USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Congress of Women : held in the Woman's building, World's Columbian exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893 : with portraits, biographies and addresses > Part 11
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Note the long process of ethical and religious culture filtering and refining through all the ages up to this present date of the Columbian Exposition; and, in the name of
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the universal law of correspondence, mark the prestige it lends to woman, the new factor in economics, and the warranty it establishes for her final emancipation into all the efficiences and prerogatives of free citizenship. When that fruition arrives, when man and woman-the dual unity of the race-are equal partners in directing the forces of social destiny, we might almost imagine and believe that the material king- dom also may become transformed into joyous correspondence with the loving equity of the human world; that the serpent's venom and the insect's sting, the carthquake's mumbling threat and the direful sweep of the tornado's wing, will no longer find place in nature's record. Note also, that, parallel with the transformations in religious and ethical ideas which antedated woman's economic debut, have been the change in forms of government and social institutious. A beast of prey the primitive man rose to nomadic forms of culture, patriarchs gave place to kings and emperors, these in turn to constitutional monarchy, and this slowly to the democratic idea and the rights of man. The bloody track of governmental evolution, conspicuous with the panoply of war, was built upon fallen thrones and devastated dynasties, the sentiment of patriotism broadening, in the red struggle, from the family to the nation.
And woman-waited! Not yet the fullness of time for her awakening to the world's need of her citizenship. Something more of brute crudity must be eliminated from the tumultuous forces of civilization. Some broader conception of human life and its universal relations must modify the world's ferment ere woman would arise from her world-old, hypnotic trance to a realizing sense of her individual ability and power, and the need of her taking an equal hand with man in working out a universal order. The ages had thundered from the date of chaos, and she had not awakened. But there came a noiseless, white-winged thought into the human atmosphere, and woman arose and stood upon her feet, and knew herself, and the world's need, and this was the white-winged thought: "There is but one life and humanity is its spiritual image."
As the genius of the springtide sets all the forces of nature in sweetest passion for expression, so does this thought quicken the hearts of men and women into a mania to make the material interests of the entire humanity correspond to this spiritual fact. To a no less work than this is woman called and awakened: to convert discord into harmony, rivalry into emulation, jealousy into magnanimity, competition into co-operation, pov- erty into comfort, and the love of money into the love of man. Need I say that such a transformation of the motives of human action-slow, silent, invisible-must sooner or later work out a system of society and government in which each shall stand for all and all for cach. It is but a question of time. The century plant that waits a hundred years for its life's fulfillment is no less certain of its final glory than the convolvulus that greets the dawn with expanded petals.
There is no uncertainty in the eternal goodness, and the inevitable advance of woman into all the lines of free citizenship is but a part of "that Divine event to which a whole creation moves."
ART. By MRS. EMILY CRAWFORD.
The subject is rather a comprehensive one, as the Arts when allied to the Sciences are the most important factors in our modern lives. Whether we eat or drink, rush about the world in luxurious trains or mammoth steamers, or lounge at home in beautiful rooms, resting our weary bodies on exquisitely fashioned and com- fortably cushioned seats, recreating our tired minds with the work of others' brains, the too often abused "fiction," the Arts everywhere encompass us with a cloud of beauty and comfort, which has become so much our natural atmosphere that we fail to notice it, accepting it as the usual thing, until a day comes when we find ourselves in wilder and more uncivilized regions, where nature only provides the art material. Then we speedily and very gratefully recognize how artificial or made up of arts our own habits of exist- ence are. The Sciences provide us with a solid frame- work, and the Arts clothe and embellish that basis, for our use and enjoyment. The higher arts, or high art, as it is more popularly called, meaning painting, sculpture and literature (it is still a disputed point whether architecture should be called an art or a sci- ence); high art may be defined as the expression of MRS. EMILY CRAWFORD. any idea or emotion, the arresting of it as it first pro- ceeds from the mind, the giving to it a more solid and durable form, a sort of body, in which it can be shown to others and started on its career in the world. A single noble idea from one noble mind so fitted out can go on and onward, illuminating and firing other minds in its course, leaving its lumi- nous track behind it. The traces of its passing will be very evident; it would be impossible to overestimate its influence when it becomes translated into works and lives.
