Olympians in Homespun

APRIL, 1926

BY LUCIEN PRICE

IT used to amuse me to think that the tale which follows would make a lively bit of romantic fiction. I still think so; but I have come to believe that the plain fact is better. Were this to be told as fiction, it would lose half its force. These deeds were done. They were done against heavy odds by quite common people. Half a century and more ago, in a small town, bleak, drab, and humdrum, miles from anywhere, beset with business cares and household duties, these people addressed themselves with pluck and energy to what is, I suppose, one of the major issues of life. And they well-nigh solved it.

I hear it said that we live in a bad time: that traditional religion is played out; that youth has gone on the loose; that our people do not know how to use leisure creatively; that life has been mechanized out of all simplicity and beauty; and that the machinery of human slaughter has slipped the leash of social control. All this may be true. But, instead of doing the Jeremiah act, it seems more practical to suggest a remedy. People say: ‘We have been told often enough that we are commonplace. We know that. But what can we do about it?’ I wonder if the story of these common people in a small town domesticating the immortals and weaving their Elysium of homespun does not tell us at least one of the things that we can do about it.

I

On a morning in 1871, when apple orchards were pink and white, young Dr. Ripley drove into town with his bride. They had been married the day before in her father’s farmhouse at the Falls.

On the parlor wall behind the bridal pair as they stood to face the minister, you might have seen, and still may see, two oval-framed portraits, the bride’s grandparents — a severe old New Englander who had hewn his farm out of a Middle-Western oak forest, and a serious old woman, cousin to Mary Lyon, foundress of Mount Holyoke College. She had brought her books along with her into the wilderness, and had in very deed kept the wolf, not from the door, but from the blanket stretched across an opening in the log cabin which served for a door. Her husband having driven twenty miles to mill, she sat up all night feeding a roaring blaze on her hearth which kept the beasts away. Her daughter, a village schoolmistress who had learned to parse out of Young’s Night Thoughts and who knew whole pages of Paradise Lost by heart, married another of these Connecticut farmers who had migrated to the Fire Lands of the Western Reserve. Thus it was that the bride had grown up in a household with a rugged, if homespun, intellectual tradition. She had even been taught to sing by a sister of the poet Sill, who had studied in New York with no lesser luminary than Carlo Bassini. Carlo had much to answer for, but his ‘method’ was then and thereabouts the best obtainable.

The doctor’s parents were strict Quakers and staunch Abolitionists. As a boy he had earned money in harvest fields and bought a violin on which he secretly learned to play. When his parents found it out, they forced him to destroy the instrument. On the other hand his father, also a country doctor, stationed at the head of a stairway in a disused sawmill where two runaway slaves were hidden, had stood off a crew of plantationowners with his gold-headed cane.

The younger Dr. Ripley, at the age of eighteen, had left the medical school of the University of Michigan to fight under General Grant, who remained, to the end of his days, one of his heroes. His other, as time went on, became Theodore Thomas. A man has many fathers, and, as the years sped, by some law of spiritual similitude the good gray doctor grew to look not unlike both these sires of his spirit.

His wooing had been, like himself, whimsically abrupt and offhand. He would be missing for weeks. Suddenly one morning be would drive into the farmyard, past the smoke-bush, in his two-wheeled gig, or perhaps on horseback, medicine cases in saddlebags. He was late to his wedding. Five minutes past the hour he arrived, his horse in a lather. There was an epidemic of scarlet fever at the Wick. Leave without visiting every one of his patients? Not even for his own wedding! The seven-mile buggy-ride to Woolwick was their wedding journey. I say buggy: it was not a carriage, for, although it was brand-new for the occasion, a vehicle with a top was an extravagance which they could not yet afford.

No sooner were they wedded than they were forced to decide whether whist and dancing could satisfy hungry minds and immortal souls. They decided not. This was thought ‘queer.’ In the same village were three other families similarly queer. One was that of the minister. Reverend Alan Burroughs. He came of a stock locally celebrated for producing scholars, schoolmasters, editors, professors, and college presidents. He himself had been a college professor, but thought he needed a plunge into common life as a country parson. One of his recreations was to drive with the doctor on his round of sick-calls, through greengolden countrysides, discussing all things human and divine. He lived in a commodious white farmhouse up the river road, under broadbrimmed maples, with a wife who was a brilliant pianist, and a numerous brood of children who variously played, sang, or drew.

The other two families were the Willetts and the Dacys, partner owners of the glass-factory. Their houses stood side by side halfway up Presbyterian Hill at a height commanding wide sweeps of lawn bordered with curving driveways, a grove of shimmering willows on one hand, plantations of fir and beech on theother. The Willetts’house, narrow and tall, was painted yellow, its cornices encrusted with wedding-cake carpentry; the Daeys’, painted gray, was one of those peak-gabled mansions, ornate with the trefoil and quatrefoil, the clustered chimneys, and the pointed windows of that wooden Gothic which invaded America in the 1850’s, with Vaux’s Villas and Cottages. Both places were gotten up quite in the English manorial style, grounds and buildings; their high-ceiled drawing-rooms chilly with white-marble chimney-pieces, and, alternating with French windows, tall pier-glasses resting on low consoletables of gilt. Tasseled bell-pulls dangled from the walls, and in the grandiose staircase hall of the Dacys behold, to left and right of newel posts, marble statues of Venus and Apollo — oh, decently draped, of course. Mrs. Willetts, who had been Ann Carter, the village beauty, and traced her descent from Colonial governors of Massachusetts, was a gifted soprano. She had two handsome boys who were learning the violin and violoncello. I remember the awe I felt when I was told that Mr. Willetts, a graduate of Yale, for his recreation read Greek and composed music.

