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 27
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Charles 'Brockden Brown, who belongs to the carly part of the nineteenth cen- tury, might be brought up as our first novelist of note. Frencau, Trumbull, Hopkin- son, Barlow, Thomas Paine, Jefferson-all contributed their share in laying the foun- dation of American literature. We shall be disappointed if we expect to find any such legends in our carly literature as the Arthurian or Carlovingian, for our people did not nurse their children to sleep with song of fairy, or quiet them with story of valiant knight. Our ancestors were stern, practical men and women; Indians, wolves and wild-cats were realities and not myths, and the Puritan religion forbade the little Franklins from believing even in Santa Claus.
The "doubting Thomases," Paine and Jefferson, the Prometheus Franklin, dealt with reality and cared little for romance. Yet we must not think that the germ of romance in Brockden Brown, or the ideal of Trumbull, was lost in political and military heroism, or in Franklin's utilitarianism. Though America had not the myths of the Old World she had her peculiar legends, and these Washington Irving invested with all the romance of Scott, and enlivened them with a humor known nowhere but among Americans- American authors. "The Legends of Sleepy Hollow" make up for the lack of an heroic people in our aborigines.
Cooper introduced the Indian into romance, but it was not the matter of his words so much as the form that made them popular. Neither the Indian or the negro is heroic, although Harriet Beecher Stowe at an opportune moment succeeded in introducing the latter into her novel, and Helen Hunt Jackson with the Indian worked upon the sympathies of her readers without appealing to their reason.
Edgar Allan Poe in this new life of American authors stands not only as a typi- cal Southern poct, but as one of whom the world loves to hear. He was a master of verse, but he lacked that inspiration that will give him a seat "with those saints who see God." The weird charm, the strange fascination of Poe's verse is without rival. "IHis heart-strings are a lute; none sings so wildly nor so well."
For a while after Irving and Poe's period our country was so torn with sectional hate that there was no motive for high literature. The John C. Calhoun, Wendell Phillips and Garrison oratory; the Harriet Beecher Stowe romance; the Bryant, Father Ryan and Whittier poetry, were engaged too much in stirring up jealousy and hatred to inspire lofty thought. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bryant, Father Ryan and Whittier, and even Longfellow, based their writings upon events that are not universal in sig- nificance, and, like Wigglesworth's writings, will meet their doom.
Rodman Drake, our American Keats, in his "Culprit Fay," kept alive the ideality and sincerity of the poet of this period.
From this great strife there was born an ethical spirit, and Emerson, an almost Christ-man, arose in strange contrast to the Garrisons and Calhouns of the day. The Alcotts, the Fullers, Thorcaus and Channings followed as disciples of Emerson.
Theories and speculations of all kinds set men's minds wild in those days, and as Irving worked up the follies and superstitions just anti-dating him, so do we have Hawthorne evolved from the extremes of his age. As was Franklin evolved from
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the extreme Puritanism of the days of witchcraft, so was Hawthorne evolved from the extreme Puritanism that overshadowed the North prior to the Civil War. Like Frank- lin, he could transcend the party spirit of his age; like Irving, he worked his people's follies into a moral; and Hawthorne, the master artist, remains the interpreter of his people in all that is high and holy for all time.
With the Civil War came the interregnum of authors that war naturally brings. After the war men were again busy reconstructing the nation-making the nation, but not literature. With the Centennial of 1876 was ushered in a new era, and while up to that period we had American authors, North and South, yet ours was not a national literature. The past is a book with seven seals, and there arises in the pres- ent a new generation to begin a new page in our literature's future work. The Cen- tennial of 1876 reached out the hand of brotherhood to North, South, East and West; the New Orleans Exposition strengthened the bond of affection; the World's Fair at Chicago riveted it with the everlasting ties of love, and our people will now turn their attention to their own country, its tales and traditions, and, as Hawthorne and Irving, point them with morals worked from the souls of the people. We have traditions of the fore time, ruins of an old civilization, and buried temples; we have Nature in her freshness and beauty; we have pure domestic life molded by freedom; we have the spirit of the ages, the spirit of him who taught the equality of man and the elevation of woman. The South, with an institution no longer retarding her progress, is again being heard in song and romance.
