A Letter to My Father

DEAR FATHER: —
I am not sure whether or not you ever read Kipling’s Jungle Book. If you did so it must have been long ago, when the Jungle Book was first published and was read aloud to me as a very small boy, a little at a time, just before we were called to supper on winter evenings. In that case I think you will remember how Tabaqui, the jackal, came, for no good purpose, to the cave of Father and Mother Wolf and, having made a meal on some bones which they had thrown aside, embarrassed them by telling them how beautiful their children were. As Kipling points out, they were quite properly embarrassed, because there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces.
Perhaps it is also unlucky to compliment the old to their faces, but if there is such a precept I do not think that it applies to the dead. I may, therefore, write words now, without embarrassment to either of us, which I never spoke, and indeed would not have wished to speak, in times past. If it seems strange to you that in the course of what follows I refer to you chiefly in the past tense, you must set it down to the literary affectation by which we are accustomed to speak and write of the dead in that way.
By a necessity even more compelling, — a necessity which, in the very nature of the case, enters into every human relationship, — I can think of you only in the form in which I knew you. You were over forty years of age when you were married, and though you lived to see me grow from childhood to be as old as you were on your wedding day, I saw you — at first through the mistaken eyes of childhood, but at last in very truth — always as an old man. So it comes about that in the picture of you that I like best only your eyes are young. You wear a sedate overcoat, hanging loosely from a buttoned top button, and a sedate felt hat. Your beard is not the full and splendid one which you first grew in the year of the Centennial, — when, having cut yourself in shaving, you came to the quiet resolution that it would be a long time before you shaved again, — but is close-clipped and gray. You stand so straight as to seem to lean backward a little, but your step has lost the spring which made you delight, in your youth, in hunting and in fishing for trout, and with which, in the days of my own boyhood, you set the pace of our Sunday walks together.
‘Where shall we walk to-day?’ I would say on each succeeding Sunday, being, like Cæsar’s Gauls, desirous of new things. ‘Do you see that barn out there?’ you would invariably reply, and we would make the accustomed circuit that took us by the barn, talking on many subjects, but chiefly of the ancient history which I was studying at school and of that other history you had seen with your eyes in the making.

It would be easy to enumerate here the great events to which you were a witness—how, like Grandmother Brown, you saw three of the five great wars in which our country has been engaged, the first telegraph, the first telephone, the first (and perhaps almost the last) trolley car, the first aeroplane, the first radio, the discovery of the North and South Poles, and a thousand other events of like moment and significance. But the truth is that you were, in general, very little influenced by objective events. Indeed, apart from purely personal happenings I can think of only two occurrences in the course of your whole life by which you were greatly affected — the Civil War, and the publication of the works of Emerson.
The Civil War irrevocably fixed your politics. You were born and brought up along the Susquehanna River in the exciting days of the underground railroad. You have told me how a boyhood playmate of yours was charged on a certain day to stay away from the haymow. Boylike, he went there at the first opportunity, and on poking about at random with a fork was startled by a cry of terror from a ‘ black man ’ — the phrase which you always used — who was hidden under the hay. Doubtless little boys were impressed by such experiences and came to more or less unconscious conclusions about them. You have told me, too, that your father was a Whig who could not quite bring himself to vote for Frémont, and that, four years later, after watching a torchlight parade of some followers of Douglas, you burst into the room where he was sitting, demanding passionately, ‘Who are we for?’ ‘We arc for Lincoln,’ your father answered slowly, and you went away satisfied. Two years later you read about the fight between the Monitor and the Merrimac in Hampton Roads, and made a boy’s model of the Monitor which stands beside me as I write. Later still you watched Lee’s cavalry riding down the west bank of the river before the battle opened at Gettysburg, while the smoke from the burning bridge at Columbia darkened the sky.