Such were the four families who made of this village a rustic Athens.

II

How incredibly old-fashioned it all seems now; and yet it was less, much less, than forty years ago that one could see a life sundered from ours, as it seems, by a century. Think away the whole of the Machine Age excepting railway and telegraph. No automobiles, no street cars — only buggies; no paved streets — only clay mud, half hubdeep in March; no arc lights — only street lamps, dim and few; no public waterworks, and hence no running water, no plumbing, no bathrooms — only a wooden washtub behind the kitchen stove for the weekly Saturdayafternoon scrub; no electric lights — only kerosene lamps; no steam radiators— only base-burner hard-coal stoves and open-fire grates; no phonographs or radio — only old-fashioned square pianos, violins, and violoncellos built by George Gemünder, and children learning to play on them out of dog-eared volumes of the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Schubert, and Beethoven; no public library — only bookcases stocked with English classics read aloud by father and mother to children by winter firesides until the heroics of Shakespeare, the romantics of Scott, and the whimsies of Dickens were household words; no moving pictures — but once or twice a year pilgrimages at huge discomfort and sharp sacrifice to one of three remote cities to see Edwin Booth as Hamlet, or Lawrence Barrett as Brutus, or Edmund Kean as Richard III, or Henry Irving as Shylock, or Madame Helena Modjeska as Maria Stuart, or Robson and Crane as the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors; with a memory of it all so vivid and exact that years later these villagers could go over the performance in imagination, scene by scene.

The village, built on the banks of a steep river-gorge, was half railroadjunction and half agrarian markettown. If confident that no citizen of Verona, its rival, stood within earshot, it claimed a population of three thousand. In the days of the Canal, along which as a boy President Garfield drove mules, Franklin Mills was a good enough name for the town. But when the railroads came Zeno Kemp, in honor of his alpaca mill (which perched, like a towered and moated grange, half on bank and half in millrace), stipulated that its name be changed to Woolwick.

How, from a soil so hardscrabble, did there sprout a chorus able to sing oratorios of Handel, Mendelssohn, and Haydn, masses of Mozart and Cherubini, and a village orchestra of shopkeepers and artisans able to play symphonies of Haydn and overtures of Weber and Wagner?

It began, I am told, with Mr. Willetts — as relaxation from his glassfactory, Greek, and musical composition — undertaking to train a church choir. There had been a little musical club which met each week at various houses. This combined with the choir and formed a Choral Society, of anybody who could sing well or ill— mostly ill. It was a cautious start. They studied short pieces of light but good music, usually sacred so that it could also do duty for church. Then came madrigals, canons, and chorales, and old English music of Lawes and Purcell. Finally, more pretentious works — Mendelssohn’s ‘Forty-Second Psalm,’ on which the chorus worked two years before venturing to give the whole in public; and, after this, as seasonable and joyous music at the May Festival, Cherubini’s ‘Requiem Mass ‘!

A dozen years of this; then glassblowing deflated, and the Dacys and Willetts went away to the city, leaving a horrible vacuum. Reverend Mr. Burroughs next experienced a return of his inherited hankering for an academic town and exchanged pulpit for professorship. Thus fell on Dr. and Mrs. Ripley a prophet’s mantle at that time much too large for them.

Life had challenged them to grow shoulders which would fit that mantle. Let us see how they met the challenge.

The doctor’s prenuptial violin playing had been little more than country fiddling. It was the farmer’s daughter who had championed Mozart and Schubert — against odds, for the doctor had been inclined to scoff. But the Willetts and Burroughses were in the classical camp. He yielded, and bought a volume of Schubert’s songs arranged for violin and piano. At the age of thirty he began learning to read music by note. His being left-handed made the fingering of a violin doubly difficult.

He bought Louis Spohr’s Violin Method and studied it by himself. He heard of a competent teacher in the academy town eight miles away and would drive there in mud, cold, and snow for a lesson once a fortnight, only to come home discouraged and disgusted and thrust his violin under the bed, vowing never to touch it again. His young wife would drag it out, tune it, put it into his hands, and sit down to the piano. They labored with backache, headache, yes, and heartache — for conquer the violin, alas, he never did. The mace-blow came with a volume of Bach’s sonatas for two violins and piano. The doctor and the station agent were staving away at them, the doctor’s eldest daughter, now a girl in her teens, at the piano. It was not going well. The station master lowered his fiddle.

‘Doctor,’ said he, ‘it sounds queer.’

‘Of course it would sound queer. It’s Bach.’

‘No. Someone is wrong and I think it is you.’

‘Sorry, Luther. But I am afraid it is you.’

They argued awhile, then agreed it was neither. The fault lay with the pianist. At this the worm turned.

‘Perhaps,’ said she, ‘the reason it sounds queer is that you two violinists are playing different sonatas.’

The maxim dearest to Mrs. Ripley’s stout heart was ‘Failure is part of the Infinite Plan.’ Conquer the violin though her husband never did, nevertheless none of his toil was lost or wasted. All unconsciously he had been preparing himself for a task better than personal virtuosity.

