USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Short story of three centuries of Salem : 1626-1926 > Part 7
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If, as Macauley said, literature exercises a wider in- fluence than that of commerce and a mightier one than that of arms, and if, as Choate said, the spirit and tradi- tions of old Salem, by Hawthorne's matchless works, would be preserved, even though all else was swept away, Salem's greatest pride in her sons must be in Hawthorne, and our chief glory, among many, after three centuries, must be in our literary heritage. In the experience of some of Hawthorne's characters, Mr. George again says, "in revealing the true relation of Art and Morality, he rises to the supreme height and becomes the greatest creative genius, the most perfect constructive artist, the most significant master of style, yet given to America".
How natural it is that our greatest pride should be in this son of Salem is understood when we consider how deep seated and universal the desire is for literary ex- pression. A current writer in a very interesting article says, "who has not felt that itch to capture the secret of self expression? Whether as a boy or girl, struggling over compositions for school or college, or as an adult reader, closing the covers over the last pages of some felicitous, delightful, volume of essays, fiction or poetry, or even upon those familiar frequent occasions when we would write to a friend-there are few but have wished for the ability to dip grandly, like the Great Pym of Barrie's tale, and set down, in clear and charming lan- guage, the drift of thought and feeling ; if there is a com- mon denominator of human experience, one hankering which makes itself felt sometime in everyone, it is this desire for comely self-expression". But accompanying this desire to set down in language the drift of our feel- ings, is a thought expressed by a French writer. He says, "those who feel the weight of centuries of past literature, who are displeased with everything because they dream of something better, for whom the bloom is off every-
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thing, and who are always struck with the uselessness, the commonplaceness of their own works, grow to look upon literary art as a thing unattainable and mysterious, hardly to be discovered except in a few pages by the greatest masters; a score or so of sentences suddenly thrill us like a revelation, but the words which follow are just like other words. . Men of genius, doubtless, escape this regret and pain because they have within them- selves resistless creative power. The rest of us who are no better than plodding, conscientious toilers can but strive against invincible discouragement by unending effort".
Hawthorne had this restless creative power and he developed and perfected it by the unending effort of the plodding toiler. The skill that harmonizes the subject and the style, the power of words aptly chosen, the swing and the strength or ease of a composition, are the result of what the poet calls 'building and spoiling, and spoiling and building again". Thought and work and study must produce the perfect thing; the successful writer is not a special favorite of the gods. With Hawthorne's life and literary achievements, his world admirers are familiar. He was wholly ours by birth and descent and his labors among us. He lived and labored here under some vicissitudes of fortune and some family sorrow. An English critic called him "the ghost of New England" and another author` says, "he explored the most recondite corners of the human heart and asked the human soul to tell him its most grimly secrets". He tells us he "felt a romance growling in his mind" and it found expression in what has been called his most rep- resentative romance. Outstanding among his works is the Scarlet Letter. In one of his short stories, after a protest against his expressed intention to burn his manu- scripts, Hawthorne causes "Oberon" to say, "let me alone,
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I will burn then; would you have me a damned author? You cannot conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has had on me; I have become ambitious of a bubble and careless of solid reputation ; they have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world and led me into a strange sort of solitude,-a solitude in the midst of men-where nobody wishes for what I do nor thinks nor feels as I do". This suggests the weariness that is bred in the hearts of those struggling for distinction in this line of endeavor. All authors have shared this weariness. DeMaupassant, called the master technician of the short story says, "for seven years I wrote poetry, I wrote stories, I even wrote a villainous play. Nothing of all these remains. Flaubert took a liking for me. I ventured to show him a few attempts. He kindly read them and replied, "I cannot say whether you have any talent; but never forget this, young man; talent,-as Chateaubriand says-is nothing but long patience. Go and work". He says further, "essential above all is the good fortune which enables us to discover and see among the varied mass of matter which is ready for selection the subject which will absorb all our faculties, all that is good in us, all our artistic powers". He says his friendship with Bouilhet convinced him "that persevering work and a perfect knowledge of the art, might in some fortunate hour of clearness, power, and enthusiasm, by the for- tuitous advent of a subject in complete accord with the tendency of one's mind, lead to the production of a single work, short, but as perfect as man can make it; the best known writers have scarcely left us more than one such volume".