Of Southern birth and education, the daughter of a slave-holder, I am ready to admit that slavery burdened literary growth, especially as we smarted under the sense of wrong done us by those who were as responsible for slavery as we. But now that feeling is sealed in the book of the past, and never since the days of Washington has there been as strong love for the Union and for the Stars and Stripes as is now felt in the South. The South will ever remain the picturesque part of the Union; its peculiar scenery, its "picturesque laboring class, will give themes for poetry and romance. Despite many changes, our relations in society are greatly the same, with deferential black men and superior white men, with our ideas of dependence of woman still lingering, and, strange to say, the newcomer adopts our customs instead of intro- ducing new ones.
George Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Gottschalk, Thalberg, Henry Grady, James L. Allen, Father Ryan and Sydney Lanier could have been born under no other than our peculiar Southern institutions, and the South will continue to enrich American literature with song and story.
The South is not what it was before the war, as far as the old life is concerned; but its men and women are more than they were. Sorrow and sorrow's reflux of energy, the strong natures made better thus are awakening us to a new life; and as we turn over the pages of Eastern magazines, and see there recorded names from the South and West, we feel that now ours is a national literature, to the roll-call of which men and women answer from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the great lakes to the Gulf.
The sunny Southland yet tells of desolation. As the traveler passes through the broad plantations, ruins and negro cabins strangely impress him in their loneliness and emptiness. No young lovers promenade the broad piazzas with admiring negroes in the background. The cedars along the broad walks stand with breaking limbs, untrained and dying; the Doric pillars of the broad piazzas are stained by loose, untrained vines, and only a few negroes or white people are seen here and there. At night the jassmines and magnolias make fragrant the air, the warbling of mocking birds, the chirping of katydids-all remind the listener that much yet remains to inspire Southern literature and art.
The West, too, has joined the national brotherhood, and with her Egglestons, Ridpaths, Bret Hartes, Rileys and Monroes prophesies a glorious future in literature for the West.
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We would like to enlarge upon this era of good feeling of our Howells, War- ners, Holmes, and all others of our authors, men and women; but the time is too short, and we can only breathe the wish that now the practicability of the East, the senti- ment of the South, and the vigor of the West are combined, that no one section will be overbalanced by the other, but that with the strong warp of the North, filled in with the sparkle of the West, and shot with the beauty and colored with the warmth of the South, our nation may weave a garment fit for divinity to wear. A nation is a moral person, and to the authors is the soul of the people committed. We are imper- fect; our mathematics as yet form but broken arcs, but time will shape them into perfect rounds. The heroic here is often too hard, the high too lofty, but the effort ascends to God, and will bless us by and by.
I have attempted to show you the qualities of each section, and now that we are united it remains for the future to decide the possibilities of American literature. Columbus found a new world, and Galileo found new heavens, and we with the micro- scope lay bare the secrets of nature, send messages upon the lightning with heaven's own bolt, bind the ends of the earth together; our knowledge of the conservation of energies makes eternity confirm the conception of the hour and time is no more. Foreigners look in vain for the standing-army of the United States, for our nation marshals her hosts in the hearts of her people, proclaiming that earth did rise and heaven did bend. America, sitting in the barge of state in Columbus fountain, facing the statue of Liberty, shows woman's elevation ever is man's, too. This consumma- tion of science united with spirit Homer foretold mystically in his conception of God in man. Isaiah foretold Christ's reign on earth; Dante saw on top of Mount Purga- toria where a woman led him up, for when woman rises man follows. On our own new America we go not back to the mythical past for the Golden Age, but as Christ taught us Heaven is now, and the Golden Age of Love is ours, which began in the night of the Nativity, was hastened when Capt. John Smith and Miles Standish brought the gos- pel of liberty to our shores, was confirmed when the shackles of slavery fell from every hand in our Union, and when R. E. Lee signed the treaty of peace that binds North, South, East, and West in bonds of union that Puritan and Cavalier, not even Washing- ton and Franklin, could understand; for they read not the liberty of the Gospel as did our Christian heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, who have left with us the pattern of heroes of the greatest Christian drama that has ever been acted upon the stage of history.
PIONEER WOMAN OF OREGON.