All this, be it noted, was incidental to the grueling practice of a country doctor, called out of bed at all hours to drive wintry leagues over atrocious roads to relieve every distress from croup to childbirth, and still in the days when general practitioners combated epidemics of diphtheria and smallpox, often at peril of their lives. Was there a train-wreck in the river gorge? He improvised a hospital in an empty wareroom and, working all night by lantern light, performed desperate, and successful, amputations. Did a timid and incompetent elder physician allow a smallpox epidemic to get out of control for fear of injuring the trade of two milliners in whose shop it started? Under circumstances which seemed to lay the blame on himself the young doctor held his tongue and bore it, again at peril of his life — from an ignorant track-hand whose wife had died of the disease, and who went around with a revolver vowing to shoot young Dr. Ripley on sight. It may, by this, be understood that music was with him distinctly a side-line.

His wife, meanwhile, had inherited the church choir from Mr. Willetts. The following Easter, deprived of their old choirmaster, they were rehearsing some difficult music and making heavy weather of it. Dr. Ripley sat listening. After coming to grief repeatedly in the middle of the piece, the dry-goods merchant said: ‘Doctor, get up here and beat time for us.'

Now the doctor was an almost morbidly modest man, even to lodging a permanent request that his name be not mentioned in the village paper. But he complied. And the music went. On Easter morning it was clear that the Choral Society also was new-risen from the tomb. ‘Failure is part of the Infinite Plan.’ A violinist Dr. Ripley never became. But he laid down the bow to take up the baton.

III

Twelve miles from the Wick was a small city, now a large one, and there, in the old Academy of Music one January night. Theodore Thomas’s orchestra gave a concert. Twelve miles and back, through bitter cold and driving snow, over country roads, the doctor and his wife drove to hear that concert, counting themselves lucky to be able to go at all, for it was a fatality that just so surely as they were about to start on a holiday jaunt someone galloped into the dooryard on an unyoked ploughhorse to call him to reduce a fracture. Many was the time afterward that they heard this orchestra, but never with enjoyment so keen. For it was their first. And their years of hard study had taught them to comprehend symphonic structure. The long ride home, still in a driving snowstorm, after midnight, they scarcely noticed at all, so absorbed were they with a new idea. Could it be done? They believed it could! What was this idea? To assemble gradually, instrument by instrument, an orchestra to play with the Choral Society. It was there that night in a (now-covered) buggy, swaddled in robes of buffalo fur, plodding homeward behind a good bay roadster named Derby, that they dreamed into being the ‘Woolwick Philharmonic Orchestra.'

In that same small city twelve miles away—connected, luckily, by a railroad— lived one of those German music masters who come heralding the Hellenism of music to Puritan barbarians, Herr Gustave Seidl. To his mingled amusement and disgust he was addressed as ‘professor.’ Yet the title was merited. His fine scholarship had been earned in a German university, and his mastery of four instruments— piano, violin, viola, and violoncello — in a German conservatory of music. To local Philistia he would not yield one inch, and was immensely respected for this firmness.

‘Don’t you just love Gottschalk’s “Dying Poet”?’ gushed one of his young girl pupils.

‘No,’ said he curtly, ‘I’m glad he died.’

He already had a small class in Woolwick. The doctor now saw to it that he had more. Shopkeepers, artisans, and their boys and girls began studying the stringed instruments. The brass and wood wind, I am told, had mainly to teach themselves. From a halfdozen the orchestra grew to a dozen instruments, then to a score, and kept on growing. Music erased class lines. On rehearsal nights the locomotive engineer’s son, a high-school lad who could execute (perhaps that is the word) the trombone solo part in the ‘Inflammatus’ from Rossini’s ‘Stabat Mater,’ was more of a personage than the rich grist-miller who tried valiantly but could not wiggle his slide nimbly enough. Year after year, byways and hedges were combed for anyone who could scrape, wheeze, or blow. Did a stranger come to town? The first inquiry was not, as ordinarily, ‘Is he marriageable?’ but ‘Can he sing or play?’ When a cigar-maker, rejoicing in the apposite name of John Smoker, who could play the double bass and play it well, took residence in the village, the musical community received him to its bosom without further ceremony, even though some of the youngsters might warble that ancient folk tune, —

Indeed, that was just the point. He could play. And the doctor? Rless you! By this time he was deep in Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation, a large and fascinating-looking book in a cover of blue embossed leather, its pages edged with red and gilt, kept on the library table where it could be picked up and studied in snatched bites before and after mealtime as he came and went from his eternal round of professional visits; yes, a fascinating book in which the print kept alternating with, instead of pictures, half-page or full-page or even several pages of musical illustrations from the scores of masses, operas, oratorios, or, it might be, the orchestral and pianoforte solo part of Beethoven’s superb E-flat concerto.

