were supported by their natural protectors. But it is clear that there is more self-maintenance—self-reliance in money matters—at the Hesperus University than in any college generally known in the East, and that the methods of obtaining self-succor are at times novel and resultant from an agricultural environment. In evidence that there are students more fortunate—one should rather say more moneyed, for the blessings of money are not always apparent to the inner eye—are the secret societies which flourish among both men and women. The club or society houses, for the furnishing of which carte blanche has been given the individual humanely known as interior decorator, see not infrequently courtesies from one Greek letter society to another, then and there kindly wives of the professors matronizing.2

An early introduction into the battle of life breeds in us humans practicality and utilitarianism. Most unfortunately it disillusions. It takes from the imaginativeness which charms and transfigures the early years of life. In the University of Hesperus one found the immediate fruit of this experience in the desire of the student, expressed before he was thoroughly within the college gates, of obtaining that which would be of immediate practical advantage to himself. He demanded what the Germans call brodstudien, and sometimes very little beyond the knowledge which he could convert into Minnesota wheat or some other iota of the material prosperity which surges from east to west and waxes on every side of our land. How strenuously one had to fight this great impulse! and against what overwhelming odds! It was a reacting of King Canute’s forbiddance to the sea, and, like that famous defeat, it had its humors.

You could see so plainly that this demon of practicality had been implanted by want, and privation, and a knowledge drunk with the mother’s milk, that the struggle of life on that untested soil was a struggle to live; you could see this so plainly that you often felt constrained to yield to its cry and urgency.

And the weapons at hand to fight it were so few! Materialism on every hand. And it was plain, also, that here was but an eddy in the wave—that the impulse toward brodstudien was undoubtedly but a groping forward in the great movement of the half-century that has endowed realschulen from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, and is perhaps but the beginning of the industrial conquest of the world—in its first endeavors necessarily crippled, over-zealous and impotent of best works.

Yet in the face of every concession there came anew to your conscience the conviction, haunting unceasingly, of the need of the idea in academic life, of the need of the love of study for its own sake, of a broader education of the sympathies, of greater activity in the intangible world of thought and feeling—desires of souls “hydroptic with a sacred thirst.” To these alone did it behoove us to concede, for through the spirit alone could the “high man” sustainedly lift up his heart—