From such experiences as these came your whole-hearted devotion and loyalty to the Republican Party, which are somehow summed up for me as from a bygone age in the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and which, though a Republican, I do not share, and a sort of mystical faith in political equality — ’the right,’ as you used to say, ‘of bad or ignorant men to express their badness or ignorance at the polls’ — which I also do not share, but which was doubtless the best element in what seems to me to have been the generally bad business of reconstruction. Perhaps I fail to do full justice to this latter feeling, and if so the reason is that I never fully understood it. You were sometimes inclined to leave gaps in your expression of abstract ideas.
There was nothing abstract about your love of Emerson. You planned in your youth to go on a walking trip to Concord in order to see him, but for some reason which I do not know the plan came to nothing, and as a result you never saw him in the flesh. But you read and pondered every word of his prose and verse, and you reread the essays every year of your life with what seemed a growing sense of their majesty and power. A month or two before you died you asked me to have rebound the two volumes that you cherished most (Emerson’s Prose Works, James R. Osgood and Company, Boston, 1876), saying that you wanted me to have them as my inheritance from you. They stand on my bookshelves now. I do not count them the richest part of my inheritance, but I want you to know that I do not undervalue them.
I shall never forget a night, ten or a dozen years ago, when Professor Bliss Perry, speaking under the auspices of the chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the college in the city in which we lived, chose Emerson as the subject of his address. The speaker told of Emerson’s early life and mentioned the death of his first wife and the accidental burning of the house in which he and his wife had lived. ‘But,’ said Professor Perry, speaking, after a little pause, with a sort of ringing suavity of utterance, ‘he came of the old unbeatable Puritan stock — and within a year he had married another wife and built another house at Concord.’ I remember nothing else about that address, except that the speaker succeeded in expressing a part of your own love and admiration for your hero. When it was over, your face was quite pink and radiant behind your beard, and your rather small brown eyes were sparkling and dancing like stars. I asked you whether you wanted to join those of the audience who were going forward to shake hands with Professor Perry, but you shook your head. You were never a ready speaker and you knew that it would have been useless to try to put into words the delight which the evening had given you. If Professor Perry ever sees these words, he will know that for at least one auditor he made a perfect speech that night.
My own feeling about Emerson has always been exactly that expressed by Mr. James Truslow Adams ¹ — that there was in him a sort of superficial optimism which arose from ignoring or denying some of the obvious facts of life. Then I think about you — how you lived and how you died — and I am not so sure.
But all that I have written is beside the point of what I really meant to tell you. You are going to be remembered here on earth for a very much longer time than you would have thought possible, if, indeed, you had thought about that subject at all. I shall tell you why. There is a feeling abroad about you which has been growing in the months which have passed since your death. I have seen it in the face of Herman, the gravedigger, — who, in the intervals between the demands made upon him, was accustomed to help you in the garden and in making your grape wine, — and in the faces of neighbors and tradespeople who knew and spoke with you during your later years. I have heard of it from the lips of the men who worked for you in the prime of your life on the Elizabeth Farms where I was born. I have heard of it, too, from the lips of those men’s sons, who never knew you and who will perhaps speak of it to their sons in after days. This feeling is that you were a very wise man. I think it is true. I write deliberately — I think you were the wisest man I ever knew.
There are many kinds of wisdom. There is the broken but triumphant wisdom of the twice-born, about which you knew nothing whatever. There is the sudden and bewitched wisdom of insight, which belongs to poets and Celts and about which you — who, to use Professor Santayana’s wistful phrase, were ‘almost a poet’ — knew something. But there is another sort of wisdom, which was the greater part of yours, founded on patience and simplicity and on watching

It was an unconscious wisdom on your part. I remember asking you once — half shyly, because I was almost sure in advance what your answer would be — whether you thought you had learned anything in the course of your lifetime about the mystery of life. You answered, as I had expected, that you had learned nothing at all. And yet, though you were unaware of the fact itself, it is easy enough to set down some of the sources of your wisdom and some of the things in which it consisted.