And now, like a noble tree, music sank its roots deep into the common life of the village and began to lift its crown to the heavens. Boys and girls blossomed into fine violinists, pianists, violoncellists — the miller’s, the apothecary’s, the innkeeper’s, the newspaper editor’s, the tinsmith’s sons and daughters. The jeweler learned the kettle drums. The dry-goods merchant’s boy, a young scapegrace, could play whole pages of the clarinet part to ‘The Messiah’ with his eyes shut; and, grumbling neighbors would inform you, that was the one good thing about him. When the Farmers’ Institute convened at the Opera House (in which no opera was ever heard), these youngsters would walk out on the stage without a qualm and play to the astonished rustics sonatas of Haydn and Mozart, or now and then a virtuoso piece, some old war-horse of the concert platform by Wieniawski or Vieuxtemps; yes, and even, as time went on, a few of those concertos which fire student ambition at Conservatory recitals— de Bériot’s Seventh, Spohr’s ‘Gesangszene,’ Mendelssohn’s and Max Bruch’s. The admiring husbandmen would gather round them afterward, exclaiming: ‘Why, you done fine!’ ‘You done noble!' And, if I may be permitted to say so, I agree with the rustics. Fine it was, and also noble; for what finer and nobler than by hard study to learn and to love early in youth the work of noble men and mighty poets of sound?

IV

Rehearsals — they went on, come fair, come foul, come hell or highwater, from September to June — were long hours of grilling work relieved at intervals by riots of uttermost hilarity. The village piano-tuner, handy mechanic, and intellectual heretic (who subsequently, under the doctor’s encouragement, blossomed out into a maker of violins of astounding excellence) sat behind the miller trombonist and convulsed the band by performing dumb-show imitations of that worthy man emptying saliva out of the bell of his instrument and wagging his head in discomfiture at having lost his place and come in at the wrong bar. The girl violinists would guy the dude cellist.

‘Why,’one would ask in shrill soprano, ‘ is Skinny Berthold’s diamond shirt-stud like a ship at sea?’

Chorus: ‘Why?’

‘Because it rests on the bosom of a heavy swell.’

Once, in the midst of rehearsal, the firebell rang. The rehearsal disbanded to the burning barn a mile away. Returning, they found the dentist, who had lived in a city, alone in the rehearsal room practising scornfully. He was so rash as to chaff them on addiction to small-town customs. But there was a hole in his own armor. He was fond of running his fingers through his handsome hair-oiled blonde mane.

‘You done well,’ retorted the pianotuner, ‘to stay here and practise. You evidently reelive that to play the fiddle takes other qualifications besides grease on your hair.’

When worn with rehearsing, the orchestra for relaxation would take some plantation melody, each instrument playing it in a different key, and a more hellish noise you could not wish to hear.

The band next outgrew the church vestry, and its rehearsal-room became the upper story of the town hall, a redbrick New England schoolhouse sort of barracks with a white cupola and a bell in it, standing midway in the row of brick meetinghouses which front the steep declivity of the river gorge where an intrepid Indian fighter, pursued by redskins, had made his prodigious leap of fifteen feet from cliff to cliff — a yarn which the townspeople affected to disbelieve. ‘But then,’ as the doctor said, ‘he was in a great hurry.’ This second story of the town hall had once been a schoolroom, and on its dusty blackboard in letters a yard high the drygoods merchant, whose spring and autumn clearance sales obliged him to be a dab at sign-painting, had chalked ‘Woolwick Philharmonic Orchestra.’ Down in one corner, however, as artist’s proof, some schoolboy instrumentalist, in a moment of exasperation with his Vergil, had scrawled: —

This room was lighted by the most villainous of all kerosene lamps and heated by a sheet-iron stove which looked as tall and frowning as one of the eight strong towers of the Bastille — at least to me, whose duty at the age of ten it was to go over there with a basket of kindling in the cold and the dark, one hour before rehearsal time, and light a fire. Thus humbly did my service to the Muse begin. If the exact truth is to be told, I was not in love with the lady. Who knew what horrible hobgoblins might be lurking in those dark shadows, ready to make a rush at you? Things with red eyes and green ears, the kind that tickled your ribs to torture in nightmares? And once, when the stovepipe had fallen (it was always falling) and the place was too dark to find it out until after the fire was built, I saw smoke and flame pouring into the room and thought I had burned the town hall down and must spend the rest of my life earning money to pay for it. Did I make a clamor with the bell? Well, you had better believe I did — one that fetched half the town, hotfoot.

The doctor, for his part, did not hasten. All in due season he arrived, at his usual pace, grave and meditative, carrying a lantern. From long habit of making sick-calls after midnight in unlighted streets, he would, years after electric arc-lamps glared blue at every street-corner, walk down through the business section past rows of brightly illuminated shop-windows carrying a lighted lantern. He was very conservative. Immensely respected though he might be, he had to take his share of chaffing like anybody else.

‘Hello, doctor! Lookin’ for an honest man ? ‘

The doctor glanced up with that quizzical glint in his gray eyes.

‘Not hereabouts,’ said he.

V

In a certain cabinet of ancestral mahogany with a rolled pediment was the ‘programme drawer.’ Here were kept, season by season, the programmes of concerts, Christmas oratorios, and Spring Festivals. As the years went on, the roster of composers and works or parts of works performed would have made a stranger’s eyes bulge: ‘The Messiah,’ ‘Elijah,’ ‘The Creation,’ ‘The Seasons,’ ‘Saint Paul,’ Rossini’s ‘Stabat Mater,’ Mendelssohn’s ‘Hymn of Praise,’ Gounod’s ‘Messe Solennelle,’ Mozart’s ‘Twelfth Mass,’ symphonies of Haydn, a finale from Weber’s Euryanthe, concertos with orchestra, the ‘Fest March,’ the ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus,’ and the overture to Tannhäuser — and this in a decade when Wagner’s art and revolution against the cultural mediocrity of European capitals were still filling the press of two continents with din and derision.

