In the discussions among the boys, relating to this marriage, I first learned the power of that temptation which comes upon every young man to look on wealth as the first object in a life-race.
Woman is by order of nature the conservator of the ideal. Formed of finer clay, with nicer perceptions, and refined fibre, she is the appointed priestess to guard the poetry of life from sacrilege; but if she be bribed to betray the shrine, what hope for us? “If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?”
My acquaintance with Miss Ellery had brought me out of my scholastic retirement, and made me an acquaintance of the whole bevy of the girls of X. Miss Ellery had been invited and fêted in all the families, and her special train of adorers had followed her, and thus I was au courant of all the existing girl-world of our little town. It was curious to remark what a silken flutter of wings, what an endless volubility of tongues there was, about this engagement and marriage, and how, on the whole, it was treated as the height of splendor and good fortune. My rosy-faced friend, Miss Dotha, was invited to the festival as bridesmaid, and returned thereafter “trailing clouds of glory” into the primitive circles of X; and my cynical bitterness of soul took a sort of perverse pleasure in the amplifications and discussions that I constantly heard in the tea-drinking circles of the town.
“Oh, girls, you’ve no idea about those diamonds,” said Miss Dotha; “great big diamonds as large as peas, and just as clear as water! Bill Marshall made them send orders to Europe specially for the purpose; then she had a pearl set that his mother gave, and his sister gave an amethyst set for a breakfast suit! and you ought to have seen the presents! It was a perfect bazaar! The Marshalls are an enormously rich family, and they all came down splendidly; old Uncle Tom Marshall gave a solid silver dining set embossed with gold, and old Aunt Tabitha Marshall gave a real Sèvres china tea-set, that was taken out of one of the royal palaces in France at the time of the French Revolution. Captain Atkins was in France about the time they were sacking palaces, and doing all such things, and he brought away quite a number of things that found their way into some of these rich old Portland families. Her wedding veil was given by old Grandmamma Marshall, and was said to have been one that belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette, taken by some of those horrid women when they sacked the Tuileries, and sold to Captain Atkins; at any rate, it was the most wonderful point lace, just like an old picture.”
Fancy the drawing of breaths, the exclamations, the groans of delight, from a knot of pretty, well-dressed, nice country girls, at these wonderful glimpses into paradise.
“After all,” I said, “I think this custom of loading down a woman with finery just at her marriage hour is giving it when she is least able to appreciate it. Why distract her with gewgaws at the very moment when her heart must be so full of a new affection that she cares for nothing else? Miss Ellery is probably so lost in her love for Mr. Marshall that she scarcely gives a thought to these things, and really forgets that she has them. It would be much more in point to give them to some girl that hasn’t a lover.”
I spoke with a simple, serious air, as if I had most perfect faith in my words, and a general gentle smile of amusement went round the circle, rippling into a laugh outright on the faces of some of the gayer girls. Miss Dotha said: “Oh, come, now, Mr. Henderson, you are too severe.”
“Severe!” said I; “I can’t understand what you mean, Miss Dotha. You don’t mean, of course, to intimate that Miss Ellery is not in love with the man she has married?”
“Oh, now!” said Miss Dotha, laughing, “you know perfectly, Mr. Henderson — we all know — it’s pretty well understood, that this wasn’t exactly what you call a love-match; in fact, I know,” she added, with the assurance of a confidante, “that she had great difficulty in making up her mind; but her family were very anxious for the match, and his family thought it would be such a good thing for him to marry and settle down, you know, so one way and another she concluded to take him.”
“And, after all, Will Marshall is a good-natured creature,” said Miss Smith.
“And going to Europe is such a temptation,” said Miss Brown.
“And she must marry some time,” said Miss Jones, “and one can’t have everything, you know. Will is certain to be kind to her, and let her have her own way.”
“For my part,” said pretty Miss Green, “I’m free to say that I don’t blame any girl that has a chance to get such a fortune, for doing it, as Miss Ellery has. I’ve always been poor, and pinched, and plagued; never can go anywhere, or see anything, or dress as I want to; and if I had a chance, such as Miss Ellery had, I think I should be a fool not to take it.”
“Well,” said Miss Black reflectively, “the only question is, couldn’t Miss Ellery have waited and found a man who had more intellect, and more culture, whom she could respect and love, and who had money, too? She had such extraordinary beauty and such popular manners, I should have thought she might.”
“Oh, well,” said Miss Dotha, “she was getting on — she was three-and-twenty already — and nobody of just the right sort had turned up—’a bird in the hand’ — you know. After all, I dare say she can love Will Marshall well enough.”
Well enough! The cool philosophic tone of this phrase smote on my ear curiously.
“And pray, fair ladies, how much is ‘well enough’?” said I.
“Well enough to keep the peace,” said Miss Green, “and each let the other alone, to go their own ways and have no fighting.”
Miss Green was a pretty, spicy little body, with a pair of provoking hazel eyes; who talked like an unprincipled little pirate, though she generally acted like a nice woman. In less than a year after, by the bye, she married a home missionary, in Maine, and has been a devoted wife and mother in a little parish somewhere in the region of Skowhegan ever since.