This single volume in Hawthorne's case must be his Scarlet Letter. Mr. Burton in an introduction to a book of tales by Hawthorne says, "The first volume of Twice Told Tales appeared in 1837. The fictions that made it
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up were many of them contributed to the annual called The Token published by S. S. Goodrich (Peter Parley). That early patron of American letters, with what now seems an amusingly condescending, hesitant attitude, kept the manuscript of a proposed volume of them for over seven years in his office before daring to put them into print. The earlier tales were written at a time when he was not thoroughly familiar with his own gifts nor conversant in the literary craft he was to adorn. Most of them belong to the Salem days when Hawthorne, a lonely recluse, was impelled to body forth his imaginings and, looking into his own heart, expressed in terms of humanity as he then knew it, the symbolic significances of the eternal spirit of man. The short stories of Hawthorne may be described as black-and-white work leading up to the great canvases which best display his power, the Scarlet Letter and the other full length novels".
It must never be assumed because of the labor and discouragement attending the literary plodder that there are not many bright spots along the way, many happy hours of dreaming, many moments of real exaltation. The black and white work of all who have felt, and tried to develop, the creative instinct, though it found its way ultimately to the flames, has left its reward and its joyful impress on the soul and has given us a better apprecia- tion of the success of others and advanced us toward that spiritual joy which softens and lightens the drab routine of life. "Oberon" still holding his manuscript before the fire says, "how many recollections throng upon me as I turn these leaves. This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air I became all soul and felt as if I could climb the sky and run a race along the Milky way".
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Salem had an author who became all soul and felt as if he could climb the sky. The name of Jones Very will, at once, occur to all our citizens. Emerson called him "our brave saint" and Channing said "to hear Mr. Very talk was like looking into the purely spiritual world." Lowell "admired and loved Very's poetry" and Bryant said his sonnets had "extraordinary grace and original- ity". Our own Mr. Silsbee said of him "he moved in Salem like Dante among the Florentines". A tablet, placed by the Essex Institute, marks his home on Federal Street. His father was a sea captain and, in common with other sea captains, had the characteristic touch of Salem culture. The brothers and sisters of Jones Very inherited from both father and mother a literary tendancy, and his sister, Lydia, remembered by every school boy who attended the Bowditch School in her time, published a book of poems; and there was a brother, Washington Very, a minister who died young. A deeply religious as well as literary strain ran through the family of six children.
Jones made his trips to sea like so many other sons of sea captains, and he taught in Henry K. Oliver's school, was graduated from Harvard and, for a time, taught Greek there. He was an essayist and poet and, having authority to preach without having been regu- larly ordained, he occasionally delivered sermons. He wrote for Unitarian journals and was a close friend of Emerson and Channing.
A French novelist says, "each of us has simply his own illusion of the world, poetic, sentimental, cheerful, mournful, or vulgar, according to his nature" and that "if a writer is an idealist, let us soar to poetic heights to judge him". Such a flight would be necessary to judge Very because from the common level he would be misjudged. He belonged to the school of Transcen-
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dentalists, men and women who lived in the spirit. He was out of touch with the social scheme, and of the woods he said, "one might forget here that the world was desert and empty and all the people wicked". He asserted every one could become "the voice of the Holy Ghost" and he "thought himself but a reed through which the Spirit might breathe a music of its own".
Of those who practiced "plain living and high think- ing" Jones Very was wholly a part, but he lived too plainly, as his attenuated form attested and having, with too high thinking, reached the point where his mental balance was for a brief time threatened, he needed the admonishment which Dr. Chillingworth gave to the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, "come, good sir, and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you home". He was, of course, something of a recluse like Hawthorne who "shunned society" and only to a very limited circle of friends was Jones Very well known. Like Wordsworth's Lucy, he "dwelt among the untrodden ways", and had all the amiability and sweetness of character attending such types. James Freeman Clarke said "the American soil has produced no other man like Very". With charm and appreciation, Mr. Andrews in his memoir describes him. He says, "when one saw the tall, slight figure outlined against a glowing twilight sky, gazing off from some of the craggy hilltops over which he loved to ramble, or perhaps disappearing down a distant valley mellowed with the golden afternoon sunlight,
Rapt, twirling in his hand a withered spray,
And waiting for the Spark from Heaven to fall,
it seems, indeed, as if a gentle presence had wandered here from another world than ours".