In looking over the collection of the various works of art accumulated in the museums of the countries where they originated, or to which they were transplanted from countries still older, so old, in fact, that their histories only remain written in their sculptures, potteries or carved gems, which, from their substance, are imperishable, and which are from time to time dug out of the masses of fallen masonry, earth and sand that have almost obliterated the traces of the cities where they were made; in looking over such collections we easily recognize one of the first uses to which art was applied, the recording of passing events for the instruction of succeeding generations. Con- sider with what difficulty those records were cut into the granite of the colossal blocks of the Assyrians, or burnt into the cylinder of the Egyptians! It was certainly pur- suing literature under difficulties. One cannot imagine flashes of wit being chiseled
Mrs. Emily Crawford was born in New London, in the County of, Middlesex, England. Her parents were thoughtful and cultivated people. She was educated at home, and with considerable thoroughness, especially in art. She has traveled in many lands. She married James Alexander Crawford, B. C. S. Her principal paintings up to the present time are life- sized portraits in pure watercolors. She was appointed judge of Special Handicraft for the Columbian Exposition, and has been invited to write the special report on Japanese Bronzes, Japanese Cloisonnes and the Enamels from all nations. In religious faith she is a Protestant, and is a member of the Church of England. Her permanent postoffice address is The Well House, Chilworth, Surrey.
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out in such laborious fashion; their delicate essence would have disappeared. All such trifling with the thistledown of fancy had to wait until the medium united to such ephemeral conceits was invented-the stylus and wax-tablets, that could be scrib- bled on and the writing erased in a moment. The stylus and tablets soon became highly ornamented, and had their fashions like our lizard-skin note-books and ivory tablets have.
But the medium that lent itself so painfully to literature, lent itself to another art-sculpture-with far more satisfactory results, no less painfully to the artist, per- haps, because all good art is brought out in discomfort. There is no such thing as case in art. It is effort, mental and bodily, all the time, and the huge figures of the ancient Egyptian kings, priests, doorkeepers, and so on, remain to awe us with their grandeur and an earnestness which we seem to have altogether lost. After all, the greatest artist is Time. I knew of a colossal lion that lay for ages at length on a promontory and looked out over the blue seas, while the suns of centuries burnt his gigantic hide into very nearly the color of the living one, and into his raised and watchful visage grew an expression and a pathos that was most assuredly beyond the power of his sculptor to produce. There is a something about the Egyptian art that appeals to our human sympathies more than the more modern, and the much more materially perfect Greek art, whose most splendid statues leave us plunged in wonder at their knowledge and correctness and beauty of form, but seldom prompt us to wish we knew more of the individual and his thoughts and fancies. Of course this doesn't hold good for such statues as are portraits - of the Cæsars, or the great philosophers, for instance. About such people the ordinary rank and file of the world must always feel a vivid curiosity. In pictorial art, the earliest known specimens are all of coarse frescoes, mural decorations. We have some very interesting ones of about the time of Moses, before or since, and they give us a very good idea of how the Egyptian of that period lived his life. We see the farmer among his cattle or driving his geese, the hunter going after game, the warrior returning from battle with his captives, and we see the society functions of the time. One especially perfect fresco shows us an entertainment devoted to the ladies, who are seated in rows, in an elegant hall, and are listening to probably the best orchestra to be had. The ladies fan themselves with the peculiar palm-leaf. They are much draped, and appear to feel the heat, while, gliding about among the company, offering trays of cakes and fruits, are very young girl attendants, whose black ringlets are kept in place by a fillet of white or gold, with a blue lotus lily stuck through it, an effective costume and their only one. While touching upon dress I only mention that we have a little Egyptian figure whose dress is "accordion-pleated" from throat to feet ; it also wears a little "accordion-pleated" cape. So the fashions and arts of dress come round.
