The Passing of New England
I
THE individuality which has always characterized New England is passing. From the days when our forefathers guarded their steps with the flintlock and the prayer-book, to the present generation, there has always been that
about New England, vivid and compelling, which has set it apart from every other place. But the day is at hand when this is becoming a thing of the past. It is being fused psychologically with the common stock.
Anyone who has known its rural regions for thirty or forty years, where ways and manners alter slowly, knows how great the change even in that short space of time. Local color has faded. Community customs have vanished. Household methods and arts have disappeared. The strict piety of the elders has relaxed to an easy tolerance. Sunday is a day of pleasure and recreation, rather than of rest or religion; and the social side of life, even in its simplest forms, is far different from that of other days.
These might seem, at first, things of minor importance; but changes which begin at the hearthstones of a people are fundamental. City life is bound to absorb individuality; but when the change reaches beyond, the general and essential difference is complete. That all the world changes, we know; but the significance here is in that which made New England its distinctive self— the ways of life, the type of people, which grew out of its elementalness. But who deals with the elemental now?
Any exception to the rule is of rare occurrence; but once in a while it is to be found — a lone individual, always a woman, left by some untoward fate to live out her life alone, and in whose house and personality are still preserved old customs and aspects. She still clings to old ways of doing things, to something of the old manner of viewing life. When such as these are gone, the last example of earlier New Englandism will have vanished in their going.
Within the year it has been my privilege to spend a little time with one of these uncommon persons, to revive a long-past acquaintance, and get a glimpse of old days and ways in much of their old setting. This is the more unusual for the reason that her house sets on the high road which leads to a populous summer region, little more than five miles away, where the bright and modern life of summer people is in full swing four months of the year. Yet she is as far removed, in spirit and in truth, as if she lived in another world. And indeed she does, in a way; for it takes little stretch of the imagination to feel that one who still makes practical and personal use of a garment sixtythree years old does dwell in a world of her own — lives by the light of a vanished order, a solitary keeper of its creeds and secrets.
It is thirty years since she was first left alone on her farm. A few years later she married, but was soon left a widow. Her only child died at birth. These things make the only touch of romance, however plain, which has ever entered her life, and she is now past sixty years old. During all these years her steps have followed in what she calls the old paths — paths of the field, the pasture, and the wood-lot, through all seasons and all weathers.
She is a farmer, practical and efficient, earning her living and laying by something always for taxes, insurance, sickness, and emergency. Being strong and well and nearly six feet tall, there is little about her farm which she does not lay her own hand to. Her firewood, cut from her own land, she hires someone to saw and split and put under cover each year — an enormous shedful, two or three years’ supply ahead; and her ploughing, though done with her own horse and plough, she turns over to another. But planting and harvesting and haying are her own work, and to my questions about it all, her quaint answer was that there were but two or three things about the place which she ever had to have ‘a man-person for.'
II
I had come late in the day, and we had had ‘tea’ — that meal which, in rural New England forty years ago, was always called ‘tea’ when there was company, and supper at all other times. I had caught the old word in her speech, when she had pressed upon me a hospitality so real and undeclinable that I could not escape it. When her night chores were done, — her three cows milked, the two calves she was raising fed, pigs and chickens tended, and many doors shut and buttoned, — we sat down in her pleasant kitchen for our first talk in twenty years.
This kitchen was the one touch of the modern in her house — a shining place of varnished floors and woodwork, and a big range in full panoply of wonderful polish and much nickel. It seemed absurd that anyone should presume to think of cooking upon it. There was a veritable tallow candle, in an ancient pewter candlestick on the mantel, beside the ancient little clock; and the chair I sat in was a fine old comb-back Windsor. Against the wall was a onearmed Adam chair, the exclusive property of the cat, and an adorable little ladder-back colonial which still haunts my dreams. My hostess sat in one of those old Boston rockers with the beautifully curved arms. It was plain, however, that the old chairs had been relegated to the kitchen, as the less important part of the house.
But it was the woman herself, revealed in her work, her words, and her ideas, who revisioned a vanished time; though there was also the originality of one who is left much to her own observation and reflection. There was a homely directness, a way of seeing things as they were, which gave soundness to her judgments of the times about her, and convincingness to her simple philosophy.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘country life in these parts used to mean small farms, — with now and then a larger one, — neighbors and children. That is all past. There is nothing of the kind now . There are no farms, because nobody farms. The places are there, but they are mostly turned into summer homes. There are more than twenty houses in this district alone, a distance of two miles and a half, that are closed the year round except for the summer months. It is the same everywhere hereabouts. If there are any remnants of the old families still remaining, they do not get their living on the farm, except in one or two instances. They work, instead, for the summer folks down bay, or run a garage, or paint or carpenter away from home — anything but work the old place.