With all of us the dreams of youth lie buried some- where and, though truants for many years, we often
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return there, for to such a place the heart prompts many pilgrimages. The special charm for us of such a locality, we cannot find the world over, even though "bounteous nature loves all lands and beauty wanders everywhere". How many of us have counted it a privilege that, in the long vacation time of boyhood's days, the Great Pastures of Salem opened wide its arms and gave us its daisy fields, its miniature ponds, its wealth of berries, its meadow larks, the "freedom of the sod" and the clouds and sky? From its hills there were vistas of the sea, glimpses of the distant spires and headlands; there were sheltered vales, with vines and bushes, and, in open and hidden places, the snow drop, the bluet and the may- flower grew. To this very spot, Jones Very often bent his way, "lone wandering but not lost". What soul wealth he here absorbed is understood by those who have shared it in their wanderings. Of the wildflowers growing in the Great Pastures, he took special note of one, and, because he was so quiet and spiritual, because this flower links many of us to youthful days we would fain live over, memory will find a place today and always for the gentle author of The Painted Columbine.
"Thou blusheth from the painter's page, Robed in the mimic tints of art; But Nature's hand in youth's green age, With fairer hues, first traced thee on my heart".
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CHAPTER VII.
PAST AND FUTURE
"Our fathers' God, from out whose hand The centuries fall like grains of sand, We meet today, united, free, And loyal to our land and Thee,
To thank Thee for the era done,
And trust Thee for the opening one.
Be with us while the New World greets
The Old World thronging all its streets,
Unveiling all the triumphs won By art or toil beneath the sun;
And unto common good ordain
This rivalship of hand and brain.
Thou, who hast here in concord furled The war flags of a gathered world, -
Beneath our Western skies fulfill The Orient's mission of good will,
And, freighted with love's Golden Fleece,
Send back its Argonauts of Peace." WHITTIER.
H AWTHORNE died in 1864 and the story of Salem since that date will be repeated by word of mouth on this anniversary by many living here at that time and now. Salem has changed much from a date even more recent, so rapid has been modern development. The days seem long ago, though well after Hawthorne's death, when the boys sat around the old pumps of the city ready to loosen the check reins of the horses coming there to drink; when the lamp lighter came regularly with his short ladder to care for the lights in the old wooden lamp posts; when the hose wagons of the fire department were hand drawn; when horse racing on
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Lafayette Street during the sleighing season was a stim- ulating pastime to old and young alike; when folks very generally sent the Sunday beans in a pot wrapped in a bundle handkerchief to be cooked in the neighboring bakery; when the now thickly settled sections of North Salem and South Salem were referred to as North Fields and South Fields; when the street cars were drawn first by one horse and then by two, being helped to ascend the hills by a third horse stationed at the foot for that purpose. Yet we had electric service to the Willows before Boston had electric cars and we have kept so well in step with every line of progress that our 300th anniversary finds us and our offspring active and aspiring modern communities. The top of Fort Lee at the Willows is a good place to go to view the sea and the real beauty of our harbor, through the islands of which, Conant and Endecott sailed when Salem was an Indian village. The view is expansive and charming, Man- chester, Beverly, and Marblehead, forming our harbor boundaries. South River, running into Legg's Hill, has a striking boundary in Naugus Head, and the opposite shore was once a line of busy wharves where many ships, outward or homeward bound, loaded and unloaded their cargoes. Bass River penetrates inland to Danvers, and the North River, a favorite haunt of the Indians, skirting Ropes Point, Mack Park, known as Paradise, and Har- mony Grove burial ground, on its way to Peabody, must have been beautiful once, before these sections had been trodden by the foot of the white man.