The frescoes that cover the walls of the exquisite little houses of Pompeii are wonderfully elegant and fanciful in device and brilliant in coloring, exquisitely fine and finished as everything in that jewel-box of a city was even to the delicate mosaics that covered its floors. It is a whole education in art to wander alone through the deserted streets of Pompeii toward sunset, when the purple and red shadows begin to sweep over Vesuvius, that wonderful background to that wonderful town; that mount- ain, that still roars and threatens and shoots up its fiery column, as it did of old, un- heeded, until at last it poured its fiery lava over the town and preserved to us those gems of its arts by which we are now profiting. Here we can see where the Italians acquired their sense of color. It was in the nature around them, in the translucent skies, the glowing light, the sun-mellowed marbles of their homes, the garments dyed with indigenous pigments that could never clash with their native surroundings.
Portraiture seems to owe its origin to various motives besides the vanity to which it is most generally ascribed. We all know the pretty fable of the young lonic girl who parted from her lover in the sunset, and as he went from her she saw his shadow thrown on the wall near by, she took a piece of charcoal and ran it over the shadow's outline, and so kept a faint image of him till he came again -- a pretty story that em-
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bodies the universal desire to keep some sort of foothold on this transient existence, to leave a something that will at any rate testify to the fact that such a personage once really lived and labored, or to secure this kind of remembrance for one's beloved. Occasionally one touch of nature will do this.
In the cloisters of Westminster Abbey there is an unremarkable stone; cut on this stone in old characters is a very short inscription, "Jane Lyster-deare Childe." Nothing more. Yet every traveler goes to see this simplest of gravestones, and if he, or more particularly she, has any imagination or human feeling at all she will understand all that was left unsaid those many years ago. I think this inscription touches the high- est point of suggestiveness in art, the what to leave undone is well-nigh as important as the what to do.
Those extraordinarily accomplished artists, the Japanese, have long grasped this fact, and, I believe, more than one treatise exists on how much can be or should be expressed by a single line as the very climax of the art of representation or sugges- tion.
I have attempted to give very concisely some notions of what must always be somewhat vague, the beginning of art. You will be able to form your own estimate of what it was, how arrived at, from the examples from all countries gathered together in this magnificent Exposition. You will find admirable specimens of the primitive attempts at ornamental art in the Smithsonian loan collection exhibit down-stairs, "Arts of Women in Savagery." Some of them are perfectly classical in form, funda- mentally identical with the ancient relics of Etruria. All these will well repay a care- ful study. The pictures and statuary from the various countries I need scarcely recom- mend to your attention; the galleries that contain them are here as everywhere the great center of attraction.
THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. By MRS. ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY.
If the illustrious navigator in whose honor we are now holding this wonder- ful World's Columbian Exposition, had so shaped his adventurous voyage as to have first sighted land on the western slope of the two Americas, the history of this continent's dis- cóvery and development would have been strangely metamorphosed. Then the star of Empire, lured by balmy skies, would have made its way cast- ward, loitering leisurely in its course, often halting for generations to enjoy the cquable temperature of the Pacific Coast, and never pressing onward to encounter the more rigorous climate of the Atlantic border until compelled to advance by the civilization surging behind it. But the destiny which directs the progress of civilization in every age never for a mo- ment forgot the golden West; and with a wise design of which we, today, are reaping the benefits, the pre- serves of the Pacific Northwest were held in reserve in the nation's youth, that they might become the heritage of the fortunate descendants of the hardy stock of Anglo-Saxons who long ago conquered the adverse climatic elements of the Atlantic scaboard, in blissful ignorance, through all their years of toil, that the balmy zephyrs of the Pacific were playing at hide- MRS. ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY. and-seck among Sierran vales, or singing summer- laden peans through the mighty trees where rolls the Oregon.
And yet, this favored land had not been left for long without a witness. Destiny, as if mindful that some day the children of men might wonder at her apparent partiality to later generations, began as carly as the year 1513 to make preliminary preparations for carrying out her plans.