‘But there are n’t any remnants to speak of. Four sons grew up on the Cap’n Ezra place below here. Not one of the four left a boy of his own. Deacon Hill had five sons. Among them all they managed to leave five boys, but only three of those have any family at all, and only two or three children at that. It is so right through — the old names are dying out — the old stock disappears.
‘Only forty years ago the schoolhouses of every district were always full. There were never less than forty or fifty scholars. I went winter terms till I was past nineteen. Now a town conveyance gathers up all the children in the three districts in this end of the town, and carries them to the Cove schoolhouse; and I am told they have twenty-six this year.
‘As for neighbors, I have two, both over seventy. But that is all. Younger people have n’t time, and they don’t know how. People have changed in their minds just as much as in anything else. Getting around, entertainment, change, seems to be the rule of life. There is not much time to waste just sitting and talking, these days. There is too much going on outside — and outside means anything from ten to twenty-five miles away. It is better, no doubt, but — it is different.
‘In my younger days, when the evenings began to lengthen, in the fall of the year, Uncle Silas and Uncle James, with their wives, not to mention a good many other people, always spent two or three evenings a week here. The women knit and visited, and the men discussed vessels and ship timbers; for you know our folks were in that business. They built, a good many schooners, first and last, from tight little coasters to goodsized bankers. It was a great day when one of them passed down river and headed out to sea on her maiden trip to the Banks. There were not less than six or eight sailed out of here. But it was always a greater day along in September and October, when news came up the Point that a banker was sighted down bay. Our folks always hitched up and drove down, to make out which one it was. And they knew the minute they got a look. They made a grand picture as they forged along, winged-out, and decks to the water with a big fare.
‘Brother John was fourteen the first trip he ever made on one of them. A few years before he died, — he was past seventy then, — we were talking one day of old times, and he told me he had fifty dollars for that run. I asked him what he did with the money. He told me he put it in the bank. “And,” he said, “it is there now.”’
This brought to mind a forgotten memory, that this old family for generations had been known for two chief characteristics — its dry common sense and its thrift. And I surmised that in this, almost its last representative, the same qualities might still exist.
But thrift, in the days of which she spoke, seemed a much more universal rule. Economic and domestic conditions were conducive to it. There was not only less money, but there was not the merchandise, and not the easy means of reaching it if there had been more.
For instance, the evening knitting of which she had spoken was a necessary feature of every household. All the hose of the family — men, women, and children — were produced at home; and our recent war-time knitting makes it better understood, perhaps, that such production was a business of a good deal of importance. Because, not only were they knitted at home, but the yarn also was produced there. Every farm, little or big, had its flock of sheep. Usually there was a woolen mill within reachable distance, — fifteen or twenty miles away, — and after the fleeces had been washed and dried, and carefully picked to pieces to remove all foreign substances, a familiar sight, any time during the summer, was the great balloonlike bundle of wool, tied in a clean old quilt or sheet, bulging far out of the back of the farm-wagon as it was carried to mill to be carded into rolls. These were spun into yarn at home, and mother’s or grandmother’s even, monotonous tread in the ell-chamber, and the subdued mournful sound of the spinning wheel, in the early fall days, were characteristic of every New England farmhouse, forty or fifty years ago.
Apropos of the hose, still more foreign to the things of to-day were the shoes very generally worn. To the day of her death, my hostess’s mother wore shoes made by the town shoemaker. For church and funerals, she wore them with her best alpaca; with her poplins and calicoes for all other occasions. Of wonderfully good shape, toe and heel, though lacking in finished appearance, there was no convention of country life which precluded their habitual use. Working or dancing, common approval had made them fit .
These shoes were less than two dollars a pair; but there was the surprising difference from these days, that people generally furnished their own material. A tannery, some twenty-five miles away, enabled farmers to send their calfskins to be tanned for their own private and particular use. ‘Dull calf,’ fashion elects to call exactly the same material to-day; and we deem ourselves well shod and in irreproachable good taste when we select it. This is not. to say that the shoes described were the only ones. Cloth boots were in vogue; and, in sea-going families especially, there was brought home, with their delaines and their cases of wine, a finer footwear.
The difference between the footgear of those days, and that of the expensively shod, silken-hosed people of the present, stands, we know, for the improvement and progress of the times, as well as for the decrees of fashion. And we are not disposed to question it. But one ventures to wonder a little, sometimes, albeit secretly and uneasily, — for it takes courage to admit it, — if there is not anywhere a halting-place, a climax, where improvement might tend to soften a little, once more, into the simpler and the plainer — a sort of golden medium of progress. For utility and durability and neatness, in a high degree, if not so much of beauty, obtained in the earlier instance, and these must, always be the basis of a best order of things. Such are not always the qualities most in evidence to-day.