By ELIZABETH M. WILSON.
The early history of Oregon's settlement confirms what has been so often said, that " man cannot advance in the march of progress except by the side of woman." If he thinks to march ahead without her, he is com- pelled to halt and wait for his inevitable partner. Turkey has tried to advance without woman; witness her rank among the nations of today. The remarka- ble recuperation which was shown by France after her exhausting wars was explained by the fact that the French woman is an integral part of the nation. She is part of all that contributes to the wealth and prosperity of France; above all, she is there the gen- eral bookkeeper and accountant. She knows where the money goes. The policy of the Hudson Bay Company, the first white men who went west of the Rocky Mountains to stay, required their employes to leave the English Bessies and Jessies, the Scotch Peggies, the Irish Norahs, to pine unmated in the old home, while they attempted a travesty of home mak- ing with only such help as could be found in the sav- age wigwam of the native inhabitants. Not so the American settler. When he started on the long path the wife of his youth was beside him, and together they faced the trials of the new life. When in the ELIZABETH M. WILSON. spring of 1835, Drs. Parker and Whitman were sent by the American Board to inquire into the feasibility of establishing missions west of the Rocky Mountains, Dr. Whitman left his coadjutor when the journey was but half completed, being already convinced of the practicability of the scheme, and when next, in 1836, Dr. Whitman rode abroad, Mrs. Whitman rode by his side. So firmly con- vinced were the missionary boards of the necessity of sending their appointees thus fully complemented, they refused to appoint single men to the work, but required that they should first be made whole men. Reinforcements to mission workers in the field were often followed by wedding bells.
Of the results of the work of the early mission settlers I have personally little evidence. Once while at White Salmon we all went up the mountain-side to where on a small plateau were a number of tepees, the occupants of which were going through the ceremonies of the Smohallo excitement or belief. I soon wearied of what to me was utterly meaningless, and went into a tepee where sat an old smoke-dried crone. She was glad to see me and seemed to have some burden on her heart that I must hear. After much repetition on her part, and bewilderment on mine, I gathered that in spite of her appearance she was not like them. I did not quite know at what she was aiming till I caught the name of " Jason Lee" repeated over and over again. Then she asked me to listen, and with her teeth tightly closed, she sent through them some vocal sounds, which at last I caught to be two or three measures of Greenville. I began to sing " Come ye sinners, poor and needy," she accompanying
Elizabeth M. Wilson is a native of South Argyle, N. Y. Her parents were Rev. Jas. P. and Amanda Miller. She mar- ried Joseph G. Wilson, judge of the Supreme Court of Oregon. She is a member of the Congregational Church. Her postoffice address is The Dalles, Oregon.
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me with what sounded like singing on a comb. She enjoyed it and so did I. Her story l translate to be this: That at one time she had been in the Salem School or under the teaching of Jason Lee; that she had glimpses of a higher life than savagery had given her; that in the years following she had held on to the little she had, stoutly refusing to countenance by her presence the Smohallo incantations. The wigwam smoke and the wild life had well-nigh obliterated the little she knew; but to the name of Jason Lee she held on as to a watchword. Most truly she seems to be one feeling for God's hand in the darkness.
In thinking of the long past, why is it that the more prominent happenings seem all tinged with sadness? There were bright and beautiful days then, days of long sunshine. The few holidays that frontier life afforded were, by contrast, very keenly enjoyed. Yet if I am to tell of incidents of those carly times one might think there was little but doing without things, in common times, varied by the days of sickness and death. "Not all the preaching since Adam can make of death other than death." Yet to the new settler it sometimes came in a manner that, with the inevitable home- sickness, no matter how stout-hearted they were, gave an added pang to those who looked on. In September of 1851 I was riding on horseback through the tlien quite unsettled counties of Polk and Yamhill. Somewhere in the north part of Yamhill County we saw the cabin of a new settler. It might be miles to the next house, and uninviting as the prospect was, we thought it better to beg shelter for the night. My escort rode to the man, who was still with his plough, and I dismounted at the cabin, where two little children, perhaps two and four years of age, were looking at me through the rude fence, and said to them: " Please tell your mother to come out." They did not speak, but looked at me. I tried again in what might be the vernacular. "Go call mammy," but with no better results. I then went in, and, taking them by the hand, said: "Take me where mamma is." The little thing led me around the house to the other side of the inclosure, and stopped by a new-made grave!