Let us turn the search-light of history upon the inland empire of the Pacific Northwest and study its discovery from a landsman's standpoint. In the year 1804 an expedition, led by Captains Lewis and Clarke, started westward from a point east of the Mississippi River into the unexplored and almost unknown wilds stretching across the North American continent.
After a summer of wild, enjoyable adventure in the wilderness, the party went into winter quarters in the fall of the same year, on the banks of the Upper Missouri River, in what is now the State of Montana. The following year, after having grown accus- tomed to their adventurous life, they pitched camp for winter quarters at the mouth of the Lou Lou fork of the Bitter Root River, a branch of the Upper Missouri, near
Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway is a native of Illinois. She was born in 1834. Her parents were John F. Scott and Annie Boloefron Scott, who were natives of Kentucky, but emigrated to Illinois with their parents in childhood. She was educated, chiefly by her own efforts, after marriage, when surrounded by her own children in the Oregon frontier. She has lectured in all the large cities, and has traveled extensively over the Pacific Northwest. She married Mr. B. C. Duniway in 1853, in Oregon. Her special work has been in the interest of Equal Suffrage and the diffusion of practical business methods among those women who must help themselves. Her principal literary works are a poem entitled "David and Anna Matron," and numerous serial stories published during a period of twenty years in her own newspaper, The New North- west. Mrs. Duniway is a member of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Her postoffice address is 294 Clay Street, Portland, Oregon.
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what is now the thriving modern city of Missoula. From this point they made fre- quent excursions, and by ascending Lou Lou fork discovered the now famous Lolo trail through the otherwise formidable Bitter Root Mountains. After having suffered severely from cold and hunger the party reached a Nez Perce village in the early spring, situated on an open plain contiguous to the south fork of the Clearwater, an important tributary to the Snake River.
In passing down the Clearwater the party noted three creeks, the most famous of these being now known as the Potlatch, which fructifies the beautiful and extensive Paradise Valley of Idaho, in the midst of which sits Moscow.
The journey of Lewis and Clarke was a series of exciting, laborious and often perilous adventures. But they reached the coast in safety and erected a rude fortifi- cation for winter quarters, which they named Fort Clatsop. They started on their return after a stay of some time, and after a leisurely voyage up the Columbia they reached the Willamette River, called by the natives Multnomah, which was discovered by Captain Clark on the second day of April, 1806.
Continuing their journey up the Columbia, they found the Dalles and Deschutes Indians very hostile and inhospitable. Doubtless the premonition of their forthcom- ing fate had dawned upon the tribes, and the instinct of self-preservation, powerful even when hopeless, had been awakened by rumors of a dreaded invasion of which these explorers were indeed forerunners.
But Yellept, the head chief of the Walla Wallas, inspired no doubt by the same premonitions, although they affected him differently, received the party with savage demonstrations of joy. He begged them to partake of his hospitality, and urged them to invite all nations to treat the Indians kindly. Setting an example himself, he brought them an armful of wood and a platter of roasted mullets with his own hands, a most peculiar service from the hands of an Indian chieftain, since it is a well-known part of the Indian's unwritten code to delegate every kind of domestic duties to women, including every burden of the camp and fire incident to their primitive modes of life.
Colonel Gilbert, in the " Historic Sketches," tells us that Yellept had five sons, who were all slain in battle, or perished miserably from white men's diseases. A num- ber of years after Lewis and Clarke had partaken of his hospitality this noble chieftain saw the last one of them die. Heart-broken, the old man called his tribe together, and, lying down upon the body of his son in the grave, he sternly commanded them to cover him up with his dead.
A wail of lamentation went up from his people, but they buried him alive as he had ordered, and the glory and greatness of the Walla Wallas had departed.
The modern psychic tells us, upon evidence that to him is demonstration, that the Indians' heaven is located within the earth's aura, and directly above the earth and beneath the American pale faces' "Devochan;" that in this heaven all genuinely "good" Indians find their happy hunting-grounds restored to them in duplicate, with all the modern improvements added. In these Elysian shades the pale face cannot enter to rob them of their homes, or possess their squaws or maidens, or spread among them the diseases and disasters of civilization and death.