There are lessons which have often to be unlearned. The eagerness to discard the old for the new, to accept whatever progress and invention bring forth, has resulted only in making the belated discovery, sometimes, of the real value and merit of the older and the simpler. As, for instance, milady is doing just now, when she seeks hither and yon for the domestic-made rug, and the home-loom blanket,—which she calls ‘flannel sheets,’— to enhance the attractiveness and, incidentally, the comfort of her often elaborate and beautiful home. These two things were devised and made for exactly these two purposes in the beginning, but were overlooked by the rising generations, for no better reason perhaps, than because they were rising.
Of course, touching upon this division of the subject of rugs does not remotely relate them to the valuable rugs, the semi-precious, to borrow the jeweler’s phrase — our orientals, for instance. They are apart — things of high art, with their mystery and charm and imperishable texture which seems to gather into itself all the beauty and all the civilization of the people that produced it. The subject of our attention is only the plain art of a plain people. Nevertheless, there is something about them that attracts and endures, that holds its own, in fitness and desirability, even after the lapse of forty or fifty years of change and competition. Already there is a certain famous little town in New England where the industry of the old-time rug has been revived by far-seeing enthusiasts, and is flourishing apace. Is it a degree of reaction against extravagance, or is it a coming back to a better appreciation of that basis before cited, — simplicity, serviceableness, moderation, — and that peculiar interest which attaches to wayside records of human steps in art or beauty?
III
As we came in through the long shed on our way from the barns, three big brass kettles, of different sizes, upturned on a bench, held my eye. They had been, as I rightly guessed, the dye-kettles of the family for a hundred years. And I found they were still in use.
Now, dyeing has been among the finer arts of the world ever since before the days, when Tyre, sitting ‘in the midst of the seas,’ fished for the molluscs with which she dyed the crimson and purple robes of all the kings and queens of her known world.
Dyeing in New England used to be the necessary and familiar habit of every thrifty household. All the useful, and many of the handsome, colors were in the list, and among them a blue, so royally and richly beautiful, that it would have impressed Ezekiel himself, who wrote in exile of his memories of Tyre, ‘blue and purple from the isles of Elishah was that which covered thee,’ and of her ‘ blue clothes . . . and chests of rich apparel.’
New England’s blue has been authoritatively declared one of the most indestructible and beautiful blues in the world. This, and all the soft browns and modes, dull greens, and rusty yellows and rose — my hostess knew the secret of them all. She had never descended to the quick and easy method of the cheap commercial dyes, whose possibilities of glaring crudeness and lack of fastness have wrought such havoc in the realm of color for the last several decades, both at home and in foreign lands.
Also, and equally to the point, she had never given up her little flock of sheep. ‘Only six, to be sure,’ she said, ‘ but six more than there are in this half of the town, where there used to be hundreds. I cannot keep house without my own hanks of yarn. They keep me in sweaters and mittens, and a good many things that people need in these winters on a farm. I always feel, too, that I am spending an afternoon with mother or grandmother when I spin. It is company.’
I felt my eyes widen. Here was revelation — a heart’s solace unto itself, without need of cult or creed. I was dumb in the light of it.
‘Besides, I always enjoy my coloring days as much as anything I ever do. They are nice days. There is nothing that gives a fresh look to a room like a fine new piece of color. The old way takes time and a good deal of work, but it is the only way worth while. Once set, sun or rain, wind or weather cannot change them.’ And the big soft skeins of yarn she showed me were entirely comparable with that of the best of our fashionable winter ‘heatherblooms.’ Thus, I perceived, I had the explanation of the still bright brass kettles.
She rose and, opening a door, took from the inner side a garment. She spread it across our knees and related its history. It was a skirt, long of length, and voluminous, three yards wide at the hem, and still firm and of good substance. It was in a design of stripes running around instead of up and down.
‘This,’ she explained, ‘was made in the fall of ’58, woven in the home-loom from wool which had been carded, spun, and dyed here in the house. They seem to have come into fashion from somewhere, for they were called balmorals, which certainly is not a home name.’
The stripes, varying from half an inch to an inch in width, were all separated from each other by a fine white line, which gave brilliancy to each color. There were seven colors in all, many times repeated: a velvety black, rich brown, the gray-blue we now call cadet, dull green, a beautiful tawny yellow, soft wood-drab, and the royal blue. Most of these dyes were made from materials gathered in the woods and fields, — the bark of certain trees, hay-scented fern, herbs and blossoms, — and all of them, including the few necessarily bought at the city drugstore, were of animal or vegetable origin. Skill and knowledge in their use was still a prized and valuable household lore to this woman. She considered it an art well worth knowing.