In February, 1855, I was going on the steamer Canemah to Oregon City. A very young couple, married that morning, were accompanied by the bride's mother, a poor widow, who had reached Oregon a year or so before, stripped by death and disaster of every- thing but her children. The oldest daughter, not much over sixteen, was now mar- ried to a youngster, and they were going to the Cascades, where he had work in a saw- mill, and his wife was to cook for the mess. He was a promising looking fellow, and I fully believed the answer that he made to the again bereaved mother, when, with quivering lips, she said: " Be good to my girl." The bride had evidently felt that to be truly married she must be attired in what she supposed to be bridal array. All the cash possible had been spent in the thin Swiss dress with its bit laces and ribbons. Her appearance brought a hardly concealed smile to those who were in the cabin, but in that terrible winter rain-storm it was likely to bring worse to her. I began talking with her and when she said it was the first time she was ever on a steamboat, I could easily. say, "Then you don't know what a place it is to take cold, with its hot fires and cold air rushing in when we are obliged to open the doors," and soon showed her where behind a portière, the only retirement possible, she could change her thin, open-sleeved gown for something warmer, and at the same time in better accordance with the cus- tom of travelers. I became very much interested in their hopes and plans, and it was with a sense of personal bereavement that, the following fall, I read the name of the young husband as being hanged by the Indians in his sawmill, having first witnessed the butchering of his wife.
From the Cascades' frozen gorges to where the Columbia plunges jubilant to the sea, by many a bright prairie and pleasant valley, they still live who shared in the early, if not the earliest, work of saving to our country the fair heritage of Oregon. Give them, from your older and richer civilization, a kind, sisterly thought as they sit waiting in the lengthening shadows.
A STUDY IN GOETHE'S FAUST. By MRS. MARY H. PEABODY.
It is a notable fact that within very late years much attention has been given to the study of Goethe's poem of "Faust." It has not been idle reading but serious inquiry, an acknowledgment that in this drama there lies something which is of general value, which appeals to experience and can bear exposition. People who have scarcely known the poem, who have a fragmentary idea of a part of the story of Faust, through its renditions upon the stage in opera or in play, now catching a hint of its power as edu- cation and philosophy, turn to this masterpiece of literature, eager to know more of its meaning. Liter- ature is often popular because of its pleasing form, its melodious movement, its appeal to single lines of sympathy, the presentation of single elements of life in tragic or happy aspects. These lighter forms, lovely in their places, are like graceful melodies which are easily repeated from mouth to mouth; but the poem of Faust is like a symphony, whose inter- woven parts are so many that even to know the leading theme and idea of the work one must listen carefully and more than once. For this reason, to read the entire poem of Faust and know it all is to study it; and the interest now aroused in the drama as one MRS. MARY H. PEABODY. of the world's greatest literary works, by intelligent people, has a significance as a sign of progress. The drama of Faust is a drama of life.
But so it is with the work that men do. They see the word within, which must be said, yet they know not for whom they labor. Emerson said: " Without a thought of fame must true work be done." The test of fame is time, and from that crucible now comes to us the poem of Faust, and we are reading it, and reading it now, for reasons which lie in the character of the work itself.
The poem of Faust stands in literature with striking individuality as the only great writing which within itself endeavors to present life as a whole, in a universal aspect. It uses the entire scale, the whole sphere of life. It presents within its limits all passions of human nature, bad and good; it shows men and women equally, in all relationships, lowest and highest; it is in its fullness the picturing of all lives -- it is the poem of humanity. Because of this recognition of life as a whole each reader reads as for himself, yet he comprehends that his own part comes from the very largeness of the writing -- from the fact that there is no effort to teach separate and particular lessons, but only through the outer form of the poem to carry onward the strong lines of its broadly human intention. The elements of the poem of Faust are nature on the one hand and the soul of man on the other, and the meeting of the two upon the planes of daily action in ordinary human life. In this drama the outer form
Mrs. Mary H. Peabody was born at Hartford, Conn. Her father was Dr. S. Saltmarsh, who married a Miss Sanford, of Philadelphia. The daughter was educated principally at home, and finally at the school of Mr. Emerson in Boston. She married Mr. D. W. Peabody, who was a lawyer in Nashville, Tenn. Her special work has been in the interest of the kinder- garten and the studies of history and literature. Mrs. Peabody has been engaged in instructing parlor classes, clubs and kindergarten training classes. She is regarded as "Having clear views in her department of work, and has a method of utter- ance that gives her writings both strength and grace." In religious faith she is of the New Church, and is a member of the Society at Cincinnati. Her postoffice address is No. 128 East Sixteenth Street, New York City.