Salem originally included greater territory than it now comprises and, very fittingly, our neighbors are included in this anniversary. The cities and towns surrounding us became detached, however, at early dates and have been distinct communities with a character and history of their own. Our territory, as described in the Indian deed included :
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"All that tract and parcel of land lying to the westward of Neumkeage river, alias Bass River, whereupon the town of Salem is built, so pro- ceeding along to the head of Neumkeage river, called by the English, Bass river, so compre- hending all the land belonging to the township of Salem, according as it is butted and bounded with and upon the towns of Beverly, Wenham, Topsfield, Reading, Lynn, and Marblehead, down to the sea, which said land is a part of what belonged to the ancestors of the said grantors, and in their proper inheritance." To this was added buildings, of every nature, and gardens, meadows, marshes, and woods, ponds and dams and fishing ways, metals and miner- als; also, "with all islands and privileges of Neumkeage river, alias Bass river."
Ipswich named for Ipswich in Suffolk, England, orig- inally called Agawam, was settled by John Winthrop, Jr. in 1633. It was incorporated in 1634 and is supposed to be the first place in Essex County visited by white men in 1611. Wenham, called Enon, was incorporated in 1643 and was named for Wenham, Suffolk County, England. Manchester incorporated in 1645 was settled by William Jeffrey and was named for the Duke of Manchester.
Marblehead was taken from Salem in 1649. This in- teresting old section was called Marble Harbor. Col. Glover and Capt. Mugford are cherished names in this place. Glover in Revolutionary days took a regiment of one thousand men to Cambridge and Mugford captured in the harbor the British transport Hope, richly laden with ammunition.
Topsfield was incorporated in 1650. The early settlers called this section The New Meadows and the Indians called it Shenewemedy. It was named from Topsfield
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Parish in England. It was "infested in early days with beasts and wolves" and the father of Joseph Smith, the Mormon, was a native of the place.
Beverly was named from a town in the East Riding of York, England. It was incorporated in 1668 but Conant, Balch, and Woodbury commenced the settle- ment, originally called Bass River, in 1630. Conant peti- tioned to have the settlement called Budleigh in honor of the town from which he came but his petition was denied. Danvers was incorporated as a town in 1757. This section included Salem Village and was the spot where lived the Rev. Mr. Parris of Witchcraft days. It was named probably after Sir Danvers Osborne, Gov- ernor of New York in 1753. South Danvers was de- tached in 1855 and became Peabody, taking the name of the distinguished banker and philanthropist of London, George Peabody, who was born on upper Washington street. And in the old burying ground on Main street, where Jones Very is buried, rests, also, the remains of Eliza Whitfield, the story of whose life is incorporated in the work, "Eliza Wharton" by Hannah Webster Foster.
Salem's population has been very gradual of growth and now numbers about forty-three thousand. Her ter- ritory is of limited area but the present cities of Peabody and Beverly and the towns of Marblehead and Danvers, part of our original territory, constitute our greater Salem and comprise a territory of large numbers, with unrivalled scenes of quiet beauty and with a population rich in all the accomplishments and all the virtues of American citizenship.
Much will be said during our anniversary period about the Puritans, about ancestry and about religion. It is a common charge against the Puritans that they were narrow but the poet sympathetically said of the early
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settlers, "who calls them narrow, let his soul be wide." A safe attitude toward them would be "to lay alike their frailities and their perfections to our hearts either as a warning or an example".
In an earlier chapter we said that the Puritans in coming to this wilderness took a step far reaching for human advancement and that they were more of a political than a religious force; but they were indeed both. The political consequence, hardly dreamed of, is our present great nation, and one great heritage which the Puritans left us as a religious force was the law of conscience in all civic and social duties. And if we want to think of them with pride, as we do, John Quincy Adams gives us thoughts to which we may easily sub- scribe. He says, "In reverting to the period of our origin, other nations have generally been compelled to plunge into the chaos of impenetrable antiquity or to trace a lawless ancestry into the caverns of ravishers and rob- bers; the founders of your race are not handed down to you like the father of the Roman people, as the suck- lings of a wolf; no Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of nations, no fabled fugitive from the flames of Troy, no bastard Norman tyrant, appears among the list of worthies. It was reserved for the first settlers of New England to perform achievements, to trample down ob- structions, to dispel dangers under the single inspiration of conscience. Viewing their religious liberties here as held only by sufferance, could they forebear to look upon every dissenter among themselves with a jealous eye? Their zeal might sometimes be too ardent but it was al- ways sincere. Religious discord has now lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are anti- quated; at this day religious indulgence is one of our clearest duties because it is one of our undisputed rights. While we rejoice that the principles of genuine Chris-
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tianity have so far triumphed over the prejudices of a former generation, let us fervently hope for the day when it will prove equally victorious over the malignant passions of our own".