One year a director was hired from the city to put the final polish on the chorus work. He began with a difficult piece by Handel, remarking genially: ‘Of course we must n’t expect that we can sing this through without mishap as yet; but let us try it anyhow.’

Midway in the piece he grew so astonished at the singing of the chorus that he ceased to beat, laid down his stick, and stood listening. The chorus finished triumphantly without him.

A traveling orchestra gave a concert in the village. Thinking it must play down to popular taste it gave a programme of light music. The audience was indignant. The orchestra had to come again and play reputable music. Artists of some fair degree of eminence heard of the place and began including it in their recital tours. Next these village boys and girls went away to college and to conservatories of music, coming home at Christmas and Easter holidays to be soloists at concerts and thunder out ballades of Chopin and sonatas of Beethoven like veteran professionals. The classic repertories of piano, violin, organ, and voice became as much a matter of course in these households as jazz phonographrecords or popular story magazines preaching commercial success-at-anyprice are to an age happier in the possession of labor-and-thought-saving machinery.

Once more, let us understand each other: this which we are discussing was no leisure-class existence. These people had livings to earn. They had to work. Heavens, how they did have to work! There were children to wash, dress, feed, and start for school. Monday washing took a whole day, ironing another. Servants? You might have a hired girl — some neighbor’s daughter who sat at table with you — for a few weeks after a baby was born; otherwise she was an unthinkable extravagance. You cleaned your own house, preserved your own fruit, made apple butter and peach butter, cooked, sewed, knit, darned, mended, swept, dusted, scrubbed, scoured, ‘hoed out,’ set to rights; and, when your housework was done, the poor came, to be fitted out from a widow’s cruse of an old-clothes box. As a matter of routine. (Were you a Christian, or just a church member?) Here was a life of little dressing-up and no playing lady. Madame Schumann-Heink once told me how in the days of her early struggles in Hamburg as a young widow with a brood of children she learned her rôles from a score propped up on a shelf above the kitchen sink. It sounded perfectly familiar. A dozen, yes, a score of women in Woolwick cultivated their minds and talents on the same terms. And what zest such a life can give to the precious margins of leisure!

To keep orchestra and choir chairs filled was a steady struggle. Youngsters grew up, married, and went away. Oldsters superannuated and died. There had to be continual scouting and commandeering. Wood wind and brass were forever shy. These parts had to be filled in by the church organ. The organ was a pest, cranky as an old scow. But it was the only one in town, and in the church with the largest seating-capacity. Worse; it was half a tone lower than the tuning-pitch of wood-wind instruments. Hence their parts had to be transposed. Most of this the doctor did himself. Once there was a tricky clarinet part from the orchestration of an oratorio chorus which he had left to the last. Rehearsal impended. He was summoned to a patient. In the pair of minutes before unhitching his horse he called his daughter, a girl of twelve, explained what must be done, and left her to do it. She was aghast. There at his office desk he left her, amid spatulas and cigar ashes, with his gold pen, ink bottle, and plenty of blank ruled musicpaper. To her own intense astonishment she did it. To her still more intense astonishment she and the clarinettist at rehearsal found that it would play. Thus emboldened she went on, studied harmony, and, after a year or two of it, took a dramatic ballad for soprano, ‘The Raft’ by Pinsuti, which she had found in an old volume of songs, and made a complete orchestration for it. At the Christmas concert her mother sang the ballad with orchestral accompaniment, and a thrilling thing it was. Two decades later, swaying between life and death on a coastal steamer in a hurricane gale off Cape Sambro, it was the bass figuration of that orchestral accompaniment which roared in my ears all day to the thunder of seas that tossed the steamer like a dory.

Do not suppose that life in Woolwick was a fiddle with one string. Quite early it was discovered that there would have to be variety, and variety there was. On a July evening, by the flare of kerosene torches, there was a performance of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, on a sylvan hill-slope, and a faëry vision of two dozen wee lassies in fluffy white with wings of spangled gauze flitting in and out of the underwoods among massive chestnut stems. As relaxation and frivolity the Opera House was hired, and they played screaming farces. Again it would be a pantomime, The Mistletoe Bough, in which a petulant bride on her weddingday hides in an old chest in the castle garret. The chest has, unfortunately, a spring lock. Her skull and weddingveil are found there by her lover half a century later — profoundly affecting, as anyone will see. The tragedy of this was relieved by tableaux (there always had to be tableaux, just as there always had to be charades): ‘Father Time,’ the histrionic dry-goods merchant in yards and yards of his own sheeting, with wings, scythe, and hourglass, vainly besought of Youth not to fly; ‘Nydia,’ after the statue by Rogers; ‘Lot’s Wife,’ after Gustave Doré; and ‘Faith,’ a lady in white draperies contemplating a cross on a Rock of Ages constructed of packing-cases. The tableaux were enlivened by comedy acts not down on the playbill. Faith, directly after her tableau, fell through an open trapdoor into the ash bin beneath. Father Time got stuck by his wings on a dressingroom stairway, unable to get either up or down, and could be heard, during the tableau of Faith contemplating her cross, calling hoarsely now on his wife, now on his Maker.