But I returned to my room gloriously misanthropic, and for some time my thoughts, like bees, were busy gathering bitter honey. I gave up visiting in the tea-drinking circles of X. I got myself a dark sombrero hat, which I slouched down over my eyes in bandit style when I walked the street and met with any of my former gentle acquaintances. I wrote my mother most sublime and awful letters on the inconceivable vanity and nothingness of human life. I read Plato and Æschylus, and Emerson’s Essays, and began to think myself an old Philosopher risen from the dead. There was a melancholy gravity about all my college exercises, and I began to look down on young freshmen and sophomores with a serene compassion, as a sage who has passed through the vale of years and learned that all is vanity.
The Valley of Humiliation may have its charms — it is said that there are many flowers that grow there, and nowhere else, but for all that, a young fellow, so far as I know, generally walks through the first part of it in rather a surly and unamiable state. To be sure, had I been wise, I should have been ready to return thanks on my knees for my disappointment. True, the doll was stuffed with sawdust, but it was not my doll. I had not learned the cheat when it was forever too late to help myself, and was not condemned to spend life in vain attempts to make a warm, living friend of a cold marble statue. Many a man has succeeded in getting his first ideal, and been a miserable man always thereafter and therefor.
I have lived to hear very tranquilly of Mrs. Will Marshall’s soirées and parties, as she reigns in the aristocratic circles of New York; and to see her, still like a polished looking-glass, gracefully reflecting every one’s whims and tastes and opinions with charming suavity, and forgetting them when their hacks are turned; and to think that she is the right thing in the right place — a crowned Queen of Vanity Fair. I have become, too, very tolerant and indulgent to the women who do as she did, — use their own charms as the coin wherewith to buy the riches and honors of the world.
The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage. All’ vigor and energy, such as men put forth to get this golden key of life, is condemned and
scouted as unfeminine; and a woman belonging to the upper classes, who undertakes to get wealth by honest exertion and independent industry, loses caste, and is condemned by a thousand voices as an oddity and a deranged person. A woman gifted with beauty, who sells it to buy wealth, is far more leniently handled. That way of getting money is not called unwomanly; and so long as the whole force of the world goes that way, such marriages as Miss Ellery’s and Bill Marshall’s will be considered en régle.
CHAPTER VII. THE BLUE MISTS
MY college course was at last finished satisfactorily to my mother and friends. What joy there is to be got in college honors was mine. I studied faithfully and graduated with the valedictory. Nevertheless I came back home again a sadder if not a wiser man than I went. In fact, a tendency to fits of despondency and dejection had been growing upon me in these last two years of my college life.
With all the self-confidence and conceit that is usually attributed to young men, and of which they have their share undoubtedly, they still have their times of walking through troubled waters, and sinking in deep mire where there is no standing.
During my last year, the question “What are you good for?” had often borne down like a nightmare upon me. When I entered college all was distant, golden, indefinite, and I was sure that I was good for almost anything that could be named. Nothing that ever had been attained by man looked to me impossible. Riches, honor, fame, anything that any other man unassisted had wrought out for himself with his own right arm, I could work out also.
But as I measured myself with real tasks, and as I rubbed and grated against other minds and whirled round and round in the various experiences of college life, I grew smaller and smaller in my own esteem, and oftener and oftener in my lonely hours it seemed as if some evil genius delighted to lord it over me, and sitting at my bedside or fireside to say, “What are you good for, to what purpose all the pains and money that have been thrown away on you? You’ll never be anything; you’ll only mortify your poor mother that has set her heart on you, and make your Uncle Jacob ashamed of you.” Can any anguish equal the depths of those blues in which a man’s whole self hangs in suspense before his own eyes, and he doubts whether he himself, with his entire outfit and apparatus, body, soul, and spirit, isn’t to be, after all, a complete failure? Better, he thinks, never to have been born, than to be born to no purpose. Then first he wrestles with the question, What is life for, and what am I to do or seek in it? It seems to be not without purpose, that the active life-work of the great representative Man of Men was ushered in by a forty days’ dreary wandering in the wilderness hungry, faint, and tempted of the Devil; for certainly, after education has pretty thoroughly waked up all there is in a man, and the time is at hand that he is to make the decision what to do with it, there often comes a wandering, darkened, unsettled, tempted passage in his life. In Christ’s temptations we may see all that besets the young man.
The daily-bread question, or how to get a living, — the ambitious heavings, or the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, all to be got by some yielding to Satan, — the ostentatious impulse to come down on the world with a rush and a sensation, — these are mirrored in a young man’s smaller life just as they were in that great life. The whole heavens can be reflected in the little pool as in the broad ocean!
All these elements of unrest had been boiling in my mind during the last year. Who wants to be nothing in the great world? No young man at this time of his course. The wisdom of becoming nothing that he may possess all things is too high for this stage of immaturity.