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is varied, frequently abrupt in transition, and therefore broken as to harmony of its literary movement. It is as though one twining a wreath had set together rose, weed and thorn, blossoms and fruits, that nothing should be left out, giving externally appearances ill-sorted or beautiful as the case may be, but within, as the student dis- covers, there flows a current of life strong, clear, unbroken-one movement of power which resolves itself into a single principle, moving with a single purpose from center to center, from heart to heart of all forms of life. This interior idea, upon which rests the writing of Faust, is the idea of the relationships of things one to another, of the relation of thought to action, the relation of man to nature, to God, and, supremely for its emphasis and culminating force, to the relationship of man to man here and now in human life.
Under the dramatic guise of figures, who move on both sides of the mystic hori- zon of earth, as human beings and spirits, high and low, evil and good, with Faust, Mephistopheles, Margaret, Helen, Homenculus and Euphorion as leading characters, this majestic drama inclosed at its heart a single thread of light, clear burning to illuminate the whole. If we call it by its simplest name, that line of noblest teaching is human duty-the Brotherhood of Man. And this is the reason why, in these clos- ing years of our age, this poem of Faust is for the first time being studied by us. In these years, when the conflict of conditions is stirring the whole world to collision, argument, rebellion and agreement; when polity and economics, the having and the not having of life, are forcing us to higher planes of thought; when justice from man to man is the demand of the hour, this wonderful drama, which has lain biding its time, now opens its pages, and with its devils and its men, in the light of two worlds at once, presents to us our own question of the relationship of man to man, the question of that clear-eyed daughter of the gods-whose name is Duty; relationship truly bal- anced-justice among men.
That Goethe foresaw our needs and wrote for us, we know, of course, was not the case. In youth something pressed upon him to be done. To satisfy himself, he reached outward after all of life above, below, and here. He drew the circle of his desire, " the near and far," set Faust therein to mark its center, and part by part, as he lived his own life, he set his figures in their places and bade them play their parts as revelation of the thoughts that arose within him. Perhaps not until he was old did he know, himself, what task it was that had been set for him; what it was that he had done. Faust represents Humanity, and as years went on, Goethe, rounding out his work, reached backward, introducing the scenes which now stand as the opening parts. Catching sight of his own thoughts in the ripeness of his maturity, he inserted "The Dedication," " The Prelude on the Stage," and " The Prologue in Heaven." These three are the keys by which we may interpret all that follows-and this brings us to our especial subject of to-day, the briefest study of " The Prelude on the Stage."
In this scene three men are present-the manager of a theater, the stage jester and a poet. The manager wants a new play for his theater. He wants something not ordinary, but, on the contrary, exceptionally good. He tells the poet that he wants to amuse and attract the crowd. They are of all sorts and kinds, these people. They have read not a little, they are interested in life, expectant as to the theater. The play must appeal to them all, for it is but just that they who support him, and whom he hopes to see crowding to his doors, should have something to reward them for their coming. In such a case what can be done? So the manager goes on talking of his needs and his scheme. He is shrewd and business-like as to the people and the play, and he is evidently intelligent as to his chosen author, for when he has gone over the ground of his requirement, acknowledging that the task is by no means a light one, he turns to his companion and says, that the poet alone among men is he who can accom- plish the great task of pleasing men of such varied character. The manager has spoken with a certain degree of caution, leading to the greatness of the work, before he really offers it. But even so, he has not won the interest or the heart of the poet. Turning from the subject in an outburst of repulsion, "Speak not to me," he cries,
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