VI

All this, you are to understand, in a world of tall, square, red-brick houses set up aloof from highways on hillsides and terraces, their gaunt rooms engloomed by dooryard groves of funereal cedar and spruce, approached by driveways that wound between evergreen hedges, the way lighted at night by lamps with metal reflectors set in caskets of glass on top of posts, one at the gateway and one at the dismounting-stone and hitching-block; or else the houses were of wood, their eaves dripping with jig-saw Gothic. Indoors it was a world of ponderous mahogany secretaries crammed with family keepsakes — wedding-veils filmy of texture and sallow with age, unfolded out of tissue paper with sprigs of faded orange-blossoms; or yellowed samplers worked by grandmother and great-grandmother when little girls; or baby curls; or daguerreotypes of fresh young faces long since withered, enclosed in cases of embossed leather and maroon plush, and framed in oval fillets of ormolu; army commissions of 1812, and ‘61; and letters from fortyniners. A world of black-walnut whatnots and steel engravings of combat and chase from the ballad poetry of Sir Walter Scott, hanging above the man telshelves of black-marble chimneypieces between pairs of brass candlesticks fetched generations ago from Sheffield, England; and tall, pedimented bookcases wedged full with well-read sets of the historians — Gibbon, Macaulay, Guizot, Buckle, Grote — and the Victorian novelists, the Lake poets, the eighteenth-century essayists, and miscellaneous biographers, with first editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Scarlet Letter. A world of blissfully endless winter evenings, as one sat cross-legged in a chimneycorner of the library on the black haircloth of a venerable mahogany davenport beside a flashing grate-fire of lump coal, scowling over The Scottish Chiefs, with grandfather, hale and hearty at eighty-five, sitting straight as a gunbarrel on the opposite side of the hearth reading the ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ by the light of a tallow candle (these pesky ‘ile’ lamps were dangerous!); yes, The Pioneer and The Pathfinder, for had not he himself as a youth of eighteen trudged across the Alleghenies from Canaan, Connecticut, to these Fire Lands at the head of his yoke of oxen and covered wagon, axe in one hand, rifle in the other?

It was a world bristling with reminders of that sturdy transplantation from New England less than three quarters of a century before — in villages named for their parent towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in meetinghouse architecture, village greens, and fanlighted doorways, and grandparents’ garrets stacked with chests, cradles, bandboxes, spinning wheels, and, suspended from beam and rafter, the poke bonnets and skirthoops of a generation not very far past; and, of the generation just then passing, a Confederate sword picked up on the field at Gettysburg; and barrels full of back numbers of the New York Tribune (‘Greeley’s paper’) and Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, which grandfather had taken for decades and not one copy of which would he allow to be destroyed; and, after these, stacks of Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, teeming with stirring and ghastly pictures of the Civil War, and of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, containing Mr. Edwin Abbey’s pen drawings for She Stoops to Conquer; and the papiermâché ass’s head worn by Bottom in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream (an object of terror in childhood that was forever turning up in nightmares). A world of leisurely drives in one-horse phaetons or two-horse family barouches through smiling countrysides of yellow wheat and green oak woods in the sweet eternity of golden Sunday afternoons in summer, ears humming with the melodies of choir music sung that morning in church — ‘As pants the hart,’ to a tune from the ‘Calvary’ of Louis Spohr, or ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair,’ from Brahms’s ‘Requiem.’ A world of autumnal Sundayafternoon promenades to the graveyard, which did duty as public park, past dooryards with latticed summerhouses which no one seemed ever to sit in, and mournful sunlight of November poured on hedges of arbor vitæ encircling tombstones, all in the vague melancholy of childhood’s associations of church and evergreens and death and pictures on bedchamber walls of just souls receiving harp, crown, and palm in ‘The Better Land’ amid dazzling rays that streamed from pearly gates of the celestial city; and Sundaynight suppers of bread and milk partaken of at a table covered with a redfigured spread sacred to this meal and to be used for none other — imagination haunted the while by the splendor of psalms read out responsively that morning by minister and congregation, gorgeous of Oriental imagery and sonorous in the majestic English of the King James version.

Each week-day evening the village intelligentsia met at the apothecary’s shop, ostensibly to get their daily papers, actually to sit around the stove and discuss the universe. The apothecary scandalized the town by being a theosophist; the doctor ditto by being a Darwinian. Picture my chagrin when, only to-day, the freshwater colleges and small-town clergymen first heard of evolution! Thirty years ago, in knee breeches, I had heard that question all thrashed out beside the apothecary’s stove, and supposed its dust and fury abated forever with Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw — thrashed out, too, with far more grace and tolerance than to-day. For the doctor, though on the rare occasions when he went to church he sat bolt upright during prayers with eyes wide open (for which be his memory held in respect!), respected, in turn, the fine character and scholarship of the minister; nor was he above studying French with Father Brard, the venerable silvery-haired Catholic clergyman, and when his first-born little boy died during the diphtheria epidemic (he saved the children of others; his own he could not save), it was to the good priest that he went for comfort, as man to man, irrespective of theologies. On the other hand, when the minister had the misfortune to remark in the doctor’s presence that never yet had man been able to conceive of a single improvement on the Creator’s handiwork, the doctor replied blandly: ‘Oh, yes. I can suggest one.’

‘Indeed!’ bridled the minister. ‘Then this is quite an event, and I, for one, should be happy to hear your suggestion. What is it?’

‘At the age of fifty I would take away a man’s passions and leave him his teeth.’