I came into college as simple, and contented, and satisfied as a huckleberry bush in a sweet-fern pasture. I felt rich enough for all I wanted to do, and my path of life lay before me defined with great simplicity. But my intimacy with Miss Ellery, her marriage and all that pertained to it, had brought before my eyes the world of wealth and fashion, a world which a young collegian may try to despise, and about which he may write the most disparaging moral reflections, but which has, after all, its power to trouble his soul. The consciousness of being gloveless, and threadbare in toilette, comes over one in certain atmospheres, as the consciousness of nakedness to Adam and Eve. It is true that in the institution where I attended, as in many other rural colleges in New England, I was backed up by a majority of healthy-minded, hardy men, of real mark and worth, children of honest toil and self-respecting poverty, who were bravely working their way up through education to the prizes and attainments of life. Simple economies were therefore well understood and respected in the college.
Nevertheless there is something not altogether vulgar in the attractions which wealth enables one to throw around himself. I was a social favorite in college, and took a stand among my fellows as a writer and speaker, and so had a considerable share of that sincere sort of flattery which college boys lavish on each other. I was invited and made much of by some whose means were ample, whose apartments were luxuriously and tastefully furnished, but who were none the less good scholars and high-minded, gentlemanly fellows.
In their vacations I had been invited to their houses, and had seen all the refinement, the repose, the ease, and the quietude that come from the possession of wealth in the hands of those who know how to use it. Wealth in such hands gives opportunities of the broadest culture, ability to live in the wisest manner, freedom to choose the healthiest surroundings both for mind and body, not restricted by considerations of expense; and how could I think it anything else than an object ardently to be sought?
It is true, my rich friends seemed equally to enjoy the vacations in my little, plain, mountain home. People generally are insensible to advantages they have always enjoyed, and have an appetite for something new; so the homely rusticity of our house, the perfect freedom from conventionalities, the wild, mountain scenery, the wholesome detail of farm life, the barn with its sweet stores of hay, and its nooks and corners and hiding-places, the gathering in of our apples, and the making of cider, the corn-huskings and Thanksgiving frolics, seemed to have their interest and delights to them, and they often told me I was a lucky fellow to be born to such pleasant surroundings. But I thought within myself, It is easy to say this when you feel the control of thousands in your pocket, when if you are tired you can go to any land or country of the earth for change of scene.
In fact, we see in history that the crusade of St. Francis in favor of Poverty was not begun by a poor man, but by a young nobleman who had known nothing hitherto but wealth and luxury. It is from the rich, if from any, that our grasping age must learn renunciation and simplicity. It is easier to renounce a good which one has tried and of which one knows all the attendant thorns and stings than to renounce one that has been only painted by the imagination, and whose want has been keenly felt. When I came to the college I came from the controlling power of home influences. At an early age I had felt the strength of that sphere of spirituality that encircled the lives of my parents, and, being very receptive and sympathetic, had reflected in my childish nature all their feelings.
I had renounced the world before I knew what the world was. I had joined my father’s church and was looked upon as one destined in time to take up my father’s work of the ministry. Four years had passed, and I came back to my mother, weakened and doubting, indisposed to take up the holy work to which in my early days I looked forward with enthusiasm, yet with all the sadness which comes from indecision as to one’s life-object. To be a minister is to embrace a life of poverty, of toil, of self-denial. To do this, not only with cheerfulness but with an enthusiasm which shall bear down all before it, which shall elevate it into the region of moral poetry and ideality, requires a fervid, unshaken faith. The man must feel the power of an endless life, be lifted above things material and temporal to things sublime and eternal.
Now it is one peculiarity of the professors of the Christian religion that they have not, at least of late years, arranged their system of education with any wise adaptation to having their young men come out of it Christi
ans. In this they differ from many other religionists. The Brahmins educate their sons so that they shall infallibly become Brahmins; the Jews so that they shall infallibly be Jews; the Mohammedans so that they shall be Mohammedans; but the Christians educate their sons so that nearly half of them turn out unbelievers — professors of no religion at all.
There is a book which the Christian world unite in declaring to be an infallible revelation from Heaven. It has been the judgment of critics that the various writings in this volume excel other writings in point of mere literary merit as much as they do in purity and elevation of the moral sentiment. Yet it is remarkable that the critical study of these sacred writings in their original tongues is not in most of our Christian colleges considered as an essential part of the education of a Christian gentleman, while the heathen literature of Greece and Rome is treated as something indispensable, and to be gained at all hazards.
It is a fact that from the time that the boy begins to fit for college, his mind is so driven and pressed with the effort to acquire the classical literature, that there is no time to acquire the literature of the Bible, neither is it associated in his mind with the dignity and respect of a classical attainment. He must be familiar with Horace and Ovid, with Cicero and Plato, Æschylus and Homer in their original tongues, but the majestic poetry of the Old Testament, and its sages and seers and prophets, become with every advancing year more unintelligible to him. A thoroughly educated graduate of most of our colleges is unprepared to read intelligently many parts of Isaiah or Ezekiel or Paul’s Epistles. The Scripture lessons of the church service often strike on his ear as a strange quaint babble of peculiar sounds, without rhyme or reason. Uncultured and uneducated in all that should enable him to understand them, he is only preserved by a sort of educational awe from regarding them as the jargon of barbarians.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 310