I have said that it was founded on simplicity and on the things of earth. You were brought up as a nurseryman, and you spent the happiest years of your life as the manager of more than a thousand acres of farm land. Though you came afterward to live in the city, the house which you chose on King Street² was at the city’s very edge. You lived there for a generation without taking more than a casual interest in civic affairs and without playing any active part, in them. You were somewhat skeptical about what most Americans regard as progress. You were never a leader. Confident and successful men respected you, and went their ways. I am not sure you were sorry to see them go. You were not readily impressed by the reputation of success.
At heart you were always a farmer. I do not remember having ever heard you use the word ‘ nature,’ and it may well be that you would have sympathized with Meredith’s caustic reference to ‘birds and beasts and herbs which ninnies call nature in books.’ But your interest in individual birds and beasts and herbs was unfailing. I do not think that you could have brought yourself to live anywhere without a garden in which to renew your youth by budding and grafting trees, to grow, among other vegetables, the tomatoes of which you were so proud, and to set up some of the red and green wren houses which you made not only for yourself but for half the children of the neighborhood. To the end of your life you found comfort in sitting alone for long hours out of doors. Balzac has called attention somewhere to the characteristic simplicity of old soldiers and old priests. The comment is acutely made, but it seems to me that he should have added old farmers to his enumeration. The reason for all these simplicities is the same — lifelong adherence to a code, which, whatever theories may be, actually works in practice. We are all withdrawals from the earth, and in the end she never disappoints us.
No one knew you well who had not heard you speak at one time or another of your way of life on the Elizabeth Farms — of your mare, Nellie, on whose back you rode over the red fields and along the little streams that flow between the hills, and of how, pausing sometimes in the hush of early spring, great thoughts would come to you which you could never quite put into words; of Peter and Annie, the middleaged couple who kept house for you; of the annual adventures of sowing and reaping; and of the sick animals to whom, for want of a veterinary, you ministered at need. Your successes in this latter connection seemed to give you greater pleasure than any others which came to you. You would tell, in a vein of ingenuous boasting which was otherwise quite foreign to you, how you studied the few medical works which were available in order to interpret the symptoms from which a given patient was suffering, and how, after due deliberation, you decided to prescribe such and such a medication. Then would come a narration of how the medicine was administered, and finally a celebration of the results accomplished. ‘Jolly!’ you would say proudly. ‘When I went to the stable in the morning anyone could see that that mule was going to get well.’
Less often you spoke of the people of that entire countryside — descendants, most of them, of Hessian prisoners of the Revolutionary War — who came to consult you in all the vicissitudes of their lives. I do not say that it is so, but if you were inclined to overestimate your skill and address with animals, you greatly underestimated your influence on the men and women who, in a not very different fashion, were committed to your care. It so happens that I have met few of those people face to face. One of them, who was a child when she knew you, said recently to someone, who repeated the saying to me, that when she felt like punishing her children she always stopped and asked herself what you would think about it. Another of them, who is now an old man, came to see me a month or two ago, bringing with him a letter which you had written him when you were over eighty years of age. He had seen you only once or twice in more than forty years. He thought that I should like to see what you had written and perhaps should like to copy it. The letter itself he would not let me keep. He said he wanted to give it to his son. The last time you visited Elizabeth in the flesh was even later than the date on which that letter was written. There was to be a reunion of some of the old residents of the neighborhood, and you had been asked to make a little speech. We arrived early at the church in which the ceremonies were to be held, and you and I walked alone as far as the bridge over the stream that flows midway between the church and the mansion house. You stood on the bridge, very frail and gray, but erect and unbroken, thinking perhaps on that June afternoon, as Malory thought on a day in May so many years ago, of ‘old kindnesses that were forgotten by negligence,’ and of such other matters to which, it may be conjectured, the thoughts of the very old turn. You called my attention to a fence along one of the fields, which needed to be repaired. ‘If I were manager of these farms now,’ you said, ‘I would say to Peter and John, “Drop what you are doing for a little while, and let us fix that piece of fence down by the bridge.”’ Then you were silent for a long time, evaluating the greater paradox and the less. At last you smiled and said, speaking slowly as your wont was, ‘In order to do that, all I should have to do would be to get Peter and John out of their graves, and if I were young again I think I could do that.’