VII

Make the immortals your daily guests and marvel at how they transform your house into a dwelling-place of light. Twenty years of this homegrown culture, and the public concerts had become but a small part of it.

April is shining and showering. It is house-cleaning time. Carpets are up and draperies down — nothing to deaden the sonority of three large rooms which will open together. Bare floors smell clean and soapy; there is a heavenly odor of fresh paint and paperhanger’s paste. Pack away tables and bookcases; get out all the chairs; roll the pianoforte to the alcove end of the library; kindle a flashing blaze in the fireplace against the chill of a spring evening; notify village singers and players to brush up their fightingpieces; and ask the neighbors in. Then ho! what a festival of spring and music right in the thick of that domestic upheaval commonly accounted one of the Plagues of Egypt. And what are the fighting-pieces of these village musicians? I remember so to have heard for the first time Beethoven’s overtures to Egmont, Coriolan, and the third Leonore in four-hand arrangements for piano, his ‘Sonata Appassionata, ‘ ‘ Pathétique, ‘ and ‘Kreutzer, ‘ Bach’s ‘Italian Concerto,’ Schumann’s ‘ Carnaval ‘ and ‘ Faschingsschwank aus Wien,’ and whole repertories of classic Lieder varied with folk ballads and Negro spirituals.

Neither were these neighborhood concerts the most of it, nor even the best of it. We are now in the 1890’s: these boys and girls who grew up with good and great music are now young men and women, and concerts are to be had any day without so much as stepping outside the threshold of one’s own home. A still evening of summer, long windows open to the mild air. Indoors, yellow lamp-beams shining on a portrait of Beethoven, a bust of Wagner, on the ivory and ebon keyboard of a piano, and on the gleaming golden varnish of violins and violoncello. An east window opens on a vine-clad verandah where listeners may sit in the dreamy dimness of starshine. Neighbors, going by, come up past the rose bushes into the dooryard and to the porch: ‘We heard the music and thought we would stop.’ Out of the open windows come floating trios for pianoforte and strings — Haydn’s, Beethoven’s, Mendelssohn’s, Rubinstein’s; violin and cello concertos, a whole piano literature, the Lieder of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, yes, and Chaminade, and heaven knows what inundations of sentimental ballads proper to the sentimental age,

—Tosti, Bemberg, Meyer-Helmund, Liza Lehmann, — without which the molasses taffy and vinegar pickles of preliminary fallings in and out of love are sweets and sours only half tasted.

How to keep children home evenings? With counter-attractions aplenty of by no means a desirable kind, these Woolwick parents experienced little difficulty. For twenty years they had been busy getting up a home-talent show with which outside attractions simply could not compete. And, when they left home, no need to ask youngsters so reared and nourished not to waste their time on idle or vulgar amusements. The idle kind bored them to fury; the vulgar turned their stomachs. Morality? Sex stimulation youth of course will have. The immoral? Well, in the light of history, such questions were debatable. Morality is a majority vote, and the finest spirits are always in a minority. But the vulgar, the ugly, the inharmonious, the unbeautiful — about these there could be no argument. They were revolting. That was all. These good parents of Woolwick thought they were teaching art. They were teaching morals. They thought they were giving religious instruction at church. They were giving it with fiddle bow and keyboard. They thought their religion came from Israel. It came from Hellas.

The neighboring town, Verona, was the county seat. Never for a moment did Verona forget this or allow Woolwick to forget it. For Verona had quite another conception of κаλός κаγаθός — what constituted ‘a good life.’ Its women were smartly dressed; its men were sharp lawyers and shrewd merchants. It set a stiff pace of whist and dancing. How it did disdain the frumps and bluestockings, the ploughman scholars, the stove-side philosophers, and the artisan musicians of Woolwick, nor hesitated to say so. Verona, be it conceded, did have a case. Not long ago I saw a flashlight photograph of the Woolwick Choral Society and Philharmonic Orchestra taken in the church against a background of organ pipes in 1899. A queerer-looking band of owl-eyed Bacchæ Euripides himself would not wish to see. I thought of the Duke of Wellington’s exclamation on beholding the first Reform Parliament: ‘Egad, I never saw so many shocking bad hats in me life!’ Woolwick parents, for their part, held up the aimless, brainless rout of Verona’s whist and dancing as a horrible example of how not to do it. Thirty years later, as a guest at a luncheon table in an Eastern college, I encountered an undergraduate who hailed from Verona; a charming youth, highly bred and incredibly fine-looking. He had heard of my father as far back as he could remember, and I of his. We fraternized. We compared philosophies of life.

‘You,’ said he, ‘are exactly what I should expect to find a native of Woolwick: unable to outgrow books, music, and theories, and face life as it is.’

‘And what is life as it is?’

‘God knows! Don’t ask me! I am merely existing in this dump of a college town until I can go back home, make brick like my father, and settle down to enjoy life with the county families.’

‘And how does one enjoy life?’

‘How does one enjoy life?’ echoed the Gentleman of Verona. ‘ Could such a question have come from any place but Woolwick? “How does one enjoy life?” One enjoys life, my friend, with a girl and a car.’