The garment was, of course, exclusively a winter one, but it has been worn by different members of two generations for many consecutive years. It was used by its present owner only for special occasions, as she explained. ‘Always when I have a long drive in cold weather, I wear it; and when John’s boy comes down from New York late in the season, and we go on some long automobile ride.’
It was a thing which a modern girl would have fallen upon with open arms. With quick intuition of its apparent stamp of the foreign and imported, a Russian blouse would have come out of it, bearing every earmark of the exclusive and unattainable, and especially of something Russian. It possessed a peculiarly Eastern look, though its name, balmoral, made it purely Scotch.
We talked far into the twilight of the evening. Her autumn work lay before her — the banking of her house, which meant the cutting and hauling from her wood-lots of numerous loads of thick boughs and small evergreen trees; smoking the hams; the sale of much poultry; gathering the apples, and general harvesting, all of which, with her stout horse, she did herself. There was, besides, all the indoor business which every season entails on a farm, and especially in late summer and autumn. Her well-stored shelves and pantries revealed the old-time excellence of her housekeeping. The hams she smoked under a barrel — a painstaking piece of work which she would have allowed no one to manage but herself.
Beyond all this lay the long winter, with its deep snow, its great storms, and often its bitter cold. Her buildings were not connected, the barns being several rods distant, which meant the shoveling of many paths and facing all weathers in the open; for her stock must be fed and watered and faithfully cared for at all times.
Now all of these activities were work — what seems, to most people, the ceaseless routine of a dull and monotonous life. What was the motif, the inner color, the mental outlook, which maintained the unchanging morale — the contentment and courage and peace of mind of all the years? What were her diversions, her relaxations, which, by every law of human experience, must exist?
From my very cautious feeling toward a solution of these things, I perceived the true secret of them all. Pure strength of character, the old traditional New England type, was the key-note of the woman’s personality. Force of conditions, the quality of life itself, in the present age, develop most of us with the procession of the times. We are products of modernity. But with this woman, who had escaped the stress and pressure of her day, there had unfolded with the years what was in her ancestrally. The proverbial firmness and repression of her New England forebears were reshadowed in the plainness of her life and the simplicity of herself. Much of her pleasure of life lay in her very work, its daily success and thoroughness.
Her satisfactions were, taking care of herself, earning her money at strictly reasonable gain from a ready patronage, living helpfully and honestly and independently, in her own way. She was never lonely — she was too busy; and a long day of work brought her at its close to her welcome hours of reading and rest. Her diversions and social contacts were of the simplest sort — the Grange meetings, an occasional outing to a fall fair, the commonest of small neighborhood events: birth and death and burial.
And back of it all was that secret of the different life — free, original, elemental; that mystery, that sixth sense of life in the open, which none not having it can possess or understand. For they are born dumb and blind to its lure and its power.
The tall spire of the old church, rising above the splendid elms surrounding it, was in full view of her window, and it came, in its turn, into our conversation. Her comments were illuminating and comprehensive.
‘In years past, we always went to church and Sabbath School every Sunday, and to prayer-meeting Friday nights. It is very rarely that a church service is held there now, and it is many years since there were prayer-meetings. They seem to have gone out of style; at least they are not counted as they used to be. But then a good many things have gone by. If there is n’t as much religion as there used to be, what there is is more reasonable sometimes. I remember Deacon Hill would never allow his wife to commune with them. From her girlhood, she had belonged to another church, where they were only sprinkled instead of being baptized. She always had to get up after the sermon on Communion Sunday, and take a seat far back in the church. People who were not regular members never could get over it, for she was one of the best Christian women in the world. But the deacon was a stern man. Nowa-days, we don’t hear much about such things. People don’t do things in the fear of the Lord, as they did once.
‘I do not know but there is one thing I would have a little different, perhaps. That is our funerals. Now Captain Haskell passed away this summer. They had a quartette come over with the minister from the city. The music was beautiful. The minister read a good deal of Scripture and that poem about the islands. That seemed very suitable to me, for Captain Haskell had sailed the world over, and that made us think of his life. But that was about all. He was a man of importance to us. He was an educated man and he knew the world, but there was no sermon about him. I should never have known it was Captain Amos Haskell that was being laid away. It may be better, but it seems to me that, when it is their last occasion, it ought to be taken that way.'
The hour of my departure had come. I left her with no least feeling of any smallness of her life, or of old-fashionedness or narrowness, but exactly the reverse — a sense of its largeness. And not only this, but a sense of its beauty and peace. For, as I came out, the beauty of the September night lay before me. Faint sounds came from far away. The mauve dimness of a dry autumn was like a veil on the land; and when the moon came up, it hung like a great pale rose above her gray fields, where crickets sang all the night long.