Though you lacked both the means and the inclination to travel, had never made the four hours’ journey by rail which would have taken you to New York, and, indeed, had been only once or twice outside the limits of your own state, you were, without exception, the least parochially-minded man I have ever known, and the one least influenced by classifications and catchwords. You instinctively disbelieved in the existence of

If, by some miracle of time and space, you had been set down in the court of the Great Khan, you would not have entertained for a moment that deepseated human delusion of which even the gifted Greeks were not wholly free, that those who speak an unknown tongue arc necessarily barbarians. You would not have reminded yourself that you were a Nordic and that the Khan was of a different race. Setting aside the matter of your personal shyness, of which you had not a little, you would have had no sense of essential superiority or inferiority. You would have met the Khan with perfect simplicity and dignity, and because he was a man you would have known the nature of his hopes and fears and the subjects of his deepest interests.

You used on occasions a ceremonious and stately sort of courtesy which would doubtless have pleased the Khan as much as it sometimes pleased others. A friend of mine has told me of having had a conversation with you on the street, at the conclusion of which he asked you to come to see him and his wife. You answered, ‘ I am an old man, and I go out very seldom in the evening, but when I sit at home I think of many delightful things.’ ‘Exactly,’ as my friend said to me, ‘as if your father sat at home in the evening thinking how delightful it would be to call on Carol and me.’
You once sought — I suspect somewhat whimsically — to justify your slowness of speech by saying that you tried never to advance an argument without restating to yourself the truth which you meant to express, as it might be restated from the point of view of your adversary. The whimsicality lay in the fact, which you knew very well, that your slowness of speech was not confined to argumentative matters; but the rule which you laid down is, for all that, the rule of a true liberal. You were a liberal in everything — in your predispositions toward social and economic questions; in your religious views, which, apart from the doctrine of nonresistance in which you did not believe, were strongly similar to those held by the Quakers; in your attitude toward science and scientific research. I remember the interest and delight which you took in the implications of the new physics, and the comment which you made on a book which contained an explanation of the Einstein theory. You read the book twice, and when you had finished it for the second time you said to me, ‘ I did not understand all of this book, but I did understand some of it. I have known all my life that there is only one thing in the world, and the scientists, working in their own way, are on the track of finding it out.’ The idea which you expressed is of course as old as Democritus and some of those other Greek philosophers who were half poets, instead of being half scientists, as are the philosophers of to-day; but I agree with you that in scientific matters the signs of the times are good. If the scientists can keep their verities within five thousand years of the guesses of the poets, they have every reason to be proud.
I have written this much, and yet I have not written what wisdom is, or what a man must do or refrain from doing in order to become wise. No man, it seems, may transmit to his son the wisdom that is his. The secret of its attainment is hidden even from himself, and is not to be purchased with money or expected as the certain reward of age and experience or won by taking anxious thought. If it were otherwise, we should all come at last to the full stature of wisdom, and, having done so, we should put away those foolish things whereby we are troubled and made afraid.
‘Raphael paints wisdom,’ said your master Emerson, ‘Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it. . . .’ You, who painted no pictures and carved no statues, whose songs were without notes and whose poems were without words, who built houses only for birds, and who never sailed adventuring on an}' of the Seven Seas, came also to wisdom by a road of your own finding. It was not the road of the gifted and the great of lhis world. I am mindful, nevertheless, of the saying of the apostle that the foolishness of God is wiser than men.
Perhaps a knowledge of this truth is the greatest of all the blessings which have come to me as
YOUR SON