VIII

Verona, I am inclined to believe, is a larger place than the shire town of Franklin County. All in due season I was sent to the eldest and most celebrated of the Eastern universities. I went, as became a child of the wheat and hog belt, prepared to venerate. Plenty to venerate I found, but it was not the cultural estate of the majority of undergraduates. These sons of upperand middle-class families had been through famous Latin schools and academies; they had lived next door to teeming libraries, rich museums, storied monuments, theatres, opera houses, concert halls, and soil trodden by the good and great. The air around them was thick with history and tradition.

They were like the man who was told that Christopher Columbus was dead: he had n’t ‘ even heard that the guy was sick.’ They were fine fellows. They had, for the most part, superb bodies and robust characters. Culturally they went in rags. Learning had always been a school exercise; hence, a bore. Intellectual enthusiasms were socially bad form, things only to be indulged in by Jews and graduate students from onehorse colleges. As for music, aside from a correct attachment to the football anthems with which college nationalism implores its tribal god of battles, their favorite songs were ‘Hello, Peaches!’ and ‘Waltz me around again, Willie!’ Pecunious Philistines. It was disconcerting — to have come, a passionate pilgrim, from the tall timber and to find these sons of the elect numbered among the intellectual great-unwashed. I was forced to conclude that the greatest of all opportunities may be lack of opportunity.

Exceptions, of course, there were. Let me mention one. He was an oarsman, an ardent scholar regardless of the jocular contempt in which scholarship was held by his mates, and also something of a poet. He was forever turning up at obscure theatres where courageous actors were experimenting with Ibsen and Shakespeare. We fell to comparing notes. He related that as a child his mother had brought him up on Shakespeare, Beethoven, and the Bible.

‘Why, what a coincidence!’ said I. ‘That is exactly like a story my mother used to read me on Sunday afternoons when I was a little boy — Captain January.’

‘My mother,’ he replied calmly, ‘wrote that story.’

He was, it appeared, the grandson of a woman who had learned to read Greek after she was forty-eight years old. Her name was Julia Ward Howe.

IX

And now that I have told you a story it is only fair that you should stay for the moral. A story should carry its own moral? Possibly. I am taking no chances.

Why should I recite events so humble? Who were these but extremely common people, thumping and sawing at music fiendishly hard for them? To brag of my home town, to glorify my own folks? My home town is no different from yours. As for my own folks, they have been paid long ago in a higher coin than any of mine. The two beloved and valiant souls have rested side by side under their tomb slabs this many a year; and people whose bodies the good gray doctor healed, and whose hearts his wife warmed and comforted, go quietly year after year to lay flowers on their graves. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.

No: the moral is something quite other. And this is it. If democracy is to be anything more than a dead level of squalid mediocrity, then common life must be lived nobly and well; and it seems to me that I have been describing one of many ways in which it may be. Suppose the property question settled—as settled, soon or late, of course it must be. Suppose everybody were already comfortably above the poverty-line, as we of the middle class are now. What then? One hundred millions living the life of full belly and empty head? God save us! I think the intellectual squalor of our middle class far more shameful than any imputed physical squalor of the poor. For the middle class has at least had a chance at things of the mind and spirit.

If common life is to be lived nobly and well — as it must be if these United States of ours are to be anything more than a highly comfortable and sanitary sty — it must be by common people exerting themselves as strenuously for some form of ideal excellence as they would for a great career; it must be by multitudes of common people living lives of greatness in obscurity without thought of applause or reward, but solely for the sake of the life itself, knowing it to be worth all that it costs. That, as I now realize after the lapse of a quarter of a century, was what these Woolwick people were doing. Humble folk though they were, they had in them the stuff of greatness. It never entered their heads that their deeds and lives might some day be proclaimed as beautiful and worthy. The suggestion would have set them aghast. Therein is half their beauty and worth. I know America to be full of this possibility, because all humanity is. In it is the hope of our future — common people living, in obscurity, lives of greatness.

I have not pretended that what Woolwick did was easy, or that it was done in a year. All told, it took three decades. Was it worth the time and effort?

Here let me answer for myself. And let me limit my answer to a single event — a certain Christmas concert, and that stirring ballad by Ciro Pinsuti, ‘The Raft.'

Christmas of frosty stars and moonlit snow; Christmas that had brought a cherished fuzzy white-woolen rabbit with pink-bead eyes; and Christmas that came with the heightened glamour of a concert in a hall up three interminable flights of stairs — a hall which seemed enormous, peopled with myriad heads, above and beyond which, by being allowed to stand up on one’s seat, one could see the singers banked rowon row, and in front of them the racing fiddle-bows and gleaming brass hornbells of the orchestra; hello! and one’s own father (how strange, and even just a little humiliating) standing up on a raised platform, making queer motions with a stick there in front of everybody: yet no one seemed to think it ridiculous, but looked and listened quite respectfully. And there beside him, beautifully dressed, her lovely hair piled high in a corona of plaited braids, and golden lights on her radiant face, who, who but one’s own mother — looking so fantastically remote up there across all those strangers’ heads, as in a dream: that breast on which one laid a tired and sleepy head, that voice which could croon cradle songs, upborne now on a thrilling tumult of orchestra; a voice which shone like a star! It was singing some tale of shipwrecked souls rescued from death, orchestra shouting for joy, and above its glorious tempest that shining voice hymning praise and thanksgiving. The beloved face was centre and soul of all eyes; the beloved voice was poet and prophet of all souls. . . . What must such a vision do to a child’s imagination? What must such a memory do to a child’s heart?