The swaying pines of the lands the pioneers loved, and left to us as a heritage, chant their eternal requiem. The mighty mountains wear white crowns of everlast- ing snow in their honor, and the broad prairies adorn their lowly graves with regularly returning flowers, as the seasons come and go. The iron horse wakes shrillest echoes now, where erst the bellowing of the belabored ox was heard. Steam and lightning have out-distanced time and conquered space in the years that have flown since they fell asleep. The echoes of the mountains and the rocks are answering back to new conditions, and the sons and daughters of the pioneers are confronted by new prob- lems of which their parents scarcely dreamed. These pioneers, in goodly numbers, found their way to Oregon early in the " forties " and " fifties," making their way across the continent in the dim wake of Lewis and Clarke. The four-wheeled ship of the desert was their vehicle and the rough-ribbed ox their motive power. In peril often,
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in fatigue always, and sometimes through sickness, death and deprivation they struggled onward toward the setting sun.
But these carly settlers found at length a country that well repaid them for their toil; a country of surpassing beauty and diversity of scenery, soil and climate; a country in which the giant minds that planned their exodus from older lands might have the ample room they needed to extend and grow. After reaching the Territory of Oregon, they settled, often in widely separated fields. For several years they lived in isolation, but also in health, peace and primitive plenty. They made friends with the Indians, and, forming a provisional government, protected themselves and the red man alike within its statutes.
But the discovery of gold, first in California and a little later in Oregon, was the lever that worked the change in the provincial habits of these Spartan-souled heroes.
By the beginning of the year 1850 the whole world had caught the gold fever. Men left their homes and families and flocked together to the new Eldorado like cor- morants scenting the means of subsistence from afar. They settled California with a heterogeneous multitude from all the nations of the carth, and gradually, as the con- tagion spread, extended their peregrinations into Oregon, where nature had, in many places, been equally successful in storing up and hiding away her precious ores.
The entire region lying west of the Cascade Mountains, within the " rain belt," rejoices in two seasons, the wet and the dry. And yet, there is no drought in summer, nor is there any long continued spell of rain at one time in winter. The climate is mild throughout the year. Here is the home alike of the fruit and the grain, the forest and the mineral. If you fancy that you prefer to settle upon government lands there are yet many openings for such homes, where, by going from twenty to one hundred miles away from present railroad facilities, thus following in a much modified form the heroic example of carly pioneers, you may, by overcoming com- paratively few of the obstacles they encountered, achieve a like or a greater success.
Do you wish a climate with more marked extremes of heat and cold? The exten- sive tablelands of the castern portion of this great domain invite you to possess them. Here, also, in many places, are the homes of the fruit and the grain. Here are mountain fortresses with intersecting valleys and limpid streams. Here, too, is the home of irrigation, the home of the stock grower and the stronghold of the baser metals, as well as of gold and silver and precious stones.
While I do not believe in a one-sexed country, any more than a one-sexed home or government, I do believe that women should have equal chance with men to acquire the homes, that both the sexes equally need, and must jointly occupy. The one great obstacle in the way of women getting homes in the country is their too fre- quent desire to possess lands of arca so great that to live upon them means isolation. But if women as well as men, when in quest of homes, would be content with farms containing five, ten, or at most forty acres, bringing with them, to a new country, sufficient means to carry them through the first year or so of settlement, say any- where from five hundred dollars up, there are comparatively few of you, who are often rack-rented in the great cities, and overstrained in every way in trying to keep up appearances, who would not find youselves and those dependent upon you very soon in independent circumstances. When you live in the country, on land of your own, you are free from the exactions of house rent, water tax, and the constantly accruing wood, milk, butter, eggs, fruit and vegetable bills that make your lives a burden. In your city garrets are old clothes enough to keep your families clad in the country till an income grows; and through the care-free lives you may lead under such conditions your broken health returns.
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