On this anniversary we pause to review three centuries of effort. We acknowledge the inspiration the past gives us, the lesson it teaches us, and we bow to it approvingly, gratefully, sympathetically. Salem's record and rating are high in all that concerns free government, civic advancement, education, culture and refinement. If we, enterprisingly, circled the globe with our canvas in early days, we did not stop there. With the invention of the telephone here, we, later, put a different "girdle 'round the earth". If the Puritans cut the cross from the English flag in the dark days of trial, their descendants exalted it again in happier days. If we drove from our confines all dissenters, we later welcomed the oppressed from every land, the victims of every tyrant, and all true lovers to liberty, to live under just laws in a common brotherhood.
Great friends of liberty came here and walked our streets to greet our citizens; George Washington, the noble Marquis de Lafayette and Louis Kossuth. Many high in office and great in the service of their country, also, visited us, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Alexander Hamil- ton, John Quincy Adams, and many others.
It would be hard to call the names of our noblest citizens and recount their private and civic virtues, their contribution to business enterprise, science, literature, and the arts; their service in peace and war, their wis- dom, charity, love of humanity, democracy, and patri- otism ; their noble participation in the progress of liberty and independence, their service in city, state and nation. It would be harder still to discriminate among so many
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SALEM
A,A.D.1626:
CIVITATIS
DIVITIS IN
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A.D. 1836.
INDLÆ
YSOVE AD
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SEAL OF THE CITY OF SALEM
who were good and great, Roger Conant, John Endecott, Roger Williams, Philip English, Gen. Israel Putnam, Chief Justice Lynde, Northey the Quaker, Timothy Pickering, Jonathan Haraden, General Miller of Lundy's Lane, Rogers the sculptor, Worcester the lexicographer, Nathaniel Bowditch, John Barlow. Felt, William H. Prescott, Stephen Clarendon Phillips, Nathaniel Haw- thorne, William Whetmore Story, Dr. Holyoke, Stephen Abbott, Rufus Choate, Henry Wheatland, Frederick West Lander, Frederick Townsend Ward, Alexander Graham Bell, and the long line of merchants and mariners between Philip English and John Bertram. The talents of our citizens were high and varied; statesmen, jurists, scientists, philanthropists, preachers, novelists, physi- cians, soldiers, poets, editors, and antiquarians, forming as full and formidable a list of celebrities as was ever mothered in any city in the land.
Thousands of pilgrims will come to our city this year to view the monuments and relics of the past, the cradle of John Massey, our first born, the witch house, the witch pins, the death warrant of Bridget Bishop, the home of Rebecca Nurse, North Bridge, the scene of the first armed resistance in the Revolution, old Gallows Hill, the House of Seven Gables, the Pickering House, the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the custom house where he worked, the Essex Institute, the Pea- body Museum, and the East Indian Marine Hall, with their priceless contents, the faces of the merchants look- ing out from oil paintings appropriately framed in gold, the old gardens, the old burying grounds, the first church and such of the very old houses as remain. If these serve but the curiosity of ourselves and our visitors, their proper end is not served, for their value is in the thoughts they excite.
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This occasion will not depart, we hope, without all of us catching a little of the spirit and a little of the lesson behind our story. The pioneers broke early sods in the conquest of the wilderness and the erection of a free state but we have our wilderness and our problems no less than they. Let their errors in some details be acknowledged, still it is true that we must face our own day substantially in the spirit, mind and heart of the forefathers. In the struggle of our ancestors there was a common tongue, common ideals and a racial sympathy. Today, here and in many eastern cities, immigrants from nearly all the nations of the earth are in our midst and of our citizenship. Ralph D. Paine in his "Ships and Sailors of Old Salem," says, "Salem is proud of its past but mightily interested in its present. Its population is four times as great as when it was the foremost foreign seaport of the United States and its activities have veered into manufacturing channels. But as has happened to many other New England cities of the purest American pedigree, a flood of immigration from Europe and Canada has swept into Salem to swarm in its mills and factories. Along the harbor front the fine old square mansions from which the lords of the shipping gazed at their teeming wharves are tenanted by toilers of many alien nations".
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