A Plea for Patent Affection

I BELONG to that old New England stock, Puritan to the marrow, which has ever suffered necessary and unnecessary things for conscience’ sake, and which, since its first cry of being, has read the Atlantic instead of picture magazines.

They were a worthy, God-fearing lot, these forbears of mine, having all the depth of character and soul that one could reasonably ask for in one’s precursors. And yet at times,—presumably more often than others, when I am attending a meeting of Colonial Dames, — in the course of a recountal of doughty deeds of divers great-greats, I am seized with a violent mental attack which I am afraid will make its way through the decorous lines of my Colonial visage, so stringent is its grasp upon me, this grasp of a diabolic desire to have been the descendant of a Milwaukee beer-brewer, sans soul, sans blood (blue blood, I mean), sans conscience, sans everything but a phlegmatic temperament tempered by the diffuse affectionateness of the Teuton, — a bit frothy, and on the top, perhaps, like the beer he brewed, but also giving its soft, warm rotundity to the famished form of family life.

And in the midst of this wandering down a path, too mellow in its softened lights of color and chiaroscuro for one destined by fate for the sterner Puritan path, I am dragged forcibly back by the strenuous tones of one whose eight greatgreats all perished at their post of duty, and whose spirits of sacrifice and contained emotion have so descended to her, their worthy posterity, that one knows by the ring in her voice she would cheerfully relinquish eight more, were they at hand, and recite with equal ardor their fervent demises.

With a sense of shame I pull myself together to listen how, in the last battle for noble principle, her only remaining great-great tore himself away from a dying wife ; fleeing his potato patch the instant duty called; stifling his love in his heart as a weak and unworthy emotion ; and running full speed to the fortress on the hill. Yes, brave he was, — but why did n’t he kiss her good-by, my Milwaukee ego insists, — it would n’t have taken a minute ; would have made him no less a hero; and she might have died serenely, — sure of his love as well as his zeal.

The beer-brewer would have done it! And again my Colonial countenance feels the red blood coursing through its blueblooded veins as the New England heart lets loose pulses and throbs in an abandon of joyous emotion over the vision of that open human love which may be the greater part of life.

Reverting from the Puritan past to our present-day America in its more gracious garb of daily living, is it not still true that albeit the affection is there, quite as surely as in the hearts of our Teuton and Romance cousins, it is, nevertheless, latent instead of patent? We seem to fear showing our feelings as if there were something ill-bred or not quite modest about their being brought to the surface.

Take the typical college man who inwardly burns to let a classmate know his sympathy in a time of sadness. How does he show it ? Is n’t he, in his inherited tendency to avoid seeming weakly demonstrative, more likely to seek relief of expression in some off-hand remark, with a friendly clap on the shoulder ? “ And what is the difference,” you say, “ if the feeling is there ? The other man realizes it. He, too, has inherited the penetration of the Yankee.” Very possibly that is true. But why not let the laws which govern art and music — which, beyond all other things, convey human longings and sympathies and aspirations to human souls — apply similarly to human intercourse, which strives, haltingly, to attain the same goal ? Why use symbols which are inharmonious expressions of the thing signified ; which are inartistic, incongruous, almost brutal sometimes in their ineptness ?

My plea, then, is not for unseemly effusiveness, for unrestrained gushings from the font of fondness, but for the natural expression in sane and congruous symbols of a real affection; the scattering of rosebuds while we may along the none-too-rosy path of human life.